Micah Stuart | Johnny / 2016

his first kiss

by Douglas Messerli

 

Brandon Lloyd [as Brandon Crowder] (screenplay), Micah Stuart (director) Johnny / 2016 [19 minutes]

 

Sam (Tony Abatemarco) is an older man who, for first time in his life, picks up a male prostitute, Johnny (Brandon Loyd), a handsome young man nearly beyond his prime as a hustler. But he is perfect for Sam, who after he signs in at the motel desk and checks out the bed springs and pillows, all the time carefully watching his young man get undressed, momentarily stops him—as Johnny moves toward him, grabs his necktie, and pulls Sam toward him for a kiss—“It’s my first time.”

     Johnny gently kisses the man and kisses him again more passionately, pulling briefly away. “Now it isn’t.” As Johnny undresses Sam you can see and almost feel the waves of pleasure pour over his body as he finally gives into a passion that he has clearly been resisting throughout his life. When Johnny bends over Sam’s naked body, you can almost see the older man shake with joy, waiting as if hypnotized by the sheer sensuality that he has been resisting for decades. To call Sam closeted would be to suggest he’s been living a gay life under cover; Sam, however, has been dead and now is suddenly awakening sexually to something he has attempted to deny since his birth.

     In a moment, Sam switches places, topping Johnny and enjoying what almost appears to be the most pleasurable orgasm of his life as he rests his hand on the young man’s neck with a slightly brutal release of years of pent-up emotion. When it’s spent, Sam stammers out the words, “Thank you” with so much feeling of gratitude that you realize just how meaningful this “first kiss” has truly been for him.

     The moment over, Johnny stands, goes the sink, quickly rubs his cock and ass clean with a towel and swigs down water to clear out his mouth. Unexpectedly, perhaps because of Sam’s quite exceptional behavior, Johnny comes back to the bed, briefly tousling with him and laying for a few moments next to his elderly client as Sam strokes the boy’s face.

     Suddenly, Johnny tells of a nearly forgotten incident when as a child, playing with his best friend David he suddenly asks Sam if he’s been in a fight? From Sam’s nod, we gather than he has. But Johnny says he has only been one fight—who he suddenly begins inexplicably to choke, his hands held around his neck. Despite the desperate scratches inflicted to his hands and arms and even, so he recalls, a slug just below his eye, he couldn’t let up. He, who was apparently seen as a weak boy, never felt to powerful, so in control. His whole body shivered with heat.

      Finally, he passed out, later coming to.

      “What happened?” asks Sam.

      “Nothing,” his mother came to pick him up. But things between them were never quite the same. A short while later, David was killed. Attending another school, he was beaten up by older kids and “things done to him,” apparently in attack, it would seem, because David was perceived as being queer. It was just before Christmas, Johnny recalls.

      Sometime after Johnny begin to no longer care about things around him. At 13, almost 13 qualifies, he left home, never to return.

      When Sam later suggests his parents must have suffered over his absence, Johnny insists that he never heard from them again, that they evidently made no effort to seek him out.

       Sam is honored to have had Johnny share his nearly forgotten story, and suggests, as Johnny prepares to leave that he might spend the night. The hustler scoffs. Might he be interested in dinner? Where does he live? All ridiculous questions, Johnny implies, as he puts on his shirt and hurries off in the early twilight.

       Alone again, Sam takes out his billfold, opening it to a snapshot of what appear to be his wife and young son, about the age when Johnny must have left home. The image ties them together somewhat, as Sam breaks down in tears, apparently having left them some time ago, or they having left him if he revealed his hidden desires to his wife.

      Johnny, stopping for a final cigarette on the motel balcony, replays the scene with his childhood friend that we have previously witnessed in his mind. But this time everything is in reverse, the fallen globe uprighted, the hands removed from the neck, the broken stack of blocks reconstructed, and something missing from the first frames, his friend David, bending towards him as he attempts a kiss. This, we suddenly realize, was Johnny’s first kiss, his almost terrorized reaction, and the violence he has never since felt. His first kiss, unlike Sam’s first male kiss, was something that he was not yet ready to accept, and has regretted it ever since, perhaps making his behavior somewhat right by seeking out thousands of kisses just such as the one he has planted on Sam’s lips.

       I’m not suggesting that Johnny lives with a deeply hidden sense of guilt, but simply after that first “fight,” he has never needed to battle with his feelings of same sex desire ever again. He has grown to want and return that kiss and sought it out so endlessly in his daily life that he has nearly forgotten where the feeling first emanated. David has been there always as a kind of hidden elective affinity, as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe might have put it, the lodestone of his life. And this night he has passed the first kiss on to another, even if he is only an old man who has almost let his life wither away before accepting it.

       I have now seen this movie 3 or 4 times, and I realized that the wonderful acting of Lloyd and, particularly, of Abatemarco has brought me back to it. The simple chordal composition of composer MadFlags adds resonance to this simple but emotionally effective movie.

 

Los Angeles, November 10, 2021

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (November 2021).