Isaac Julien | Looking for Langston / 1989

the hunger of shadows: cruising a film

by Douglas Messerli

 

Isaac Julien (screenplay and director) Looking for Langston / 1989

 

The Harlem Renaissance, the short-lived window (1924-1929) on what was actually a much larger picture of the burgeoning development of US black visual artists, dancers, poets, fiction writers, playwrights, actors, singers, and other creative beings who had migrated since the Civil War from the Jim Crow Deep South to Harlem and elsewhere in New York City was certainly as James Weldon Johnson described it, “the flowering of Negro literature.” But it was so much more, continuing and affecting black writing throughout the rest the century, including the international francophone movement of Caribbean and African artists of the Négritude group and, later in the century, black artists as diverse such as James Baldwin, Jacob Lawrence, Lorraine Hansberry, Amiri Baraka, Essex Hemphill, and so very many others. Earlier influences on the movement such as the works of playwright Ridgely Torrence, the early writing of Claude McKay, and many others also cannot truly be separated from the so-called Renaissance. And many of the movements’ major impacts are still be felt today in the 21st century.

      Despite the importance of the actual performers and work, now fairly well documented, throughout much of the century the Harlem Renaissance seemed to be buried in history textbooks and in black memory; for young artists such as filmmaker, writer, and video artist such Isaac Julien coming of age in the 1980s it something yet to be fully discovered.

      Julien himself describes those days:

 

“I was a student doing a pre-foundation course in East London. This work was initially called something like ‘How Gays Are Stereotyped in Media,’ and I made it for my A-Level Communications Project, where one could make a video piece.

     I remember a teacher saying to me, ‘It would be really great if you made a film that explored how Black gays are stereotyped in media.’ I remember thinking, yeah, I could have done that. But you could say that my reply took almost a decade after making that very early work, which no longer exists. In art school at that time, one wasn’t really taught anything about Black art movements or the Harlem Renaissance. So when I found out about it, I was completely fascinated. I thought, there’s something called Black Modernism? My partner, Mark Nash, had a job teaching at NYU, and basically I asked him to go to see if he could get materials on the Harlem Renaissance, anything moving image.

    And he went to the archives at MoMA and found a song called “St. Louis Blues” by Bessie Smith. That started this whole tour—you could call it a Harlem tour—of going to different archives. Luckily, I came across a filmmaker who made a film about Langston Hughes, and we worked with the archivists. And eventually we came across an archive of instructional films in which we were able to see Black artists at work.

      Of course this was happening at the same time as the AIDS crisis, at the same time when these strong Black queer voices were emerging: Essex Hemphill, Joseph Beam, Black gay anthologies.”

      What surely also stood out to Julien in those heady days of discovery was also that so very many of these figures were also lesbian and homosexual. As Henry Louis Gates Jr. has observed, “The Harlem Renaissance was surely as gay it was black.” To name simply a few, and not all, many of the female writers, singers, and dancers who were lesbian or bisexual: Ethel Waters, Gladys Bentley, Bessie Smith, Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Alice Dunbar Nelson, Alberta Hunter, Nella Larsen, and Jessie Fauset. Among the numerous male gay participants in the Renaissance were Claude McKay, Alain Locke, Countee Cullen, Jimmie Daniels, Wallace Thurman, Richard Bruce Nugent, and Langston Hughes.

       And that list doesn’t include the white promoter of the Harlem scene, Carl Van Vechten, a fiction writer who later became famous for his photographic portraits of thousands of US celebrities and, in a private collection, his photographs of black male nudes, creating a dilemma for his own generation (still unresolved) that Robert Mapplethorpe’s black nudes would for those of Julien’s.

      On the list of homosexual males, I have put Hughes last because he was perhaps the most closeted of them all, and frustrated even his close friends such Cullen, Locke, and Nugent for his seeming lack of interest in their sexual gaze.

   But there was also a strong opposition of certain of The Harlem Renaissance supporters and participants such as W. E. B. Du Bois, who argued quite forcefully that artists must recognize their moral responsibilities, particularly that “a black artist is first of all of black artist.” Obviously writing about homosexuality or other social issues that didn’t directly relate to the black community were not in accordance with his views. With the publication of Wallace Thurman’s groundbreaking magazine publication of FIRE!!!, particularly given the inclusion of Richard Bruce Nugent’s highly gay erotic poetry-fiction Smoke, Lilies And Jade, A Novel, Part I, Du Bois and other major black leaders viewed the effort as decadent and vulgar. Even among the gay writers, Alain Locke criticized the publication of FIRE!!!, in particular for the inclusion of Nugent’s work, arguing that it promoted the effeminacy and decadence associated with homosexual writers.* The offices of the magazine soon after burned to the ground.

     As perhaps already the most well-known writer of the group, Hughes—although clearly aligning with Thurman and Nugent who at the time shared a room painted red and black, mockingly nicknamed by Thurman and Zora Neale Hurston as Niggerati Manor, a major meeting place of the black literary community—remained quiet as he did about his own sexuality. Moreover, Hughes’ major autobiographer, Arnold Rampersad, although recognizing that the poet demonstrated a preference for darker-skinned African-American men in his work and life, argued that Hughes was not homosexual, asserting that he was probably asexual and passive in his sexual relationships. Hughes’ estate for a long period would not permit the use of his poetry within a gay context, later, however, permitting several of his poems to appear in gay anthologies. Somewhat predictably, the Hughes estate attempted to censor Julien’s film because of copyright infringement, forcing the director to turn down the sound whenever one of Hughes’ poems was read.

     Numerous other critics and historians have argued otherwise, but that his not made the attempts to white-out Hughes’ name as a black homosexual artist and to dismiss the idea that the man might have had very real sexual urges for same-sex intercourse and acted on them accordingly. Julien’s reaction to this is quite clear in his comments in his interview with Stuart Comer at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

      

“Langston Hughes is an icon, and also an emblem of the closet, a space that was enabling HIV infection, and AIDS, to become insurmountable in Black communities in America and England. Having sexuality not being articulated created terrible ramifications within these communities. And so the whole question of bringing Langston out, so to speak, really united intergenerationally with what the poet Essex Hemphill was contesting. What does silence look like? What does oppression look like in those spaces? Essex Hemphill was someone who was really at the forefront of articulating that. And my challenge was how to translate that cinematically and give it a kind of space that would resonate visually.”

 

    There is no Langston Hughes directly portrayed in Looking for Langston, and since Hughes’ own poems are quieted, the dominant voices we hear are mostly the words of Richard Bruce Nugent, James Baldwin, and Essex Hemphill. No character in the film is described as representing Hughes, although there are some archival images included of the poet. The famed Cotton Club is represented by a stylized set on a British sound stage, and the landscape images are in London and the British countryside.

      There is also no coherent narrative except for the fact that each night mostly black men, notably one handsome white man, gather at the bar; and near the end of the film a group of policemen and mean homophobic and racist men gather to pound down the walls of the club, hoping to find the drinkers, dancers, and lovers within and bring them to justice either through arrest or brutal beatings. An angel who looks over the dancers in the club has warned them, however, and when the “law” arrives, everyone has disappeared almost as if they had lived in another time or space. They are still dancing, so reports the angel, in another place.

      And most strangely, except for the selection from Baldwin’s eulogy (read by Toni Morrison) and the recited poems, there is no language spoken in this cold nightclub. The eulogy from Baldwin reveals his own highly conflicted desire to be “at home with one’s compatriots” as opposed to being “marked and detested by them,” and with a deep feeling of irony and sorrow, he expresses the fact that “there is a level on which the mockery of the people, even their hatred, is moving, because it is so blind.”

      “Tell Me,” one of Hughes’ poems also speaks to the sorrow of being the unintentional outsider:

“Why should it be my loneliness / Why should it be my song / Why should it be my dream / deferred / overlong?”

       As critic Martina Kudláček, writing about this film in Bomb magazine in 2019 reminds us that “The lack of candid language for queer desire in the early twentieth century, beyond poetry and prose, illuminates why Black queer narratives have often unfolded spatially and in many parts.” There is, frankly, even in poetry, no way to even describe their sexual love in straight-forward narrative form. Dialogue in this film would be meaningless. In a scene in which Langston’s ghost follows him through a field to deliver him up to a nude man, the receiver answers from Nugent’s “Smoke, Lillies, and Jade,” answers, “I’ll wait.” The language had yet to evolve.

       The film, accordingly, asks us to be cruisers, so to speak, to ourselves be on the lookout for Langston. He is the handsome lone drinker at the bar, the one who celebrates in the drunken madness with the white gay man, or the man who takes home strangers, including at one point, who appears to make up a threesome. Perhaps Hughes will not even bother to show up. As one of the poems observes, there is throughout "the hunger of shadows."

      But we live through the film in the process of “looking,” observing everyone and everything closer in order to ascertain what the poet’s gay life, if it openly existed, might have been like. To whom was he attracted: “Beauty” (Matthew Baidoo), the name of one of Hughes’ central gay figures and of Nugent’s fiction as well, James (Akim Mogaii), Gary (John Wilson), Marcus (Dencil Williams), Dean (Guy Burgess), Carlos (James Dublin), the Leatherboy (Harry Donaldson), or the Angel himself (Jimmy Somerville)? Most viewers identify Hughes as the character named Alex (Ben Ellison). But that is not the point: Langston is a part of all of these men, who lived in a world in which their love could not be openly expressed and whose feelings and identities were thwarted for it.

     These characters float in an out of the frame of archival photos, as we watch them in their elegant tuxedos, drinking, dancing, and making love. If you’ve forgotten how very sensual black-and-white can truly be, you much watch this film again and again—if you can find it; the DVD seems to have vanished except for university collections, the film being shown primarily on special occasions by museums.

      Meanwhile, we must also recognize that the original film, like many of British director Derek Jarman’s works—an important influence upon Julien and the New Queer Cinema in general—was taking a position of gay activism in its search for a man declared by so many to be straight. Asked by Comer how the film was received at the time of its release, Julien responds: 

    

“Looking for Langston arrived in New York, and in the United States, with a certain excitement. It was a work that was being made with a community in mind; there were simply not many films being made about these experiences.

     In the film I was using Langston Hughes in a metaphorical manner, and his estate did not like the film, which was questioning the heteronormative aspect of how the estate had created Langston. This was something that was always contested within Black communities. And I do think the Hughes estate used copyright as a form of censorship. But when I was making the film, I was aware that I would have an encounter like that. That’s where the activist part comes into play—pushing against the ways in which certain historical characters were constructed.”

    

     What he doesn’t mention is that when the film premiered in New York in 1989, The New York Times Reviewer unwittingly attempted to do what the film itself was decrying, to wipe the famous US poet clear from the gay world in which he was involved. In response to the attempt of the estate’s censorship, she responded: “That issue should not obscure the fact that Mr. Julien's film would have been much more honest and effective if it had simply left Hughes out from the start. Looking for Langston is not about the poet's life or work; it is Mr. Julien's fantasy of beautiful, gay black men during the Harlem Renaissance.” Clearly that reviewer never found Langston—or perhaps just wasn’t looking very hard.

   For several years now I have used an image from the film for my primary computer page. In this dark smoky room, two men are dancing. The image appears only for an instant near the end of the film. I have found my Langston Hughes in the man at the right.

 

*For a fuller discussion of Robert Bruce Nugent’s relationship with Wallace Thurman and Nugent’s writing and career as a painter, read my essay, “Between Heaven and Hell,” on Nugent’s long fiction Gentleman Jigger in My Year 2008: In the Gap (Los Angeles, Green Integer, 2015).

 

Los Angeles, September 23, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2023).

 

Agnès Varda | Le Bonheur (Happiness) / 1965

a kind of fraud

by Douglas Messerli

 

Agnès Varda (screenwriter and director) Le Bonheur (Happiness) / 1965

 

Agnès Varda’s 1965 film, Happiness, begins in a paradisiacal landscape representing a happy couple and their two beautiful children on a country outing on a sunny Sunday afternoon.

      The husband, François (Jean-Claude Drouot), a handsome hirsute being, is asleep on his beautiful wife’s lap. The children, encased in a kind of plastic then, are also sleeping. Everything in the world seems nearly perfect, and when they awaken they together walk through the woods, ending in a lily-pond straight out of Monet. As the “hero” openly displays, his life is filled with joy, a feeling subtly reiterated by the fact that Thérèse (Claire Drout) and the two children are Drouot’s real-life family as well.

     The following day we see their work-a-day realities: François is a carpenter, working of his uncle, and Thérèse labors at home as a dressmaker. Given that she also cares for the children and cooks her husband’s meals, it does appear that Thérèse has a harder time of it, particularly since her customers demand that she create a new wedding dress in a couple of weeks. Yet it is clear that both enjoy what they’re doing, living lives that create things, as opposed to the more passive job of simply taking and sending messages as does Émilie Savignard (Marie-France Boyer)—the especially beautiful woman with whom François also falls in love.

     The new relationship happens gradually and quite simply over a couple of weeks, culminating with Émilie’s move to the same city where François and his wife live.

     François admits to Émilie that he is perfectly happy in his marriage and is not seeking anything beyond it; the new relationship, he insists, simply brings him even more happiness, a joy which he didn’t even know he was missing. Yet, he also suggests that had he met Émilie first he might have married her, and suggests that she is more adventuresome, a person closer to his own personality than is his more “sturdy” and perhaps predictable wife.

     What is quite amazing about this male-centered film is that it has been directed by a feminist, who tells this tale of male infidelity without openly condemning her “hero.” But then, we must recall that Varda’s own husband, Jacques Demy, was a gay man, apparently in love with his wife, but equally attracted to gay men from whom he eventually contracted AIDS and died early.

     François, indeed, remains a good husband and father, refusing to abandon any of his commitments to his family, with whom he continues to share lovely weekends in nature. I anything, François, in his double sexual life, seems to have even more love and joy to share with everyone, even his working friends. Émilie, moreover, seems perfectly happy with the situation of this almost magically blessed couple.

      Yet, we have the feeling, somehow, that the male, in his silence, is clearly not being fair to his wife; how, if she were also to take on another lover, might he react? And how would such a situation affect his growing, quite selfish, “happiness.”

      Thérèse, herself, perceives François’ increasingly pleasure with life, and finally seeks to understand its source. Wishing not to lie to his loving wife, François explains what has happened, trying to explain to her that it means no less love for her or the children: we love each other with ten arms each, but I have simply discovered that I have another set of arms. She seems to accept his theory as they make love, as in the first scene of the film, in an open field.

     But when he awakens this time, she is missing, and he scoops up his beloved children to go in search for her. Only a few strangers have noted her passing through the fields and ponds, but when he reaches the lovely lake of the first scene, he notices a boat taking in a body of a woman who has apparently drowned.

     We never fully discover whether or not Thérèse has actually committed suicide or accidently drowned, but we can image various other scenarios: that she has been made to feel incidental in her husband’s world, that her conventionality could not extend to his open flouting of the marriage vows, or that she has determined to sacrifice her life for her husband’s further “happiness.” In any event, a bit like Hamlet’s Ophelia, she recognizes that in his own focus on his fulfillment of life of his own needs, she has grown less important and, perhaps, almost meaningless.

     To give her credit, Varda never hints at any one answer to her heroine’s actions. In fact, after a period of mourning, Émilie, apparently loving the children as much as did their mother, takes over Thérèse’s role, as the new “family” returns once more to the rural paradise with which the film began.

     Only now, we feel that the beautiful world which the film is portraying is a kind of fraud. The happiness of this film is a male-centric vision of how things should happen instead of having anything to do with the reality of the work. The fact that Varda has create it, in fact, almost mocks those hundreds of male idylls such as Jules and Jim and other Truffaut films, wherein males are generally awarded a greater “happiness” than their female lovers. Ultimately there is something almost fatuous about François new-found “bonheur” at the end of the film.

     Several years after writing the above, I came upon a quite brilliant short essay from a commentator using the moniker “montypython22” (how I wish such intelligent writers would be more open about their contributions) writing on a Reddit site TrueFilm in which he quite perceptively reminds us that “Le bonheur” in French is male, not female, and that nearly everything that defines the state of happiness, accordingly, is tinted with the masculine gender.

 

“Le bonheur. Not la bonheur. Even when we’re talking about a woman’s happiness, in French, the ‘le’ article insinuates a masculine happiness...

      The reason I bring this up? Well, we’ll have to consider our auteur for this thread—Agnes Varda—and her penchant for wordplay. Anyone who dives into the work of Agnes Varda will find her work is replete with constant puns, repartee, quirky quips, and meditations on language. She is a person who is not only interested with the grammar packed into a painting, a still photograph, a moving picture—she is also interested in how spoken words relate to what is being spoken. Certainly, somebody as delightfully verbose and in-tune with the intricacies of language as Varda would have picked up on the fact that happiness, in the French language, is defined by a masculine article. Though it seems like a minor note, it is a crucial one. Le Bonheur, a film with one of the most intensely subjectivized male perspectives in cinema history, comes from a director whose primary concern has been the female perspective. Why, then, does Varda feel the need to not only a.) tell the story of a marriage through the perspective of the overly idiotic male, but also b.) refuse to condemn ANY of his actions throughout the course of her film?”

 

    Recounting the story I have described above, he (or possibly she) concludes that:

 

    “Le Bonheur remains one of Agnes Varda’s most daringly constructed feature films. Its subversive message railing against chauvinistic perceptions of marriage, happiness is cloaked under a palate of beautiful chromatic colors and the lilts of Mozart’s spring-themed pieces. To paraphrase Varda, what interests her are “the clichés of happiness, the set images that society and art have dictated to indicate the state of happiness.” According to Varda, the aim of Le bonheur is to “seriously question these clichés” and to twist them on their heads in disturbing ways. Not only is the film a visual feast—in many ways, it can serve as a companion piece to husband Jacques Demy’s equally bombastic tale of tragedy and loss The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964)—it is also, narratively, quite original. Not once does Varda allow her female characters’ voices to be heard; instead, we gather the information of this too-perfect world from the husband, François. By giving us only François’s perspective, Varda enables the viewer to consider the question of happiness from a biased source and, through subtle cues, asks us to dislike—even hate—his saccharine disposition.

….What do we make of the film’s ending, where François successfully assimilates the once-liberated Émilie into his cookie-cutter vision of conjugal happiness? Is this to suggest, like in Demy’s Umbrellas of Cherbourg, that all happiness is only fleeting and ephemeral? Or does it suggest that all marriages are doomed to the sickening banalities of François’s marriages?”

 

     Given the reality of Varda’s own marriage, I suggest we must take account of Demy’s own notions of possible “happiness” regarding the many gay relationships her own husband explored over the years during his marriage. I am not arguing, at all, that Varda’s film is in any way a direct commentary about her own marriage. We can never fully know how these two individuals chose to negotiate their personal lives together despite their sexual differences, or can we ever truly comprehend what Varda’s reactions were to her husband’s outside sexual liaisons. Despite Demy’s own success, Varda went on to create a body of work that in many ways matches and may even have surpassed her husband’s own filmmaking history. Sometimes relationships have that affect of challenging a forceful other to create in meaningfully important other directions as Varda did.

     Varda’s film narrowly embraces only the heterosexual world, but we cannot simply ignore the other realities behind this brilliant understated work, that employs gentle irony to make its point.

We must remind ourselves also that Demy’s own, quite “gay” work, was totally about the heterosexual world. These are coded worlds that don’t even offer clues for the unknowing general audience.

 

Los Angeles, February 14, 2016; June 23, 2026

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (February 2016) and My Queer Cinema blog (June 2026).

Matt Chupack | I Think I'm Gay? / 2019

a comedy of errors

by Douglas Messerli

 

Matt Chupack (screenwriter and director) I Think I'm Gay? / 2019 [18 minutes]

 

Poor Zach (Miles Tagtmeyer). He has just been told by his girl fiend Amy (Rebecca Goldstein) that because he can’t get an erection that she thinks he gay. The only evidence of the fact is that Zach gets immediately confused and contacts his gay friend Kyle (Matt Jennings) for advice.

     Kyle takes him out to a get brunch with his friends, Sandy (Victoria Mele) and Drew (Aaron Jung). Drew, a flamboyant Asian gay man who first question is whether or not Zach likes “dick.”

His answer characterizes this rather puerile little comedy which stereotypes its own characters.

     Zach: “I’ve never tried it. But I can tell when a guy is good-looking or ugly.”

     Drew puts it simply: “If you want to if you are gay you’ve got to get bummed by a guy.”

     He then proceeds to pour out information to the totally innocent Zach about the various “tribes” of gay individuals—"bears, otters, twinks, daddies, sugar daddies, cubs, silver foxes, pups, wolves, bulls, gym bunnies, circuit queens”—enough to confuse even an old pro like me.

     Baffled and feeling utterly out of place, Zach cannot even begin to assimilate all this information, let alone know whether he belongs to this world. The solution is to “take him to church,” which only further flummoxes him until they explain that they mean to take him to a gay bar where he can maybe meet somebody he might like. Where they found one today not swamped by young straights, I have no idea. But maybe that’s the point. Sexuality if so indefinite these days.

    Like the old TV series, “Queer eye for the straight guy,” they go straight (well, they actually zig-zag) to his closet and startled at what is there immediately begin producing new clothes (obviously borrowed from one another) in order to dress him up. Nothing looks quite right until they dress him in a black T-shirt and black jeans, re-arrange his cute red hair and premiere him at the bar, where nearly everyone falls in love with him.

     Immediately, Drew encounters a group of fellow twinks to whom he introduces Zach, one of them, Justin (Adam Razavi) immediately taking advantage of the situation by asking him to buy 10 tequila shots for the two of them and Justin’s friends. Kyle looks on rather forlornly to see from a distance what appears to be Zach’s quick adaptation to the situation.

     Suddenly Justin is bad-mouthing an older man who he feels is a creep just for coming to a gay bar; and before Zach can even comprehend what it means, he’s asking Zach to come to the bathroom with him.

     The very next moment they’re kissing and before he can even think, Justin has pulled down his pants and is actively providing a blow-job.

      But Zach still is soft. Something’s missing. A knock on the bathroom door sends Zach scurrying out, not at all happy with what has just been revealed. The manager, observing what is going on, chases Zach out of the bar.

      Perhaps Sandy, the lesbian, has been right all long. Sexuality is about intimacy and passion, not a quick blow-job or even a forceful fuck with a woman.

      At the end of the evening, both Sandy and Drew have found others to be with. Only Kyle sits alone with his drinks. Observing the fracas, he follows Zach to the back parking lot where the disconsolate would-be gay boy now sits.

       Zach admits that he now realizes that he is just fucked up, but Kyle suggests that it may have just been a scary, random bathroom incident. “You know all this being gay stuff; it’s not as easy as I thought it would be.”

       Kyle’s response is perhaps the most serious line of this comedy: “Whoever said it was easy to be gay?”

       But Zach has learned a few things: “I know that bathrooms are not sexy. Twinks scare the shit out of me. And I have some really amazing friends who stick by me in all my craziness.”

       Well, at least he has one loyal friend in Kyle who now kisses him. In the middle of trying to express that he thinks he “might”….we’re ready to hear him answer that he is perhaps aroused when a voice cries out “Zach.”

      It is his ex-girlfriend standing like a dark rupture of the past with all her cronies behind her giggling, a reminder perhaps that seeking out the gay has been worth it.

 

Los Angeles, June 23 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (June 2026).

    

Andrew Thomas Huang | 兔兒神 (Kiss of the Rabbit God) / 2019

declaring affiliation to the rabbit god

by Douglas Messerli

 

Andrew Thomas Huang (screenwriter and director) 兔兒神 (Kiss of the Rabbit God) / 2019 [14 minutes]

 

The Rabbit God, the Chinese deity who stands as the patron of male-male love, was beaten to death for having been attracted to an imperial officer. The gods of the underworld, however, saw his act as one of passion and rewarded him by making him a god. The Rabbit God travels through time to awaken homosexual identity and reward it with a special kiss that permits the “Double Happiness” jade green pendant he wears to be awarded to the recipient in the form of love and bliss. 

     Writer and director Andrew Thomas Huang explained his motives quite clearly in telling this tale in film in a comment on Reddit:

 

“In 2018 I was asked by London-based culture platform “Nowness” to create a film on the theme ‘Define Sex.’ As a queer Asian filmmaker I had yet been tasked with the challenge of representing my sexual identity on screen. This challenge was a loaded one. Having grown up with a deficit of queer Asian visibility onscreen along with the frequent stigmatization and devaluing of Asian male bodies in Western visual culture, being asked to create a piece centered around queer Asian characters became a dauntingly personal journey for me to unpack these issues, while also crafting a story that I felt enriched our collective imagination of what queer Asian male love, sex and intimacy could aspire to be.

     On a trip to Mexico City, I encountered an exhibition on Xōchipilli, the Aztec god of flowers and patron of gay love. The story of Xōchipilli inspired me to redirect my lens toward my own Chinese heritage, through which I found the Qing dynasty story of Tu'er Shen, 兔兒神 , known as the Rabbit God. Written by 18th century poet Yuan Mei, the myth of Tu'er Shen traces a Fujianese soldier who was sentenced to death for professing his love to another man. In death, the soldier was ordained The Rabbit God and became the patron deity of gay love. Today, Tu'er Shen is still worshipped at a temple dedicated to him in New Taipei City, Taiwan where religious ceremonies are performed for gay couples.

     This research led me to craft a narrative about a Chinese restaurant worker who encounters Tu'er Shen as a ghostly visitor. Nightly visits from the god blossom into a tryst that empowers the boy to release his sense of trapped invisibility and embark on a journey of sexual awakening and discovery. Interweaving my personal family history in the Chinese restaurant business with the richness of Chinese mythology, Kiss of the Rabbit God is a confession and a love letter to my queer Asian community and tells the story of a lover's quest for self-possession to own one's desire and unlock sexual intimacy through spiritual embodiment.”

    The film focuses on a very hard-working Chinese American, Matt (Teddy Lee) working in a Chinese eatery named Lucky Dragon, where among the busy chefs and waitress, he lugs goods in and out of refrigerators, takes over-the-phone food orders, sometimes delivers food to tables, and scrubs up the floors and locks up after everyone else has left. He is a “gofer,” who has hardly anytime left for himself.

      In the midst of all these tasks however, one night a beautiful red-haired boy, Shen (Jeff Chen), appears at a table, orders, and then just as suddenly disappears after having a very brief conversation with Matt. Matt is totally intrigued not only by his beauty, but the tattoos on each finger, the earrings he wears, and the obviously coordinated outfit, so out of place in the everyday wear of the workers and customers of this rather bleak Chinese dining spot.

     Upon closing up, however, he finds the red-haired boy is still standing on the corner and quickly invites him in. What follows is not only the historically “promised” kiss but a sudden intense sexual encounter that suddenly terrifies the neophyte, who pulls away while still obviously standing opposite the incarnation of the rabbit god while out of breath and filled with confusion. The god, as gods tend to do, may have almost killed him he his intensity of passion, and he realizes that perhaps it is better to leave.

     But the next day, all through his work, it is apparent than Matt cannot get the experience out of his mind, and when he closes up is almost pained not to see his beautiful boy waiting on the corner. Nonetheless, the boy soon does show up, and this time it is Matt who greets him with intense passion and the two again kiss and shove the other to the wall, before, yet again, Matt relents, also suddenly perceiving the welts of skin embedded in the other boy’s chest.

     Just as suddenly, Chen pulls the kitchen knife out of Matt’s pocket and puts it to his neck, suggesting that he too should dedicate his body to the embracement of the characters that evidently represent devotion to the rabbit god.

      For me, the blood scene of skin disfiguring reminds me far too much of what self-hating youths do in cutting; and I found that kind of representation of his dedication to be contrary to the simple beauty of opening another to the charms of gay love. I am of a generation, I should explain, when tattoos and other body marks were seen as a defamation of the beauty of the body. And I still feel that way.

    In the empty dining space, Matt awakens early the next morning, finally, with the welts of affiliation now in place, but feeling nonetheless that it may all have been a kind of dream.

      He has, in a very different way, however, now finally and most definitely “come out.”

 

Los Angeles, June 23, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (June 2026).