Monika Treut | My Father Is Coming (aka Out on a Limb) / 1991

the harsh world of self-discovery

by Douglas Messerli

 

Bruce Benderson and Monika Treut (screenplay), Monika Treut (director) My Father Is Coming (aka Out on a Limb) / 1991

 

The plot of this fetching gay/lesbian fantasy has been played out dozens of times in LGBTQ+ films. A son or daughter has moved away to the city—in this case a female German immigrant to New York City—and suddenly, without notification, the conservative father, mother, uncle, aunt or other family member shows up on the doorstep, requiring the offspring to suddenly reconfigure their living conditions and pretend a marriage or some other relationship in order to maintain family peace.

    In this case, Vicky (Shelley Kästner), a young German-born woman working as a waitress with dreams of acting, finds her entire world about ready to disintegrate when her German father Hans (Alred Adel) shows up at her door, intrigued by her own reports of his daughter’s success in theater and her marriage, smuggling sausage he has brought from home. She quickly demands her gay roommate Ben (David Bronstein) play her husband, who himself is eager to move out with his Latin boyfriend Tito (Israel Marti). Meanwhile, Vicky herself is unsure of her sexual identity, particularly given her experiences in the new world in which she has encountered so many different sexual beings; all which provides a great deal of farcical hiding until the almost clueless father himself gets involved with the St. Mark’s crowd that demonstrates he may not be as uptight and sexually conservative as his daughter presumes.

    The film begins, as do so many of works in the genre, with the father already at the airport calling to announce he will be there soon, while in this case Vicky is working at the restaurant, even late for that job because of an audition to play a demanding German tourist whom the director characterizes as a kind of Nazi, not at all the role for our discombobulated and charming immigrant.

    Hans, as one might expect, is rather shocked by the neighborhood of closed up and boarded buildings to where the taxi driver and delivered him up depositing him somewhat like his luggage on the side of the street along with plastic-wrapped garbage.

     Vicky’s Hungarian friend Christa (Dominique Gaspar) meets him on the stairs of her apartment, and immediately whisks Hans off to her sister’s apartment to refrigerate the Bavarian sausage he has brought along for his daughter, explaining to the now more-than-curious Hans that Vicky is at work.

     “Doing a matinee?” he inquires, Christa pausing a second, before responding, “Something like that.”

     Before we know it Hans is enjoying his sausages with Christa and her sister, proclaiming that his sausages are probably nothing like anything they have previously tasted, but quickly receives his first lesson in New York charm from the sister: “This is New York. You can get anything in New York if you have enough money.”

      Returning home, Vicky finds her father’s message and immediately calls Ben, demanding that he come home as soon as possible and “look butch.”

      Meanwhile, when Hans asks if you can drink the water, Christa gets up, pours him a glass of tap water and serves it up to him, suggesting that perhaps his daughter will be getting a little worried about his not showing up to her place by now, merrily showing him on his way.

      When he does finally reach Vicky’s apartment, he cannot but comment that it looks far worse than he imagined. “What does your husband say?”

      The daughter can only plead that he not criticize her life.

      Hans has brought her a miracle of German technology, a small area vacuum. And immediately after Ben arrives, hugging his pretend wife and declaring “Hi Daddy” before they both simply break down in laughter from the whole ridiculousness of everything, including the old man’s appearance. Later, the father safely shuffled off to bed, Ben sits watching a gay male stripper on the TV, begging to go out since it’s Latin night at his local bar.

     Things get quickly more combobulated soon after as Hans, a “health nut” attempts to take his daughter swimming at Brighton Beach, and starved he attempts to take her to a lunch stand in the beach, demanding to know what “Kunisches” are in German to a German Jew purveyor. Vicky tries to lure him away before he truly gets into trouble, trying to explain to him that they won’t be served there.*

     In fact, throughout the entire movie, there is almost an oversensitivity to how the Germans are perceived in the US as still be Nazis and difficult and obnoxious people, perhaps experiences which Treut herself experienced, but which I never perceived in New York culture. And it is particularly disturbing given the almost full innocence and ignorance of the very Bavarian father, who rather flatfootedly moves through the city investigating all sorts of corners one might never have imagine, including, during a moment when he accompanies his daughter trying out for a New Age Erotic film, when he encounters the performer Annie Sprinkle, almost accidentally getting himself involved with Annie and the commercial for which Vicky isn’t chosen for a female role.

     The scene in which he accidently encounters Annie in the female bathroom where he escapes in an attempt to clear off a liquid Coca-Cola bottle exploding upon his pants, is truly hilarious, where the almost completely mindless Annie is appreciate that men and women can come together in shared bathrooms, showing him that his rubbing of the spot near his penis is better to be blotted up, as she stoops down, full breasts in his face, to accomplish the act.

      Vicky meanwhile discovers a truly hunky and attractive man attached to Annie who in a truly narcissistic manner keeps looking at himself in the visor, explaining that if he doesn’t keep look he will forget who he is. Yet he finds comfort with Vicky, and begs to come see her at the restaurant.

     From there it gets even more ridiculous as Hans explores sex shops, gender-bending events, discovering through Annie what transsexuals are, and even visits a local fakir, while Vicky tries a singing career that Christa’s sister describes as pure passion, “even without a voice.”

     And before long Ben is teaching Hans how to properly moisturize his face: “Don’t pull so hard, you lose elasticity.” After all, “daddy” has a hot date with the most beautiful girl in New York, Annie.

     Meanwhile, the beautiful new man Vicky has met, Joe (Michael Masses) meets up with her for a short luncheon visit, trying to explain to her that her body is there simply for what she wants it to do. But soon after we discover that Joe, previously Joan, is also transexual, of which Vicky is not aware.

     Soon after we see Vicky and Joe passionately making out in a car.

     A few frames later Vicky is attending a lesbian bar with her cooking partner from the restaurant, Lisa (Mary Lou Grailau), who has been steadfastly a support through all this difficult time and the surrounding turmoil. Ben is there with Tito as well. But this scene is dominated by the remarkable drag singer Mario de Colombia.

    It is now Vicky’s turn to sing, obviously unable to even begin to match the previous performer. Fortunately, she performs it as a sprechstimme performance, a spoken song instead of sung. She now works as an actress instead of someone auditioning, singing almost directly to her friend Lisa, ending “I guess I’m ready to love you now.”

    Hans comes home from his obviously successful date with Annie to find no edible food in the house, but also his daughter in bed with Lisa. He picks up his coat and walks out. He leaves and she simply returns to her lovemaking.

     When she explains the event to her local Hungarian friends, afraid that she even might lose her job for her chronic lateness, they suggest they can also use her on their sexual phone line, which has become terribly successful.

      Hans meanwhile is off to the sex shops and the (I feel quite necessary) encounter with the fakir. Vicky, meanwhile, meets up again with Joe, who wonders, now that she knows his transsexual, whether she still likes him. She admits, “even more,” while walking away but suggesting he call her. Commentator Jason Drews on Letterboxd hoped that the love triangle between Vicky, Joe, and Lisa might even continue; but we know it probably will not. Vicky has come out even to herself as lesbian. If nothing else, radically changed in every manner from the first scenes of this open-minded, totally accepting film.

      Vicky, finally visiting the bar Eileen’s just to get plastered after all that his happened, meets up with her wandering father. He begins the conversation: “I finally thought about it. What it was like between two women.” He goes no further, he simply accepts her for who she is, no explanation needed. She explains that Ben and she are not married, and he responds that he never imagined they were.

       Startlingly, a woman turns toward Vicky, asking if she is indeed the “diva from the club?” Her father now recognizes her as a local celebrity. He pulls out an envelope with a great deal of cash and hands it to his daughter as a gift, declaring it was from his agency, but nonetheless, after reading the contract realized that they had ripped him off. She smiles, even giggles, knowing that is, after all, the American way. And simultaneously realizes how innocent and truly open-minded her own father is. Together, they toast to America!

      In the last scene, Hans is on his way back to Germany, telling Annie again that she is the best person he has ever met, and worrying over his daughter. But everything has changed, not only their personal relationship, but their perceptions of the possible expressions of their own beings and sexualities, something that would never have been possible without this farcical get together in the impossible, confusing, dangerous, destructive, accepting, and inclusive USA of the 1990s. Might we ever again find a time so crazy in its contrary permissible realities? I doubt it. The hardball of the new century never permitted quite so many personal contradictions, doubts, and possibilities of other realities.

     Jenni Olson, writing in her The Ultimate Guide to Lesbian and Gay Film and Video observes: “In some ways My Father Is Coming is a tale of cultures clashing and the immigrant experience, but in many others it is about sex and the body. For both Vicky and her father, New York becomes an escape from the intellectual traditions of the fatherland into a world where appetites and sensory experiences take precedence.”

     Yet today, we might argue, Berlin is the place, much as in Wiemar Republic, where one might escape the narrowness of vision present in the USA.

 

*I have to admit that perhaps most of us are simply unaware to the residual prejudice that still exists throughout the US for both German speaking individuals, and German-accented Jews. I was amazed when my editor just a few years later than this film, Perla Karney—who as a young girl after the war had lived in the camps which Americans erected to project German-Jews from continued prejudice in Germany—who on a trip to New Orleans, was treated quite dismissively in the major hotel where we had made a reservation and in the local shops, something I would never before might even have imagined. I saw it immediately. They would talk to me while totally dismissing anything Perla might ask or suggest. I was outraged by the end of our stay; and New Orleans in those days, where also the wife of one of my sales representatives was brutally pummeled by a random passer-by on the streets, shocked me. On my previous trip to New Orleans nothing of that sort happened.

 

Los Angeles, June 7, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (June 2026).