Lee Rose | Jack / 2004

my dad’s gay. but at least he doesn’t beat his wife

by Douglas Messerli

 

A. M. Homes (screenplay, based on her fiction), Lee Rose (director) Jack / 2004

 

Who could not like a television film made to be seen on Showtime, Hallmark and other such feel-good networks starring a young Anton Yelchin, Ron Silver, and Stockard Channing as members of family that has suddenly, and more importantly from the 15-year-old boy’s point of view, inexplicably fallen apart? The problems, seen through the eyes of Yelchin as the titular character are centered upon the fact that the boy’s idolized father, Paul has gradually come to discover himself as a gay man, and has left his wife Anne and son Jack to live with his new lover Bob (Paul McGillion).

     Of course, such a film must first find a way around Paul’s difficulty in attempting to explain the situation to his son, and then deal with Jack’s reaction, whatever that may be. But obviously both of those issues also depend very much on the time-frame in which these revelations are taking place. In the world based on A. M. Homes book, written when she was only 19, it appears we might almost be in the suburban 1950s, perhaps the early 1960s, particularly given the emblematic signs the director, Lee Rose, has posted of all American boyhood during the movie’s credits: a skateboard, a basketball, a football, a baseball bat, a soccer ball, and a pair of roller skates all planted, apparently, in the family’s front yard, as if accidentally left there. It’s enough to give even the head coach of American University, where Homes went to school, a good case of jock itch. I didn’t so much scratch my crotch as my head in pondering why just one token from US boyhood might not have served better than six or more emblems of boyhood normalcy. Perhaps the skateboards suggests the 1970s or 1980s. We never quite find out what decade we’re in.

     The intelligent and sensitive Jack, who we meet mostly through his external moderation of his internal feelings and who comes off, at moments, to have the amazing insights and wisdom of the young Barry Gordon playing Nick Burns in A Thousand Clowns, could not possibly be the same boy who lives in that house. Indeed, his home is the kind of two-story clapboard construction one sees more in urban areas. Anne, a wise-cracking, understandably bitter, basketball-playing mother who never makes breakfast and can hardly cook, seems anything but the placid suburban housewife that her best friend, Elaine Burka (Wendy Crewson) portrays, as if the two got confused and showed up thinking they were on different movie sets. In short, we don’t know where we’re at except in some sort of stereotypical vision of the good ‘ole USA.

      No wonder Paul is having such a difficult time explaining to Jack what’s happened as he invites his son out to the very best restaurants that serve up delicacies such as mousse, squid, game hen, and whatever else it takes make a homosexual happy to the hamburger eating Jack. For such a bright kid in his narrative voiceovers, however, Jack appears to be rather dense about sensing what his father is trying to tell him. And when Paul finally does, with the two of them in a boat in some whipped up wildlife paradise, Jack simply cannot deal with having a queer father, diving into the lake and swimming off with a determination to never speak to this new stranger again.

      No sooner has he confessed what he has just been told to his best friend on the basketball team, Max (Giacomo Baessato), than someone spray-paints the words “fag baby” on his school locker door. Jack’s friend has clearly let a few of his school chums know the situation, trying to appease Jack’s wrath by writing, in red ink, above it: “Not a….”

      When Paul finally convinces Jack to join him and Bob on a bowling outing, since they’ve also invited two gay friends, one of whose daughter, Maggie (Britt Irvin), who is the most beautiful girl in the school on which Jack has a crush, the son is somewhat mollified. The two, as children with gay fathers, suddenly have a great deal to say to one another and even make a movie date. But as they eat in the alley after, Maggie’s father kisses his gay partner, sending all the kids, Jack, Max, and Maggie into nervous twitters. Certainly, this movie can’t be set in the 1990s!

      In that same bowling alley, a hostile school bully shows up witnessing the whole gathering and, you guessed it, now sweeping up Maggie into their schoolmate’s adolescent abuse. As Jack reports to Max: “I’m about two minutes away from losing my mind...” Reporting to the school nurse—who evidently shares the humor of the puberty-tortured kids around her, asking him, “So shall we call this a mental health moment?”—he calls his mother to come pick him up.

      In short, Jack has not only the normal difficulties of a 15-year-old in comprehending what a shift in sexual interest might mean, but practically announces it as a disease to which he himself has now been exposed. Although both Anne and Paul make lame attempts to explain to Jack that he cannot inherit being gay and that, despite the changes around him, he will remain the same being he always was, that they both still love him, and that, well….sometimes you just can’t change the way you are, there is utterly no attempt to sit the boy down and attempt to explain what sexuality is really about and why some people prefer opposite sex partners while others prefer the same sex. The movie, rather, treats it all as a ridiculous joke that simply must be endured by the children of such altered relationships.

      When Jack finally tells Paul of the school abuse he’s suffered, the confused father asks is something he might do such as speak to his schoolmates, Jack makes the perfect comeback:  “Like what, have a school assembly: ‘Okay everybody, Jack’s father’s here to talk about homosexuality and why we shouldn’t call his son fag baby.’”

       But don’t worry folks, everything will turn out okey-dokey. On a camping trip into the back country with Max’s father, mother, and brother, not only does he discover that Mr. Burka is more than a little alcoholic, but that he regularly beats his beautiful wife Eliane, this time quite seriously.  

     Elaine drives off with the boys, her face black-and-blue. And along the way, Jack calls his mother, who’s not home, and then his father to come check on Max’s mother when they arrive home. In a hokey Indian shop, he buys an Indian headdress and a spear, clearly a young boy’s attempt to signal to Elaine that he will protect her, also offering her as a present, we suspect, of a hand-woven ring to announce his secret pledge.

       So Jack discovers his family is just normally crazy, not miserably crazy like Max and his folks. He even gets to like his father and, to a certain degree, Bob. And he grows especially close, as his 16th birthday rolls around, to his now true love-interest, the other fag baby, Maggie. Evidently “fag-babies” in this time and world—whenever and wherever it is—naturally make bonds.

        I’m sure it never crossed the minds of author Homes and director Rose, their stomachs swollen with a Christmas ham or Thanksgiving turkey stuffed with the best of intentions, that there might be anything homophobic about their tale. Afterall, Jack got through his hard times by realizing that he is not a queer but just “Jack” with his whole life ahead of him. And they didn’t even gag, I am certain, on their empty clichés.

     No one connected with this film, it appears, might have ever imagined that Paul is the real one who has been made to suffer, and that his only salvation has been the truth he has come to about his being queer. Apparently, he and Bob have no real agreement with Anne about child visitation rights. In fact, we know nothing much about Bob and Paul’s relationship, how they fell in love, and how Paul came to terms with himself, information which might have truly helped Jack—who at one point asks why his father can’t just forget the phase he’s passing through, and come back home—to understand what sexuality is not always something firm and finished, but can be fluid and even indeterminant as one comes to realize one’s inner needs and desires. Or that sometimes one’s wired sexuality just isn’t perceived until later in maturity.

       All that might be necessary to deal honestly with Jack’s understandable questions is sucked out of the work in its predictable sympathy with and accordant attention to wife and child, much like Todd Haynes’ Far from Heaven, another film with lots of good intentions but in its almost nostalgic reverence for the sexual and racial limitations of the past, offers few honest solutions. Growing to perceive that one’s family situation is not as bad as others, is no answer to coming to terms with just how remarkably brave and honorable both Jack’s parents despite their individual suffering. The movie even seems to imply that Jack will be just fine because, after all, he’s a heterosexual, a basketball player, one of the normal kids with a skateboard, bat, foot- and soccer-ball in every pocket.

      I can just see a brand-new Hallmark card: on the outside it shows two partying guys with the words “Hey, we’re gay!” And inside: “But it’s all right ‘cause you’re still you.”

 

Los Angeles, October 9, 2020

Reprinted from World Cinema Review and My Queer Cinema blog (October 2020).  

Yasujirō Ozu | 東京暮色 (Tōkyō boshoku) (Tokyo Twilight) / 1957

gambling with life

by Douglas Messerli

 

Yasujirō Ozu and Kōgo Noda (screenplay), Yasujirō Ozu (director) 東京暮色 (Tōkyō boshoku) (Tokyo Twilight) / 1957

 

Japanese director Yasujirō Ozu’s Tokyo Twilight of 1957 is one of his darkest and despairing of his works. Here, as in most of his films, the focus is on domestic relationships, but whereas in most of his cinematic depictions people come to a common level, signifying open communication, in the Sugiyama home people come and go with the quick ring of the opening door as they sit and stand at various levels, or hurry off to their own rooms within.

     Shukichi Sugiyama (Chishū Rhū), a successful banker, lives at home with his youngest daughter, Akiko (Ineko Arima), who has been attending the university but, to his disappointment, has decided instead to become and English-language stenographer. She is at the age when, as a grown woman, she is testing the limits of her freedom, and, having fallen in love with a fellow student, Kenji, she stays out late each night; in the local bars and gambling parlors she is known as a wild woman.

     Just prior to the beginning of the film’s events, Aikio’s elder, more domestically responsible sister, Takako, has temporarily left her professor husband Yasuo Naumata, and with her toddler daughter has moved back home. She alone seems to care for her father, who gratefully accepts her attentions, although he mostly eats out each evening before returning home.

      In many of the film’s early scenes, we follow both the elder Sugiyama and his youngest daughter through a series of tea houses, bars, and other locations, wherein passing strangers and friends reveal information both inconsequential and personal, that establishes the context of the drama’s events.

     With a few cinematic strokes, Ozu makes it clear that Akiko, seeking out her boyfriend, is pregnant. And we later discover from Sugiyama’s sister, Haruko Sugimura (Shigeko Takeuchi) that Akiko has attempted to borrow money from her, without giving her the reason, which we must presume is for an abortion.

      When Akiko finally does catch up with her lover Kenji, he is overwhelmed by what he describes as his bad luck. Although he promises to meet her after he gets off from his job, he never shows up, soon after determining to leave Tokyo.

      After waiting for hours in the bar in which Kenji has promised to meet her, obviously a meeting place for a house of prostitution, the young Akiko is taken in by the police for questioning. Takako is called and arrives at the police station to take Aiko home.

     Takako attempts to keep the news from their father, but he too has been called in their absence, and questions Akiko about both her attempt to get a loan and her arrest. Takako finally succeeds, however, in stopping the questioning, sending the obviously upset Akiko to bed.

     In short, any real attempt to get at the truth is silenced in this house, and neither father or sister discovers the facts which may better help their troubled family member. Soon after, we observe Akiko at a clinic, having evidently found the proper amount of money to get the abortion. The father accidently discovers the source when a friend later reveals that he has lent Akiko money.

    We soon discover, moreover, another of the family’s secrets. A woman who runs a local mahjong parlor, Kisako Soma (Isuzu Yamada) is asking questions about Akiko, and seems to already know, reports a friend, a great deal about her. Aikio herself visits the parlor and speaks briefly to the woman, who invites her into a private room to talk, Akiko refusing to enter.

     She later reveals her encounter with Kisako to her sister, suggesting that the woman seemed almost like her mother, a woman who she has been told died when she herself was a toddler.

     The family’s busybody aunt confirms to Takako that she has encountered Kisako in a department store. Takako, who knows the true story of her mother’s abandonment of the family for another man, visits the mahjong parlor to demand that Kisako not reveal her identity to her sister.

     But once more, a casual comment by a friend that Akiko’s sister has visited the mahjong parlor leads the younger sister to confront her elder sibling. Takako is forced to reveal the truth, and in anger and now believing that her own “bad” ways may have been inherited if she was the daughter of the other man, she seeks out the woman, who takes her to a nearby location where the two can privately talk.

     Their conversation begins with the girl’s insistence to whether or not Sugiyama is her real father; when Kisako insists that he is, Akiko turns on her for her abandonment of the family and storms out.

     Depressed both by the abortion and her encounter with her mother, Akiko retreats to a Chinese noodle shop. When she accidentally encounters Kenji there, he tries to apologize for not showing up in the bar and lies to her about his feelings; Akiko slaps his face and runs from the shop. The owner hears a scream and leaves to find out what has happened while Kenjo merely sits alone in self-pity.

     Ozu reveals the rest of his story in a series of sequences with ellipses between them. In the first, Takako and her father sit by the bedside of the suffering Akiko, who coming briefly out of a coma, reports that she wants to begin over again and hopes that she will survive. This suggests that the “accident” may have been an attempt at suicide, but Ozu is careful not to definitely tell us what really happened.

     In the second sequence, Takako visits her mother to tell her of the death of Akiko and blame her, yet again, for her preference for her lover over the family and maternal responsibilities, leaving the elderly woman alone with the recognition that both of her daughters have suffered for her leaving them. Kisako’s husband, who, having been offered a job elsewhere, has been trying to convince his wife to join him, and now Takako tells him that she is ready to go.

     The third sequence entails a visit to the Sugiyama house by Kisako. Met at the doorway by Takako, she is not invited in, but nonetheless, Kisako gives her condolences and hands over the flowers she has brought, telling her daughter of her intentions to leave by train soon after.

     In the last sequence, Takako, finally seated at the same level as her father, tells him of her decision to return home, determined to try to make the relationship work for the sake of her own child.

     It is almost, in these last sequences, that the director were closing off all possible routes of real love and communication for his characters. Perhaps Takako will find a new life with Numata, but we have no evidence for his transformation or that she will find new happiness.

     Throughout this powerful story, Ozu shows almost all of his characters gambling. When Akiko goes in search of Kenji, she first encounters his classmates illegally gambling in their rooms. Again and again, the denizens of the mahjong parlor put their money on the line while claiming they always lose. Later, we observe even the family scion, Sugiyama, sneaking out of his bank to play the local slots. Akiko and Kisako, quite obviously, have bet their loves against love. So is Takako making a bet that life can be made better through personal sacrifice.

 

Los Angeles, October 28, 2015

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2015).

Greg Berlanti | Love, Simon / 2018

out of the blue

by Douglas Messerli

 

Isaac Aptaker and Elizabeth Berger (screenplay, based on the novel by Becky Albertalli), Greg Berlanti (director) Love, Simon / 2018

 

Watching the new teen comedy, Love, Simon, yesterday I realized it is not truly a gay story; in fact, we see little of young Simon Spiers’ (Nick Robinson) sexual desires, and even he admits that he is just like everyone else around him. His friends, a long-time (13 years) woman acquaintance, Leah (Katherine Langford), a black woman who has more recently moved to his Atlanta suburb, Abby (Alexandra Shipp), and a black-Hispanic male, Nick (Jorge Lendeborg, Jr.) might represent the most correct coalition of high school relationships possible. Simon is not just “normal,” but almost a model for what young folks should be in this world of anti-racist and forgiving sexuality. Both of his parents, particularly his psycho-therapist mother, Emily (Jennifer Garner), along with his father, Jack (Josh Duhamel) are liberal, and even their son admits that if he told that that he was gay, they would probably be quite accepting. Clearly, this studio movie argues, times have changed from The Boys in the Band, the play and movie which defined my own generation.

      No, the problem here is not in being gay but in admitting (or we might say simply “expressing”) it, in “coming out.” The problem is that in speaking the truth Simon will be perceived as someone else, as a kind of stereotype rather than just an ordinary kid. If his desires are not particularly expressed—he simply feels that he, too, deserves a good love story—the film expresses a great deal of angst about sharing his desires with others. Indeed, a whole sequence plays with the idea of what it might mean if “straight” kids had to express their desires to their parents just as do gay ones. It’s a great comic moment; but, of course, we recognize that normality, even in this fantasy world, will never be perceived as being homosexual; heterosexuals are simply privileged in our society.

     My companion Howard has expressed that his greatest fear of being gay was that he would become one of the mincing fairies represented in Mart Crowley’s Boys in the Band, and, by and large, that is just what Simon fears, that in telling everyone he is gay he will become someone else than he is actually. Throughout the film, he keeps insisting that he is the same person that he has always been, perhaps suggesting that he has been a kind of perfect person. I don’t think all young people register that.

      I have never had those fears, but I certainly did fear speaking to my parents about my sexuality; and when I did, as I’ve noted several times in My Year volumes, they arose from the dinner table and left Howard and me in Washington, D.C., as they quickly made their way back to Iowa. It was a devastating act that, even if they later came to accept me, from which I never quite recovered. Now, in their minds, I was not the same son who had grown up in their house. So, I certainly do know where Simon is coming from. Being gay was not the issue, sharing the fact, particularly with parents and friends, was another problem.

   Fortunately, and quite by accident, Simon discovers, on-line, someone very much in the same position, a young gay man in his own school, who writes under the name “Blue” confessing that he feels that he is on a kind of Ferris Wheel, with terrible highs and lows, and that in his inability to express his sexuality, he is losing himself. Simon almost immediately bonds with him and writes back (how I wish we’d had computers in my day), signing his shared messages, just a few of which we overhear, with the name of Jacques. Together these two internet correspondents try to negotiate the problem they have had to face: how to remain the beloved kids they are while simultaneously having to keep such deep secrets.

      As the film casually explores, all young teenagers are in similar positions, being afraid to lay their emotions on the line, fearing to express love for one another because of the possibility of rejection or to tell of their own private fears because they might suddenly be mocked by their multiple interlinking “groups.”

     Perhaps, like Ethan (Clark Moore)—an apparently transgender student, who announces early on that she is also “gay”—being an outsider, as I was, may actually be an advantage. Being an “insider,” as is Simon, creates problems that doesn’t easily allow an admission of “outsiderness.”

    Much of this lovely film is simply a detective story, as Simon attempts to uncover the young man with whom is has now fallen in love. At first, he suspects Bram (Keiynan Lonsdale), but when he discovers him about to engage in sex with a female classmate, crosses him off the list.

     Later, he suspects a handsome local waiter, Kyle (Joey Pollari), but when that lad asks him about dating one of his female friends, the illusion is also destroyed. Who could “Blue” be, and how might he find him, a particularly difficult task now that “Blue” has come out to his father and has retreated to a WiFi free camping retreat to re-bond with his dad? What is the now fixated Simon to do?

     At last, he suspects a young gay-looking boy, who, when he finally confronts him, also leads to a wrong alley.

     In comes the film’s only real villain, the clumsy, comical, and self-serving Martin Addison (Logan Miller), the true outsider of this school community, who has a crush on Simon’s friend Abby and who, after discovering Simon’s communication with “Blue” on a school internet connection, blackmails Simon into helping him get a date. In doing so, Simon betrays all of his friends, trying to rearrange their social involvements at the very moment when such young people are already simply “scared” to express them. In short, to protect his own neck, Simon makes their own “coming out” commitments impossible. When, after a completely failed and utterly comic attempt to woo Abby, Martin finally releases Simon’s on-line messages, the young hero is now utterly shunned. Unintentionally is has accomplished just what he most feared: he is now “someone else,” a person excluded by the very people he was fearful might abandon him.

     Since this film is a teen comedy, of course, things do work out. Simon, finally, is re-embraced by his family—despite, in one of the most painful scenes in the entire move, his younger sister, Nora, arguing that he should simply deny the gay accusations—and, ultimately, by his best friends, particularly after an ugly incident when both he and Ethan are mocked in the school lunchroom.

     After a high school musical production of Cabaret, Simon signs on again, this time pleading with the mysterious “Blue,” to show up on the Ferris Wheel after the production to take that wild ride of ups and downs with him. At first it does not seem that his plea will work, and even the always clumsy, John Belushi-like clown, Martin arrives to argue that he is actually “Blue,” the idea of which Simon, and we, reject. Fortunately, Bram arrives at the very last moment to take a seat next to Simon and ride up to the skies before returning to earth again. I can’t tell you why, but I knew Bram was “Blue” all along. Maybe, as an actor, he was just too convincing in the role.

     In the end, Greg Berlanti’s teen comedy does not truly plow deep territory, but its concerns about speaking out does, and I now believe it screams volumes about young people speaking out, particularly after what we have just witnessed when the Marjory Stoneman High School students from Parkland and millions of other teenagers have seemingly come to life and intelligently spoken up and out about something that has long been troubling them and the entire country—far more tragic than their sexuality! If my legs were stronger, I would have loved to have marched along with them on the very same day I was watching this movie. But my mind is still functioning, and my gift, I hope, is that I can still write.

 

Los Angeles, March 25, 2018

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2018).

Giorgos Lanthimos | The Favourite / 2018

17 babies

by Douglas Messerli

 

Deborah Davis and Tony McNamara (writers), Giorgos Lanthimos (director) The Favourite / 2018

 

As many critics and viewers with whom I communicated felt, Giorgos Lanthimos’ 2018 film, co-produced by companies from Ireland, the United Kingdom, and the USA, is an enjoyable comic romp about two women, Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough (Rael Weisz) and Abigail Masham, later Baroness Masham (Emma Stone) who vie for the “love” of Anne, Queen of Great Britain (Olivia Colman).

      Americans, the British, and evidently the Irish can’t get enough of the kind of “upstairs/downstairs” intrigue that this film, by the totally eccentric Greek director Lanthimos, provides. Here it’s all evident, as Abigail, sold by her father to a German in a card game, comes filthily into Anne’s court (she literally falls into the dirty mud and pig-slough as she arrives after a long carriage ride). Witnessing, from her new position as a scullery-maid, what is truly going on in this court, in particular that Sarah is evidently sharing the bed of the ailing queen, creating a kind of lesbian relationship that might or might not have been the reality of the historical Queen Anne.

     It hardly matters, since once Lanthimos, through the script by Deborah Davis and Tony McNamara takes us through an early 18th century romp filmed within the walls of the Hatfield House in Hertfordshire and at Hampton Court Palace in Hampton Court, Surrey, we have entered another world which is beyond any concept of realism. This is perfect Downton Abbey territory, with far more treacherous behavior, as the two possible queen consorts battle it out with graceful bows, guns, and drugs. Abigail ultimately wins out over the almost masculinely powerful Sarah, and she shifts the power structure from the Tory-based demand for war with France to a more pacific retreat which will surely allow property owners in the United Kingdom to achieve greater wealth.

     It is delightful at times to see these two powerful lesbian-aligned women fight it out, particularly given the current issues of Brexit, where many of that country’s citizens want to cut off relationships with the rest of Europe as opposed to allowing a deep interrelationship with the continent with which they are divided only by their island isolation.

     On the one side is Sarah, determined to conquer the European relationships, while on the other is the beautiful Abigail, who helps the Queen realize that the strategies of retreat might allow for better communication with the European continent. Given the historical context, I might argue that Abigail’s manipulation of the royal cunt (a word used quite often in this film) was highly beneficial.

       The much-manipulated Queen, however, is not so certain—particularly when she observes the newly acclaimed Keeper of the Privy Purse pressing her shoe against the head of one of her 17 beloved rabbit bunnies, representing the same number of children whom she has had to suffer their deaths. Why, one must ask, did so many innocents die in her palace? Something is clearly rotten in the Palace of Whitehall in the heart of London.

       Lanthimos, accordingly, suggests a complete overthrow of the masculine world, where the males, dressed up in wigs, pale makeup, and rouged cheeks, are the true stereotypical feminine figures of this world, even if they still presume power. We know, through the back rooms of Queen Anne’s kitchens and bedroom, that they are, in fact, merely pawns in the power-struggle they imagine themselves involved with. Anne shifts positions as her vagina is entertained. She may even regret her changing decisions, but we recognize them as realignments with her lesbian associates. In this matriarchically-dominated world, the men are only spokesmen for the queen’s transforming perceptions, which is one of the major delights of this film, pretending, just for a few moments, that the issues of politics are truly controlled, in this instance, by women.

     In a larger sense, what Lanthimos is allowing us to perceive is a future male which we have not quite imagined yet. Except that the world we might not even have imagined will surely not be controlled by terribly arthritically pained woman, who can barely read her occasional major statements of governance (which surely must remind us of another now famous government figure). Since Anne could hardly read her daily messages, she made many of decisions based on the influence of her sexual liaisons. I believe that in this film Lanthimos has got it quite right, even if we cannot, finally, truly like any of the figures involved in the society which he has presented.

      None of his characters are nice people, none of them morally admirable. But then that is true in our own ruling leaders as well. And this film demonstrates just how sad that is—despite our utter enjoyment in watching how it might play out.

 

Los Angeles, February 22, 2019

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (February 2019).  

 

Grant Singer | My, My, My / 2018 [music video]

rushing forward to sex

by Douglas Messerli

 

Troye Sivan (performer), Troye Sivan Mellet, Brett McLaughlin, Oscar Görres, and James Alan Ghaleb (lyricists and composers), Grant Singer (director) My, My, My / 2018 [3:30 minutes] [music video]

 

One of the most memorable of gay Australian pop icon Troye Sivan’s songs, My, My, My was released on his second album, Something to Give Each Other in January 10th, 2018, and was first performed live on Saturday Night Live on January 20th. The song, he has admitted, was inspired by his then relationship with US model and photographer Jacob Bixenman, a relationship which lasted from 2016-2020.

   At the time, the song was described as a break-through declaring pure gay passion, and immediately moving to the heart of the issue wherein two men keep “Running from love” at the very moment that each night they “die” in one another’s arms. The constantly shifting frames of Sivan’s willowy figure (Sivan suffers from a mild condition of mild form of Marfan syndrome), mostly in black-and-white, with an open shirt rushing away as he moves in a kind of frenzied forward dance, help to reiterate the almost breathless utterance of the chorus:  

    

Oh my, my, my

I die every night with you

Oh my, my, my

Living for your every move

 

    The video begins with its general statement of what seems to be his nearly breathless condition of passion:

 

Shine on, diamond

Don't make me wait another day

'Cause passion is passion

You know it just as well as me

     This is followed by a pre-chorus that summarizes the difficulties of that fact:

 

Now, let's stop running from love

Running from love

Let's stop, my baby

Let's stop running from us

Running from us

Let's stop, my baby

 

    And is followed by the chorus which cannot even fully express its love, leading with the phrase “My, my, my.”

 

    The second statement even more fully exclaims their passion:

 

Spark up, buzz cut

I got my tongue between your teeth

Go slow, no, no, go fast

You like it just as much as me

 

    By the end of the song, the curly blond-haired singer (blond, at least in this video) cannot do anything except respirate his passion, repeating the chorus over and over.

    This short gay work almost smells of lust and sweat, as we see both singer and brief blips of his lover. The rush forward to sex says everything about the work we need to know. 

 

Los Angeles, July 29, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (July 2026).