Axel Strøm | Dorian Grays Portræt (The Picture of Dorian Gray) / 1910 || Phillips Smalley | The Picture of Dorian Gray / 1913 || Vsevolod Meyerhold and Mikhail Doronin | Portret Doryana Greya (The Picture of Dorian Gray) / 1915 || Richard Oswald | Das bildnis des Dorian Gray (The Picture of Dorian Gray) / 1917 || Alfréd Deésy | Az Élet királya (King of Life) / 1918

hidden pictures

by Douglas Messerli

 

Over the years, one of the most popular of LGBTQ fictions was perhaps the hardest one to actually pin down as representing the gay experience. There is no question that Oscar Wilde’s renowned fiction about a handsome, apparently bisexual man, whose beauty attracts both sexes represents the kind of closeted condition of the homosexual in disapproving societies. But to actually pin Dorian Gray to gay sexual activity is difficult unless you more fully examine his relationships with the painter Basil Hallward, the influences upon his character of Lord Henry Wotton, and, in particular, his former relationship with Alan Campbell over whom Dorian evidently holds some sort of power of blackmail, presumably their own sexual relationship including a letter. But all of these subtleties were surely difficult to express in the short silent versions which were highly popular in the second decade of the 20th century.

       The subject was filmed in Denmark, the US, Russia, Germany, and Hungary, but all of these versions are lost and we have only sparse listings and commentary on them. In a sense they have all become “hidden” versions the The Picture just as surely as Dorian’s own locked-away portrait.

 

the picture of dorian gray

 

Axel Strøm (writer, based on the fiction by Oscar Wilde, and director) Dorian Grays Portræt (The Picture of Dorian Gray) / 1910 || lost film

 

What appears to be the very first cinematic adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray was directed by the Danish filmmaker Axel Strøm and released on October 6, 1910. The silent film was produced by Regia Kunstfilms with cinematography by Mads Anton Madsen.

 

      Valdemar Psilander played Dorian Gray, with Clara Pontoppidan playing a character named Clara Wieth, presumably the role of Sybil Vane in the original book. Other actors included Adam Poulsen and Henrik Malberg.

       Since the film is lost we have no idea what scenes the film portrayed from Wilde’s original text or whether these contained any overt homosexual references. However, In his Queer Cinema: The Film Reader Henry Benshoff notes that in the 1910s films begin to explore for the first time “the monstrous as expressed in the gothic literature of the nineteenth century.” Films such as Edison’s Frankenstein (1910) and D. W. Griffith’s adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart,” The Avenging Conscience (1914), along with seven versions of The Picture of Dorian Gray began to explore the male monsters of the previous century, with the 1917 version of Wilde’s story, in particular, characterizing Dorian Gray as the devil. Clearly, these several depictions of Wilde’s Gray began to establish the homosexual as a monster, a danger to the society at large.

 

Los Angeles, April 10, 2021

 

 

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the picture of dorian gray

 

Lois Weber (screenplay), Phillips Smalley (director) The Picture of Dorian Gray / 1913 || lost film

 

Very little is known about the lost 1913 version of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, and some film historians now doubt whether this version of the film ever existed, although credits and the specific release date of March 17, 1913 are repeated on the internet Wikipedia and IMDb sites. This version was first mentioned in the 1966 copy of Films In Review.

     If these sources are correct, the cast of the 16-minute short starred Wallace Reid as Dorian, with Lois Weber presumably playing Sybil Vane, and the director Phillips Smalley performing the role of Lord Henry Wotton. New York Motion Picture Company is listed as the producer.

     What scenes from Wilde’s novel were adapted for this short is not known, along with any information of whether there are any implications in the work of homosexuality other than Wilde’s original coded text.

 

Los Angeles, April 10, 2021

 

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the picture of dorian gray (1915)

 

Vsevolod Meyerhold and Mikhail Doronin (text, based on Oscar Wilde’s fiction, and directors) Portret Doryana Greya (The Picture of Dorian Gray) / 1915 || lost film

 

Perhaps the most prestigious of the now lost Dorian Gray films was the 1915 silent, 22-minute film directed by Vsevolod Meyerhold and Mikhail Doronin in 1915. That film, with Aleksandr Levitsky serving as cinematographer featured a woman, Varnara Yanova as Dorian Gray, emphasizing the beautiful young man’s androgyny, and featured Meyerhold himself as Lord Henry  Wotton. Other members of the cast included Paola Belova, Gustav Enriton, Yelizaveta Uvarova, Alexandre Volkoff and Doronin playing other unnamed characters. The art direction was by Vladimir Yegorov.

       A long essay on the script has been published which basically describes the film as introducing biographical information about Dorian Gray as well as linking the character with Wilde himself, based on his notion that a work of art always most resembles the artist himself.

       Meyerhold’s company was noted for its international theater productions of plays by Ernst Toller, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Emile Verhaeren and numerous others along with two other films by fin-de-siècle authors. But at this point in his career Meyerhold had not yet found his audience, most the films being ignored also in the West, and, accordingly, “lost.”

      As one unnamed commentator put it:

 

“...we can only imagine what this film was like, based on the few stills in circulation. Meyerhold frequently made use of modern art trends, in particular Constructivism, German Expressionism and Cubism (employing the likes of Aleksandr Rodchenko and Aleksandra Exter to design sets), and it is likely that he did so with this picture. Indeed, one critic has claimed that if Dorian Gray had been seen in the West before Wiene’s Das Kabinett des Dr. Caligari, then it might have won similar acclaim and exerted a much higher level of influence.

     As it stands, the film was not noted until it was too late, and now it, like Meyerhold’s film of Stanislaw Przybyszewski’s novel The Strong Man, no longer exists. However, Meyerhold’s theoretical works on theatre have survived, despite the director’s execution under order of Stalin in 1939-40 (due to his refusal to toe the Party line during the 1928-32 Cultural Revolution), and they are probably the most useful tools for anyone wishing to inform themselves about the works of this great director.”

      Above is a poster for the film and a frame from the film itself.

 

Los Angeles, April 10, 2021

 

 

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the sympathetic decadent

 

Richard Oswald (screenwriter, based on the fiction by Oscar Wilde, and director) Das bildnis des Dorian Gray (The Picture of Dorian Gray) / 1917 || lost film

 

Although it still appears on some lists of productions as an extant film, the German cinematic version of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, Das Bildnis des Dorian Gray, directed by Richard Oswald and released in July 1917 has for long been considered a lost film.

       This version, unlike most of the previous adaptions, was a full five-act, 80-minute feature starring the German matinee idol, Bernd Aldor, this the first of some 20 film roles in which he starred between 1917-1931.

     He often portrayed a detective, but also worked regularly with Oswald acting roles of other kinds of characters in a 1917 film about venereal disease Es Werde Licht!, Des goldes Fluch (God’s Curse, 1917), Der lbebende Leichnam (The Living Corpse, 1918), and Die seltsame Geschichte des Bron Torelli (The Strange Tale of Baron Torelli, 1918).

     From the pictures we have of this production, Aldor evidently played Dorian Gray as a sailor, although another shot of him before the portrait represents him as wearing a Japanese-like robe. Ernst Pittschau appeared as Sir Henry Wotton, Ernst Ludwig as Basil Hallward, Lea Lara as Sibyl Vane, and Andreas Van Horn as Dorian’s ex-college chum Alan Campbell.

     The cinematographer was Max Fassbender and the sets were designed by Manfred Noa.

     Reviewers of the day praised its relative faithfulness to the original text, and for the empathy the director created for the lead figure Aldor.

     The poster for the film quite nicely catches the fin de siècle spirit of the original.

 

Los Angeles, June 8, 2021

 

       

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lugosi as a wit?

 

József Pakots (screenplay, based on the fiction by Oscar Wilde), Alfréd Deésy (director) Az Élet királya (King of Life) / 1918 || lost film

 

In hindsight it appears that one of the requirements that anyone undertaking to film a version of Oscar Wilde’s fiction The Picture of Dorian Gray is that, even if that work were to become enormously popular, it would ultimately be lost to future generations.

     Just as with the early Danish, US, Russian, and German productions of Dorian Gray the Hungarian 1918 film, Az Élet királya (King of Life), directed by Alfréd Deésy, is a lost film.

      The casting of actor Béla Lugosi as Lord Henry Wotton (in this version named Arisztid Olt) is of particular interest. It’s interesting to imagine the rather lugubriously speaking Dracula playing the fast-quipping wit Wotton. Norbert Dán was Dorian Gray, opposite Ila Lóth as Sibyl Vane. The painter Basil Hallward was performed by Gusztáv Turán.

      Wilde’s novel was adapted by József Pakots, with cinematography by Károly Vass.

     Deésy was a major figure of Hungarian silent filmmaking, shooting some 17 silent films including one on Casanova and another on Sacco and Vanzetti, but very few of his silent works have survived. After World II, Deésy also made feature sound films and continued to work until his death in 1961 at the age of 83.

 

    Like the others playing Gray, Norbert Dán was an extremely handsome matinee idol, who would have likely drawn a great many fans to the movie.

 

Los Angeles, June 10, 2021

Timmy Thompson | Up on the Roof / 2023

love for hire

by Douglas Messerli

 

Timmy Thompson (screenwriter and director) Up on the Roof / 2023 [12 minutes]

 

It appears to be a first date, in which clearly Otis (Timmy Thompson) is more than a little uncomfortable. For example, even though the handsome Zane (Cole Newburg) tells him that he likes hanging out with him, there, on the rooftop beside a small pool, Otis isn’t quite convinced. It’s unsure whether Zane is just saying it make him feel well or really means it.

     Zane has evidently brought home some cookies, but Otis is uncomfortable even sharing them with Zane, having to make physical contact or even to share something with another. Otis, feeling more than a little self-conscious, suggests that Zane needed go through with “it,” presumably the date, if he doesn’t feel it’s worth it. But Zane reassures Otis that everything is fine, again telling him that he enjoys his company.

      He suggests a breathing exercise, just to calm Otis down, which confuses us slightly. What has happened to Otis? Has he just gone through a difficult relationship? Has he just come and afraid of the consequences?

      Perhaps in a bit in frustration, Zane removes his shoes and shirt and jumps into the heated pool with his pants still on, Otis troubled evidently by the possibility of nudity or even Zane’s stripping down to his jockey shorts.

      The water’s perfect, he argues, warmer than out there. But Otis won’t join him. In the 3 ft. wading pool, Zane ridiculously pretends to be drowning, pleading for help. But Otis only laughs and still won’t enter the pool. After a few more comic attempts, Otis finally decides to join him, also removing his shoes and shirt but leaving on his jeans.

     Once in the pool, he realizes that it actually cold, allowing Zane to warm him up by rubbing his back, and seems amendable to the other’s touches.

     Zane explains that one day his roommate had come to his room crying, perhaps the first time he’d every seen another man crying. It appeared that his roommate was having sexual problems with his girlfriend, and Zane stayed with him, apparently holding him and just talking. It finally made things better for his friend, and it made him happy as well for his ability to help.

      And we now begin to recognize, even if we haven’t previously that Zane is not some magical boyfriend who has accidently met up with Otis. He holds Otis’ nose for moment and takes him under the water, and follows it up two more times, Otis finally feeling safe in his arms and kissing him, laying his head upon Zane’s shoulder. It appears that finally Otis is again feeling joyful, that he feels truly loved.

       In the very next scene, we see Otis alone in elevator, on his way down, apparently to his room. His cellphone message thanks him for using the services of Zane Abrams, asking him that if he was happy with service to leave a tip.

       Clearly Zane was hired to help get Otis out of his funk; but it worked. The stranger was able to make him realize again that he was loveable.

 

Los Angeles, November 18, 2023

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (November 2023).

Derek Jarman / Wittgenstein / 1993

unspoken contradictions

by Douglas Messerli   

 

Derek Jarman, Terry Eagleton, and Ken Butler (screenplay), Derek Jarman (director) Wittgenstein / 1993 (TV drama)

 

Since I love both the often contradictory films of Derek Jarman and the fully contradictory philosophical thinking of Ludwig Wittgenstein, it would seem almost impossible for me to express reservations about British director Jarman’s 1993 theatrical comic drama about the man who argues, as I have long posited in my own work, that the meaning of words is not something fixed but best understood within their use in the everyday world as a “language game.”

    Rumor has it that Jarman was challenged by producers to attend to a gay figure and his ideas without revealing his ass or penis. The great director achieves the latter, creating at times a quite hilarious farce about the boy genius who had absolutely no ability to control his disdain, sometimes expressed quite physically, regarding his students’ (the youngest especially) and peers’ utter stupidity, and yet could not allow himself the delights of even a soft bed, living often like a religious fanatic—which despite his wild philosophical ideas, his then unacceptable views of human relationships, and his radical viewpoints—he often seemed to really be, attempting to model his life more on Fyodor Dostoevsky and Leo Tolstoy (in his later religious phase) than upon any of the conclusions he had come to in his Tractatus and his later Philosophical Investigations, the latter the work of some of his most devoted students who through their copious notetaking in his classes, brought together his major later thoughts. Wittgenstein was the kind of man who might had laid down each night upon a bed of nails if he hadn’t thought such an action was too ostentatious and illogical.

 

“To believe in God means to understand the meaning of life.

To believe in God means to see that the facts of the world are not the end of the matter.

To believe in God means to see that life has a meaning [ ... ]

When my conscience upsets my equilibrium, then I am not in agreement with Something. But what

     is this? Is it the world?

Certainly it is correct to say: Conscience is the voice of God.”

 

      Jarman quickly mentions that his “hero” had given up his inheritance, making him one of the richest men in Europe, to a group of poets who may never have read (including Georg Trakl, Rainer Maria Rilke, and architect Adolph Loos) and returned to his own wealth to his remaining siblings, three older brothers of whom, Hans, Rudi, and Kurt, committed suicide, his noted pianist brother Paul having lost his arm in World War I. Paul was so respected as a pianist that Maurice Ravel composed for him “Piano Concerto for the Left Hand,” the score of which he hear in this film.

 

    Yet, strangely, given Jarman’s own homosexuality and his obvious attention to major gay figures throughout his cinema oeuvre, he merely mentions, through an aside by the child Wittgenstein (Clancy Chassay), that Ludwig’s brother Rudi was most certainly gay, committing suicide in a Berlin bar by drinking a glass of milk laced with potassium cyanide while a pianist played Thomas Koschat’s “Verlassen, verlassen, verlassen bin ich,” (“Forsaken, forsaken, forsaken am I”). One of Rudi’s several suicide notes referred to what he described as his “perverted disposition,” and earlier he had evidently sought advice from Magnus Hirschfield’s the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, an organization that actively campaigned against Paragraph 175 of the German Criminal Code, which prohibited homosexual sex.

     And even the death of the eldest brother Hans, also a musical prodigy, who at age four could identity the Doppler effect of a passing police siren as a quarter-tone drop in pitch, died quite mysteriously in May 1902, disappearing off a boat in the US Chesapeake Bay very much in the manner of gay poet Hart Crane.

    Although most Wittgenstein commentators and biographers, many with a deep intention of attempting to downplay or even cover up Ludwig’s own homosexuality, describe it simply as the families’ pathological disposition to depression, it might have served Jarman to have even slightly explored this anomaly, connecting the sons’ deaths with the imperious father Karl, whose steel cartel made the family the second richest, next to the Rothchild’s, in Europe.

    Alas, Jarman, defying expectations, seems to be more interested in exploring the many other contradictions of the great philosopher, quoting bits and pieces of the adult Ludwig’s (Karl Johnson) contradictory philosophical thinking, such as the famous “The limits of my language are the limits of my world,” and the later “There is no private meaning. We are what we are because we share a common life.”

   The film, as well, reveals Wittgenstein’s roiling battles with his Cambridge mentors, particularly the man who believed Ludwig, despite his disagreements with or perhaps his misunderstanding of various of his ideas, was “a true genius”: the highly respected Bertrand Russell (Michael Gough). Russell is rightfully given a major role in this film along with his highly sexually active, brilliant, but also conventionally thinking Lady Ottoline Morrell (played by Tilda Swinton who quite stunningly   brings her character to life). Despite Russell writing the introduction to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, perhaps the only reason why the difficult text was even published, it was perhaps inevitable, so Jarman’s film makes clear, that the two men would eventually break up as friends, while Ludwig remained friends with the flamboyantly gay, far less brilliant, but for a time more influential, economist, John Maynard Keynes (John Quentin), who despite his sexuality (or perhaps because of it) married the Ballets Russes star ballerina, Lydia Lopokova (Lynn Seymour).

     Along with his Cambridge student’s early mockery of Wittgenstein, and brief episodes from Wittgenstein’s attempt to teach elementary school children which ended in accusations of his physical abuse of the children he found to be representative of the village Trattenbach where he was surrounded by adults and children of “odiousness and baseness.” Although Wittgenstein’s utter intolerance of ignorance or perhaps even disagreement is truly interesting, it should be a given for the character created by Jarman, who was also visited by a silly green Martian—perhaps just to allow him to quote his statement: “If people never did silly things nothing intelligent would ever get done.”—and argues with Russell that he cannot agree to his certainly that a hippopotamus is not in the room because philosophy does not deal with postulates.

      One would think that given the rich opportunity of having Wittgenstein as his subject, Jarman might also have explored the entire family’s vacillations about their own Jewish background. Although raised Roman Catholic, Ludwig and his siblings were 3/4 Jewish, and under the Nazis were therefore, particularly after the Austrian annexation, defined as Jews under the 1935 Nuremberg racial laws. While in Ireland, he was now also declared a German citizen under the enlarged notion of the German borders. Paul left for the US, leaving behind his common law wife Hilde Schania with whom he had had two children, and, accordingly, was served a summons for Rassenschande (racial defilement).

       Ludwig had even gone to the same school as Hitler, one year between them overlapping, although there is no evidence that the two, who probably would have met, were ever friends or even close acquaintances. Hitler, however, did grant the Wittgensteins “Mischling” status, only 12 of 2,100 applications granted, perhaps on the basis that their paternal grandfather had been a bastard son of a German prince. And soon after Gretl, an American citizen by marriage, began negotiating with the Nazi’s over the 1700 kg of gold held in Switzerland through a Wittgenstein family trust, using it and the family’s large foreign currency reserves as a bargaining tool. Paul, arguing against the negotiations, permanently split with his family, while Ludwig asked Keynes to help him gain Irish citizenship; he was eventually declared a British citizen.

      None of this we brought up in a film that centers itself on the numerous contradictions that the philosopher faced throughout his life.

       Nor does Jarman, most surprisingly, deeply explore Ludwig’s homosexuality. One figure, a young philosophy student named Johnny (Kevin Collins), who whom Wittgenstein is said to have had sex with only three times, becomes a stand-in for the very serious relationships that the philosopher had with David Pinsent, a mathematics undergraduate related to David Hume, with whom Ludwig as very close to in 1912, nor of his relationship with Francis Skinner in the 1930s, and his 1940s sexual relationship with Ben Richards. No sign of the young Norwegian man, who helped his to build his isolated shack in Norway in 1936-37, whom he wrote about in letters, no any mention of the couple of German officers mentioned in his private diary which Marjorie Perloff suggests might have offered him some respite from the ordinary “beasts” with whom he served in the German army. Jarman seems uninterested in investigating the close friendship Ludwig developed with the working-class teenager, Keith Kirk, when the philosopher was working at Guy’s Hospital early the 1940s.

      In the film, although Wittgenstein argues that as a philosopher he is not at all embarrassed or disturbed by having sex with men, the closeted Christian in him still feels shame. Jarman has Russell accuse Wittgenstein as “infecting too many young men”; but that phrase, although so commentators see it as a reference to AIDS, is actually a justified statement given Ludwig’s attempt to get the working-class Johnny—whose miner father has saved and scrimped to get him a proper education—to quit the university and become a mechanic in an attempt to play out his own fantasies through the boy.

      How much richer might have Jarman’s film, when he himself was so very close to death by AIDS and in the very same year lost his eyesight, to have truly explored that major series of contradictions in Wittgenstein’s life, which few people have wanted even to talk about. How did the man of God, even if he had long ago abandoned religious teachings, still deal with the complex problems of homosexuality in a world of so much anger and hate—his own included. What might have been his feelings about his elder brother Rudi? What did he think of Keynes hypocritical sexual behavior? How did a man who refused to be seen as special and challenged himself to serve like other men his age in a military which he surely felt horrific, face what Germans were doing to people of the same religious background as his own family; did he find his sister’s actions as unforgiveable as Paul did?

      Here we observe Wittgenstein the troubled genius, a man willing to even give up his own ideas when he perceived them to be wrong-headed, a man willing to live simply even though he had been awarded a major chair at Cambridge. But if there was anyone who challenged his intellect with the physical almost every day of his life, Ludwig Wittgenstein fits the bill. Isn’t that what Jarman himself had been doing for most of his life as well? Why didn’t the genius director Jarman show us the gay other of the man so aloof that even the greats were terrified of his presence, who was banned from the famous Vienna Circle for letting no one else speak? It appears, I am sad to say, that the director simply did not have the energy to fully engage himself with his subject.

      As the Letterboxd commentator Ashley summarizes the film: “The path of Wittgenstein's philosophy hangs together; the path of his life does not.”

 

Los Angeles, November 28, 2023

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (November 2023).

Gus Van Sant | Milk / 2008

out of sync

Dustin Lance Black (screenplay), Gus Van Sant (director) Milk / 2008

 

I missed the original showing of this 2008 biopic about San Francisco supervisor, Harvey Milk (Sean Penn), shot to death by his highly disturbed fellow supervisor, Dan White (Josh Brolin), along with then San Francisco mayor, George Moscone (Victor Garber); my companion Howard saw it at the time, and encouraged me to see it, but for some reason I cannot now recall, I never visited the theater.

      Although I might have wished that Harvey Milk might have been portrayed by a truly gay actor, Penn’s performance is excellent, as is the (perhaps) closeted Brolin figure and many of the others, not truly gay, but who nonetheless play gay figures credibly, including James Franco as Milk’s early lover, Scott Smith, the man who brought him out of the closet and into the crucible of San Francisco’s Castro district.

      Using a kind of fake-documentary style, Gus Van Sant’s film early on establishes the context of where Milk, previously an insurance man in New York City, suddenly ended up; the film begins with his death, and gradually moves backwards with a sort of awkward last tape session, in which Milk tries to restate his activities from the early 1970s to his death in 1978. Although it works to tie the various fragments of his life together, the movie also ties up the narrative in a somewhat false logical process, where I might guess that his true transformation from a kind of late hippie lover, to small-time businessman, and ultimately, his self-declared position as “mayor of the Castro,” took far more twists and turns that this movie shows us.

      In Van Sant’s telling, it almost appears that Milk was destined to his political aspirations and ultimate achievements from the beginning. But the few scenes we have early on, as Milk picks up a cute boy in the subway to help him celebrate his 40th birthday, do not even suggest that this transformation might have been imaginable, despite his ability to even convince the young pick-up, who claims he does not have sex with men over forty, to not only join him for the night, but to move across the nation with him as his companion.

     In fact, the whole movie, despite its dedication to the actual events, seemed to be somehow out of sync with my own personal memories and experiences. Who would have thought that in the early 1970s San Francisco was still a very difficult place in which to be gay, with regular police raids on Castro bars, regular arrestment of gay denizens, and even street murders of gays simply walking their lovers home?

      I tried desperately to remind myself of those horrible events. But my year in 1969 in New York, where every night I visited gay bars—many of them far tawdrier and more controversial than the Castro bars mentioned—simply did not accord. I never once, in almost a year in New York, encountered an intruding policeman, and never for one instant did I feel threatened. Perhaps I should have been. Certainly, Milk, at the same period of time, was almost paranoid, warning his young friend that he should not have agreed to go with the elder man.

      Only a few days after I left New York, on June 28th, 1969, the Stonewall riots took place, almost permanently, so I imagined, changing the entire landscape for gays throughout the country. I had often stopped by the Stonewall, on my way to a much wilder place—with a late night back room for open group sex. But I have never felt any possible danger. Clearly, I was wrong; maybe I was just lucky.

      Yet in Madison, Wisconsin the year after, when I met my long-time companion and now husband, Howard, at that campus’ first gay liberation meeting, I still felt no danger. Politics, yes, could land you in jail, and I experienced the violent campus riots in late 1969 and 1970. But not for sex! Howard and I were a few of the first University of Wisconsin students to openly protest the seminal gay film, The Boys in the Band, for its stereotypical characters. We’d seen—and even appreciated the film (I had even been an usher for its off-Broadway productions in New York)—but both of us and others resented its presentation of gay “types.”

      When we moved to Washington, D.C., we were quickly accepted as a couple at the University of Maryland. And soon after, when Howard became a curator at the Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, we were invited, as a couple, as guests of Walter and Joan Mondale at the Vice President’s Mansion (I later became a good friend of both, and was invited to their home while he was running for President); and, during the same period that Milk recounts, I was invited to President Carter’s White House for a celebration of American poets, and was able to take Howard with me to the event. When we left Washington, soon after Milk’s death, The Washington Post announced Howard’s move to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, along with his companion, my (giving my name) departure. In short, it now seems, upon seeing this movie, that San Francisco was not as open-minded, in some respects, as Washington, D.C.—one of the most slow-to-change cities in the nation.

 

    I am not doubting, given the facts, that Milk made radical governmental changes in San Francisco and across the nation, particularly with regard to Anita Bryant’s terrifying attempts (much like some supporters of Trump) to take away gay rights, which Milk quite brilliantly stood up for. And I am sure that in San Francisco, the gay wealthy were not quick to embrace his open populism and his true challenges to the local governmental machines. I’m just saying that the facts rather startled me. I had no idea, at the time, that we gays were still being treated like deviants and second-class citizens in the most openly gay community in the nation. Let me just admit, that this movie was terribly revealing to me, and brought a lot of tears to my eyes. Milk’s challenges to the young street boy, Cleve Jones, were even a bit shocking.

     I too was taunted as a gay boy in my high school days in 1960, but that it had continued to happen in Phoenix (Jones’ hometown) in the mid-1970s tortured me. Maybe Howard and I, embedded in the liberal art and literary world, had just been isolated from what so many others suffered, even in totally liberal societies such as San Francisco. Today, I can only explain it that we were in the bubble that is now most of California.

     But Milk helped make that bubble, even if he had to offer up his own life to make it possible. And what you realize in watching Van Sant’s fine film is that it could revert to another reality in a flip of the hand. Well, maybe not that quickly, but in a blink and a nod. The rights the LBGT community has achieved are not there forever, and might be revoked, as they were in Weimar Germany, without our even imagining that possibility. Rights must be fought for, as Milk every day realized, and which helped to make him the hero that nearly everybody in the Castro perceived him to be. Around us there is always the bigotry and hate, despite even the protections of money, prestige, position, which I guess we had—although we never perceived it that way. Milk was a populist street-fighter and knew that such a position might surely cost him his life.

      The way Penn beautifully portrays him, Milk always had a sense of hope and a delightfully sly smile that charmed the best of his friends and even the worst of his enemies. And perhaps it was that charming smile that finally got to the heart of the angry man hating himself for who he was: Dan White, who after release from prison—shockingly only seven years for manslaughter instead of murder— committed suicide. He was no longer welcome in any major California community, had lost his marriage, and, clearly, his entire identity, even if he had been saved from what was surely a hate crime. Later, it came out that he had originally intended on killing two others, supervisor Ruth Carol Silver and future San Francisco mayor, Willie Brown.

      The events are still so shocking and change gay history so extensively that it is hard to imagine that such a world as Harvey Milk had so suffer still existed, and may, at any moment return to today.

 

Los Angeles, February 20, 2017

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (February 2017).

Steven Mckenna | Lover Boy / 2018

sex without a kiss

by Douglas Messerli

 

Shane Stokes and Steven Mckenna (screenplay and story), Steven Mckenna (director) Lover Boy / 2018 [16 minutes]

 

This short Irish film from 2018 deals with issues that frankly I have never previously given much thought to. The young central figure, Mark (Jamie Lloyd Belton) is clearly out to his friends and roommates Leah (Amy Gallagher) and Barry (Ruadhán Mew), but has problems regarding his desired sexual encounters due to problems with intimacy, most particularly with kissing and close hugging.

     Like many a male prostitute, he appears ready for someone to sexually touch his cock and, perhaps, even fuck him or allow him to fuck them; but he isn’t immediately ready for the most important part of gay sexuality, the very personal expressions of love that go with facial and non-sexual body embracement. It’s difficult to define the root of the problem, if it can even be described as such; it may have to do the behavior of his father and mother, with their denial of outward expressions of sexual love; or it may simply be a manifestation of his inability to fully give himself up to a total stranger, to abandon the control of body to his sexual desires. 

    For male prostitutes, it often appears to represent a commitment to homosexuality that they cannot admit to themselves. They are paid for sex, but the intimacies of kissing, hugging, and long embracement suggests a full enjoyment and acceptance of the homosexual act to which they are not willing to admit. Sex is represented as work, not sensual enjoyment.

     But clearly it is not something that occurs only in males, but in women as well, as Mark’s friend Leah attests, hating people who invade her “territory” even in talking to her—an experience which I also find uncomfortable—or individuals who come up behind her while she’d dancing and grind themselves into her. What she likes is when two individuals catch eyes across the room, as in a romantic fable, moving closer to one another to discover themselves of one mind, of one desire, and possible lovemaking.

      We realize that the handsome young Mark suffers this problem when he meets up with a good-looking gay man, Allen (David Greene), whom he’s evidently hooked up with through Grindr or some such service. He won’t even allow the preliminaries such as getting a drink with the boy, but demands to be taken directly to the guy’s apartment for sex. But even then, he stops in an alley nearby, ready apparently to share in the sexual act. But when Allen goes to kiss him, he pulls away, instead moving Allen’s hand directly to his cock. The stranger seems kind and willing, as he explains, that if Mark wants, he’s ready to take things slower, but Mark is clearly available only for the direct lust of lips on cock or a cock entering an ass. Finally, in frustration Allen moves off, realizing that his meet-up is too limited and frightened in his ability to engage in the full sex experience.

      Mark returns home, where Leah has been painting up her own and Barry’s faces for either Halloween or some such costumed holiday. She pulls Mark away to his bedroom to work her art upon him, at the same time trying to find out what happened on his meet-up. All Mark can say is that it was “strange,” without seemingly being able to perceive any strangeness was most on his part.

      Leah does up only half of Mark’s face, allowing everyone to see him as the beautifully handsome boy that he naturally it is.

      At the bar, he dances with his friends, but in the bathroom encounters a quite handsome young man who attempts to attract him by watching him in the mirror. Mark immediately pulls away and leaves.

 

     But then, just as suddenly, he spots a dark young man, Ashley (Abe Smyth) also half-made-up just as he is. As their eyes meet, our “hero” suddenly imagines them bare chested in a deep kissing session while he apparently paints the other man’s body with a red dye.

       The two continue staring at each other as, finally, Mark makes the move, the two finally standing face to face. Seeming to break the taboo Mark leans forward and kisses him on the lips. Ashley pulls back, seemingly taken aback by the beautiful gesture. But if you think his next movement forward with his entire face is a return of the kiss, you are sadly mistaken as—after a sudden black-out and a cut in the film—we encounter Mark and Leah walking outside the next morning. Mark’s lip has a deep red cut and his nose shows another red mark where he apparently bled. He’s been either face-butted and slugged out for his gentle maneuver.

       Leah, evidently a witness to the scene, argues that she would have killed anyone who did that to her; but Mark demurs, knowing just how Ashely, obviously suffering from the fear of deep intimacy even more than he is, feels. What this may do to his ability to commit to the normal patterns of love-making in the future is not established. But surely it will be a long time before he is again ready to break through the taboos of intimacy which he and others suffer, meaning perhaps that he will continue to be an outsider in the normal patterns of gay sex.

 

Los Angeles, November 27, 2023

Reprinted from My Gay Cinema blog (November 2023).