Jen McGowan | On the Ride / 2020

the heart of the matter

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jeremy Glazer (screenplay), Jen McGowan (director) On the Ride / 2020 [14 minutes]

 

This lovely short is a real tearjerker that takes the viewer on a ride at the very moment when a survivor of a gay marriage, Scott Long (Jeremy Glazer) goes on a morning bicycle trip after his husband has died of some unnamed disease.

    In his back pack is a letter which he intends to mail, but he finds, as in 2020 we all discovered, the mailbox closed. In his mind, filled with flashbacks of his husband’s illness and death, he loses his focus and narrowly misses an accident with a car in the Los Angeles roads in which he’s riding. He ends up by the side of the road, finally realizing that it is time to take the next step, to visit the family to which has been writing to him, the son Roshawn (Spence Moore II) having received his lover’s heart as a saving live-saving transplant.

 

    The mother, played quite remarkably by Deidre Gilbert, openly greets him into her home, as he finally meets the young black man who has received his husband Todd’s heart. In a remarkable sequence the young man, who now wants to become a doctor, allows Scott to actually listen to the beating heart he has inherited.

    The mother drives the bicyclist home, welcoming him into her family and the noisy world of her son, while he returns home, alone, to celebrate Thanksgiving with alone, yet celebrating his lover who, he claims, endlessly talked.

    If this is not a particularly profound short film, it is certainly an eloquent one, a work which makes you realize the continuation of life is not necessarily spiritual, but a real possibility that exists in the possibilities of community, love, and memory.

 

Los Angeles, March 19, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (2025).

Maximilian Homaei | Kettle / 2014

religious hate

by Douglas Messerli

 

Maximilian Homaei and Shiyan Zheng (screenplay), Maximilian Homaei (director) Kettle / 2014 [38 minutes]

 

Two young gay boys, Kris (Christian Byers) and Andre (James Fraser) are in love, but they also attend a conservative and repressive Catholic school, Kris as well “blessed” with a cold and unfeeling mother (Kelly Butler) who worships the terrible wardens of her son’s sexual imprisonment. When he fights back against the bullies, it is he who gets suspended for a few days, not the others.

    At the same moment in his life, he is beginning to perceive a great many other things, as he goes in search of his missing father. For one thing his mother seems to be involved with one of his priestly teachers, Father Peter (Jai Koutrae), which perhaps explains why he is punished for the bullying of others. The mother is also opposed to him even having a friendship with Andre, who, after all, doesn’t attend church. He also tracks down his sister, Claudia (Lizzie Schebesta), who has long ago left the family, a woman who apparently works after the hours she works as a waitress as a stripper named Maggie Love in a local bar.

     Our young hero takes his friend to the bar in which she works, and after they play cards, the friend seemingly utterly enchanted with a new woman in his life, without recognizing that it is, in fact, his friend’s sister. We have entered new territory, perhaps a challenge to their gay relationship. But it is also an attempt to comprehend Kris’ own past and future.

     He asks her about his father, but her only answer seems to be, “You were too young Kris, and now it’s too late.” But who can he turn to? He cannot talk to his mother. He has only pictures.

     She insists that despite his other affairs, the father was still very much in love with their mother. But even more importantly, as she looks over at the sleeping and drunken Andre, she suggests to her brother “You should tell him.” Obviously, she is aware of his love for his friend.

     His mother is furious that he comes home the next day, and even more angry when he suggests that she still has a daughter, for which she roundly slaps him for even mentioning the fact. This is a woman who has carefully struggled not to care for anything outside her restricted religious beliefs.

     Once more, Father Peter, the handsome man with a hairbun, reminds him of his responsibilities, and the fact that he has suspended the boy to reflect on his actions. But this time, finally Kris, stands up to the world of genuflection, admitting that he has indeed reflected on his actions. “I know why you’re here,” he adds, “you gonna tell me that my father didn’t love me?”  Finally, he speaks out that he no longer cares what the priest has to say, that he doesn’t have to listen to him anymore. The only answer this hateful priest can provide is that his sister will also betray him.

     This is a sour world in which a young 17-year-old boy in Catholic school has to accept or himself be punished. A kiss from Andre results in a slug. Something truly awful has happened. Even love has lost its potent meaning. He attempts to visit his sister, but his kept out by her boyfriend. He screams out to him without her responding; she has in fact left her own brother to the wolves.

     For his punishment, the priest and his mother oversee his conversation therapy, watching a movie of two young gay lovers while they pour a kettle of hot water, as he is locked into a chair, upon his penis.

     Oddly, or perhaps I should say predictably, a number of commentators came out of the Catholic Church benches to proclaim on IMDb this film as a hateful protestation of their beliefs. This could not happen in our church they all proclaimed. Perhaps in other religions such as Islamic and Judaic traditions, but not ours! But of course, we know even worse sins were committed in the name of the Catholic Church, young boys killed, young girls sent into relationships with older men, and young and older priests preying on young boys of all ages. Indigenous people, poor children, and children born out of wedlock were punished for their non-existent “sins.” Religions of all kind have destroyed more people for being something “other” than almost any other force on earth. The “kettle” here is a symbol of the pure hypocrisy not only of Catholicism but of all fervent believers who can’t permit anything outside of their narrow purviews. The wonderful Norwegian writer, Jens Bjørneboe spent much of his life revealing the dangers of religious and socially narrow views. But again and again religious fundamentalists of all sorts go blithely forward destroying other’s lives.

 

Los Angeles, March 19, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (March 2025)

     

Gwen Wynne | Wild About Harry (aka American Primitive) / 2009

the unspoken truth

by Douglas Messerli   

 

Mary Beth Fielder and Gwen Wynne (screenplay), Gwen Wynne (director) Wild About Harry (aka American Primitive) / 2009

 

Early in this movie Harry Goodhart (Tate Donovan) tells his daughter Madeline (Danielle Sayre) to keep to her dead mother’s ideals, “Stand up for who you are and what you believe in.” It takes an entire movie for this coddled Cape Codder to even comprehend the message her father is sending her. All right, it’s 1973 and gay rights, despite the Stonewall Inn battles, were only just trickling out to the suburbs. But really Howard and I easily had come out to all of our friends three years previous to this cinematic feature as a couple on the University of Wisconsin—Madison campus. I admit that it was a very liberal world, and we were blessed with open-minded friends, but even the reviews seem to accept the idea that 1973 was still a closed-off world in which no gay need even imagine peer acceptance.

     This is yet another hysterical gay movie, that may have been based on true experiences, but only reveals, once more, the continued terror of the gay experience that seemed to cluster around films in what one might have imagined was a far more open-minded era of the new century, 2009.

     If his groovy, slightly hippie-dressed daughters don’t quite immediately fit into the more Cape Codder’s conservative decorum, they nonetheless soon make friends, and a handsome new man on the island delights the neighborhood ladies, married and widowed.

     At least his younger daughter, Daisy (Skye McCole Bartusiak) is a blessed with a much wilder imagination, constantly interrupting her elder sister’s attempts at accommodation. But, of course,

she doesn’t quite succeed, particularly when Maddy meets the lovely school jock Sam (Corey Sevier), with whom she almost immediately falls in love and impresses with her tennis skills. Enter clumsily, stage left, Josh Peck (Spoke White), a scruffy boy who truly falls in love with Maddy at first sight.

     Madeline becomes a full star tennis player, and Sam Brown’s mother almost admits to Daisy that she’s fallen in love with her father on first sight, in his bathrobe in his front-yard antics of

trying to deliver breakfast to his two bus-bound daughters. Sam’s mother eagerly engages the two daughters, by driving them home so, of course, she can further meet their attractive father. But at that very moment, Harry has posted a new sign, which gives alert to his real “interests,” and most particularly to his new partner, Gibbs & Goodhart, and their new business relationship of which his daughters had absolutely no warning, another eligible bachelor as Mrs. Brown (Anne Tamsay) perceives him to be, a perfect reason to stop by and see their “American Primitives.”  

    Suddenly his daughters are introduced to Mr. Gibbs, Theo (Adam Pascal), as even Martha describes him “the other half.” What none of them seem to be able to perceive is that he is in fact Harry’s lover, who even entertains, since he is a lovely piano player, the entire community with the song “I’m Just Wild About Harry” which is not simply played out in the song’s lyrics but his actual love of Harry Goodhart, Maddy’s father.

    Soon, tagging along with the “in” crowd, Maddy joins her friends at a local Provincetown bar, where she proclaims in the obnoxious youthful innocent of her prejudice that “I’ve never seen a real queer before!” only to discover her father and Theo dancing together at the same bar.

     So begins a spin into an hysterical homophobic world that changes all their lives.

     Maddy, believing it’s just a deviation of his true existence, works hard to throw her dad into the arms of the local women, including Mrs. Brown, meanwhile imagining that she has a real relationship with her son Sam, to whom she confides her fears. But Sam is not at all trustworthy, and word soon spreads throughout the community, with homophobic taunts, and, even worse, the arrival of the highly conservative parents of Harry’s ex-wife, determined to rescue their granddaughters from the life of the debauched gay couple.

    Finally, Maddy is left alone, without seemingly anyone to even take her to the homecoming dance until the loner Josh returns into her life, admitting that he has known about her father from the first moment, and finally making it clear to her that all her desperate troubles, her true hysteria, doesn’t at all matter. He wants to take her out, and that is what matters more than anything in her delimited imagination.

    Finally even the in-laws perceive that Harry and Theo are raising up the girls quite wonderfully. Case closed.

    No, Theo realizes that perhaps they should not be living together, after all it is 1973, and things can still happen, just at the moment when the in-laws reappear and find Harry and Theo engaged in a deep kiss. The in-laws are determined that Madeline and Daisy will now live with them. “The Lord does not allow homosexuals to raise children,” proclaims the father-in-law, reiterating every stupid Christian moralist on the planet. Martha and he are about to take the daughters away from the healthy relationship Harry and Theo have created for their children for absolutely no reason other than they are a homosexual couple.

     Harry brings his daughters together for their sudden exit from their lives, “You’ll spend a few nights with your grandparents, and we’ll work something out.”

      Jason knocks on the door; it is the night of the homecoming party, but, of course, Madeline is not able to make it, as Harry announces. Everything has changed—this being a hysterical movie that cannot possibly imagine that even in 1973 things had altered in another way than the direction this film seems to be heading. You truly want, at this point, to enter the film, and like Cher in Moonstruck (1987) slap their faces and demand they wake up. The passivity of gay men suddenly becomes transparent. They are giving up their entire reality to bigots.

      I wonder, given our own rather wonderful experiences at the same moment whether this was what reality was all about. I cry imagining that it probably was for older gay men in the real world from which Howard and I were so immune. The door closes on Jason, the gentle man who might have been the perfect mate for the confused Madeline. Everything seems to have fallen apart.

     The girls are told that neither of them are to go to their father’s house unless accompanied by their grandparents, and their whispers make clear they are going to file for custody.

     The girls are trying to figure out the conundrum of their father’s sexual shift. Was he always that way, even with their mom? What happened to him to make him so different? But within their proper Cape Cod dinner experience, Maddy again encounters Jason, this time as a restaurant busboy, the young man who brings in the clams for their dinner delight, explaining that “I came to take you out, at your house but you weren’t there,” she admitting that her grandparents took her away from her father.

       Jason tells of his own dilemma, when his brother Paul, constantly in fight with his father, joined the marines, his father describing him as “a selfish jerk.” That was the last time he saw him, the brother having died a couple of years later in Viet Nam. He regrets that he could not comprehend his own brother as family, a fact he only realized in his own elder brother’s death.

      Family, I would argue is a dangerous and tribalistic force, but in this case it helps. “Your family is your family, no matter what. Your dad’s a part of your deal.” Bluntly he explains why she shouldn’t have abandoned what was truly a fully-working family, even if it didn’t fit normative expectations. This rough young man wants to be a part of her “deal” also, expressing a love so much deeper than any young Sam Brown might have ever imagined what love is about.

     Madeline almost immediately after pulls her sister away from the table where her grandparents sit and rejoins their father, this time as a force against any further ado. “We want to stay with you and Mr. Gibbs,” she proclaims. It’s not quite that simple, answers their delighted but confused father. Harry describes his true love of Madeline’s mother, Daisy entering, the poet to say, “Two eternal flames burn in his heart at the same time,” finally relieving her sister’s impossible comprehension of how two very different loves might be possible.

     But the delightful Mr. Gibbs is now moving out, the girls disconsolate for his decision. After all, he was an excellent cook, a loving force, himself a good father to them. He admits he’s trying to find a way for Daisy and Madeline to stay with their father. But Madeline finally admits that he shouldn’t go, that he is very important to her father. “You’re part of the deal,” she quotes Jason’s comments, and in so doing ending the hysteria transforming it into a family situational comedy.

     They unload his baggage, and bring him back into the new family they have now discovered.

     The grandparents return, of course, to reclaim their luggage. They insist that Madeline and Daisy must come with them, but this time, finally, Harry speaks out: “I hate to contradict you, but I’m afraid they don’t” They like Mr. Gibbs. But the traditional heteronormative grandparents finally put it out on the table, “It’s a question of decency, it’s a question of morality.” Suddenly Madeline reveals that when her mother was in the hospital, she asked her “Never let her father grow old alone. And I never knew what she meant. But now I do.”

     That complete transformation of comprehension makes it clear that suddenly this young, quite confused girl, has grown up into a mature woman of utter comprehension overnight. Her grandparents have lost their conservative power. They no longer have a role in either of the granddaughters’ lives. There is nothing more to be said. They too are now wild about Harry—and Theo.

 

Los Angeles, March 18, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (March 2025).

        

Douglas Messerli | Two Films of Gay Hysteria / 2025

two films of gay hysteria

by Douglas Messerli

 

Before I even begin this essay, I want to make clear that in using the word “hysteria” I am not at all referring to what dictionaries now refer to as “the old fashioned term for a disorder characterized by neurological symptoms often accompanied by exaggeratedly or inappropriately emotional behavior, originally attributed to disease of injury of the nervous system and later though to be functional or psychological in origin,” and usually applied to women and gay men. My use of the word is the general contemporary and modern use of the word to suggest an “exaggerated or uncontrollable emotion or excitement.”

     In this case, I am speaking about two movies—long after the mythical gay enlightenment of Stonewall, in both cases using as their excuse a period before that event—whose characters behave in a manner that seems so alien to the conditions of 2009, when both of these films appeared, that it creates a kind of conundrum for someone like me, well versed in gay cinema, why they were even made.

    In both films there is an exaggerated sense of behavior in a time in which Howard and I had easily come out as a couple and that films were being made that showed an entirely different view of the gay world than in 2009 I can’t quite even recognize the issues they attempt to bring up. Granted, Howard and I lived in a privileged world of university life, surrounded by liberal friends. In fact, our entire lives, even later in the museum world and for me in the university, protected us from having to face the general prejudices of US society, despite my own parents’ inability to quickly adjust. But if these films are to be believed, and I suspect they are outrageous exaggerations, in which the only worlds that Stonewall effected were small communities in New York City, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and other urban areas. The rest of the world remained terrified by the realities of gay life. Perhaps I simply missed out knowing that reality. But why suddenly in 2009 did Evgeny Afineevsky in Oy Vey! My Son Is Gay! and female director Gwen Wynne in her film Wild About Harry feel compelled to remind us of this fact? Wynne, in particular has been an outspoken champion of “unspoken” stories and an important supporter of gay causes. And Israeli director Afineevsky has made several important documentaries on how divorce effects children, and other perfectly reasonable films. One has to wonder what was in the air in 2009 to make both directors dabble in a kind of hysteria that roars through these films. Barack Obama had just been inaugurated as President. History had been made as the first black man became our nation’s leader.

     Did these intelligent forces suddenly feel, accordingly, the need to go back in time and reveal what it was like before such a new force? Having no way to properly explain it, I have just noted it, almost as an aside. Neither film is brilliant, and neither of these films offers anything really new in its perspectives. But they both, quite similarly, bring up familiar reactions far out of whack with what seems to have been the truth of the times, and was certainly not at all of great interest to 2009 audiences.

 

Los Angeles, March 19, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (March 2025).