removing the braces
by
Douglas Messerli
Alistair
Baldwin (screenwriter), Madeleine Gottlieb (director) Bound / 2023 [27 minutes]
[TV episode, Erotic Stories, Episode 3]
Episode
3, one of three LGBTQ works in the series of eight “erotic stories” presented on
Australian (SBS) TV, concerns a handsome young man, CJ (Joel Lago), suffering
the results of childhood cerebral palsy. CJ is a sexually active gay man who is
active on Grindr, although often doing himself harm in some of his sexual
activities. Even his doctor advises him that “Someone else’s pleasure isn’t
worth your pain.”
Yet
CJ has a kind of comic, but bitter response to his own disabilities, in part
oversensitive to the selfishness of abled others, such as the perfectly healthy
businessman who is impatient that he give up his disabled seat of the subway,
while at the same time refusing to be perceived as somehow disabled and, in particular,
of being regarded as worthy of being treated as someone different and special
for his disability. To resolve the stand-off with the businessman, he gives up
his seat, while allowing the attentions of another able being who sits in the
same section, Jet (Tim Draxl), a slightly older but still trim and good-looking
man, who invites him to an evening party at new gay sex bar, providing him not
only a “special entrance” but a key that gives him an unexplained special
entrance.
CJ is not at all sure that he wants to
attend the “special opening” of the club, but is fascinated by what he later describes
as a “hot” man who has approached him in the subway, who also noticed that CJ
wears leg braces, not necessarily a good sign since some, seeing them some immediately
respond with pity, while others with have a kinkier attraction that involves
pain and domination.
Not only is CJ whisked through the long waiting line, but is shown his way upstairs where Jet in a S&M room decked out with a metal bed, bejeweled with handcuffs, leg locks, and other devices to give further pain to Jet’s visitors, and longer sexual pleasure to himself. As Jet attempts to woo him into the bed, he explains that his S&M attractions began with handcuffs, moved on to ropes, and from there to various other devices, ending in his obsession with the handicapped, all with the express purpose of confusing the pain and pleasure that he has come to associate with his own gay sexuality. CJ is tempted to play along, realizing at last why his leg braces has attracted Jet, but is hardly able to keep a straight face as the man reveals his pleasure in suffering—particularly since he has spent his life suffering without much pleasure involved. Why, he demands to know does Jet bring disable people into his “freak fetish stuff.”
Finally, he quickly demands release and
leaves the premises only to meet up with a disabled woman who he has previously
encountered at the doctor’s office, Blue (Crystal Nguyen) who is wheelchair
bound.
She has come her precisely looking for
action from those who perceive her as a “freak,” which CJ argues Jet was trying
to make him. She has long ago accepted the term, although she is surprised when
the word comes out of her fellow disabled friend’s own mouth.
Recognizing that he has for most of his
life fighting against the just such a designation, he returns to the bar,
finding Jet in a far humbler state of mind. Jet admits that he has always
perceived himself, just for being gay, one of the freaks of life or what some
of as have reclaimed as our birthright, among the people who are born “queer.”
Yet most of his gay friends have gone on to claim their “normalcy,” to marry,
have children, live basically heterosexual lives. For Jet, he is still a “freak,”
a queer who identifies with the old vision of the separatist homosexual
experience.
Finally, recognizing a shared perspective without
the victimization that Jet tried to impose, the two do begin to make real love
without all the apparatus.
On his way home on the subway, a stranger
asks about why he is wearing “that,” and instead of immediately reacting with a
quip or bracing for an outpour of meaningless sympathy, he simply explains that
he has had cerebral palsy. But the stranger is not all talking about his leg
braces but CJ’s hole-punched leather halter. CJ finally smiles: “To get attention,”
he admits.
Los
Angeles, April 10, 2026
Reprinted
from My Queer Cinema blog (April 2026).
No comments:
Post a Comment