working boys
by Douglas Messerli
In the vast network of LGBTQ films, one might
well expect that there would be numerous works devoted to the horrific if even
sometimes rewarding world of boys and young men who serve as male prostitutes.
In my discussions of longer films, in fact, I have already devoted numerous
pages to this subject in my essays on Polish-born director Wiktor Grodecki’s
trio concerning young boy prostitution in the Czech Republic, Andělé nejsou
andělé (Not Angels but Angels) (1994) and Tělo bez duše (Body
without Soul) (1996), both documentary works, and his final fictional
masterwork based on the true-life experiences of its actors Mandragora
(1997). The emotionally gut-wrenching power of these films stands behind almost
every discussion of the shorter films I am about to undertake.
Jean-Paul Civeyrac’s La vie selon Luc (Life According to Luc)
(1991) takes us into the true desolation and horror of young boy prostitution
in an honest way that few films other than Grodecki’s Mandragora have
attempted before or since. In this film, it appears, the young free-working
prostitute has alternatives which he refuses to accept, in part because he is
making so much more than he would from a “real” job and he has, maybe, the
ulterior motive of attempting to raise enough money to pay for his mother’s
growing medical bills, although we can never be certain of his true motives. He
also simply appears to enjoy his sexual encounters in way that we have seen few
other hustlers accept their sexuality and embrace all sexual acts, for which in
the end he is severely punished. Civevrac’s work offers no general exploration
of male prostitution, focusing as it does on an apparently eccentric and even
inexplicable figure, but at least the director is serious in his exploration of
the effects of selling the body upon the soul beneath the so-desirous skin.
And, in this sense, Life According to Luc clearly represents a new
approach, if only temporarily, to LGBTQ characters and their lives.
At
least Brian Scott Mednick, in his 1992 film The Confessions of Male
Prostitute, attempts, like Grodecki’s work, to approach the subject
somewhat objectively, trying to illicit the reasons for the young boy’s street
hustling from his own mouth; although once again there is no real attempt to
explore the deeper dimensions of the experience of prostitution itself. In the
end, this kid, kicked out of his home, seems to find that things are not as bad
as they might otherwise have been, and has adjusted himself to his limited and
soon again to be up-rooted life. Except for a few individuals such as Joe
Dellasandro and John Rechy, male hustling offers a professional lifespan even
shorter than gymnasts and dancers.
Later cinematic hustlers, such as the central character in Benoît
Jacquot’s The School of Flesh (1998), seem almost happy to return
to hustling in order to bring in extra money for their romantic attentions to
women. In the French short film by Anne Fontaine, Tapin du soir (Night
Hustler) (1996) a young man pretends to be a hustler simply to get the
opportunity to meet up with someone to whom he can talk. And the pill-popping
male prostitute in Gregor Schmidinger’s The Boy Next Door (2008), when
his client skips out for a few hours for a business problem, takes over
temporarily as a responsible father-like figure for the man’s neglected son. In
these and other such cinema manifestations one would think that being a male
hustler wasn’t at all such a serious matter.
Of far deeper consequence and interest are the two hustlers who appear
in Canadian director Nik Sheehan’s television series Symposium: The Ladder
of Love (1996), one episode of which was partially censored and the other
which seems to be missing in the final TV broadcast. In the first, a rather
elderly (50-year-old) hustler Gerald Hannon meets up with a young boy who is
frightened about coming out. Hannon not only helps him to enjoy his sexual
self, but spends more than the required time to help the young man comprehend
whether having gay sex might have anything to do with his desire for love. The
second episode, evidently cut from the final production, is Donald Martin’s
moving encounter with a young boy prostitute with whom he falls “absolutely in
love,” but unable to tell him, searches for him only by film’s end to discover
he is died from the effects of his transitory life. Both shorts are far deeper
than most of the films I’ve discussed, and are far more personal than
Grodecki’s catalogue-like exploration of the subject in his two documentaries.
Perhaps the most devastatingly honest of films I yet know on this
subject is Danish director Brian Bang’s 2014 work, For min brors skyld (For
My Brother), a film dealing with a pedophilic father who rents out his
elder son Aske to almost anyone willing to pay, including those who might
engage him in dangerous S&M fantasies. Aske accepts his father’s assaults
and his role as a boy prostitute mostly in order to protect his younger brother
Bastian, but when his father finally assaults even Bastian the two escape to a
sort of mythical world of protection in Norway. The film is so forthright in
its telling that even the normally open YouTube demanded it be censored. I
don’t believe this film has been released in the US, but I was able to obtain a
copy released in Germany and will soon write about it.
In
Adam Tyree’s 2020 film Green Light, it is the hustler strangely, who
must qualm the guilts of a long-ago, now almost forgotten friend who for
decades has believed that his childhood sexual playfulness has helped to make
the grown male prostitute gay. There is something hilarious about this man’s
lack of comprehension of what being gay truly is all about; but at the same
time, given the hundreds of heterosexual misapprehensions about LGBTQ life, it
is also an ironically touching reversal wherein the long-suffering outsider
must be comforted by a fairly happy gay man who might in the past have been
described by those very terms.
Finally, I suppose I need just to mention in passing a film that is
tangentially related to this theme, Christian Coppola’s 2019 short Daddy.
But that work is closer to a fantasy than to a true concern with male hustlers.
The youngish escort boy in this work performs in drag for an older man who has
lost his wife and wants to regain, if for just one night, the memory of their
love, the gay male grandly substituting for the wife in a pink dress. This work
treats the subject so comically and sweetly that you can’t describe it as being
a truly serious exploration of the subject.
And I have purposedly excluded the many works where young men serve as
gigolos or kept boys since their relationships with someone with whom they
regularly live is quite different. You might check out such figures I discuss
from Bastien Schweitzer’s Gigolo (2005), Arman J. Kazazian’s Gold
(2005), and the more recent feature Kept Boy (2017).
There are, obviously, numerous other works devoted to male hustlers
which I shall describe later in these pages. But for the moment I have gathered
10 shorts from the first two decades of the 21st century (2002-2019) some of
which together explore the territory in far deeper ways than many of the films
I mention above.
What is fascinating is more than half of these works were released over
a three-year period from 2002-2005, works from various English-speaking
countries, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the US. One cannot imagine what
might have been in the air to account for this coincidence.
Los Angeles, December 14, 2021
Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog
(December 2021).
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