Thursday, July 3, 2025

Naman Gupta | Coming Out with the Help of a Time Machine / 2021

worth repeating

by Douglas Messerli

 

Naman Gupta and Jani Parekh (screenplay), Naman Gupta (director) Coming Out with the Help of a Time Machine / 2021 [20 minutes]

 

Other than the clumsy and far too literal title, this film by US director Naman Gupta employs the use of the equally clumsy and obvious device, the titular “time machine” to enhance what is otherwise a rather predictable “coming out” movie. The boy Sid’s (Karan Soni) first attempts in his diner meetup with his Indian conservative parents, Poonam and Rakesh Seith (Snageeta Agrawal and Raghuram Shetty), to tell them who he really is are met up with a crying baby and a coffee-spilling waitress (Trella Mebieth) along with the reactions of his rather fierce mother. And in another version of the meetup his mother immediately calls up Dr. Patel to get her son straightened out. We might wish we had a reset button, as does Sid, to start the conversations over again.


     But when he finally gets across his message, that he is gay, and begins a true conversation and the accusations quiet down, Sid has a no less painful time than many a boy his age do. In tears, Sid admits he knows how hard his parents have worked for his future, but it is nearly impossible to convince them that just because he is gay that he will no longer have any future—that despite the familial ostracizations and parental embarrassments his career can continue and their son succeed in the world. For them it is immediate catastrophe with no way out, representing a kind of hysteria which Sid’s mother, in particular, is fond of displaying when things go against her liking.

     Sid attempts to explain, like all young men in his situation, that it is not a willing choice, a fad he is going through, but an emotional response with which he was born and began realizing at an early age. And his expression of his long pain in attempting to change things and keeping the truth inside finally convinces his father to support and even defend him.


      But his mother is a force of homophobic denial that he her husband can’t qual. She leaves the two of them stranded and unsettled, only to finally return when she recalls how she has all her life attempted to allay and protect her son from harm and fear. So, it appears the peace has been temporary made, his parents love having won over their fears and ignorance.

      That is until his father, curious about the watch his son has left on the table, is about to push the red reset button once again, meaning than everything will have to happen all over again, this time with perhaps a different ending.

      But, of course, that is what happens in real life. The next day parents wake up with new fears, different reactions, other solutions. Coming out is never a single incident, but an ongoing process that families must undergo sometimes for long periods of time or even the rest of the lifetimes. Fortunately, however, they need not each time to start all over again with the same so-difficult-to-say first words…”Mom, dad, I’m gay.”

      If I had a time machine, I’d set it for the day when those words were perceived as a joyful recognition. But in the meantime, throwing in a little sci-fi to jazz up those endlessly repeated words isn’t really worth it.

 

Los Angeles, July 15, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2023).

Peter Strickland | GU04 / 2019

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Brad Hammer and John Duff | Is It a Sin / 2022 [music video]

sinning till the end

by Douglas Messerli

 

John Duff, Anil Sebastian, Max Bergå, and Scott McFarnon (composers), Brad Hammer and John Duff (directors) Is It a Sin / 2022 [3 minutes]

 

John Duff stands in a church, wondering if it’s sin to love. Already, given the Duff has made several clearly gay albums, and despite the fact that in that past he has refused to be called gay or put in any kind sexual category of what he describes as a “box,” that he’s posing the question all religious gay boys inevitably have to.


    The original lyrics of the first three stanzas read:

 

If all’s forgiven

Then why am I imprisoned

Can I get a minute

On my knees

 

Please

If you’re wasting time

Then waste it on me

If it always ends

Then we should be free

To love

Am I free to love

 

Is it a sin

To touch you

Is it a sin

To say there’s no one above you

If it’s a sin to love you

Then I’m sinning till the end

Thank God I’m forgiven

 

      But in producer Eric Kupper’s remix of what YouTube describes as the “Official Music Video,” the last line, repeated several times, I kept hearing as “God I’m gay then,” which I interpreted to read that if it was a sin, he was something other, a gay man outside the church. Others heard it differently, reporting back what’s written or at least something closer to it. (I took a test, without divulging what I heard or even that I heard something different, with several visitors).

     At the site @IAmJohnDuff, the singer writes the message that follows:

 

“Hi everyone! Thank you for watching my video.

     As a gay man, I have dealt with immense guilt and shame for my whole life—due to indoctrination and moral codes created by the church.

     As a lover of Christ's teachings, I have felt overwhelming forgiveness and acceptance.

     As an adult with reading comprehension skills, I struggle to see where the church picked up its bigoted and judgmental stances on love… and how exactly those views abide by Christ’s teachings.

     As a rebel, I wrote “Is It a Sin”. A song for people like me, who do not want to denounce spirituality—but rather ask why they should be denied a place in it.

     I hope you enjoy the song and video. They mean a lot to me. Much love!”

 

     My hearing or mis-hearing (the only line I hear differently from the published lyrics) is not terribly consequential, however, since this still remains a song about hopefully being forgiven for loving God even if the Church calls his loving other men a sin. Most fundamental believers, however, Might even see Duff singing such a song in a church-like setting might deem Duff’s song and actions as blasphemous.

     And there is a big different from admitting to being gay and being forgiven for it.

     But the truly important thing here is that instead of his early denials of being gay, fearful of being categorized, he seems to now accept it as fact.

 

Los Angeles, July 3, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (July 2025).

Arthur Dong | Coming Out Under Fire / 1994

living lies

by Douglas Messerli

 

Arthur Dong (screenplay, based on Allen Bérubé’s Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War II, and director) Coming Out Under Fire / 1994

 

Coming Out Under Fire, Arthur Dong’s fascinating and often horrifying documentary about being a gay or lesbian while serving in the military in World War II (based on Allen Bérubé’s book Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War II) begins in a time long after that war, with President Bill Clinton still arguing in 1993 for a continuation “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” to be the policy under which soldiers under fire had long been asked to live. The film continues with the rather shocking, if not surprising, agreement of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, all males and over 50, responding to Indiana Republican senator Daniel Coats’ question, each repeating that “homosexuality is incompatible with military service.”

     As one of the major voices in this film, Radio Technician in the Women’s Army Corps, Phyllis Abry, a lesbian who served as a WAC during World War II, suggests in a follow up to that clip, it was a catch-22: “The only way you could get in [to the military] was to lie. The only way you could stay in was to lie. Man or woman. It was not tolerated. So, they made you live a double life.”


      Marvin Liebman, a WWII member of the Special Services, U.S. Army Air Corps continues “The Army. the Navy, the Marine Corps, and the United States Government wants its citizens to be liars. And to be unaccepting of themselves rather than say gay or homosexual [they wanted you to] be invisible, shut up.”

      A scroll down of words restates the major presumptions with which these men and women were faced from World War II and lays out the concerns of Dong’s documentary.

 

            Beginning in World War II the military developed a discriminatory

            system that forced homosexuals to hide who they were and punished

            them for telling the truth.

 

            Over the years, the military has given different reasons for treating

            homosexuals as if they were a separate group.

 

            At first they were labelled criminals, then mentally ill, then security

            risks, and in 1993 they were considered threats to unit cohesion.

 

            Underlying these shifting rationales was an unchallenged contempt

            for homosexuals and a belief that they contaminated society with their

            very presence.

 

       So the film turns its attention to the early days of World War II. After the events in Europe and Pearl Harbor nearly everyone, we are reminded, wanted to enlist in order to demonstrate their patriotism. The issues that Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and then the warrior culture of Japan had put forward were so obviously opposed to any idea of democracy that it was difficult for anyone with a conscience to not want to serve. And the military suddenly needed a vast number of men and women to join up, young people which included gay men and lesbians and numerous others often still too young to have truly perceived their own sexuality.

      New guidelines had already been established that homosexuals were among the mentally ill, psychologists suggesting that all recruits be asked whether or not they were homosexual. This clearly put all the loyal young volunteers in a double bind: pass as heterosexual or be sent back home officially labeled as a “sex pervert.”

      Even more frightening were the stated Articles of War punitive charges which included “fraudulent Enlistment” and the notorious Article 93 which listed sodomy—defined by the military as “sexual connection by rectum or by mouth by a man with a human being”—both of which were punishable by dishonorable discharge and confinement to hard labor at a US Penitentiary for five years. Young gay men in the prime of their life, unlike their straight counterparts who were basically expected to and even encouraged to seek out sex with local prostitutes in brothels, engaged in sexual activities recognized as being what today we perceive as a natural act might lead them to criminal punishment and problems of finding employment for the rest of their lives.

     For gay black men such as the one interviewed in Dong’s film who served in the “Colored Units,” being black and gay was a “double whammy,” both seen as detrimental in the military, the one obvious but the other kept hidden. You had to learn how to evade attention, he laments.


     Lesbianism was not explicitly illegal but was strongly frowned upon, even though some more openly “butch-like” women were promoted for seeming to be more compatible with military leadership. Many of the young girls who joined the various branches of service were raised rather conservatively without even imagining lesbian activity. But as Sarah Davis, Aviation Machinist Mate of the WAVES suggests, suddenly being surrounded by so many women for the first time brought out hitherto unimagined desires, particularly since contact with males was often difficult and took place for relatively brief intervals. She found a lover who after the war appeared to been unfazed by their intense war-time relationship, leaving her behind, confused and suspicious of relationships for the rest of her life.

      When Abry left the military she married a man with whom she lived happily for several years before rediscovering her sexual preference.

     Yet despite all of the immediate conflicts the military structure had set up, many young men and women, surrounded by their own sex in numbers of individuals larger than their own home communities suddenly discovered numerous gay men in their midst. As Dr. Herbert Greenspan, Psychiatrist in the U. S. Navy recalls, everyone new that many in our unit were gay, that I was and so was the Captain to whom I reported.

     Others describe finding numerous gay friends who kept apart from the straight boys, often using a kind of coded language based on rhyming words and phrases from writers such as Dorothy Parker. Some of them even began underground newspapers, using the company mimeo machines and paper to create gay-lingo news journals such as The Myrtle Beach Bitch and The Bitches Camouflage.

   Gay military men wrote numerous letters to others using the so-called Parker-parlance, calling everyone “Darling” and writing witty bon mots about the bad food and group morale.


       Still others served important roles as drag performers in chorus lines, singers, and dancers in camp shows, as one of the famous military drag queens who performed under the name of “Madame Latrine” recounts, allowing the soldiers in a time before the Bob Hope and other regular entertainers of the troops a chance to laugh and find pleasure. He argues that they too lugged their guns about, but dressed in drag. He remembers looking out at all those young men and wondering “which ones would be dead tomorrow. Some of them had to die. That was what war was all about.”

     Even popular cultural works such as the musical South Pacific represent that aspect of military life through the character of Luther Billis whose gay sexuality I discuss in connection with the 1958 movie version. Moreover, we mustn’t forget the importance of the all-male military drag performance of World War I in Jean Renoir’s The Grand Illusion (1937).

    A couple of interviewees such as the U.S. Navy camp storekeeper David Barrett describe the openness of being gay during the first part of World War II, when everybody knew you were gay and employed that fact for their amusement and a kind of comic protection. One recalled approaching corporals in new units who looked them up and down, saying in slightly campy voice, “Well, who do we have here?” Others asked to be reassigned to units in which they knew were gay officers or other gay friends.


       All claim to have been good soldiers and recognized their fellow queers as good soldiers as well. Moreover, even many so-called “straight” men were often willing to explore gay and lesbian sex. Being young and exploring new worlds was only natural, and traveling to places which they might have never previously even imagined as existing, they were willing to try out new experiences. I have always held a long-time suspicion that someone might have attempted to explore gay sex with my very handsome, straight-arrow father, which might explain his homophobia with regard to his son’s homosexuality later in his life.

       Some young men, not unlike my father, began showing up to camp psychiatrists such as Stuart Loomis, Psychological Assistant in the U. S. Army, confused by their new sexual feelings or concerned about having to encountered homosexuals in their units. Loomis likens it to a sense of “panic” engulfing them. As a gay officer himself he could help the patients he saw, but other so-called professionals had little experience with counseling such young men.

        And the military officials were themselves increasingly unsure of how to deal with what they saw to be an increasingly openness to both male and female same-sex relationships. There was currently only one way to get rid of a gay soldier, charge him with sodomy; then he could be court-marshalled and sentenced to prison. Commanding officers claimed that the system was too cumbersome, while psychiatrists argued that it was inhumane and archaic to imprison individuals who they saw to be “mentally ill.” And since women could not be convicted of sodomy there was no way of dealing with lesbianism among the ranks.

       By the middle of the war authorities proffered a solution: diagnose them as psychopaths. Or charge them with sodomy and quickly dispose of them as “undesirables.” The more “efficient system,” as the film’s narrator (Salome Jens) describes it, brought new purges upon many of the companies. Indeed the creators of the gay newspapers whose stencils they found among the trash were denounced as gay. Barrett, the writers of Parker-parlance whose letters had crossed the desks of the censors, and even the black soldier trying to avoid the spotlight were rounded up. Many gay men were put in special holding cells not unlike mental wards of hospitals or gathered in what others called gay stockades.

       As in the later McCarthy hearings, they were asked to admit to their crimes and name names of their gay compatriots. When they were finally released as “undesirables” they were forced to return home to face families who were embarrassed and hostile, sometimes rejecting their young sons and daughters. Jobs were difficult to obtain.

       Arby eventually discovered that her lover had been asked to report “suspicious behavior” to her superiors—although apparently she never found any to report. But many of these survivors talk about their treatment causing them to themselves be suspicious of others and prone to hiding their own sexualities for the rest of their lives. These maimed men and women were among the many who suffered from their war-time encounters, but in this case had no entry to a Veteran Hospital to diagnose their psychological wounds.


       In the time since the end of the war and the release of film these problems had not improved for LGB men and women, not to even speak of even greater difficulties facing transsexuals. The number of homosexuals discharged since World War II eventually reached over 100,000. 

       Looking back, given the context that Dong’s and Bérubé’s works provide us, we can now easily recognize that “Don’t ask, don’t tell” was a brutal policy that demanded the patriot lie not only to their friends and military superiors but to themselves. Such logic represents the hostility of a culture still not able to embrace queer life.

     During the 1990s hearings Jack Warner, Republican Senator from West Virginia asked, “Is it too much to ask that you just serve honorably and quietly and efficiently and not profess?”

     Margarethe Cammermeyer, former Colonel and Chief Nurse of the Washington National Guard, attempts to answer: “As long as there isn’t the regulation that gives someone the opportunity to threaten me with ‘I think you’re a lesbian and I’m going to ruin your career.’ As long as the regulation is there it says that no matter if we are totally closeted for the duration that means that someone has the power to use that threat.”

     “You feel that intensely and patriotic that you want to serve then give up a little something.”

     “We have, sir.”

     “Give up the right to actively profess your sexuality among your fellow soldiers, then we’ll let you serve quietly and patriotically in every other way.”

      But obviously giving up one of the most important elements of what defines a human being is to give up being itself, to deny what it is that one is bringing to the service in the first place, a thinking and loving woman or man. To remain silent is the same as not existing, as denying your identity.

      I am sure, given my own feelings about the issues at 17 that, had I been born a generation earlier, I too might have volunteered to serve in World War II, at an age when I was still not sure about my sexuality. I probably would have realized I was gay a year later, at the age when I really did, and might have been court-martialed or even imprisoned, my future destroyed.

      I have mixed feelings, nonetheless, about the new and needed changes in military regulations, particularly when it involves induction by draft.

     At age 23—soon after I met my husband Howard, with whom, as of today, I have now lived for 51 years—when I was called for the draft for the Vietnam War, a war I adamantly opposed, I was terrified that they might not recognize me as being “undesirable.” After a full physical checkup and a battery of forms to fill out, they asked for anyone who thought they might be gay or have other psychological problems to move on to the induction center psychiatrist. 

      I’d long heard that psychiatrists had become quite skeptical about anyone claiming homosexuality given the unpopularity of that war. Some rumored they demanded rectal tests or the “Gag Reflex and Fellatio Test” and “Drawing-a-Man Test” which had been required for some volunteering in World War II—all of which I might have failed. I like masculine-looking men, I have always had an immediate gag reflex (just ask my dentist), and, although I had certainly had anal sex I believe that my rectum had not terribly stretched since I was neither exclusively, as gays sometimes describe it, “a top” or a “bottom.” I was shaking as I approached the psychiatrist’s desk.

      “Why did you choose to see me?” he asked.

      “I’m gay,” I assertively claimed, “and I’m in a relationship.”

      I think he looked at me for a moment and quickly stamped my form 4-F, “deemed unfit for military service.” And although I breathed a great sigh of relief even then I knew it was also a lie.

 

Los Angeles, February 4, 2021

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (February 2021).

P. David Ebersole | Death in Venice, CA / 1994

maybe i loved him

by Douglas Messerli

 

P. David Ebersole (screenwriter and director) Death in Venice, CA / 1994

 

P. David Ebersole’s 1994 MFA Thesis film at New York University straddles two LGBTQ film genres, a head-on campy satire—in this case of Thomas Mann’s novella Death in Venice and Luchino Visconti’s 1971 cinematic treatment of it—and a tragic coming out tale in the Southern gothic tradition relocated to the long strand of the Venice, California beach. The closest to the latter in genre, I’d argue, is James Bolton’s Dream Boy of 2018.

      This, quite obviously, is Tennessee Williams territory, and in recognition of that fact director Ebersole brilliantly cast Shirley Knight, who performed in Williams’ A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur (1979) and in the film version of Sweet Bird of Youth (1962) to oversee the dramatic encounters of his central characters. I saw Knight in in the 2012 New York production of Williams’ last play Masks Outrageous and Austere in which, as Clarissa “Babe” Foxworth, she performed a similar position. 


      It’s too bad, given the link she provides to Ebersole’s obvious influences that she doesn’t have a larger role. Yet, as Mona Dickens—the owner and guardian of the decaying, gothic-like boarding house in which the Gustav von Aschenbach-like figure Mason Carver (Nick Rafter) takes up residence and in which lives her step-son Sebastian (the name with which she has dubbed the 17-year-old John [Robert Glen Keith] that also references Williams)—she hovers over the work with monstrous effect.

       The difference is that Williams was able to graft these opposing genres together to create a hot-house like magnolia whose scent wafted throughout the theater so powerfully that his audiences lost their rational facilities as if they had smoked a dozen reefers before sitting down to watch his plays. Williams took camp to new levels by grounding it in the seemingly realist tradition of the Southern melodrama that broke our hearts through its pathos of lost lives and loves. Williams’ plays are comedies at which instead of laughing you’re forced to cry, cutting away that transitional arc between, as the cliche puts it, “I laughed so hard it brought tears to my eyes.” Williams proved Bergson was right, there is a thin line between the comic and the tragic, between the pleasure of laughter and the suffering of fury.


      Alas, Ebersole is not quite sure, it appears, whether he really intends his Venice, California transposition of Death in Venice to be a comic or a serious work. Ludicrously, his von Aschenbach doppelgänger, Carver arrives with his suitcases and ill-fitting suit on Venice beach as if he has magically been flown in, just before the camera started rolling, from a Long Beach dock. And, as he passes the famed Venice Beach Weight Pen (now enlarged into Muscle Beach), we immediately know he’s doomed when he catches the eye and knowing smirk of the hunky young Sebastian working out with his musclebound friends.

       Certainly Ebersole could not have chosen a better place than Venice to create a sense of a pending choleric epidemic. In its unending mix of a carney atmosphere where men and women freaks swallow blazing shish kabob skewers and juggle fully-operating electric hand saws along with its endless maze of cheap souvenir and T-shirt shops, Venice is a sleazy tourist’s delight. And the men’s bathrooms, which the film features, are truly foul-smelling refuges for homeless men, time-worn surfers, and gays seeking sexual liaisons—at least at the time when this film was made. Since then, much of that has been cleared away, but I recall back in 1985 or 1986, shortly after having moved to Los Angeles, driving to a Venice parking lot and breaking down in tears while the radio was playing Billy Joel’s “New York State of Mind.” Although I had already come to love Los Angeles, I so hated Venice that I despised even visiting it, occasioned on that morning I presume by a visit to the local boardwalk bookstore, Small World Books.

       Yet given all the noise and apparent contagion about the place, I cannot imagine even a derelict house remaining on the boardwalk, let alone run by a germophobic landlord such as Knight’s character, who keeps the windows locked tight. Early in the film, “dropping beads” (see my essay about the process) to the new tenant in the bedroom across from his, Sebastian complains that his step-mother has got the place “shut up like a coffin” so that “Come summer I’m going to have to sleep naked outside the covers.” While I am sure that Carver went to bed that night with plenty of lustful thoughts, because of the sea breezes Venice is often cold in the nights, so that he might find the nude beauty shivering instead of sweating.

      Oh well, we get the point, as does Carver, his eyes growing so wide that by the time, when the half-naked Sebastian drops into his room again a few days later, pulling the man’s hand to his chest for a quick stroke of his pectorals—before Mona knowingly hoots out “What are you boys doing in there?”—we are sure that the elder man is ready to fall into a faint with what he describes as his “stress.” For a man who has evidently been stalking boys now for a great many years, he should know, as his voiceover epistles seem to indicate, that the ”pollution within his body” is not ever going to be put to rest by his doctor’s pills.

      So far Ebersole has spun out a kind of campy version of an extremely closeted fuddy-duddy finding a delightful torment in his longing for a young man’s body. Yet when the film begins to get down to its semi-realist foundations, we simply can’t believe it at the very same moment we have just begun to be intrigued by Carver’s rather absurd dilemma.

      How could this art historian who sees himself as an authority of Romantic love, have ever agreed to be holed up in such a Venice dump? Ebersole’s attempt to cover the implausible situation by suggesting that Carver’s wife is Mona’s sister, making him Sebastian’s step-uncle, just doesn’t resolve the riddle.

     And even had Mona resided in a smart Venice rehab why would he choose Venice as his Los Angeles “home-base”? Although we soon see him, on a day in which Sebastian has been charged to show him around the Venice environs, in a museum, anyone having come to the city with the intent of museum-going or doing of research would know that there are no museums in Venice (although there is the splendid contemporary art gallery LA Louver) in which you might find a painting of St. Sebastian, which he lovingly describes to his namesake. Such a work might be studied only in the Getty Museum in Malibu (the Getty Center had not yet been completed at the time of this film) or the Los Angeles County Museum of Art*—both miles away from Venice.

      And why, for god’s sake, does Carver daily dress up in a suit each morning when no one else in Los Angeles does except for museum directors and a few businessmen working in downtown offices? As a native Angeleno, Ebersole certainly knows better.

      Even if we were to ignore these minor details, however (recognizing that in the movies accuracy is a rare commodity) or to accept them for part of satiric absurdity, we still have major problems in simply believing in the characters Ebersole is trying to create as his satiric targets. This is certainly the first LGBTQ film that I’ve seen to date (and admittedly I have hundreds still to view) where the youth in a “coming out” film not only is more aware of his sexuality than any adult the movie portrays, but is lasciviously involved with the gay sexual world. Sebastian is no innocent Tadzio. He admits he’s been knifed by a leather number he tried to pick-up in a Venice bathroom and when he goes missing, Carver immediately goes to look for him and finds the boy trolling in the then infamous Venice toilet. When Carver describes himself as being an authority on Romantic love, he means he is a scholar of the attitudes the 19th Century Romantics held about love. But when Sebastian claims “I am too,” he means just that; he’s a firsthand authority about gay sex and where to find it. 

       Accordingly, whatever does Sebastian see in Carver, an exhausted and confused, if admittedly a somewhat handsome, elder who hasn’t yet and probably will never be able to come out of the closet? Even if we grant that the lad may have a father complex—Mr. Dickens, as Mona describes him, was probably a gay man who nightly haunted the bridges of the Venice canals—it simply doesn’t explain why the kid spends so much time trying to seduce the elder boarder. And even when he finally succeeds in getting the gentleman caller into bed—at Santa Monica’s Shangri-La Hotel, now a popular place where our artist friend Robert Longo always stayed when he was in town—the savvy 17-year-old must realize he’s never going to convince the codger to leave his wife and run away with him.



        Finally, when the sexually cowardly Carver finally turns tail, ready to run back to his wife, why would such an experienced gay boy decide to hang himself under the Venice beach pier pilings (incidentally, there is no pier that I know of in Venice, and I’ve never seen these pilings unless they’re under the Venice Beach parking lot). It just doesn’t ring true.

        If he’s finally resolved to leave his lustful ways behind him, why also does Carver seek out Sebastian, now known as John, under those darkly-lit pilings? Just for one last kiss? Maybe one more blow job?

        Most importantly, if this 30-some minute film was meant to be a satire, why are we suddenly faced with an ending that proffers a serious enough offense that the police are easily convinced that Carver has killed the kid, locking the innocent sinner in prison for the rest of his life. The film’s early humor and even its several beautifully composed scenes and images are suddenly reduced to a spiritually-based psycho-babble: “Maybe I loved him. I certainly was a victim of that romantic possibility. But a man has the right to live a life in which he sidesteps persecution.  I have one hope for salvation. A chance to begin again. To die. And to be reborn a braver soul than I left.”

At least von Aschenbach kept quiet about it all!

       I hate to say this, since I kind of liked Carver and hoped that he might find a way to enjoy the sex he longed for, but even if he’s totally innocent, I’d now argue “lock him up.” Besides, he’s been locked up for his entire life already.

 

*The LA County Museum of Art does hold Delacroix’s St. Sebastian Helped by Holy Women, but the painting we see in the film looks something like the 17th century Baroque master Guercino’s St. Sebastian held by the Pushkin Museum in Moscow.

 

Los Angeles, March 22, 2021

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (March 2021).

 

My Queer Cinema Index [with former World Cinema Review titles]

https://myqueercinema.blogspot.com/2023/12/former-index-to-world-cinema-review.html Films discussed (listed alphabetically by director) [For...