Trent Atkinson and Brandon Stansell | For You / 2018 [music video]

in the name of love

by Douglas Messerli

 

MYLEN and Brandon Stansell (composers), Trent Atkinson (director) For You / 2018 [3.30 minutes] [music video]

 

There’s not a great deal to say about openly gay Country/Western singer’s Brandon Stansell’s For You except that it’s great fun.

     Here we have a kind of duel Stansell as, in a kind of nerdish version of himself, he introduces the “larger than life” drag queen Eureka to his “crowd,” she scanning the room and falling immediately in love with another more dapper variation of Stansell who sits with others.

     The two eye one another, Stansell winks, and love in suddenly in the air. But a moment later the dapper, socially accepted Stansell turns back to his friends, seemingly dismissing the outlandish newcomer.

     Hurt, she goes running off, the first Stansell chasing after her, as well as the slightly more dapper second version. The nerd tries to comfort the inconsolable gray and white plaid clad queen without much effect—that is until he offers her up a plate of corn chips. Suddenly taken with her, he reaches out and pulls away her glasses revealing the truly glamorous version of Eureka the likes of which we have seen in RuPal’s drag show.

     Suddenly the woman who Stansell has described as the “real deal…tough as nails and funny as hell,” appears in a blouse emblazoned with country & western like cowboys that might have been drawn by Tom of Finland. The fellow Tennessean becomes the comic embodiment of Stansell’s real boyfriend, “a wonderful man” he’s been dating “for a couple years now,” for whom the buoyantly uplifting song was actually written.

    In the video’s narrative, however, the dapper Stansell now enters the scene, demonstrating his interest in the queen as well, a feeling she’s now only too happy to reciprocate, leaving her nerdy admirer behind.

     But soon we see him mopping very much in the manner of Eureka earlier on. Observing his pain, she pushes the new lover away, returning to Stansell the outsider to offer him up a fresh plate of corn nuts.

    Both lovers, in cameo locket-like frames, meanwhile sing out the chorus:

 

You got me finally feeling emotions

Lost in the moment don’t know where it’s goin'

When it’s hard just breathing

You keep my heart beating

Love looked like falling everyday

'Til I fell for you

 

     Stansell, born and raised in Nashville, explains that his coming out was not easy. The singer explains:

 

“My coming out was pretty tumultuous, actually. I grew up in a small Southern Baptist family, and when I came out at 22, my family reacted harshly. They never wanted a gay son/brother and didn’t know what to do when they realized they had one. Unfortunately, things were said and done that I don’t think any of us really care to remember, but for me, they have been impossible to forget. I have spent the better half of a decade trying to wade through all the things that happened to me, and even though those things were painful, I can’t help but to be thankful for them. I’m thankful for the path that brought me here because I believe it is what made me who I am ⎯⎯ and that is person I am deeply proud of.” Stansell recounts that even he grew up as a child in the Grand ‘Ole Opry, he had to leave Nashville for Los Angeles, to finally create “my sound and style in my own unique way.”

 

    Although the chorus represents a glorious statement of resilience, the verses and pre-chorus lyrics hint at that darker and earlier distress:

 

[Verse]

Used to be bitter but you make me better now

There’s something about your style

Like I’m gonna stay a while

No longer searching feels good to figure out

That it’s gonna be alright

Come take my hand let’s ride

 

[Pre-Chorus]

In moments and seasons

We're caught in the deep end

I need a hand to hold me

Love me like you know me

When it’s hard just breathing

You keep my heart beating

Love looked like falling everyday

'Til I fell for you

    And then the chorus reiterates what love can do for anyone: keep the heart beating. In a time when much of the conservative South has begun turning their backs on drag, Eureka turns heads, revealing the fun and beauty of, as Stansell puts it, a woman having “more hairspray and heels than my momma ever had!”

   Who could not love this absurd pairing of the gay Nashville singer and the splendiferous Tennessee drag queen all in the name of Stansell’s real-life love?

 

Los Angeles, August 21, 2025

Dylan S. Baker | Eric & Oliver / 2023

out of class

by Douglas Messerli

 

Dylan S. Baker (screenwriter and director) Eric & Oliver / 2023 [14 minutes]

 

The subject and location of Dylan S. Baker’s Eric & Oliver might now almost be said to being close to becoming a new genre wherein an unconfident, hard-working boy meets up in the university library or elsewhere on campus with a slightly better-looking, self-assured, and far more relaxed boy and falls in love. There are, obviously, slight variations such as in British director Jacob Kernis’ Who You Wanted All the Time (2024) in which three boys are involved, or as in Brian Rowe’s Lonesome Bridge (2005), where the second boy is not at all willing to go along with roommate’s crush on him, particularly since he’s straight. In each case, nonetheless, two opposites attract and form bonds from which they further learn about one another. If only Nick and Charlie were a couple of years older, one could argue that even the popular series Heartstoppers, since in the final season Nick is heading off to University, might be said almost to fall into the backpack of this recent genre.

     The family-oriented, hard-working introvert in the case of Baker’s short film is Eric (Alexander Espinoza-Luna) who is having difficult with his new Law class assignment. While working in the library with his best female friend, Jade (Olivia Byrne), Eric looks up to see another boy who is in his class enter and hunker down in a study carrell.

     Noticing the distraction, Jade demands to know who he is, and insists that Eric at least introduce himself to his apparent heart-throb, who happens to be the young handsome, friendly Oliver (Noah Schnabel).   

     When Eric actually does as he as half-promised Jade and makes the other boy’s acquaintance, the magic begins as Oliver invites him to work together on their papers. Both quickly discover they are gay, and the seemingly self-assured Oliver admits that he has been through great difficulties with his family while Eric makes it clear that his mother and he are close.

     They boys quickly fall in love and do most of the things young gay students do together on their university campus—you know, take long walks, smile at one another throughout their classroom lessons, share a campus hammock, throw popcorn at one another in the library, and walk across the outer ledges of campus buildings.

     On the more serious side, Eric admits that his parents are divorced and that when his father found he was gay, he refused to have anything more to do with him; his mother, on the hand supported him, and he wants, accordingly, to make her proud. But the courses are more difficult that he imagined they might be, and he’s worried that he might not make it.

     Eric supports him and even makes a commitment to be there for his new friend every step of the way. How he can promise without even a so much on little more than a wink and a touch is not explained, but it’s surely a sign that these two boys are seriously in love, and to prove it they hug, Oliver insisting on showing Eric his favorite campus spot, a sort of religious plaza upon which a giant sculpture of Christ officiates (the film was shot at LaSalle College in Pennsylvania). For Oliver, he likes it because it’s not a highly trafficked spot, and it brought him peace, he recalls, in his freshman year.

     Together they look at the stars, and finally, Eric admits that he “thinks he likes Oliver” (which evidently means that he loves him), Oliver sharing the same feelings which finally allows them to kiss under the statue of Jesus.

    If only writer/director Baker could now explain to us, please, what they doing on a college campus other than sharing their personal feelings and fears. If it sounds like I am making fun of these kinds of films, well I am in part. I also met my life-time companion on a university campus, and I’m sure we did a lot of silly things; I’m certain we shared our worries, and talked about our families; but we actually participated, once in a while, in discussions of about music, film, politics, theater, and general ideas, even sharing what we were learning in our classes. Given their banal behavior and clichéd conversations, these boys might as well be back in high school.

 

Los Angeles, August 21, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2025).

Gary Halvorson and David McVicar | Giulio Cesare / 2013 [The Metropolitan Opera live HD broadcast]

tears and hope

by Douglas Messerli

 

Nicola Francesco Haym (libretto, after Giacomo Francesco Busani’s Giulio Cesare in Egitto), George Frideric Handel (composer), David McVicar (director), Gary Halvorson (director) Giulio Cesare / 2013 [The Metropolitan Opera live HD broadcast]

Handel’s beautiful opera, Giulio Cesare—along with Rodelinda, among his post popular works—might be said to alternate between extremes: tears and hope. And the Glyndebourne-created production performed by the MET plays with those serial shifts, joyfully spoofing both Caesar’s / Cesare’s (countertenor David Daniels) and Ptolemy’s / Tolomeo’s (Christope Dumaux) grabs for power between the tearful tribulations of the proud and beautiful Cornelia (Patricia Bardon), Pompey’s widow, and her son Sextus / Sesto (Alice Coote)—both of whom sang particularly well in Saturday’s performance. David McVicar’s introduction into Handel’s drama of British-like colonialists creates comic yet appropriate tensions that turn Cleopatra’s Egypt into a strange amalgam of numerous colonially controlled cultures from India (by the British) to Turkey (by the Greeks). Marching and dancing their way through the newly captured country, Cesare’s “legions” appear more like soldiers out of a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta than conquering heroes, and their bumbling, often leering and jocular behavior clearly predicts their third act defeat by Tolomeo’s troops.

     Similarly, in this version Cleopatra (the ever-active Natalie Dessay) represents the character as a series of contradictions. Beginning as a playful if domineering sister to the ineffectual, but nonetheless boastful Tolomeo, she quickly shifts to a scheming competitor for her brother’s crown, meanwhile passing as a 1920s flapper named Lidia and, upon falling in love with Cesare, turning into a seductress and, upon his apparent death, a lamenting woman (“Se pietà di me no senti”) like Cornelia. By opera’s end, she has also danced—as Dessay described it at intermission—in a Broadway-like chorus line and soon after becomes a crowned queen.

    This production, in short, while at times audaciously anarchistic, even campy, nonetheless emphasizes the dualities dominating Handel’s work, both musically and narratively. In a work in which the proud, even haughty Roman Cornelia later washes herself and her son in Tolomeo’s blood, and in which her seemingly incompetent Hamlet-like son finally becomes enabled to enact revenge, we cannot but see it as a series of ups and downs. Not only does Giulio Cesare alternate between visions of tears and hope, between terrible deaths and love, but moves in and out of sexual identity. Even in Handel’s day, with the performances of several of its male leads by castrati, the work must have suggested sexual incongruities of which the Glyndebourne production takes advantage. One character, Nireno—who guides several of the opera’s figures to each other—is played as a flamboyantly gay character. Tolomeo appears to be not only bisexual—apparently attracted to his soldiers and his loyal Achilla—but early on expresses incestuous desires for his own sister, as well as expressing his prowess in his harem, while dressed like a gay S&M figure in harem pants. Sesto (wonderfully performed by female “pants” specialist Coote), dominated by his mother, seems to be almost sexless.

     In further extremes, loyal followers such as Achilla turn against their leaders, while Tolomeo’s sister, as I previously mentioned, plots against her brother. Even the dead, in this production, return to life, Cesare’s soldiers suddenly springing up again upon his command, and the two bloodied corpses of Tolomeo and Achilla joining up with other cast members for the coronation party at opera’s end.

      While opera purists and, perhaps, even Handel himself might not have approved of this 21st century reading of this great opera, I would argue that the constant alteration between the comic winking and the tragic melancholic emotions of this work is already embedded in Handel’s music and the original libretto, and is part of what makes this work so vital as it spins out its tearful hopes, its sorrowful dreams of peace and love.

 

Los Angeles, April 30, 2013

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (April 2013).

Helena Santín González | Ver (See) / 2016

raise high the roof beam, carpenter

by Douglas Messerli

 

Helena Santín González (screenwriter and director) Ver (See) / 2016 [14 minutes]

 

In Spanish director Helena Santín González’s 2016 short See, actor Biel Oliver plays a young man working at a repetitive and, as he later describes it, rather uninteresting job of a carpenter, the firm he works for evidently remaking furniture and other fine crafted goods. If nothing else, he is bored and tired of his job, including his nightly meet-ups with a woman who may be his girlfriend or just his best woman friend.

      For soon after they part for this particular evening, he takes the subway home, on the way picking up a slightly older man, played by Ricard Rivero, who is a photographer. Although the photographer gets off at a stop before his, the carpenter doubles back and meets up with the man, returning with him to his studio / apartment, where the photographer tours him through is newest work, with which Rivero is not sure he’s fully satisfied.  

      Oliver’s character, however, is highly intrigued by the photography he witnesses, and even fascinated by the camera itself. When he rises early in the morning with the photographer still sleeping, he dresses and takes the camera with him. We don’t necessarily see him taking photos, but he does look through the lens, and through the process refocuses on the thousands of everyday objects that he previously has not even noticed. What we perceive is that for the first time, he “sees” the world around him.

      At his job, the sterile work space suddenly becomes a world of objects and textures. At the end of the day, he takes the camera back to the photographer, waiting for his arrival at the gate to his apartment building, obviously explaining to him, out of our hearing, just what he has discovered through their chance meeting.

      Unfortunately, this film which has very little dialogue is itself filmed in dark, washed-out colors, which makes sense for the carpenter’s pre-sex encounter, but contradicts what we are supposed to “see” and discover in the latter half. The director Santín González clearly hasn’t yet found her way to open her lens to the full light and color of the world she is filming. Accordingly, much like Oliver’s character in the first scenes of this 14-minute film, we are forced to see the world through a glass darkly.

 

Los Angeles, September 18, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2022).

Ryker Allen | Citrus & Moan / 2016

so sweet

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ryker Allen (screenwriter and director) Citrus & Moan / 2016 [4 minutes]

 

Billed as an experimental short film, Citrus & Moan is actually more of a traditional confessional work that begins, in the first section titled “Citrus,” with a simple analogy. The narrator tells us that for much of his life he ate oranges by cutting them up into their segments and, one by one, sucking the juice from them before putting the rest of the pulp on a plate to discard. “Sweet on my lips, but tart to my tongue, this is the way I would consume my citrus. I was never taught how to eat a slice of orange; I thought this was the way.”

    So too, when he kissed, he leaned forward, kissed, and stepped back; but then one time he accidentally let out the words “I love you.”

     Similarly, the narrator notes he was never taught how to show his feelings (were any of us, I can only ask?), “And I guess he [the boyfriend] wasn’t either. You’re so sweet, he patted me on the head.” Accordingly, writer/director Allen suggests his boyfriend treated him very much in the way he ate oranges, sucking out the sweetly, tart juice of his being, yet leaving the true remainder of him behind.

     In an interview in Out, Allen restates his simple argument: ““Citrus is a comparison I have between the way I consumed oranges to the way my first boyfriend consumed my love for him. Every time I see an orange I am reminded of the pat on the head he gave me after I let out those three words. Citrus itself triggers a mental reminder for relationships in general with me. I even have my bedroom scented with essential oils from an orange.”

     In rhyming couplets (alas) the “Moan” section of this short film, speaks of sweaty sex with another young man. When drops of sweat fall the narrator during sex, he moans, speaking out the name of his previous boyfriend: “I moaned the wrong name.” In further encounters, he held in his moans, speaking the right name to maintain his relationship.

     In the same Out interview, the director summarizes: “The second piece in the video, ‘Moan,’ is about a previous boyfriend of whom, I was of course, completely infatuated with. He had the same

syllable sounds as the boyfriend that came right before him. Our first time having a sexual moment together, I accidentally moaned the wrong boy’s name. From that point on every time we were intimate, I tried my best to avoid making any noise.”

    Although the form of the short film setting problems with love-making side by side, may be different from most other narrative films, the sentiments are rather conventional and certainly not in any manner experimental compared with the numerous gay experimental filmmakers of the previous decades, and has absolutely nothing to do with the so-called avant-garde. Personal confessions go back centuries, St. Augustine’s Confessions being far more radical and exploratory than this young sentimentalist. Unfortunately, I’d argue, confession has become one of the favorite forms of what many still insist in calling the novel.

    Personally, I found Allen’s poeticized story-telling, with very few cinematic values, to be coy. I hate to reiterate the narrator’s boyfriend’s expression that might demonstrate my inability to see this creator’s depths, but frankly it is quite simply, “sweet.”

 

Los Angeles, August 21, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2025).