Ray (Aureilo) Vecchiola | The Blue Boy / 1997

the readjustments

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ray (Aureilo) Vecchiola (screenwriter and director) The Blue Boy / 1997

 

For a while considered a lost film, Ray Vecchiola’s 1997 drama is about a young man Matt (Carlo Angelo), convinced that he is straight, who attempts to pay for his career as an actor and for his cocaine-snorting girlfriend by working in the porn industry.

     A beautiful blue-jeaned, leather coated young man, Matt soon is making good money, although still, at times, a little hesitant to enter the gay sex encounters he is asked to perform. But soon, partly because of the demands of his girlfriend Diane (Susan Nichols), he is asking if the director can give him more jobs, and before he knows it, he is hooked up with an older man, Fred (Tom Katsis) for whom is suddenly bottoming and with whom in mostly enjoys the relationship which allows him entry to a world of art galleries, new suits, and all sorts of other perks, including the use of one of his many cars. To Fred’s question, however, “So, when did you come out,” Matt still denies he’s gay.

    Increasingly, Matt’s girlfriend, although delighted with the extra money—which she quickly confiscates—grows increasingly dissatisfied with the lonely nights and the many times he simply doesn’t show up for their meetings.

    With so much sexual activity, Matt is having difficulty at times “performing” is duties as the top in his porn films, and soon even becomes willing to let the director film him as a bottom, shifting his role not just on screen but in real life. He too begins to wonder if he doesn’t prefer the gay life. Soon after his girlfriend leaves him.

     Matt finally determines to leave the porn industry.

    But he still has Fred, or does he? In several phone calls he is brushed off by Fred’s office staff, and when he attempts to visit his older lover, finding him hosting a large party for his wealthy friends, he is put off, with an offer of money, that strongly makes clear that the relationship is over.

    Without a career, Matt is finally forced to accept the attempt to pick him up off the streets by a passing driver. He has become a male street whore without his even knowing it. And we know that, even a bright and charming as he is, all now will be downhill. Matt is yet another figure that the gay world itself has enticed and tossed away when his beauty has only slightly dimmed.

    Although this story has been told hundreds of times in heterosexual films featuring women who though they could make it big by working their way up as female hostess and porn stars, and such themes were explored in gay films throughout the 1960s and 1970s, in 1997, with the world still reeling from AIDS, Vecchiola’s film was certainly considered rather daring. No mention of AIDS, however, is made, except for a moment with Matt’s older lover declares that “he’s safe.”

     Yet we know that Matt is anything but safe in the world in which is has ended up, finally defining himself as a homosexual prostitute.

 

Los Angeles, April 18, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (April 2026).