the end of love
by
Douglas Messerli
Since
time immemorial religion, the state, and personal beliefs have worked
singularly and often hand-in-hand to find ways to restrict, redefine, limit,
and even ban various forms of love heterosexual, homosexual, and any other
expression available to human beings. For some absurd reason, one of the most
joyful, healing, and regenerative of all human expressions and emotions has
constantly been the source of fear, terror, and even hatred for some parts of
the population, as if sharing pleasure were the most dangerous of
possibilities. And well it may be. As the gatekeeper to the State-run
“Permission to Love” certificates whispers to one of his disappointed
applicants: Don’t you see? Love creates passion, the freedom and confidence to
threaten their [the State’s] power.”
Religion cast most of sexual activities as
a sin except in the modest expression that went toward producing new bodies for
the church. And individuals from the beginning of time were jealous and
frustrated that others were more attractive, sexually gifted, and just
personally appealing as sexual partners than themselves, leading them to
strongly support State and Church restrictions.
Understandably, dozens of major films have
dealt with these subjects from the very earliest of gay films, Different
from the Others, which the central character is being blackmailed for his
love of a younger man to the hundreds of the later 20th and early 2lst films
that showed how religious culture infected families who stood against their old
children for various loves not readily permitted by their beliefs. Even the
education institutions, supposedly bastions of open-mindedness, worked with the
State and religious organizations in helping to delimit what can be expressed
of love—at the very time when human beings are hormonally most intrigued to
explore their passions.
Christ, who espoused love as being the most
important of human behaviors was killed for that very reason. And isn’t Romeo
and Juliet, after all, simply another attempt to control and delimit the
expression of youthful love. Even normative heterosexual love was
perverted by envy and just plain evil forces in Othello. The Romantics
spent long hours in confusing their intense feelings of love with death. Love,
so the ending of King Kong insists, even killed the powerful beast.
Only in the late 1960s and 1970s did it
seem possible for a few decades that love, in all his forms and expressions,
might prevail. Hair (1979) was not just an expression of the body growth
atop one’s head, under one’s arms, and around and beneath the chin, but about
the rapture of the body itself.
And then AIDS and a return to the
conservative times in the US of Ronald Reagan and the two Bushes destroyed that
momentary revolution.
Although he LGBTQ community had most
certainly made incredible strides in convincing the world that differing
sexualities were not a threat to heterosexual love; in fact, their very
existence did continue to threaten the patriarchal versions of straight love,
and we always knew the Church and State might rise up again at any moment to
threaten any concepts of open love.
Even before the first election of Donald
Trump, a man who has attempted to cover up his own pedophilia through the
embracement of the religious and social prejudices against sexual difference, gay
filmmakers, in particular, begin to perceive a new breed of men and women, who
oppose any but the most selfish forms of love, mocking empathy, fellow feeling,
or any other form of sexual expression except patriarchal heterosexuality,
feared that we might be approaching a new dystopia, not only a political
theocracy or brutal dictatorship, but one that called adamantly for the “end of
love” as we know it. Perhaps these was always an ongoing undercurrent of these
kind of predictive works, particularly the numerous films which actually dealt
head-on with the growing hate that gay men suffered in the earliest years of
AIDS. But their focus, understandably, was on the disease and the lack of human
response to it, not to the larger forces demanding the end of all non-progenitive
sex.
The very next year, the wonderful director
of short gay puzzlements, Canadian filmmaker Wrik Mead, questions whether love
might have ended forever in a gay bar in which the drunken Cupid himself
accidently was struck down with one of his own arrows.
In 2010 alone, two more such works
appeared, the first, Dennis
Hensley’s The Rubdown, joked about a rather minor restriction of a
massage chain demanding the covering at all times during the massage of the
male and female nipples and what lay beneath; featuring a gay undercover agent who
is sent out to check to make sure the masseur is following the new strictures,
hoping we will obey them while wishing simultaneously that he might break the
rules just this once.
In the second film of that year,
Christopher Ludgate’s The Love Permit dives more directly in a dystopian
nightmare wherein the State need approve any attempt a making love through its
requirement of permits which it not so secretly is no longer granting.
In 2021 Brazilian filmmaker Madiano Marcheti’s
Madalena presented a world in which anyone whose sexual differences
became too noticeable suddenly disappeared in the vast agricultural fields
around which clumped the thousands of small matching field worker’s homes who
helped Brazil to feed it masses while turning its own people into ghosts,
permitting their young hardly any expression of sexual joy, and allowing very
limited sexual difference.
That same year saw a series of short
dystopian films. In Harry Weston Two Birds in a Cage a small Australian
suburb cannot even permit the sympathetic hugging of a straight man and his gay
friend, the straight boy later being punished by a beating and perhaps death.
In a complete reversal of the usual
pattern, a gay boy, afraid of losing the love of a new boy in town, invites the
boy over to his homes and locks him away in a basement dungeon so that they
will be “together forever,” the name Kass McLaws’ film of that name. Here
torture and punish are doled out in the name of love and a fear of losing it
that is every bit as strong as the fear of demented heterosexuals afraid of
difference kids of expressions of love.
Also in 2021, the short film a Bloom,
South African filmmaker Anthony Rangel Coll reminds us of the terrifying
dystopian world in parents often place their children in submitting to the care
of conversion therapists, reminding us of Kerstin Karlhuber’s Fair Haven (2017),
Joel Edgerton’s Boy Erased of 2020 documentary Cured, ending as
in the latter two earlier films in the suicide of a central character.
Taking us back to dictatorial government’s
like the Soviet Union which attempted to outlaw homosexual behavior Peter
Rebane takes us back to a military base in the Soviet occupied Estonia to
reveal to Soviet governmental and social repression which continues today in
Russia in his gay soap opera Firebird (2021), while Máté Konkol’s Budapest,
Closed City (2021) shows us the results of current Hungarian leader Viktor
Orbán’s racist and homophobic policies. Both of these works, in turn can only
remind us of earlier cinematic representations about the Nazi attempts at LGBT
eradication in films such as Bent (1977), Pink Triangles (1982), Paragraph
175 (1999), and Sebastian Meise’s Great Freedom (2021), the latter
film of which I also include in these pages.
Even when it is not nationally decreed, the
social order can create a world in which young gay lovers are not permitted to
survive, as in Guiseppe Fiorello’s beautifully moving Scillian dystopia, Fireworks
which resonates—perhaps unknowingly—with Kenneth Anger’s 1947 masterwork by the
same name.
By 2024 French directors Nathalie Musteata
and Alexandre Singh had already perceived and assimilated just what the kind of
world Trump imagined might truly look like in the truly dystopian tragedy, Two
People Exchanging Saliva. In this film not only had love been erased but
even it’s emblem, first evidence, and entry, the kiss itself. To those who even
might wish to explore it, foretold in Ludgate’s earlier work, Eros had at last had
become redefined as Thanatos.
Love of all kinds has been threatened
throughout history, but for LGBTQ figures it almost goes with the territory. As
Vito Russo made clear in The Celluloid Closet death is how most gay men
and women end of any film which bothered even to represent them.
Yet the works I include here were all made
after Stonewall, the symbol of the supposed end of gay prejudice in the USA.
Yet we all know it is only an emblem, that reality continues to be a world in
which gay men and women still find themselves often marked by local community
haters, and is subject to major social of government shifts in sentiment. Today
transgender individuals are under even greater torture and punishment than many
gay men and lesbians were in the previous century. In many states they no
longer have any legal rights to be who they are—a deeply existential statement—but
must return to their birth names and the reality that surrounded their youthful
non-existence; they are refused licenses, the permission to vote, and even the
simple access to appropriate bathrooms, denied even the permission to dress as
the gender by which they define themselves. Transsexual individuals have also
been denied their flexible shifts in identity, drag queens, long individuals
who were most able to move between the heterosexual and homosexual worlds in
their satire of and disregard of gender definition, are denied in some states their
performances or even socially conscious activities such as reading to children
in libraries. And we all know that the rightest groups in many countries are
working hard to take back the rights gays, lesbians, and bisexuals have
demanded and won over the years, banning books and educational services so that
younger people cannot even find a way out of their confusion of sexual identity.
For queers, the end of love has always
been just around the corner, lurking to deny their own passions, pleasures,
identities, and deep love. We have been forced into an almost paranoid view of
our positions in society, believing at times that perhaps a veneer of
heterosexual-like marriage and family life might wipe away all prejudice, but
being, nonetheless, to be always wary perceiving that the façade might just as
quickly turn on us or actually corrupt our true identities and widely and
sometimes wildly loving beings. Perhaps, Wrik Mead was right; we are all cupids
infected by our own commitment to love.
The works I have chosen in this small
collection are just a sampling of the many such feature and shorter dystopian
cinematic representations of our societies since the so-called liberations of
the late 1970s and early 1980s, freedoms quickly squelched in the terrible AIDS
epidemic of the 1980s-the early years of the new century, and which continue to
be denied today. Yes, since 2015 we can even marry, but don’t imagine for a
moment that individuals, governmental officials, and judges of the courts aren’t
waiting in glee for the opportunity to again deny those rights. There are still
laws on the books banning same-sex marriage in 26 states. All the Supreme Court
has to do is to return the law to State regulation and many thousands of US
citizens would be banned from the right to love those with whom they live.
Los
Angeles, April 3, 2026
Reprinted
from My Queer Cinema blog (April 2026).
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