Agostino Leone | Tell Me How / 2018

how to be gay

by Douglas Messerli

 

Agostino Leone (screenwriter and director) Tell Me How / 2018 [7 minutes]

 

In Tell Me How Canadian director Agostino Leone deals with an intermediate zone between coming out, as his character Matt (Kurt Alan) describes it, “closing the door of the closet,” and the ongoing struggle to be himself. The question that arises in this short film is who is somebody during that twilight zone when formerly “straight’ boys are asked to stop flirting with women and pretending to be heterosexual before they come to terms with their new sexuality.

     The short begins with Damien (Brendan Flynn) storming out of a party where Matt, his lover of apparently only two weeks, has been flirting with a girl. Like many such comfortably “out” men he feels demeaned by Matt’s continual vacillations, rejected through Matt’s inability to admit to the commitment their relationship has already come to symbolize for him.

      This time Damien is ready to leave until Matt has been able to settle upon his own identity, and as in the situations of so many similar films—Get Real (1998), In the Dark (2005), Man in the Mirror (2011), Summer Vacation (2012), Dominant Chord (2019), and the several Will Lexington episodes of Nashville, USA (2012-2019)—we sympathize with him at first, frustrated by his lover’s continual lapses into a way of life that he himself claims to have abandoned and dismissed.

      But Leone’s film, in its back and forth argument between its two characters, makes it clear that this time the director also empathizes with the still malleable gay boy who doesn’t yet quite know how to embrace the identity he has been exploring. He still defines himself, at one moment, as not being gay. And when reminded that he first contacted Damien asking for sex, “I’m horny,” tacks it up to being simply a “guy” response, as if all straight men are ready to explore gay sex simply out of their insatiable sex drive.

      But as Damien backs him into a corner, threatening this time to leave him until he has come to terms with who he truly is, we sense the terror of the uncomfortable gay Matt, who first attempts to charm and rekindle Damien’s love for him with a kiss and begging him to go back home. But this time it doesn’t work, and when Damien actually walks away, Matt sits alone on street bench grimacing in true pain, clearly inwardly wishing if now outwardly demanding that someone simply tell him how to get over his long-lived pattern of pretense created as a shield against his continued fears of what being a homosexual signifies.

      Those who have come out, do often tend to forget just very difficult it is for some indoctrinated males to embrace their own sexual feelings and everything that might come with that. My own husband Howard, even after our 52 years together, still reminds me that when he first came out he feared that it meant he might suddenly “come down,” as if it were a contagion, with the effeminate mannerisms, the exaggerated gestures, and disagreeable disdain which film and other societal portrayals had taught him defined a homosexual being. I, strangely enough, who had lived in a far more isolated world than he never imagined that such portraits had anything to do with reality, realizing it was simply a sexual preference, not necessarily a “way of being”— although I certainly later comprehended that being gay could very much result, given our societies’ attitudes and dismissal of LGBTQ individuals, in a variety of anti-societal modes of behavior or gestural actions that mocked normativity.

      Perhaps, most of all, individuals such as Matt have to learn not what they will lose in defining themselves as gay, but what they may gain, and I don’t mean simply the abstract idea of “a sense of being oneself.” We need far more positive representations of what living the gay live provides, not only offering up such individuals a different kind of available community but arguing for an anti-normative way of perceiving things. For century after century, society has taught us that it is easier to live in tandem with the majority, to share its values and structures. But given the way each century reveals the failures of our species, perhaps we must begin to rethink that entire myth, realizing that, in fact, it is often the most “normative” that is destructive and terrorizes nearly every individual trapped within its embrace as opposed to those creative outsiders who take us, even at worst times, in different directions. But to preach that is to face off with most of the human race, a near impossibility for most of us cowards. Conformity is so much simpler.

      Out of the closet, Matt will now have to find his way out of the bedroom and out of his familiar home, neighborhood, and even city; he must learn how to be a lone traveler within the larger society in which he exists. Damien is clearly not blessed with the ability to “tell him how.”

 

Los Angeles, September 24, 2022

Reprinted World Cinema Review (September 2022).