Mike Lemon | Touched / 2003

the forces of fate

by Douglas Messerli

 

Mike Lemon (screenwriter and director) Touched / 2003 [25 minutes]

 

What happens when two profoundly lonely men who are strangers, one older and gay, and the second younger and questioning, take one last chance at making a sincere human connection? Based on true events in the life of the writer/director.

     One most certainly might declare this film about two Michael’s, young and old, who meet up quite by accident at a gay bar one night as being overtly sentimental, somewhat badly acted, and with it’s fairly washed out colors (the older Mike, Bob Bowersox, looks at moments like a ghost), lacking in good acoustics, and highly melodramatic. I strongly felt these failures as I watched this short 25 minute film, but nonetheless was highly moved by it.

    In part, we know it was based on a real experience in writer/director Don Lemon’s real life; but the magic of that one night, where the elder man (Bowersox) leaves his female friend, determining for some inexplicable reason to return to a gay bar he promised never again to visit, is still palpable. He even explains to Dafna (Vicki Gorman) that he is prepared to go home alone, no one in such a bar wanting to have sex with any middle-aged man. But then, maybe, he might through a miracle meet someone whom he can again make contact, to actually be physically touched.

     Even he can’t explain why he feet are taking him again to a place truly unwelcome for those over a certain age. But magic does happen that night when a beautiful young man, Michael (David Duzenski) joins him for a drink and amazingly determines to go home with him.

    There is most clearly a problem of logic here, in many respects, from just a script continuity confusion that can’t explain why Mike has arrived at the bar without a car but now has a car to drive his pick-up home.

     And even he can’t explain, after asking what the golden-haired Michael does for living—he’s a mason—why he replies that he is on a spiritual mission. It is precisely that crazy statement that attracts the angry young Michael to him.

     As we soon discover Michael is so angry that he has determined to kill someone that very night, and Mike appeared to be that perfect “someone.” Apparently his discovery that he was queer and his heavy drug abuse sought as a palliative to his feelings, has lost him his wife and child, no visitations even allowed by her parents with whom they now live who have attained a restraining order against him.

     He now lives on the street, furious at himself and his fate, and finding now answer to his situation. Perhaps life in prison would be better—those being my observations, not his.

     Strangely, Mike still keeps him near, answering in an almost amazed but also prophetic manner, assuring him that they were intended by fate or whatever it is to have met up.

     “Spiritual. Yes. I don’t even know how or why I said it. It was like, I didn’t say, but the words came out of my mouth anyway. Because you needed to hear them. I don’t know. Neither Michael. Me Either. Before you go, can I please just hold you for a while? No sex, no games.”  And, in fact, the two do hold one another, Michael breaking down into tears, as finally they lay out on the couch together just in deep sensual communication.

      Mike drives Michael to his destination, wherever that might be since he has suggested he no longer has a home, and the two kiss and hug, Mike offering him money, Michael at first refusing, but finally being convinced to may help him to survive.

     Mike drives home, now in the early morning, to call his friend Dafna just to report that, indeed, he has finally “touched” somebody, having both saved someone’s life and shared the bodily contact with another human being just for the short while that he so desired.

     These men are the survivors at the edges of gay society who often get ignored and forgotten.

    

Los Angeles, April 27, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (April 2026).