Sasha Ettinger Epstein | Wall Boy / 2009

standing in wait half-naked in the night

by Douglas Messerli

 

Sasha Ettinger Epstein (screenwriter and director) Wall Boy / 2009 [17 minutes] 

 

Another Australian film, Sasha Ettinger Epstein’s 2009 Wall Boy, serves both as a kind of public message about the problem of the slave trafficking runaway children and a kind of “feel good” film in the fact that in this particular tale, based on a real-life event, the “wall boy” (Keegan Joyce)—real name Tom Sutton in the fiction of the film, a boy listed on a national “lost boy list”—was successfully whisked away from a pimp’s (Terry Serio) control and packed off on a return home to his family.

       But the real story here is not that Tom Sutton is saved by kindly Salvation Army workers (Ben Wood and Danny Adock), who each day show up in a food truck that offers homeless men and sex workers hot coffee, donuts, computers on which to work for short periods of time, and, if they wish, seek out the company of the youth workers, but the fact that others remain on wall vigil, young boys who even in the days that are clocked by the narrative structure which interleaves their daily appearance with a running digital clock ticking away their days, remain by film’s end under the vigilance of a pimp, who watches their every move with binoculars.

     When we first see “Tom,” he  his dressed in a pullover T-shirt, but each day the truck and workers return they see him stripped down, first to a lighter shirt, then a sleeveless tank top, and finally bare chested, as if he were gradually being stripped nude before our eyes just as we observe the pimp attempting to both reverse his growing lassitude and perhaps also controlling him with shots of heroin, drugging him into a state of momentary rejuvenation that in the long term leaves him in an even more passive and dead-like state.

     The wall boy in this tale knows what is happening to him, and attempts over the weeks that the youth worker’s truck visit to leave behind cryptic messages on the computer that might be read by the friendly worker, the first time simply saying “Don’t call the cops. He’ll kill me,” and gradually revealing further that he is under observation and is doomed if action is not soon taken.

      Even his entry into the truck is not only observed but is perhaps subject to some punishment, as each time, after briefly looking up his name on the list or shopping for roller skates—a pair of which he evidently enjoyed as a younger child—he quickly bolts to return to his stand along the wall. To be honest this skinny, acne-faced kid, despite his age of about 11 or 12, seems not to be popular among the clients. Indeed, none of these boys, on the edge of death, are terribly attractive to the patrons behind the near constant flow of cars which pause momentarily at the wall as if in memorial tribute before speeding away empty.

      When our do-gooder hero, the kindly youth worker, determines he must finally take action to save the boy, it involves a cloak and dagger event that might almost be stolen from an episode of a good adventure movie. Slipping off and out of view from the ever-observant pimp and camera view he evidently enters a nearby car driven by someone else playing a mean-minded john, who like the others, slows down in front of the kid, this time inviting him into the automobile before driving off, the pimp even jotting down the car’s license number.

       Moments later the half-naked boy hears the automatic lock of the vehicle doors, suddenly terrified of what might happen, particularly since the newspapers have recently headlined that a male boy hustler has had his throat slit by a local killer.

      From the back seat, however, the youth worker rises to assure the boy as they speed away to the airport where they hand him a ticket home, some money, and a used pair of roller skates the worker has pulled out of his own closet of old mementos. They assure him that authorities will be waiting on the other side of the flight to help facilitate his return to his family.

       The unfortunate truth, however, which in its celebration of the boy’s salvation Epstein’s film does not even begin to explore, is that many if not most of these boys leave home because of abuse or are forced to run when rejected by parents unwilling to accept their sexual orientation. And there is utterly no attempt to explore how this child deals with his return to “normalcy” after his near-death experiences in the city. Can he truly be expected to return to his roller-skating childhood after shivering and sweating out the nights against the wall? How will his sadly gained knowledge of evil interact with the youthful innocence of his peers?

        It is obviously a cause for celebration when such a terrorized youth is “saved,” but one cannot help but feel if less time were spent on applauding the particular and a bit more energy was spent on exploring the general problems that this narrative presents, Wall Boy might have been a richer film. And where are the police in all of this; why haven’t they swept down upon these wall-bound boys and their evil controller watching over them in the nearby car. Surely even a casual viewer might discern that many of these night owls perched against that wall are too young to be standing in wait half-naked in the night? Are kindly youth workers who devote their energies to kidnapping such kids away from their pimps the only solution to this serious social problem?

 

Los Angeles, November 10, 2021

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (November 2021).

Gracie Otto | Broken Beat / 2005

the perfect relationship

by Douglas Messerli

Gracie Otto (screenwriter and director) Broken Beat / 2005 [12 minutes]

 

In Australian director Gracie Otto’s 2005 film, we meet two young men obviously in love and living together for evidently a short period of time, Will (Ed Cooper Clarke) and Jacob (Jamie Coombes).

     Like so many film lovers, these two lay around in bed when the alarm sounds, both hoping to keep the other’s body near him as long as possible, Jacob finally convincing Will that he might be late for his evening appointment so they might enjoy one last sexual escapade, but finally himself having to shower for his own job.

    Will insists that his lover might also stay a bit longer, arriving late to his job, but Jacob reminds him that if he doesn’t work, he isn’t paid. After a long shower and a snort of coke, he’s ready, despite the fact that even his lover suggests he looks a bit on the pale side. Nonetheless Will drives Jacob to his job site, and pulls away, reminding him that his mother has invited them out the next day for lunch.

     In the next few minutes, what we are about to discover represents not only a completely other world than we might have expected, but a cultural and social disparity between the two that we soon realize has destined their “perfect relationship” to failure.

     As the director herself notes of their superficial differences:

 

“Will and Jacob are lovers but are worlds apart. Will is a golden boy, tall, fair, and accustomed to success. He is loved by his family, has "come out" to his parents, but conceals his homosexuality from his colleagues. Jacob, on the other hand, is as dark as Will is fair, of a large hardworking Italian family who could never accept his homosexuality.”

      

      But it is the truly darker differences that make this film so fascinating. The moment Will has dropped him off, Jacob changes his clothes becoming a recognizable male prostitute hustling johns in cars, mostly it appears for “head”—a blow job—at 60 Australian dollars (about $40 US dollars). In the few moments of this 12-minute short, he evidently picks up a couple of guys, joining them in their cars, while one potential client rudely rejects him.

       On this night, however, Jacob is also apparently picked up by the cops. We see only the aftermath, as Will seems to have bailed him out and driving away from the police station suddenly demands that Jacob leave the car and his life forever, as he speeds off.

       That act signifies Will’s painful decision—at least one about which he appears to suffer in dejection and second thoughts—throughout the rest of the film.

        But the rejection is obviously far more horrific for Jacob, who has no other place to go. He attempts to telephone, trying to explain that he has only loved Will, and fragmentarily conveying that perhaps Will was the only one who seemed to love him for someone other than simply a paid-for body.

       Apparently, however, hustlers are not allowed to have real-life lovers, especially if there is the vast class difference on top of Jacob’s outcast behavior. Even Jacob’s return to the apartment door, where he cries out for Will just to let him talk is to no avail, as the cowering Will sits within determined to have nothing more to do with the man a few hours before he claimed to be in desperate love.

        The only problem with his revelatory black-and-white short is that we find it a little difficult to believe that Will would not by this time have perceived that his lover was not working in a restaurant or involved in some other nightly employment. But then we also perceive that Will, living in the bubble of apparent wealth and social approval might not be able to imagine a world so very different from his own blessed state of being. He will surely get over the breakup.

       But Jacob, we perceive, may not. Without anyone solid in his life, he sits brooding at film’s end on a park bench where another stranger (Ronny Mouawad) approaches him, offering only 50 for head, Jacob having no choice but to accept the offer. And we realize that for Jacob, survival is now all that he has left, and that will surely be a downhill battle.

       Will can now join his mumsy and friends for lunch without the embarrassment of his gay friend.

 

Los Angeles, November 9, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2021).

Greg Atkins | Build / 2004

concrete

by Douglas Messerli

 

Greg Atkins (screenwriter and director) Build / 2004 [23 minutes]

 

The first few frames of Canadian director Greg Atkins’ Build already establishes the basic situations of three broken individuals. The least reformable is clearly Sherry (Nancy Beatty) who is an alcoholic mother, and as we glimpse in the first few moments of the film, the former wife of a man who walked out on her and her son, Crete (the boy played by Milan Malero, the man by the writer/director Atkins).

     From the time of her marriage to the time when Crete has become, so it appears, an architectural student, nothing has changed in her world as she sits on the couch sipping her scotch. Even his early return from school is a cause for a celebratory drink.

     We also catch a glimpse of another outsider, Garnet (D. Garnet Harding), a man who has obviously been thrown out of his apartment for non-payment, who when he comes to collect his possessions within the 7-day period his landlord has promised to hold them for payment, discovers she has sold them or given them away.

      Garnet is also a male prostitute we soon discover, after, even more startlingly, we perceive that after Sherry falls asleep and Crete tucks her into her bed on the couch, he too hits the streets to partake of man’s oldest profession, selling himself for anyone on the take. He has ensconced himself on a corner that Garnet claims for his own, and when the other man arrives, Crete gracefully moves to the other side of the street. Both of them get picked up this first night.

       But while they wait, we see Crete imagining a situation not usual for male prostitutes, fantasizing a sexual encounter with his fellow street hooker standing a few yards off. From the dozens of films I’ve now watched about male prostitution, by and large such individuals, young and older, all claim to be heterosexual and certainly do not engage in sexual activities with their fellow male friends—at least not openly. And throughout this short film, despite Crete’s obvious longing for the man who—since he no longer has a place to sleep—quickly becomes Crete’s bedmate, Garnet shows utterly no sexual interest in the handsome boy, announcing as he pulls down his pants to join him in bed: “I only take cash; no major credit cards will be accepted.”

      Crete, it is clear, is not just looking to make some money to help support him and a mother who has no way to earn a living, let alone to pay for his education, but is looking for someone whom he can love. His choices seem more than diminished, just as we soon discover that he has delimited the possibilities of his life by dropping out of architectural school, despite his love of the profession. The backpack he leaves the house with each morning is carefully hidden in a in a crawl space under the porch; and Crete spends most of his days staring lovingly at the buildings in his city under construction, longing for a career in which he will never be able to engage.

      Garnet, meanwhile, who runs into the mother after Crete leaves the house, gets on wonderfully with Sherry, the two sharing a bottle of whiskey and a joint with total drugged-out and drunken abandonment. Garnet doesn’t even bother to show up for work at night, while Crete, having run across a couple of more johns, brings home bags of groceries, only to discover Garnet fucking his semi-comatose mother.

     When Garnet joins him in the bed later, Crete hints that it’s time he moves on. Apparently, however, Garnet finds a way to get back for the rejection. When Crete returns home from his wandering at the end of that day, he finds his backpack gone, his mother and Garnet waiting for him on the couch, his mother obviously having been shown his pack of books and told of his son’s late-night activities.

     Her anger and hurt dissipates as she hurls accusations at her son while realizing that she has only contributed to his situation. Their world is falling apart, and it appears that Crete is also now ready to totally abandon his dream for the cold streets where he will have to face off with the likes of Garnet. Will Sal, Sally, his real name as Garnet has learned from his mother, not, as Garnet puts it, “con-Crete,” be able to withstand the loveless world he must now face? Even blocks of concrete, as we observe in one metaphorical scene, will break when they come crashing down unto the streets.

 

Los Angeles, March 25, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2023).

 

Mary Feuer | Rock Bottom / 2002

fear and trembling

by Douglas Messerli

 

Mary Feuer and John Militello (screenplay), Mary Feuer (director) Rock Bottom / 2002 [22 minutes]

 

It’s late at night and the male and transgender prostitutes are standing at various corners of Santa Monica Boulevard. A car drives by slowly, the driver catching the eye of one cute, very young, probably underage boy, Jason (Timothy Lee DePreist). The light stops the car, and Jason moves forward but the car moves on when the light changes, the driver clearly uncertain whether or not he wants to go through with the meeting.

     But Jason catches with the car, driven by an overweight man, Billy (John Militello), and gets in the car, starting up a conversation which becomes almost a seduction, as Billy, still mixed in his emotions, is slowly swayed to make the commitment. They introduce themselves as Rick and Charles.

     Billy asks the outrageous question of the boy, “You’re not a cop are you?” To reassure him, the boy grabs his hand and places in on his cock. “Would a policeman do that?”

     When Jason asks him what he likes, Billy is still shy, perhaps truly unsure, as he turns the question back to the boy who answers with what sounds like an unsatiable appetite depending upon the price: “That all depends, I like to suck or get sucked, fuck or get fucked.” It’s 50 for a suck, a 100 for fuck. Jason likes to take care of business first.

     Billy suggests they drive to his house where he has his money, and the game is on, a game of fear and trembling given Billy’s near complete naivete and Jason’s smooth-talking reassurance that he’s a very honest person—despite the fact that the moment he’s in the house he uses the excuse of going to the bathroom to smoke cocaine and check out Billy’s bedroom where he discovers his paycheck laying upon a desk, at the same moment realizing that Charles is really named Billy.

      Meanwhile Billy picks up the boy’s pants from the floor, his billfold falling out of the back pocket, which when Billy opens it, he discovers from the boy’s license that Rick is really Jason.

    We’re not sure either if we can fully believe Billy when he describes himself as a writer now working for the Los Angeles Times. He seems so childlike we wonder if he really knows what he has gotten into. As if he were entertaining a guest, he serves wine with cheese and crackers, carefully placing his payment on the nicely arranged tray he brings to the coffee table in front of the couch.

      Jason meanwhile asks if he wants to party, to which Billy innocently responds in the positive. But when the boy takes out his drug paraphernalia Billy is somewhat taken about the appearance of drugs, insisting he wants no part of it. And we realize finally that Jason is an addict.

      Jason asks for a massage which Billy is only too happy to provide. As Billy moves up from kissing the boy’s belly, he moves in for a kiss, to which the boy violently reacts, almost unable to control his emotions, apologizing at the very moment that he continues to pound his hands together shouting out “fuck, fuck!” As for many male prostitutes, kissing is off limits. As even Billy suggests, it’s a strange restriction given that he seems amenable to both passive and aggressive sex.

       Billy ends up apologizing, holding him close to calm him, and strangely enough things return to normal, Billy suggesting that he’s ready for sex, the two moving into the bedroom for what appears to be a session in which Billy has fucked the young man.

       Jason is now almost gentle, pleasant after what might have seemed to be a tense situation with a heavyset man as his sexual partner. But now the violence has disappeared. Yet when he rises before Billy, he once sneaks into the other room where, we are surprised to discover the paycheck still remains, Jason picking it up once more without the viewer being able to determine whether he keeps it this time or once again returns it to the desk. But at the same moment he spots something else that detracts him.

      When Billy returns to the living room where Jason is still sitting, we discover that what Jason has found is a boxing robot game, which the boy insists he loved as a kid. Billy responds with wide eyes agreeing that’s why he kept it from his childhood.

      It is hardly possible to believe that these two very different individuals, of seemingly disparate ages, might share a similar childhood pleasure. But evidently they very much do, embarking upon a series of challenges with each determined to win the game, helping us to recognize that emotionally both of these individuals are still children, having come together at a low point in both their lives, Billy reaching out from loneliness and Jason from his need for money in order survive, having apparently “fucked up” the situation with other johns. But perhaps he needs an innocent like Billy for other reasons as well.

      His fear of kissing obviously has something to do with some terrible hurt he has received in the past. And Billy, child that he is, clearly makes Jason feel comfortable and safe. For suddenly Jason comments that “It’s starting to feel like home,” which delights Billy, but surely puts fear into an objective viewer. Is the boy about to take advantage of him in some further way we haven’t  yet imagined?

      As they sit pleasurably together, Jason ingests some more cocaine, this time inviting Billy to kiss him and, in the process, blowing the fumes into the other man’s mouth. Billy discovers he enjoys it, and they repeat the process.

       But now Jason discovers he has run out of the stuff, saying that if he can get some more money they can continue, Billy agreeing without hesitation. Suddenly the two are deep kissing as if they were lovers, having seemed to discover something in each other that as outsiders in judgment have simply not been privy too. It is a seemingly a kind of magical bonding of two opposites who clearly need one another to become full human beings, both supplying something that the other desperately needs.

      If it is difficult to describe this as love; it represents a momentary fulfillment, at least, for two desperately needy people who, just as they have with drugs, have emotionally reached rock bottom.

      Together Militello and Feuer—the latter of whom would go on to write and work on the TV series Dante’s Cove, With the Angels, and East Los High—created in Rock Bottom a work that is at once tense and gentle, a reconfirming story than still opens itself up to a great deal cynicism and doubt.

 

Los Angeles, March 26, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2023).

 

Tony Krawitz | Into the Night / 2002

broken versions of love

by Douglas Messerli

 

Cath Moor (screenplay), Tony Krawitz (director) Into the Night / 2002 [15 minutes]

 

 Australian filmmaker Tony Krawitz’s 2002 film Into the Night—not to be confused with one of my favorite films from 1985 by John Landis—begins with two teenage rent boys, among others, standing against a wall in wait. Soon Damien (Sam Barlow) and his friend are joined by a much young pre-teen kid, who the two tell to get lost, the boy responding by calling them “fags.” But we already realize, as they also do, that there is no “away” to go. The child represents yet another boy tossed into the dark streets, just as they have been.

   A customer, Marcus (Bryan Marshall) drives up, and Damien goes up to the car window to check him out. The middle-aged man has the money, he assures him, and the boy gets in. But first there is a “stop off,” the boy insists, for sandwiches and chips, clearly a way to put something in his stomach for work.

      The man takes him back to his beautiful home, complete with a small indoor greenhouse. Marcus offers the boy a drink, the boy responding that he’d like a scotch, clearly no beginner in the ways of adult hard living.

      Perhaps with the suggestion from his host, Damien is next seen in the man’s step-in bath, enjoying the hot suds, and cleaning off the city grime that has accumulated. The man takes up a bar of soap and washes the boy’s back, noticing a heavy black-and-blue bruise near his shoulder where he’s obviously been beaten.

      Coming out of the bath, Damien wanders about the house a bit more, commenting on the man’s photographs, particularly one of his mother and himself as a child, the boy commenting that he can tell the man was his mother’s favorite simply from the expression of love of her face. The boy admits to having no father, but says nothing about his mother.

      When Marcus goes to urinate, the boy checks out the video player, observing a young boy standing near a pool and playing with a dog, a boy nearly his own age in what appears to be a home-made video.

    The moment the man returns, Damien blurts out, “I’ll suck you off, but I don’t fuck,” the man, smiling in reaction, answering, “Well, I’m glad we got that settled.” Soon after, however, we watch the man giving fellatio to the boy who seems to be quite enjoying it. But when after he goes in for a kiss, Damien forcibly shoves him away, “I don’t kiss!” And with that, the boy seems to be on his way. “Besides, you don’t need me, you’ve got your videos!”

      Somewhat startled by the comment, the man explains the boy on the video is his own son, not porno. “That’s all I have of him,” he adds, hinting that either the boy is dead or a more likely scenario that he has been taken away in a divorce proceeding concerning the man’s sexuality.

        He offers to pay the boy more to stay on for a while, as we realize Marcus’ utter loneliness. In the next frame the two are laying side by side on a bed, the man asleep, presumably after further sex. The boy gets up, checks out his wallet and takes all the remaining cash within.

        He makes a telephone call and says one single word, “Dad,” before the person at the other end hangs up.

        Damien’s father has obviously forced him out of the house and will not speak to him. In this film everyone has been both abused and, in turn, are abusers, even the boy’s adult abuser being a gentle and loving man who has had nearly everything taken from him that truly matters. As the film’s own publicity reads, it is sometimes difficult to know the difference between the betrayer and betrayed.

       When Damien returns to his wall, the young child is still sitting there, nearly frozen. He scolds him once more for not having left, but then encourages him to come along, the camera trailing them to a spot outside of pastry shop, Damien coming out of the store with a package and a bottle of soda in his hand for the kid. The boy is also seeking, obviously, the love of someone else, an older boy like Damien, perhaps reminding Damien of his own not so long ago past.

      In this world of total abuse, the three have each offered up broken versions of love that won’t replace the real love that they are all seeking, but will at least get them through another day and into another night. This moving movie is accompanied by a beautiful score by composer George Papanicolaou.

       Théo Lemouzy’s Condition Humaine (Human Condition) and Harrison J. Bahe’s Nobody’s Boy, both from 2021 bear several things in common with this film, although the later working boys are older than in Into the Night.

 

Los Angeles, January 12, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (January 2023).

 

Douglas Messerli | Working Boys [essay] / 2021

working boys

by Douglas Messerli

 

In the vast network of LGBTQ films, one might well expect that there would be numerous works devoted to the horrific if even sometimes rewarding world of boys and young men who serve as male prostitutes. In my discussions of longer films, in fact, I have already devoted numerous pages to this subject in my essays on Polish-born director Wiktor Grodecki’s trio concerning young boy prostitution in the Czech Republic, Andělé nejsou andělé (Not Angels but Angels) (1994) and Tělo bez duše (Body without Soul) (1996), both documentary works, and his final fictional masterwork based on the true-life experiences of its actors Mandragora (1997). The emotionally gut-wrenching power of these films stands behind almost every discussion of the shorter films I am about to undertake.

     And of course, we had far less intense presentations, less horrifying only because of the older age of the individuals depicted in Andy Warhol’s My Hustler (1965), Paul Morrissey’s Flesh (1968), John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy (1969), and in an almost invisible appearance as a party favor in William Friedkin’s The Boys in the Band (1969), in which the male hustlers were presented less as societal victims and more as clueless child-men who survived far behind the age of the Czech boys because of the stricter age restrictions of US society and the good looks and engaging presence of the central figures, Paul America, Joe Dellasandro, Jon Voight, and Robert La Tourneaux. But, in the end, we can only describe these figures as types which the directors and writers spooled out to their audiences without any intent of deeply exploring them.

    Jean-Paul Civeyrac’s La vie selon Luc (Life According to Luc) (1991) takes us into the true desolation and horror of young boy prostitution in an honest way that few films other than Grodecki’s Mandragora have attempted before or since. In this film, it appears, the young free-working prostitute has alternatives which he refuses to accept, in part because he is making so much more than he would from a “real” job and he has, maybe, the ulterior motive of attempting to raise enough money to pay for his mother’s growing medical bills, although we can never be certain of his true motives. He also simply appears to enjoy his sexual encounters in way that we have seen few other hustlers accept their sexuality and embrace all sexual acts, for which in the end he is severely punished. Civevrac’s work offers no general exploration of male prostitution, focusing as it does on an apparently eccentric and even inexplicable figure, but at least the director is serious in his exploration of the effects of selling the body upon the soul beneath the so-desirous skin. And, in this sense, Life According to Luc clearly represents a new approach, if only temporarily, to LGBTQ characters and their lives.

      At least Brian Scott Mednick, in his 1992 film The Confessions of Male Prostitute, attempts, like Grodecki’s work, to approach the subject somewhat objectively, trying to illicit the reasons for the young boy’s street hustling from his own mouth; although once again there is no real attempt to explore the deeper dimensions of the experience of prostitution itself. In the end, this kid, kicked out of his home, seems to find that things are not as bad as they might otherwise have been, and has adjusted himself to his limited and soon again to be up-rooted life. Except for a few individuals such as Joe Dellasandro and John Rechy, male hustling offers a professional lifespan even shorter than gymnasts and dancers.

    Later cinematic hustlers, such as the central character in Benoît Jacquot’s The School of Flesh (1998), seem almost happy to return to hustling in order to bring in extra money for their romantic attentions to women. In the French short film by Anne Fontaine, Tapin du soir (Night Hustler) (1996) a young man pretends to be a hustler simply to get the opportunity to meet up with someone to whom he can talk. And the pill-popping male prostitute in Gregor Schmidinger’s The Boy Next Door (2008), when his client skips out for a few hours for a business problem, takes over temporarily as a responsible father-like figure for the man’s neglected son. In these and other such cinema manifestations one would think that being a male hustler wasn’t at all such a serious matter.

       Of far deeper consequence and interest are the two hustlers who appear in Canadian director Nik Sheehan’s television series Symposium: The Ladder of Love (1996), one episode of which was partially censored and the other which seems to be missing in the final TV broadcast. In the first, a rather elderly (50-year-old) hustler Gerald Hannon meets up with a young boy who is frightened about coming out. Hannon not only helps him to enjoy his sexual self, but spends more than the required time to help the young man comprehend whether having gay sex might have anything to do with his desire for love. The second episode, evidently cut from the final production, is Donald Martin’s moving encounter with a young boy prostitute with whom he falls “absolutely in love,” but unable to tell him, searches for him only by film’s end to discover he is died from the effects of his transitory life. Both shorts are far deeper than most of the films I’ve discussed, and are far more personal than Grodecki’s catalogue-like exploration of the subject in his two documentaries.

      Perhaps the most devastatingly honest of films I yet know on this subject is Danish director Brian Bang’s 2014 work, For min brors skyld (For My Brother), a film dealing with a pedophilic father who rents out his elder son Aske to almost anyone willing to pay, including those who might engage him in dangerous S&M fantasies. Aske accepts his father’s assaults and his role as a boy prostitute mostly in order to protect his younger brother Bastian, but when his father finally assaults even Bastian the two escape to a sort of mythical world of protection in Norway. The film is so forthright in its telling that even the normally open YouTube demanded it be censored. I don’t believe this film has been released in the US, but I was able to obtain a copy released in Germany and will soon write about it.

      In Adam Tyree’s 2020 film Green Light, it is the hustler strangely, who must qualm the guilts of a long-ago, now almost forgotten friend who for decades has believed that his childhood sexual playfulness has helped to make the grown male prostitute gay. There is something hilarious about this man’s lack of comprehension of what being gay truly is all about; but at the same time, given the hundreds of heterosexual misapprehensions about LGBTQ life, it is also an ironically touching reversal wherein the long-suffering outsider must be comforted by a fairly happy gay man who might in the past have been described by those very terms.

      Finally, I suppose I need just to mention in passing a film that is tangentially related to this theme, Christian Coppola’s 2019 short Daddy. But that work is closer to a fantasy than to a true concern with male hustlers. The youngish escort boy in this work performs in drag for an older man who has lost his wife and wants to regain, if for just one night, the memory of their love, the gay male grandly substituting for the wife in a pink dress. This work treats the subject so comically and sweetly that you can’t describe it as being a truly serious exploration of the subject.

      And I have purposedly excluded the many works where young men serve as gigolos or kept boys since their relationships with someone with whom they regularly live is quite different. You might check out such figures I discuss from Bastien Schweitzer’s Gigolo (2005), Arman J. Kazazian’s Gold (2005), and the more recent feature Kept Boy (2017).   

      There are, obviously, numerous other works devoted to male hustlers which I shall describe later in these pages. But for the moment I have gathered 10 shorts from the first two decades of the 21st century (2002-2019) some of which together explore the territory in far deeper ways than many of the films I mention above.

       What is fascinating is more than half of these works were released over a three-year period from 2002-2005, works from various English-speaking countries, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the US. One cannot imagine what might have been in the air to account for this coincidence.

 

Los Angeles, December 14, 2021

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2021).