Daniel Daperis | The Colour Blue / 2024

the problem that never disappears

by Douglas Messerli

 

Daniel Daperis, Jeremy Kewley, and Braydn Michael (screenplay), Daniel Daperis (director) The Colour Blue / 2024 [20 minutes]

 

Over the years since I began my Gay Cinema volumes, watching over 4,500 films to date, I must have watched more than 500 painful coming out films with a few versions of them being the kind of feel-good films now popular to help people in the process. The fact remains that the very important act of sharing your identity as a gay or LGBTQ+ person is mostly still a painful experience even the Australia, of this film, in 2024.

      And frankly, given all the other films I’ve seen along with this that recount again and again the difficult LGBTQ+ people have in simply being themselves is sometimes overwhelming. Daperis’ movie is certainly not very profound, and far too many of the important conversations between the central character Reece Jackson (Anthony Littlechild) and his family members, as well as his former friend best friend Pete Cook (Lee Cormie) are presented as musical interludes instead of intelligent dialogue.

     Reece’s family, for the most part, particularly his mother and sisters seem quickly to accept his homosexuality, and his mother, in particular, is truly supportive. But his father Paul (Andrew S. Gilbert) and brother Mark (Braydn Michael) cannot come to terms with it yet, and basically ignore him, privately revealing their anger and hurt.

    Yet this time, given the date of the film and perhaps the simple mass of suffering and sorrow I have witnessed that young gay boys have had to endure since the beginning of the filmmaking, I just lost it and broke down in tears. We shouldn’t be seeing the same films being repeated over and over the years, but particularly those you men in rural areas still face the same dilemmas as boys did in the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s. Will it ever stop?

     Some commentators simply describe this film as retrograde. But if it represents the viewpoints of its presumably young writers, how can that be disregarded? Yes, film relies on fiction, but it also comes often from experience and the heart. We all know this kind of thing still happens. And it can’t simply be wished away to some cornfield of the imagination.

     When I grew up in the 1950s and early 60s in the small town of Marion, Iowa, I was certainly made fun of, called names, and sometimes explicably beaten. I didn’t quite know what a “fag,” which Reece’s former friend describes him, was. But I realized because they told me so, that somehow I was different. Yet I didn’t truly suffer and didn’t bother to share being gay with my parents until I was old enough to be long separated from them; although, as I’ve expressed elsewhere, they certainly were not accepting, and perhaps never fully embraced me again as a member of the family; even on his deathbed my father still described me as stubborn.

     But I was no longer a teenager, and could deal with it. I had a lover who I am still with 56 years later. But, I think today, in an even more conservative Iowa, it might be even harder than when I grew up, and the gay community had not yet so established its presence that further frightens homophobic provincials.

    In Reece’s Australian town, even his former friend lures him to a school gathering for a party, only for Reece to be confronted with a gang of gay-hating thugs who beat him severely, his brother Mark coming to his rescue and rushing him to the hospital.

    His father comes round, now recognizing just how difficult it is for his son to have been honest, encouraged by his female friend Margie (Billie Rose Cachia) to come out.

       Fortunately, in this case, he has a still loving family; so many other parents of gay children are as homophobic as those gang members. And even governments have joined in the hostilities. Gay services, for example, are inexplicably being cut off by a hateful and unfeeling US government. Trump and his administration has made a decided and focused attack on transgender individuals. And members of the Supreme Court would even like to “rethink” gay marriage.

      Sometimes it’s all just too much to bear, despite the great strides the LGBTQ+ communities have made throughout the world. Why is sex difference so absolutely frightening to so many people? Of course, I could write an entire thesis about the subject, but after a while it just makes utterly no sense.

 

Los Angeles, August 24, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2026).