savage christ
by Douglas Messerli
Anthony Hickling and Amaury Grisel (screenplay),
Anthony Hickling (director) Little Gay Boy, chrisT is Dead / 2012 [30
minutes]
This is now the third time I have watched Little Gay Boy,
chrisT is Dead, not to mention a couple of its scenes which have been posted on porn
sites. The first two times I saw it, I perhaps interpreted it as most viewers
had, as a slightly homophobic work that portrayed a young boy treated so abusively
by the society around him that he himself has become a BDSM performer, ending
up the film in basement sex in gay bar in a sling with a belt around his neck
while being brutally
fucked.
After
all, the poor cutie Jean Christophe (Gaëtan Vettier) has hardly begun his day when on
his way to his job on the metro a man sitting nearby suddenly describes him as
a faggot and a “fucking puff,” gets up and verbally abuses him before slapping
his face. It appears that incident might even have ended in the boy getting an
erection.
At work
as a cleaning boy in a moderne furniture shop filled with outrageous crap, he
encounters a boss who is at first somewhat friendly, before a few minutes
later, as Jean Christophe is cleaning the toilet, enters, dunks his end into
the toilet bowl and pisses on him while screaming out that the boy is a queer who probably likes it.
Jean Christophe has dreams of possibly
becoming a fashion model. But the first photographer he visits (François Brunet),
while at first seeming to be interested in having the boy model different
outfits, quickly asks him to keep his shirt off, then take off his jeans, pull
down his underpants a bit lower, and finally to pose naked.
He forlornly returns home only to be
confronted by his grossly overweight English mother (Amanda Dawson) who works
as a prostitute, demanding he massage her feet, while managing to display her
vagina and trying to encourage him to explore it with his fingers. When he
refuses and storms out, she too disgustedly names her own son as a poof.
As he exits his building he
accidently crashes into a transvestite, who outraged that he has made her drop
her newspaper in the collision, demands he pick it up. Soon after, whether in
reality or simply in his head, we see her whipping the boy as she plays the
role as dominatrix.
The
second “fashion” photographer he visits (Alvaro Lombard) is far worse than the
first, who by the time we see them together has not only demanded that the boy
be completely naked but is instructing him in how to spread his legs and reveal
his bare butt. Insisting that he put on a pair of skimpy pink shorts, he demands
he get down on all fours and reveal his ass to the camera.
Between
each of these indignities, performance actors and dancers play out the internal
hurts with, in one case, a dancer (Biño Sauitzvy), covered in white chalk growing more
and more bloody as events accrue.
Several others are tied up
and bound BDSM style as they swing in space. While the second photographer
touches and arranges his ass one actor plays out a fist fucking scene. Others
stick needles into their chests as the blood slowly drips down their bodies.
By the
time day is almost over, Jean Christophe returns home despondently, ending up
in the bathtub with his mamma who simply holds him, as tear runs down his
cheek.
At
night, he visits the gay bar I already mentioned, downs a half-pint of beer and
heads toward the basement sex den. Is it any wonder in a world of such hatred
that boy should have come to associate pain with love?
As if to
prove their point, director Anthony Hickling and his co-writer Amaury Grisel eventually
portray their hero as a kind of savage Christ. Not the Christ the Holy Bible,
but an alternative Christ of outsiderness, of gore and blood.
But that
is perhaps to take all of this far too seriously. And I now realize that was
why I kept turning away from this nonetheless fascinating film. It was simply
too painful to watch, let alone to speak of it objectively.
I have
finally come to see this work, however, as a kind of comedy. The clue came in observing
the cover of the original DVD. In the image the words make clear that the title
also serves as a kind of anagram, spelling out that the LGBT, like Christ, is
dead.
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And suddenly, I realized that this is more
of a comedy than a tragedy. No young gay boy could possibly suffer, even if he
sought it out, so much abuse in a single day. This film, rather, stands as an
almost comic fantasy of the abuses still facing queer individuals despite all
the supposed gains made by the Rainbow community. And it serves as a sort of
underground comic vision that is no more or less fantastical than the LGBTQ
approved scenarios such as the Doritos ad of only year earlier (2011) that
fantasized that even a straight neighbor might be interested in the cute gay
boys next door or, later works such Love, Simon (2018) in which everyone in
his high school is desperate to help Simon find his gay love. Even more recently,
the fantasies have multiplied, such as the more recent Heartstopper (2022-2014, a fourth season
recently announced) where the openly gay boy Charlie not only wins over the
bullies, finds love with the head of the ruby team, but befriends two young lesbians,
one white and black, while his nerdy Asian friend falls in love with a black
transexual girl, and his overweight friend, his face always buried in a book,
happily discovers he’s Ace or asexual. Everyone here lives in world that can’t
possibly exist but which is firmly approved, the film having checked off all
the proper boxes of sexual representation, by the LGBTQ community. So too is
the fantasy of Red, White, & Royal Blue (2023) in which the son of
the female President of the USA falls madly in love with the future King of
England pure hogwash, yet gushed over by the LGBTQ community in general.
Hickling
simply takes an alternate view, creating a fantasy of cruelty, an exaggeration
of the issues which the LGBTQ community seems to have forgotten in it is demands
for disparate representation. Both versions, the positive and negative, are
mirror fantasies of sorts, although I believe Hickling takes himself less
seriously, and, in fact, may be closer to the truth. What happened to sex in
the Rainbow world? Hickling grabs us by the balls or the cunts and demands we
feel something again about our sexual organs.
Of
course, there is a middle ground. One can take joy and pleasure in the Rainbow
fantasies of the now hundreds of works such as Heartstopper and still work as an
activist for real change in the actual homophobic world, one that over the next
four years, with Donald Trump once more as president, will surely grow even more
unfriendly to our sexual differences. Hickling, in 2012, could perhaps not even
imagine just how right he was in his fantasy of a world that had retreated into
a hate of queers. In his film, even the transsexuals hate “them.” Only time
will tell whether the original goals of the LGBTQ community have been lost or
rediscovered, whether it is moribund anagram or still shows signs of meaningful
life. Will all those now happy married queer couples, living basically
heterosexual lives, come to its rescue? That is a question I have had to ask
even of myself.
Los Angeles, December 11, 2024
Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2024).
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