Larry Kennar | Spokane / 2004

the night i kissed a man

by Douglas Messerli

 

Larry Kennar (screenwriter and director) Spokane / 2004 [16.38 minutes]

 

Larry Kennar’s Spokane represents quite straight-forwardly the kind of sexual incident which happens millions of times each year but seldom gets spoken about or cinematically portrayed for a couple of reasons, the straight man—James (James Bornheimer), in this instance a close friend of the man to whose wedding they have just been—being afraid to reveal to anyone else that he has been interested in and explored gay sex, and the gay man—in this case the groom’s gay brother David (Jason Waters) terrified that he will be seen as having seduced his brother’s drunk friend to behave in a manner he would normally never have imagined. In the heterosexual world in which David as grown up, gay men are often seen as predators.

     In this 16.38-minute film cut from the original of about 29 minutes—the original evidently beginning at the wedding, taking them to a strip club, and to a bedroom hotel room where they engage in clumsy sex—eschews almost all narrative and, as the two comment on a straight sex film James briefly watches in the hotel room—they immediately “get down to business.”

     But “business,” in this case, is a slightly preposterous situation since the straight man has no experience in being properly seduced. It’s strange because I’d never thought about it before, but in many a gay encounter both men simultaneously play the role as willing seducers and those being seduced. And there is a kind of interchange between the two that perhaps does not occur as much in male / female sex, although I may be mistaken. In this instance, nonetheless, James is entirely passive, David forced to set up the TV with a heterosexual porn tape, make his guest comfortable, take off his shoes, strip off his pants and undershorts, put on his condom (although no anal penetration occurs), and engage in pre-sex play.

     Finally, the best David can do his jack-off his friend, and even that ends in basically mutual self-masturbation with a kiss or two thrown in by David.

      To describe it as a sexual act is to elevate it from the mutual masturbation experience that many straight male friends have as adolescents. In short, it is nothing truly special—except these are not teenage boys but grown men who discovered that they truly enjoy one another’s company and, perhaps, have suddenly fallen a bit in love.

       But when James awakens, quietly puts on his clothes and tiptoes out, we know that since David is flying off again that morning, there will probably never be another meeting of the two, that love or even friendship between them can be no more than their one-night stand, something almost forgettable. James will never be able to accept the fact that he might truly have also homosexual desires, that he might be like the so many millions of people who identify themselves as such, a bisexual. He will return to his girlfriend, wife, or porn tapes, or possibly all three while trying to put the incident out of his mind by chalking it up to a drunken night.

       Or maybe not. He might live out the rest of his life wondering in the back chambers of his mind. It is David who can truly forget it and see it for what it was, the comedy of heterosexual exclusivity, the dark heart of homophobia. Someday James might admit to his kids, “I kissed a man once.” But probably not.

 

Los Angeles, May 9, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (May 2022).