Mark Olmsted and Thomas F. Sailer | 1980 / 2022

one of the very first of the contemporary coming out films

by Douglas Messerli

 

Mark Olmsted (screenplay), Mark Olmsted and Thomas F. Sailer (directors) 1980 / 2022 [32 minutes]

 

For years I have been arguing that the first of the more contemporary B versions of the “coming out” film came into being in the late 1990s with Hettie McDonald’s Beautiful Thing of 1996, Simon Shore’s Get Real of 1998, and David Moreton’s Edge of Seventeen from the same year.

     Yet I always suspected that given the common experience shared by gays long before that, including my own coming out to my parents long before in 1970 and my husband Howard’s even earlier experience, that there must have been earlier films. I even observed an earlier, quite different version of the same subject, half-way between the A and B versions in the documentary from 1980, Bruce Glawson’s A Gay Son; and since then I have discovered even others.

      But recently I came across even an earlier one, filmed by Mark Olmsted, co-directed by Thomas F. Sailer, at New York University as a graduating senior film from their famed school of film in the late 1970s titled …and he’ll grow up to be big and strong. In those days before the numerous gay and lesbian film festivals such films were released to extremely small audiences, and when, some years later, the young filmmaker Mark Olmsted requested a copy, he was told the film was destroyed in storage.

      In 2021 he wrote an essay for an AIDS memorial site for his brother Luke who had died 30 years earlier, and was contacted by Adele DeWitt Racheff, the actor who played the central character’s, Max Rockman’s sister in the film. She had a pristine copy of the film and sent him a version, thus restoring a film that had been thought to be lost.

     He made some modest changes concerning the sound, small changes in dialogue, and added music, retitling it 1980 and re-released it to the public.

       Here, in fact, we see all the standard forms and structures of the modern, B version, of the genre, without any traces of the A version. And other than some further earlier documentaries, this might be said to be, to date, my nomination for the earliest contemporary “coming out” film, which was finally released only in 2022.

    Max Rockman (Keith Jones) is living in a small apartment with is lover David Marks (Greg Schaffert), jogging some mornings along with his more athletic friend—he doesn’t like jogging—when he suddenly receives a letter from his sister Madeleine (Racheff) that she and her mother will soon be arriving in the city for a visit.

     Max does not necessarily panic, but suggests to David that he will simply dine out with them at restaurants for their stay, with no need for them to visit and see the single double bed they share. David even suggests that he can easily get lost for an evening or so if they decide to visit, but he is the cook of the two, and how to explain the double bed.

     Indeed, after a cold wait for a taxi, so common for those who are not urban dwellers who attempt to hail a taxi while mildly stand back on a corner, as others hastily push forward. My parents in Paris once spent more than an hour attempt to hail a taxi, while I, angry with their timidity, walked the long distance back to our hotel, and even after observing one of the major protests of 1965, walking through the crowds and still returning to the hotel before they did.

      And suddenly they do show up at his door, he finally suggesting he will cook for them and they tour the small apartment, he quickly calling his friend to tell him how to fix flounder.

   His mother, Simone (Marjorie Fierst) immediately imagines that he is seeing or sleep with a girlfriend. But Max honestly explains, particularly when she dares him to shock her, that he is sharing the space with another male. She asks the obviously question, who sleeps on the couch, to which he finally replies that he shares the bed, Madeleine praising him for his opened-mindedness since, after all, it is the 1980s! But he calmly explains that actually the other male is not just a friend but his lover which quickly turns the mother into a homophobic gorgon, who insists that he can’t say he’s gay being just 20 years old. He demands she stop trying to pretend he’s something else. When she demands to know how long it has been going on, he admits since he was working, which clearly dates back to his high school days. She immediately stands and leaves, very much the reaction of my parents, as I have written elsewhere in these pages, upon just such announcement, who rose up from a dinner table in Washington, D.C. and drove back to Iowa.

     His sister is completely accepting of the situation, but he sends her back to help her mother digest the facts.

      The next day, after meeting with Madeleine at Columbia University, where she also plans to attend school, they discuss the situation, and the mother soon calls for a meeting. She cannot even comprehend when he tells her, surely one of the first such admissions on film, that he likes being gay because he knows who he is and can live with himself.  But she only makes things worse by questioning whether he, at his young age, can really imagine what love is—even though his parents have had a rocky relationship for most of their lives—insisting he come back to Chicago and seek out the help of a psychiatrist. He angrily replies that she is even questioning his own emotional feelings, explaining to her that he has long known he was gay, that it is not something to “cure” or “fix,” and that she is still unable to comprehend that he truly has a full and fulfilling relationship with his lover. When she still refuses to believe it, he simply walks away from her.

     Returning, he finds David away, evidently on a luncheon date, and despite his dislike of jogging, goes for a long run, returning to find his lover back home. When he explains what has happened to him, David attempts to assure him that he shouldn’t cut her off since he is certain she still loves him, Max becomes angry, suggesting perhaps that his mother was right, there is no true love there, but David finally stops him, explaining in an emotional scene something that he has never told his lover previously.

      After they begin to arrange meetings with a very nice girl, he felt disturbed that he was being forced to hurt her feelings, particularly since it was apparent that she really liked him.

     He too came out to his parents before moving to NYC, which did not work out well at all. His father told him to immediately pack and leave, while his mother stood quivering in fear and shame behind him, finally saying that “It should have been me.” Since she was a German concentration camp survivor, the works have a very particular meaning, that she should have been one of them to die instead of being a survivor.

      As David packs up to leave his father hands him a $1,000 check, suggesting it is for help in curing him, he throws the check back at him, and leaves, never to talk to either of them again.

      The film ends with Max calling his mother and attempting once more to make a meeting with her to help her understand who he is.

      This is a truly excellent coming out film long before the others. It doesn’t quite share their humor or the release that comes, particularly in Get Real, of announcing one’s gayness to his entire school community and their parents; but then at the beginning of the 1980s or particularly the late 1970s being gay was certainly nothing to be taken lightly or even laughed at, acceptance being rare a painful event that often took months and even years to occur—if ever. How wonderful it might have been if this short work had truly had distribution when it first appeared. But, at least, we now have it back to help understand how difficult and brave it was to come up in those early days when young men dared to break the quietude and painful suffering of the first A version of the coming out films.

 

Los Angeles, August 5, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2026).

Héctor Babenco | O Beijo da Mulher Aranha (Kiss of the Spider Woman) / 1985

the webs we weave

by Douglas Messerli

 

Leonard Schrader (screenplay), Héctor Babenco (director) O Beijo da Mulher Aranha (Kiss of the Spider Woman) / 1985

 

It’s nearly impossible to even begin to describe a film made by Argentine-Brazilian heterosexual director Héctor Babenco, based on a novel by the gay Argentine writer Manual Puig, staring a many-times married British actor John Hurt as an effeminate gay man opposite a Puerto Rican macho political figure, played by Raúl Julia, set in a Brazilian prison during that country’s dictatorship, while being based on the terrible Argentine dictatorship of Jorge Rafael Videla Redondo, with a script by American writer Leonard Schrader.

     If you’re getting a bit confused let me just add that the role of that effeminate gay man was originally to have been performed by the macho US superstar Burt Lancaster, who was rumored, according to the Wikipedia article on Kiss of the Spider Woman—unknown to me until writing this piece—to have been a notable Hollywood crossdresser! He was famously arrested in an all- gay party.

     Let me just add that the films Molina describes to his beloved fellow prisoner, Valentin, are based centrally on Nazi propaganda films and those of his own imagination—particularly the title film about the Spider Woman—while he himself has been arrested for pedophilic sex and is offered freedom only if he succeeds to get secret information from his would-be lover.

     And if your head’s still spinning, let me just add that most of Puig’s works were brought into English by the remarkable lesbian translator Suzanne Jill Levine (whose translation of José Donoso’s Hell Has No Limits both of my presses also published). The webs this “spider woman” weaved were terribly complex, and evidently woven so deeply that all those involved simply could not escape the ties that bound them.

     Lancaster is listed as one of the producers since his age at the time forced him to bow out of the performance he desired to undertake. I wish he had; it might have been as utterly fascinating as his Felix Happer role in Local Hero or his Prince Don Fabrizio Salina performance in The Leopard. I believe Lancaster was one of the most underrated of Hollywood stars.

      The publicity and commentary on this 1985 film, moreover, is highly unreliable, most of them simply suggesting that the two oppositional prisoners—the one a true loving, but passive humanist, the other a terribly caring, but active, political figure—“form a bond,” or, even worse, “become friends.” Yes, they do both of those things, but far more importantly, they come together into a sexual relationship: in short, they fuck. This happens, not just in prisons, but everyday life, everywhere when a macho being releases him or herself into sexual same-sex ecstasy, when men and women suddenly realize that they are not limited by the sexual decrees of the society at large.

    Molina’s kindness, his protectiveness, seductiveness, and self-serving tendencies finally break through the wall of the true believer and, yes they become friends, they bond, and finally they fuck, even able to share a deep kiss as Molina is released in order to further torture from the man with whom he has now fallen in love.

     Given the clear brutality of the government which surrounds them—the true spiders which encase their lives—we already know the result. Desperately in love with the only man who seems to fit his endless impatient “Waiting, waiting and waiting…for a real man,” the weaker Molina is even willing to join the political underground for that intense momentary kiss.

     It is, of course, the kiss of death, yet simultaneously that kiss, a bit like Snow White, brings him back to life, to commitment, to a fire in his stomach that will surely kill him but turn himself into that “real man” for which he has so long sought. Even the macho Valentin demands of him, as they part, to no longer accept the homophobic abuse he has previously suffered.

      In the end, ironically—a word that does not any longer seem to have much meaning—the previously uncommitted, now believer, is killed not by the evil right followers but by the left figures to which he is attempting to provide information. In Puig’s vision there are no real heroes. Valentin himself was a modest political figure, hiding out in his girlfriend Marta’s wealthy bourgeois home. It seems to me now that he, not Molina, was the “Spider Woman,” someone involving people into his own well-meaning, but not very thought-out intentions.

      Once shot, Molina dies slowly, falling to his knees after a long perception that he has been killed, refusing to reveal anything to anyone. We don’t know what his still-imprisoned and terribly tortured cell-mate has revealed. A hospital assistant illegally shoots him up with morphine, which, if nothing else allows him visions of his beautiful, lost lover, Marta, as they cross the perfect pond of water together—an illusion that might never even be allowed in Molina’s more visceral and painful vision of the cinematic world, where women were cruel, and men so, so very seductive.

      Maybe, just maybe, in describing all the films I have discussed, I have become a kind of Molina, a spider-man who cannot totally break out of the web I myself have constructed.

 

Los Angeles, March 14, 2020

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2020).

Mohammad Shawky Hassan | بشتقلك ساعات Bashtaalak sa'at (Shall I Compare You to a Summer's Day?) / 2022

the alternatives

by Douglas Messerli

 

Mohammad Shawky Hassan (screenwriter and director) بشتقلك ساعات Bashtaalak sa'at (Shall I Compare You to a Summer's Day?) / 2022

 

This Egyptian, Lebanese, and German co-production is like no Arab gay feature film ever before made.  Indeed, there are very few movies like it in the Western world. A musical based on random selections from Shakespeare and Scheherazade, with heavy doses of camp humor thrown in just for fun, Hassan’s film explores through live action, animation, and music video-style sequences, as well scenes of rather explicit sex, various inter-male gay relationships, particularly the problem of love in open, polysexual relationships.

     There appears to be, at first, a kind of narrative continuity to the work. As critic Susanne Gottlieb points out in her comments about the Berlinale 2022 showing:

 

“Separated by inserts into several sections, only one of which carries the famous opening line of the sonnet, the film is a merry-go-round involving one simple idea. Two men meet in a club or a bar: one of them is Egyptian, the other hails from Latin America. The attraction is instant, and sexual intercourse follows soon after. After their lovemaking in between the late hours of the night and early dawn, as is befitting of a Shakespearean tale, they start talking about their love lives. One of them has led a rather polyamorous life, while the other is still only discovering himself. A future in which both commit to each other, in which they don’t drag their own damaged lives into this bond, seems impossible.

     This is as far as the comprehensible part of the plot goes.”

    What follows are songs in Arabic, sketches revolving around mythical depictions of sexual situations, interviews with different gay men, drag scenes, basic cabaret numbers, and various scenes and tropes that point to gay porno movies and videos (meeting up with a mechanic who doesn’t take credit cards, participating in a gay orgy, doing a photo shoot, etc.) that relate to the thematic issues such as they exist.

     One of the most beautiful stories concerns a merman with who the human swims for several days before the merman, realizing they cannot truly consummate sex, swims off.

 

     If there does, however, seem to be any coherence between this work’s parts, it emanates from the fact that it appears, like the works of the Arabian Nights, that elements are repeated over and again. One central figure continues to demand of the others who love that they accept his open life style or that they join in for polyamorous sex, but the two others continue to find it difficult that they cannot love him alone and so possess him or at least establish some sense of permanence other than the famed single “summer day.”

      At other points the men, from various perspectives, discuss Grindr dates, threesomes, and the rejection they feel of the sexually active figure they so strongly love.

     On one level, there is almost a traditional heteronormative viewpoint expressed, particularly through the personification of Sharazad (Donia Massoud), holding out the normative values of marriage and childhood, and some view of a “happy ending,” which the men’s behavior does not permit, their reactions to the more societal correct view being the subject of both humor and expressions of sorrow.

      But the real delight of this work comes not from its narrative but its bold theatricalism, the constant shifts of performative methods that challenge any coherent possibility of behavior. And we recognize in the work’s very form, accordingly, the multivalent possibilities of the LGBTQ experience. There is no one way to perceive reality, no one way to define sexual satisfaction. The form itself defies the very traditionalism which is repeated as an undercurrent again and again, forcing one of the figures to ask, “I wonder why he keeps telling me stories I already know?”

     The numerous cast members, including Nadim Bahsoun, Hassan Dib, Ahmed Awadalla, Richard Garbriel Gersch, Kenton Türk, Gabriele Marra, Erik Cataldo, Agatino Camarda, Carlos Vasquez, Ronni Maciel, Sergio Abril, Albert Janze, David Townsent, Amr Karkout, Eyad Houssami, and Rashid Oweyele and numerous others represent a multitude of different voices speaking and singing about the issues of gay sex.

      Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Perhaps. But there so many other metaphors to consider that ultimately Shakespeare’s simple “romantic” metaphor almost loses its significance, which given the numerous alternatives to describe love is perhaps not at all a bad thing.

 

Los Angeles, February 6, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (February 2023)

Gilles Bindi | Un beau jour, un coiffeur (One Fine Day, a Hairdresser) / 2004

discovering sex

by Douglas Messerli

 

Gilles Bindi (screenwriter and director) Un beau jour, un coiffeur (One Fine Day, a Hairdresser) / 2004 [12 minutes]

 

Jérôme (Julien Baumgartner) is a philosopher major working on his doctorate, happy ensconced in a totally heterosexual relationship with his girlfriend Claire (Malvina Héraud), both of whom speak the language of Kant and other great philosophers rather than any language sounding like love.

 

    Long-haired and shaggy, Jérôme, in fact total unaware of his appearance, is told by his mother (Marie-Laure Beneston) that he simply has to get a haircut. So he sets out to the local hair salon, suddenly meeting up with the beautiful eyes and face of the hairdresser, Brice (Clément Allanic), upon which, as if he had been literally struck by Cupid’s arrow, he immediately falls in love.

     Given free reign to do anything with his hair, Brice gives the previous conservatively dressed and styled Jérôme a kind of combination French crop and Modern Mullet.

     By the next day, the PhD. pupil is so confused that he can hardly lecture to his younger philosophy students about Kant, and asks permission to leave. He explains what has happened to

Claire, who is now so fed up with his sudden infatuation that she tells him to take two aspirin and leaves him alone in the library to stew over how he might again meet up with Brice.

     He returns home and immediately announces to his family that he is in love with a male hairdresser. His mother comes out of the kitchen simply demanding that he not make such a thing about as long as he is happy.

     That night he has a sexual fantasy in which first Claire, hair down begins to sexually tease him on a table top, but is quickly thrown off by a half-naked Brice who so excites Jérôme that he immediately comes all over the philosophy book he is reading.

     Perhaps he should take him some flowers; after all he is a hairdresser. But he has never learned any of the protocol of flirting or dating for that matter. He has no social skills.

     He returns to the salon, where this time he is assigned an older woman who gives him a buzz cut while he watches Brice at work on one of his elderly female customers. The experience is frustrating to say the least.

     But he soon meets Brice on the street, explaining that he has suddenly met someone with whom he has fallen in love, waxing quite brilliantly about his romantic desires. Brice is so impressed that he begs him to join him in a café to help him explain his own love to a girl he has just met. Jérôme has no choice but to tag along, later watching make-out madly when whatever he has done to match them has been successful. Brice and he become friends, a far cry from what he imagined.

    What is a boy that has suddenly discovered that he is gay to do? Of course, the whole idea of someone discovering their sexuality in one fell swoop is highly unlikely. For most of us it takes years of confusion and self-doubt before we are ready to admit that we like the people of the same sex. But this is a cinematic fable much like Bringing Up Baby (1938) where, after meeting the exotic, leopard-loving Hepburn and being dressed by her in a female negligée Cary Grant declares he’s “just gone gay”; and let us just admit that Jérôme has previously kept his face and mind in his books. It is doubtful that he and Claire have ever had sex, much like Grant’s character and his former fiancée Alice Swallow.

   But now Jérôme, having discovered that the new love of his life, although working as a hairdresser, is totally straight is newly depressed. His mother insists that he take her for her swimming lessons. And there, within moments he discovers her hunky swimming coach (Guirlain Géran) who appears to be equally delighted to meet Jérôme and have a full conversation when he returns in 4 hours to pick up his mother. Love has struck again.

     There’s nothing profound about this short work, but it’s beautifully filmed, mixes serious conversations with its darts of love, and provides several handsome boys along way, including the lead actor Baumgartner. That’s a lot for a 12-minute film to offer.

 

Los Angeles, August 5, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2026).