Agostino Leone | We Had a Time / 2019

the date

by Douglas Messerli

 

Agostino Leone (screenwriter and director) We Had a Time / 2019 [12 minutes]

 

Billed as a prequel to Tell Me How, Leone’s We Had a Time of the following year is a strange work in that we discover that Matt was indeed further “out” than we were led to believe, having as he tells Damien in their second encounter together, that he has purchased the Warhol piece hanging on his wall, evidently one of his “Self Portrait in Drag” works, because it seems vulnerable and the artist was interested in issues of gender, etc. We never see the photograph, but we are almost surprised that the still-confused figure of the 2018 movie has clearly been thinking about issues of sexuality before we see him being left behind by Damien in earlier film.

      He almost loses Damien as well in this film. The two have evidently met up through the internet once previously when, so it appears, when they simply engaged in sexual foreplay. But now Matt has invited him back, perhaps this being the time when he expressed the fact that he was “horny.”

      But Damien appears, at the beginning of this short work, more cautious about having sex with a stranger than does Matt. We soon realize, however, that Matt’s interest may be in just sex, satisfying his urges, and that he has not actually yet developed the notion that he may want to spend any significant time with another gay man, which Damien is truly seeking.

      It is yet another way of pretending to oneself that you aren’t truly gay, that you’re just interested in exploring a range of sexual experiences, or that sex somehow doesn’t have anything to do with being a homosexual. The latter, in fact, is the same ruse so many male prostitutes use to protect themselves from describing what do for a living as having anything to do with their own private sexuality. Which, in turn, is presumably why Matt would be just as happy with “fooling around,” a session of mutual masturbation serving the purpose just as fully as more complicated sex.

     It also explains why when Damien suddenly bends forward and kisses him, he is taken aback, responding, “well, this is a first.” Many prostitutes, in their denial of being homosexuals, do not kiss or allow themselves to be fucked, those activities suggesting a deeper commitment to queer self-definition.

      In any event, this time the two have sex, after which Damien suggests that they might continue the “relationship” by getting to know one another through a date.

       That word is truly an anathema to Matt, who expresses his total disinterest. Couldn’t they just meet again here and fuck? But Damien is adamant that if they get together again, it has to be date first and then…perhaps sexual activity.

       Matt simply replies that “he doesn’t do that,” meaning “dating” or what one might better describe as socializing. Actually, engaging with a queer man clearly suggests another kind of involvement, a recognition that the other is an equal, a human being with whom one might communicate other things than sexual pleasure.

        Yet clearly Damien has aroused something else in Matt, and when the boy dresses and is ready to leave without any possible return, Matt finally agrees to the “date,” afterwards calling someone to whom he had been talking earlier to describe the “event,” saying “We had a time,” still unable evidently to attach an adjective like “good” or “wonderful,” which might suggest his real involvement and evaluation.

        Once more Leone has demonstrated through what appears like a simple series of events, that he is exploring a far more complex territory in his short movies. I hope with these two under his belt, he might take this into a feature film that will further explore Matt’s and Damien’s gay maturation.

 

Los Angeles, September 24, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2022).

 

Agostino Leone | Tell Me How / 2018

how to be gay

by Douglas Messerli

 

Agostino Leone (screenwriter and director) Tell Me How / 2018 [7 minutes]

 

In Tell Me How Canadian director Agostino Leone deals with an intermediate zone between coming out, as his character Matt (Kurt Alan) describes it, “closing the door of the closet,” and the ongoing struggle to be himself. The question that arises in this short film is who is somebody during that twilight zone when formerly “straight’ boys are asked to stop flirting with women and pretending to be heterosexual before they come to terms with their new sexuality.

     The short begins with Damien (Brendan Flynn) storming out of a party where Matt, his lover of apparently only two weeks, has been flirting with a girl. Like many such comfortably “out” men he feels demeaned by Matt’s continual vacillations, rejected through Matt’s inability to admit to the commitment their relationship has already come to symbolize for him.

      This time Damien is ready to leave until Matt has been able to settle upon his own identity, and as in the situations of so many similar films—Get Real (1998), In the Dark (2005), Man in the Mirror (2011), Summer Vacation (2012), Dominant Chord (2019), and the several Will Lexington episodes of Nashville, USA (2012-2019)—we sympathize with him at first, frustrated by his lover’s continual lapses into a way of life that he himself claims to have abandoned and dismissed.

      But Leone’s film, in its back and forth argument between its two characters, makes it clear that this time the director also empathizes with the still malleable gay boy who doesn’t yet quite know how to embrace the identity he has been exploring. He still defines himself, at one moment, as not being gay. And when reminded that he first contacted Damien asking for sex, “I’m horny,” tacks it up to being simply a “guy” response, as if all straight men are ready to explore gay sex simply out of their insatiable sex drive.

      But as Damien backs him into a corner, threatening this time to leave him until he has come to terms with who he truly is, we sense the terror of the uncomfortable gay Matt, who first attempts to charm and rekindle Damien’s love for him with a kiss and begging him to go back home. But this time it doesn’t work, and when Damien actually walks away, Matt sits alone on street bench grimacing in true pain, clearly inwardly wishing if now outwardly demanding that someone simply tell him how to get over his long-lived pattern of pretense created as a shield against his continued fears of what being a homosexual signifies.

      Those who have come out, do often tend to forget just very difficult it is for some indoctrinated males to embrace their own sexual feelings and everything that might come with that. My own husband Howard, even after our 52 years together, still reminds me that when he first came out he feared that it meant he might suddenly “come down,” as if it were a contagion, with the effeminate mannerisms, the exaggerated gestures, and disagreeable disdain which film and other societal portrayals had taught him defined a homosexual being. I, strangely enough, who had lived in a far more isolated world than he never imagined that such portraits had anything to do with reality, realizing it was simply a sexual preference, not necessarily a “way of being”— although I certainly later comprehended that being gay could very much result, given our societies’ attitudes and dismissal of LGBTQ individuals, in a variety of anti-societal modes of behavior or gestural actions that mocked normativity.

      Perhaps, most of all, individuals such as Matt have to learn not what they will lose in defining themselves as gay, but what they may gain, and I don’t mean simply the abstract idea of “a sense of being oneself.” We need far more positive representations of what living the gay live provides, not only offering up such individuals a different kind of available community but arguing for an anti-normative way of perceiving things. For century after century, society has taught us that it is easier to live in tandem with the majority, to share its values and structures. But given the way each century reveals the failures of our species, perhaps we must begin to rethink that entire myth, realizing that, in fact, it is often the most “normative” that is destructive and terrorizes nearly every individual trapped within its embrace as opposed to those creative outsiders who take us, even at worst times, in different directions. But to preach that is to face off with most of the human race, a near impossibility for most of us cowards. Conformity is so much simpler.

      Out of the closet, Matt will now have to find his way out of the bedroom and out of his familiar home, neighborhood, and even city; he must learn how to be a lone traveler within the larger society in which he exists. Damien is clearly not blessed with the ability to “tell him how.”

 

Los Angeles, September 24, 2022

Reprinted World Cinema Review (September 2022).

 

Gus Black | Why Did You Invite Me to Your Wedding? / 2025

tears at a wedding

by Douglas Messerli

 

Kevin Atwater (screenwriter), Gus Black (director) Why Did You Invite Me to Your Wedding? / 2025 [4 minutes]

 

This short, most visual work, is based on the guitar song composed by Black, performed by Kevin Atwater.

    It is basically a poorly-acted teen tear jerker wherein Kevin has returned “home,” presumably for a wedding party he did not want to attend since the groom is a past lover. We see him, tearfully enduring what appears to be the party, before we flash back apparently to his room, his memories of joyful times with his love, and his casual invitation to the wedding party.

    His first reply, after a few moments of thought, is yes, he’d love to attend, but after a few moments of further memories the pain becomes just too much to bear, and he quickly deletes the invitation. I guest we are to believe that he changed his mind again, and did finally attend, unless the first scene is simply another incidental—and accordingly quite confusing incident that shows his difficulty in attending any party.

    But this film, despite all good intentions and the melancholic guitar solo that accompanies it, is not deeply imaginative filmmaking. And in the end, we have to wonder why we were invited to this sad non-event, yet another incident of a gay boy being unable to admit to himself his sexuality and, accordingly, probably causing later havoc in the life of his wife and any children that may have come our of his attempt to assert his heterosexuality.

     In this case, however, we no absolutely nothing about the “other.” Perhaps he was bisexual, or their relationship was not actually what Atwater imagines it was. Or maybe the boy’s former lover just realized, in the end, that he was straight. The deep feelings that the musician experiences are difficult to share without being presented with a true dramatic story instead of quick images that seem to be clipped out of a gay film catalogue.

    This is not example of profound LGBT filmmaking, nor even a clever music video, although it certainly helps to give meaning to the music. As for the questions the song poses, I think there might be only one reason why a man about to enter into a heterosexual marriage might wish his former gay lover to be there: to prove to lover and obviously to himself that he is now absolutely straight, and what happened in the past as a youthful experiment. I wish him good luck with that!

 

Los Angeles, March 10, 2026 | Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (March 2026).

 

Jared Kahn | If You Could Only Be You / 2015

when the time is right

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jared Kahn (screenwriter and director)

If You Could Only Be You / 2015 [18 minutes]

 

This film by US director Jared Kahn presents the nightmare world in double where unfortunately the time is never right for handsome young men who have convinced themselves that they might be heterosexual despite their homosexual desires.

    Chris (played by the film’s writer and director) has recently become engaged to his girlfriend, Jillian (Morgan Matthews), and for the last few weeks have been busily planning their wedding. Yet something else is happening. Chris goes missing for long periods of time, and his attentions to Jillian have been minimal at the best. Even when she brings the problem up to him he leaves her, stalking the streets and a bar.

   His problem is one many closeted by men face: too late he has discovered and finally recognized that he is gay. He even confides to his friend, a former sexual partner, Rob (Phillip Pruitt), but still has not found the courage to reveal the situation to his fiancée, and the time for the marriage is fast approaching.

    After several drinks he determines to seek help by visiting his gay friend. But Rob already has picked up a beautiful older man in a club and is in the midst of enjoying sex when Chris bangs insistently on his door.

     Rob’s date, Jim (Robert Seeley), given the insistent knocks, is ready to hide believing the visitor must be an old or current angry boyfriend, but Rob insists he has neither and requests Jim to stay

where he is while he takes care of the problem. Desperate for help, Chris tries to barge his way in until Rob convinces him that it is a terrible inconvenient moment and finally sends Chris off.

    Chris leaves but so terribly needs consolation that he returns, sneaking into the apartment and finally opening the bedroom door only to discover that Rob’s pick-up for the night is none other than his father, both calling out Chris’ name simultaneously as he races off. There is clearly some explaining to be done.

    As Chris sneaks back into bed with his girlfriend, she reminds him that they have dinner with his parents the very next evening.

    Suddenly, it is no longer Chris who must face coming out and destroying his relationship with Jillian, but a matter of the years of lies told by his own father. The passive closeted man has suddenly become the active accuser ready to put an end to all their lies immediately. Given the dinner table conversation between Jillian and his mother Linda (Caroline Redekopp) about the

table decorations for the upcoming wedding and his father’s quietude, Chris finally stands up and leaves the room, his father chasing after him.

    In a quiet conversation outside, Chris angrily accuses his father of lying all these years, with Jim admitting it and his self-hate for doing so, his lack of courage for not telling his family. But, he explains, his son was also the best thing that ever happened to him and he was afraid of losing all. He truly intends to tell Chris’ mother, but at the right time. Meanwhile he expresses his pride that, as Rob has explained to him, that he is now ready to come out, presuming that he will also tell Jillian “at the right time.”

     They return to the table, with Chris finally determining that for him at least, this is now the right time for honesty. He turns to tell Jillian that he has something important to share with him at the very moment that she expresses the same sentiments.

     Given the gravity of Chris’ revelation, he suggests she go first. But her announcement, as delighted as she is in expressing it, is of far more consequence: she’s pregnant, Chris’ parents about to become grandparents.

     Is this what happened to Jim? Was Chris a child that forced him into a life of deception? Is time repeating itself?

     There are millions of people who surely would disagree with me I am certain, but the truly moral thing to do would be for Chris to share his news as well and let things fall where they will. Perhaps they could better raise a child together through living independent lives, or perhaps given the way things are, Jillian might be better off seeking an abortion. Or perhaps, an even braver act might be for Jim to suddenly admit that he was gay to his wife, paving the way for Chris to be able to follow his example and thus ending the decades of mendacity.

     Kahn’s cinema-fiction, however, offers so such pardons, seemingly trapping Chris into the same horrific dilemmas Jim has faced all of his life, a world without true sexual fulfillment and honest identity. There is never a “right time,” clearly but the immediate moment, and postponing such confessions can only lead to sorrow for all, including children.

     If to some people this phenomena may appear to be highly unlikely, I believe given how many thousands of such relationships based on the male (and female) cowardice of admitting one’s own sexuality before entering into heterosexual marriage—queer film is filled with a history of such examples—that perhaps the simultaneous father/son outings have occurred many times in history. It also appears as an issue in Nigel Finch’s 1991 TV drama, based on the David Leavitt novel, The Lost Language of Cranes.

     Here the issue is expressed quite boldly, with no resolution proffered. It appears for these two couples it is almost a destiny which wives, husbands, and children are doomed to face until someone has the strength to break through the lies told to others and the self. One wishes that If You Could Only Be You might be a feature film where the issue might be fully explored with a possible resolution by film’s end.

 

Los Angeles, March 9, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (March 2026).