Juan Sebastián Valencia | Pink Trumpets / 2024

on the street where you lived

by Douglas Messerli

 

Juan Sebastián Valencia (screenwriter and director) Pink Trumpets / 2024 [21 minutes]

 

Gregory Parker (Ryan Kirby) and Hunter Jones (Douglas Jung) were gay lovers six years before this short film begins. Somewhat inexplicably, they have run into one another again in Hunter’s favorite ice cream place back in the states, despite the fact that he now lives in Paris. The meet-up results in Gregory inviting Hunter back to his cabin in the mountains, the place where they regularly met up years before—at a time before Hunter discovered that Gregory was a married man with two children who had been lying to him and not even provided his real name.

   For Hunter, particularly, but for both men, we soon discover their break-up was a horrific time in which Hunter, unable to remain with his memories in the States, escaped to Paris and in which Hunter, we soon learn, gradually realized that he had loved Hunter and through therapy admitted his sexuality to his wife which ended in a divorce. His wife is soon about to marry again, although it’s apparent that he still sees his beloved children from time to time, and that finally his friendship with his ex-wife has been repaired.

    It is a story told time again about gay men who have not been able to be honest to themselves or others about their sexuality. But in this case the focus is on what happens to the other man to whom he has lied and cheated.

    Hunter begins the visit with insisting that he is intending to stay only a short while, perceiving it almost as a closure to such a painful period in his life. As he announces to Gregory: “I’m not the same anymore.” Gregory responding, “Neither am I.” And surely, despite Hunter’s seemingly charmed life in Paris where he is working now at a high paying job, has found a new friend, and has just purchased a lovely new apartment, Gregory’s life has changed far more radically given his divorce, his open admission to being gay, and his complete remodeling of the cabin house, where he now lives, the cabin symbolizing the only legitimate part of his past life, where the two of them spent their time together.

    If their slow series of revelations of their changes is a bit melodramatic, featuring as it does a rather bland picture of a place in the city, photographed evidently by Gregory of the street where they temporarily lived, this short film nonetheless makes it quite apparent of how the man who wouldn’t even reveal his name, in an attempt to protect his wife, children, himself, and, so he claims, even his gay lover, affected all of their lives for the worst.

     Given the fact that Hunter has found Paris and Gregory’s wife has found a new husband and father for the children, perhaps the only one who remains living in a fantasy world is Gregory, who finally reveals his real name, the fact that he has kept their friendship bracelet (Hunter has also kept his, although he has hidden it upon arrival), and now has only the memories of his life with Hunter left to sustain him.

    Soap operas, the genre in which this work basically functions, are the last bastions of romantic fantasies along with gay movies. Even heterosexual rom-coms are far more cynical these days. For here, after finally confronting Gregory for all the hearts he has broken and the pain he has caused, Hunter admits that he has a bag of clothes hidden in the trunk of his car and is willing still to spend the night—or perhaps an eternity with the man he realizes he still loves.

 

Los Angeles, January 8, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2026).