Luchina Fisher | The Dads / 2023 [documentary]

making a difference

by Douglas Messerli

 

Luchina Fisher (screenwriter and director) The Dads / 2023 [10 minutes] [documentary]

 

Luchina Fisher’s documentary concerns the meeting up of five fathers, Peter Betz, Stephen Chukumba, Frank Gonzales, Wayne Maines, and José Trujillo with a the very famous father Dennis of the brutally murdered young gay man Matthew Shepard.

     These fathers are not here, in fact, as supporters of young gay men who have come out of the closet, but of transgender sons and daughters. Fisher herself the mother of a trans child and the director of Mamma Gloria (2020), a film about Gloria Allen, a septuagenarian trans woman from the south side of Chicago, knew of some of the fathers’ love of the outdoors. As Fisher relates it in an interview from 1923 with Stephen Saito in 2023:

 

“Apparently, Dennis Shepard, Wayne Maines, and Frank Gonzales had been talking for some years about going on a trip together. They all are avid outdoorsmen. They like to hunt, they like to fish, they like to camp. And I knew them from the Human Rights Campaign’s Parents for Transgender Equality Council — we had all been together at A Time to Thrive, which is the youth gathering for the Human Rights Campaign, where they bring in all these kids from all over the country, and I overheard Dennis, Wayne and Frank talking about this trip, and I was like, “I want to go on that with you. Can I bring cameras?” [laughs] “I just would love to be a fly on the wall to hear the conversations you’re going to have.”

 

     Accordingly, Fisher joined them on their fishing trip in Broken Bow, Oklahoma, where for long moments he simply watched the men fish and later dish up the fresh fish they have caught. One might almost describe this as an all-male cooking fest for men who like the rugged life, except that their dinner conversations are not about sports and women, but rather, as Saito nicely describes it:

 

“It turns out it’s the first time back out on the water for Dennis Shepard, the most well-known father in the group who hasn’t handled a fishing rod since a family gathering in the Big Horns in 1998, the last for his child Matthew, who died tragically shortly after, and while the men assembled can take great comfort in one another, Fisher captures an emotionally charged weekend where they swap stories about regrets they have personally about forcing certain gendered items like clothing and sports on their kids before gaining a full understanding of what they were going through and some of the advice they received from therapists for better or worse. When such a dialogue is relatively new amongst parents, let alone society as a whole, The Dads is bound to spark more conversation as it presents its title characters working through issues that they surely never thought they’d encounter but all come back to loving their children unconditionally, showing simply that acceptance doesn’t have to be all that difficult.”

 

      These men, all now totally devoted to their transgender sons and daughters, related not only their early mistakes and the pain for both their children and the family they had to embrace during their transformations, but worry about the increasing hostility throughout the nation toward transgender individuals. These men break all stereotypes, as they go about enjoying what men are “supposed” to enjoy in red states at the very same moment that tears well up in their eyes when they confess their own failures at raising their children to be their birth gender while their boys and girls were suffering for that very identification.

      James Kleinmann in Queer Review observes: “The mischaracterization, dehumanization, and rejection of their trans children by some, and fears for their kids’ safety just because of who they are, has fundamentally changed their perception of what it means to be an American, where not everyone is afforded the equal treatment promised.”

      One might wish to hear even more about how these men each came to accept their child in a world where so many fathers like them have not been able to. We long to know if and how these men’s sensibilities were able to embrace what so many “rugged outdoorsmen” and just plain bigoted fathers cannot. Was it their upbringing, their education, their social-economic situations, or their overwhelmingly deep love of their kids that permitted them to not only accept their transgender children but to take pride in their children’s courage and to continue to rally for them in just such meetings and through the several transgender rights organizations which they have collectively joined?

      We not only admire someone like Shepard for having become an advocate for gay rights but also participating with the seemingly unrelated offshoot of transgender concerns.

       Fisher truly does participate as a cinematic “fly on the wall,” seemingly objectively filming their conversations and observing their pleasures just to get together and talk. In a time when hate groups of all kinds have chosen transgender rights as a rallying cry against sexual difference, this film is particularly important. And I was pleased to read the Netflix had picked it up for showing at their influential site and that it finishes its runs at LGBTQ+ festivals such as NewFest where I saw it.

 

Los Angeles, October 19, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2023).

Kris Studios Chicago (Charles Renslow and Dom Orejudos) | The Plumber / 1967

clean sex

by Douglas Messerli

 

Kris Studios Chicago (Charles Renslow and Dom Orejudos) (director) The Plumber / 1967

 

This beefcake production was filmed by the noted Kris Studios of Chicago. The story, as in many such a posing strap movie, does not feature any sex—and least within the framework of the film itself. But we certainly do know what these boys are washing up for, other than primarily our delectation.

      Model Don Dunne has decided to take a shower, and the movie presents him seemingly in the nude, but when the water seems to be depleted, he suddenly puts on a posing strap and calls up the local plumber, appropriate attire for a come-on.

      The plumber (Tony Pagan) arrives, also a cute hunk, who tries to figure out what is wrong with the water output, but tricked by Don, soon gets wet himself. Off go his clothes as well, he too enjoying a shower, Don providing him with towels before he returns to take a proper shower.

      Waiting for him to finish, Tony get impatient and soon joins him, permitting us a lovely shower duo a bit like the stereographs viewing of Victorian days.

      In each of these cases, the camera focuses on the butt and covered penis, which in Tony’s case is quite visible through him white posing strap.

      The soaping up and the seemingly endless teases of the camera as it focuses on the derriere and cock, is what this film is all about. In fact, it’s little other than a frustrating tease for contemporary audiences, with none of the usual body contact through wrestling introduced by Los Angeles Beefcake filmmaker Bob Mizer, and a far cry from Mizer's full nude shorts he was making that same year. 

     Only at the end, with Don lays out on his couch, butt up and Tony finally approaches him do we get any suggestion of possible sex, too late of course, since it’s left up now to our imaginations.

     Imagination, in fact, was what most Beefcake movies were all about. The beautiful bodies which pretended to proffer up simply models of what males might embody, had to be caught, fondled, and fucked in the viewer’s imagination, which some viewers still might prefer.

     Certainly, it is a long way from today’s porn shoots where absolutely nothing is left to our imaginations, and our engagement with the work is primarily that of voyeur.

 

Los Angeles, June 21, 2025| Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (June 2025).

Ted Kotcheff | Two Gentlemen Sharing / 1969

showing up to the wrong revolution

by Douglas Messerli

 

Evan Jones (screenplay, based on a novel by David Stuart Leslie), Ted Kotcheff (director) Two Gentlemen Sharing / 1969

 

Andrew McKenzie (Hal Frederick), wearing a bowler hat and an umbrella, after graduating from Oxford is a novice solicitor and champion cricket player who most definitely has a proper British accent, but is having difficulty finding a room to let. On the phone with one would-be landlord, he is asked if he might be Scottish, to which he replies that he’s from Jamaica. Does that mean he’s black? comes the predictable next question. “Hopelessly,” he replies, which obviously reasserts the dark color of his skin but also may suggest his own personal attitudes toward his skin color. Obviously, he will not get the apartment.

      When he finally shows up to the flat of a more friendly gentleman looking to share his flat in Knightsbridge, Roddy Pater (Robin Phillips), he finds his potential flat-mate has also graduated from Oxford, although from another school, by way of a not very good public school which, he jokes, offers “Homosexuality at reduced prices.” Yet when Andrew asks if he himself is queer, Roddy appears to be startled as he snaps back in the negative, Andrew openly stating the obvious, “It’s best to be clear from the outset.”

      Yet neither of these men are very clear when it comes to identifying their true selves. Andrew quite apparently wants to be fully accepted by the British establishment into which he has been educated, yet keeps insisting that he is fed up with playing the white man’s game and is determined to return to Jamaica.

       Roddy, born into the British gentry with a decaying manor house with parents hiding out in its kitchen from the tourists who tromp through the historical testament to their financial losses, is equally unhappy with his job as an advertising executive and is desperate for the opportunity to fraternalize with and even become, if possible, one of the working class and a participant in the black world temptations of the sensual and sexual.

       These two, “gentleman sharing” as the film’s title announces, are in some respects the perfect pair, a kind of Yin and Yang or mirror image of one another, the one seeking a way into traditional British society while the other seeks a way out. Yet oddly enough, although they are almost standard-bearers of their “types” of human being, neither of them quite perceives that fact.

     Although Andrew seems, on occasion, to mock his own behavior, he nonetheless remains throughout dreadfully conditioned to define what is meant by a “white bigot in black skin”; while, Roddy, as Vincent Canby writing in The New York Times observes “looks like a cherry-lipped Beardsley, [who] is so fey it's quite impossible to believe that he is unaware of his repressed homosexuality.” Both have girlfriends who represent, in part, the aspect of themselves they would like to abandon. Obviously, it’s easier for the sexually frustrated Roddy to ditch his fox-hunting, almost frigid gal; at least Andrews’ Caroline (Esther Anderson) is beauty who provides him with intelligent repartee and good sex.

      The problem is that not only are these two major figures unable to figure out who they truly are and how they want to proceed, but by movie’s writer Evan Jones, working from a novel by David Stuart Leslie and Canadian-born director Ted Kotcheff seem unable to know what they what to say about these two or how to express it.

      Some of this territory was far more intelligently and deftly explored in Colin MacInnes’ three fictions City of Spades (1957), Absolute Beginners (1959) and Mr. Love & Justice (1960). Certainly McInnes dealt head-on with the issues of British racism and its establishment in a way that this film seems only to be able to flirt with. While Kotcheff’s film firmly pokes at the edges of the problems with highly sarcastic (if cringeworthy) bigoted lines such “Negroes are like air crashes. I mean you read about them but you don’t expect them to happen to you,” and even goes as far as to have Roddy’s landlady throw out Andrew because of the noises he and his lover make during sex, describing the two as “Niggers,” Two Gentlemen Sharing finds it nearly impossible to actually explore the various differences and self-degrading behavior within the black community itself or, more importantly, to actually have its black figures confront the white racism around them as do McInnes’ West Indies characters.

     It is far easier to snigger over the absurdity of Roddy’s parents and would-be girlfriend or through him to demonstrate the inadequacies of white desire to lay down their prejudices and join up with their “otherness” which they approach as if traveling to an exotic land where they may discover someone dangerous but possibly friendly natives. Even a white girl like Jane Archer (Judy Geeson) is difficult for Roddy to truly love or even have sex with since she has an adopted black father.

     In the end, Kotcheff’s film seems, in fact, to lay all the inherent difficulties of these two worlds laying out the problems primarily in Roddy’s court, since he not only refuses to fully call out his landlady’s behavior, resists introducing his flat mate Andrew to his father, and, at film’s end, but finally orders all his partying black friends out of his apartment with the help of the cops and a neighbor’s complaint.

     Nearly all the critics, accordingly, although finding something basically likeable about the premise of the film, determined the work itself to be “confused” and unable to define a coherent purpose through its various cultural and sexual implications. Roger Ebert summarizes the general critical response:

 

“Two Gentlemen Sharing is one of those movies that absorbs us from moment to moment but never resolves itself into any sort of coherent statement. Not that a movie should necessarily make a statement; but this one appears to, and yet leaves its audience confused.” 

     What appears to be at the heart of the problem is that the story has set up to situation where two men, sharing a perfectly nice flat, have unintentionally fallen in love—love in a way we might describe as a deep brotherhood rather than a sexual attraction (although in Roddy’s case it may even be the latter)—with which director and author felt uncomfortable truly engaging. Even the British censors thought the film represented dangerous territory, so restricting its showings for fear that it might excite a race riot (events which MacInnes’ work actually engaged) that the British Film Institute proclaims that it never saw the light of day in the UK, despite the fact that in ran in a few theaters for several weeks.

     What creators and censors both didn’t seem openly to be able to say is that both the central figures are inherently, given British culture, queer, outsiders who are frightfully determined despite all evidence to the contrary to remain closeted.

      Each has his moment of coming honestly to terms with their queerness. Andrew, prodded by his friends to apply for a position of a British law firm, arrives only to recognize from the walls filled with portraits of all white elderly forebearers of the firm’s reputation, and knowing the current ones are clearly far less intellectual capable than him, that his whole attempt to become one of them is absolutely pointless, and leaves the building before even meeting for the interview, handing over his superficial badges of respectability, his hat and umbrella, to a flabbergasted passerby.

      For Roddy, it takes a great deal of alcohol and the endless sexual flirtations of a flamboyant black queer named Marcus (Ram John Holder), who observing Roddy’s condition, determines it’s time to sexually pounce. The surprise his advances and Roddy’s momentary reciprocation of them sends him into such a spin that he can only slug his abuser while simultaneously trying to deny and rectify his sudden violence. Yet the shock of the truth, tears running down his face, forces him

to also realize that what he thought represented the goals of his rebellion, the embracement of a culture utterly different from his own, was not truly what he was seeking after all—forcing him to painfully and hurtfully send his “friends” away. It is not, after all, Andrew he loves and admires but an otherness that can only described as sex with men. Foolishly, he’s signed up for the wrong revolution, the gay one still further off in the distance. And, in a sense, he too now can be seen as a kind of racist, as someone who doesn’t truly care about blacks, but simply was confused by the fact that for him they symbolized a difference he was vaguely trying out.

     In other words, even seemingly sympathetic whites, like Roddy, can’t truly be trusted when they discover their own needs differ. Marcus, who also stands apart from his black community, may have been his only possible link.

     In fact, these two gentleman seemingly “sharing” were actually sharing nothing except for a way out of who they truly were at heart. If the film’s abrupt ending seems to call for a resolution, or at least a clearer expression of just what the issues were and are, think about the consequences. How might an elderly heterosexual professor attempt to explain what it’s like being black to an all-white gay audience or lecture, in turn, on gay politics to a room of pained and frustrated blacks? And we’re not even talking about the subtle issues that concern the dismissal and outright abuse of women expressed throughout this work. To spell out the absolute distinctions between these various but vitally important issues is demean those suffering for the inability of comprehension by the others. The movie is confused because so are the issues which cannot be summarized in a fiction of a couple of hours in length.

      By the film’s end, all we can say is that both the central figures have been forced to come to terms with themselves, and now have no choice but to walk away from the false solutions they sought out in the other. Andrew has still a large community with whom to communicate. And Roddy might at least begin with the gay boys who have been keeping an eye of his comings and goings across the street.

 

Los Angeles, August 12, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2021).

 

Paul Bartel | Scenes from the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills / 1989

comebacks, or let’s misbehave

by Douglas Messerli

 

Bruce Wagner (screenplay, based on a story by Paul Bartel and Bruce Wagner), Paul Bartel (director) Scenes from the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills / 1989

 

Bartel’s dark and witty comedy of 1989 begins with a huge orange tent being draped over what is supposed to be a Beverly Hills house. Anyone living in Los Angeles would recognize immediately

that the house was being fumigated and the home shown is not at all in Beverly Hills but in the swankier Hancock Park section of the city, where the houses are more palatial than in the wealthy city to its west.

      Two misnomers of this film’s title, accordingly, are, at least I interpret it, no real class struggle occurs, both servants and masters being readily willing to crawl into each other’s bed and, at least in one case, to form a “lasting” relationship, and, even were to have been a “struggle,” it has not occurred in Beverly Hills!

     Having decided to leave her philandering, gynecologist husband, Lisabeth Hepburn-Saravian (the marvelous Mary Woronow) has ordered up the fumigation as part of the cleaning-out process. She, along with her brother, Peter (Ed Begley, Jr.) and his new wife, To-Bel (Ametia Waler)--who pay a surprise visit to Lisabeth--must temporarily camp out next door in the equally large mansion of Lisabeth's friend, Clare Lipkin (Jacqueline Bisset), who along with Lisbeth's daughter, Zandra (Rebecca Schaffer) and Clare's son, Willie (Barret Oliver), Lisbeth's handsome houseboy Juan (Robert Beltran), Clare's chauffeur Frank (Ray Sharkey), her aphoristic-spouting maid Rosa (Edith Dias), and the ghost of Clare's recently self-strangulated husband Sidney (Paul Mazursky) fill the house with their psychological conundrums and sexual peccadillos. Add to this bizarre assortment of individuals of Clare's "thinologist" Dr. Mo Van De Camp (Paul Bartel)—a firm believer in binge and purge eating--occasional guest, Michael Feinstein, playing himself, and the return of Lisbeth's erring husband, Howard (Wallace Shawn), and chaos breaks out.

     The lovely Zandra is having sex with the chauffeur, Frank, who has also indirectly been responsible for Sidney’s strangulation while masturbating, and, as a bisexual, has the hots for Juan. The ailing Willie spends a great deal of his time in bed taking naps with Rosa when he isn’t watching porn tapes provided to him by Juan. Although just married to To-Bel, Peter is quickly attracted to Clare, an admirer of his absurd-sounding dramas, and soon finds his way into her bed. To-Bel is fucked “animal-style” by Frank, and she provides her services as well to the inquisitive Willie. Meanwhile both the wealthy women, Lisabeth and Clare, contemplate sex with the servants at the very moment Frank and Juan make a bet on who can bed Lisabeth and Clare first. If Juan loses, Frank wants Juan to try sex with him. Even in his ghostly manifestation, Sidney would like to return to his wife’s arms, while Howard, who coincidently had an affair in Hawaii with To-Bel, would like to crawl back under the covers with Lisabeth.

      A bit like a more frenzied Smiles of a Summer Night, Bartel’s lusty work entertains with the naughty comings and goings of these confused misfits, whose bizarre couplings are revealed at brunch in front of a shocked and terrified young woman reporter, interviewing Clare about her attempt at a comeback as a television actress. In a sense, each of the film’s figures are seeking a sort of comeback, a new yet familiar direction or audience in which to channel their loves.

    Near film’s end Lisabeth pairs up with Juan, but not before Juan, claiming to lose his bet to Frank due his macho protection of Lisabeth’s virtue, joins Frank in a homosexual coupling; Clare, determined to finally devote some time to herself, leaves her son in the protection of the quite mad (Juan insists that she is burned-out as a housekeeper) Rosa; Zandra takes off with the slimy Doctor to the depths of Africa to help with his “hunger project” (he warns her they will have to share a tent); To-Bel returns to her former gynecologist lover, Howard; and Frank, presumably, will

continue to bugger everyone in sight. Only the self-enchanted playwright Peter is left in the lurch—but then, there’s always Frank!

     True to the model of what have been calling the Los Angeles sub-genre of film, almost everyone in this work, except Clare, are outsiders—all attempting to find a new home and relationship. Although, at film’s end, only Willie, Rosa and Frank stay in Los Angeles, the others will surely take Los Angeles on their diaspora. And all, except perhaps for Peter, the outsider who does not find a place for his heart, are certain to return to the city where such misbehaving folk are most at home.

      

Los Angeles, September 29, 2012

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2012).

 

Chaim Elbaum | ואהבת (And Thou Shalt Love) / 2007

tearing against faith

by Douglas Messerli

 

Chaim Elbaum (screenwriter and director) ואהבת (And Thou Shalt Love) / 2007

 

Ohad (Uri Lachmi) serves in the Israel Defense Forces as a Hesder student, but has been feeling sexual desire for his extremely handsome learning partner Nir (Omer Zonenshein). His sexual d esires quite clearly are at war with his religious identity, and he calls “Ztzat Lev,” similarly named to the real organization Atzat Nefesh, an entity which, as Wikipedia informs us, “claims to treat homosexuality with the help of a conversion therapy.”

     Ohad is encouraged to repeat the “Tikkun HaKlali” and fast for forty days, convinced that at the end of that period, which coincides with Nir actually being called up for army service, he will be cured of his desire for men. Also, a thick rubber band is tied to his wrist which by snapping it until the wrist bleeds is supposed to help him deal with his “forbidden feelings.”

     Ohad, going by the name Moshe, calls the center after 40 days and suggests he is a changed man; he even asks the rabbi to arrange a marriage for him.

      But with the sudden return of Nir, all his attempts to rid himself of his homosexual feelings  are, he realizes, for naught. He attempts to keep a distance from Nir, but as roommates, best friends, and study partners it is nearly impossible to escape his feelings for the handsome soldier.

      After several attempts to escape Nir’s queries about the changes he observes in his friend, along with the literal “forcefield” of Nir’s personality, Ohad finally admits to both the phone voice at Ztzat Lev and to himself that it has all failed. He is in love with Nir, and feels fulfilled when he is around him. The therapist can only provide him with a list of further self-punishments, and Ohad hangs up in tears.

      When he attempts to show that love to Nir, however, he is rejected, Nir telling him that he must leave the Yeshiva. Moreover, Nir attempts to block Ohad, a Cohen,* to bless the blessing of priests (“Cohanim”), demanding to know of him, “How can you pray if the Torah says that this is an abomination?”

      Strangely, in Nir’s rejection, Ohad suddenly comes to terms with his own feelings, turning away from his former friend, and removing the rubber band on his wrist, before participating in the blessing.

      Despite the fact that Israeli cinema had already produced some truly remarkable gay cinema, particularly through the contributions of Amos Guttman and Eytan Fox, this film was an important work of its time (2007). As the Wikipedia entry notes:

         

“The hero is torn between his love for his God and his desire to be a full partner in Torah and Yeshiva life, and his sexual orientation. The recognition of his attraction to men creates a difficult conflict for the hero, both with his faith and his identity. The film touches on the loaded subject carefully and does not suggest any solution to the dilemma facing the protagonist.

     Along with other developments of the time, such as the establishment of organizations such as Bat Kol, Havruta and Hod, statements by rabbis such as Yuval Cherlow who deviated from the traditional position on the subject, and documentaries Trembling Before G-d and Keep Not Silent, the film led to the opening of an open internal discussion within Religious Zionism on the status of gays and lesbians in the religious society, and the beginning of a change in relation to them.”

 

     And Thou Shalt Love won the best drama award at the 2008 Jerusalem Film Festival and other cinema awards.

 

* Kohen (also spelled cohen or kohan) is a descendant of the sons of Aaron who served as priests in the Temple in Jerusalem.

     Traditionally, kohanim (the plural of kohen) get special honors in synagogue, but also are subject to certain restrictions. Like Levites, who are descendants of the priests’ assistants and also singled out for certain honors, kohanim are descendants of the tribe of Levi. Many people with the surname Cohen, Kahn, Katz (and their various spellings) are kohanim, and many with the surname Levi or Levy are Levites.

     Among the special honors kohanim receive: They are given the first aliyah (being called to the Torah) when the Torah is read in synagogue, and during some services they reenact the giving of the priestly blessing.

 

Los Angeles, June 21, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (June 2025).