Bob Mizer | Monte Hanson / 1967 || Monte Hanson Outdoors / 1967 || Monte on the Rooftop / 1967 || Monte on a Cycle / 1967 || Monte in the Pool / 1967

full monte

by Douglas Messerli

 

Bob Mizer Monte Hanson / 1967 || Monte Hanson Outdoors / 1967 || Monte on the Rooftop / 1967  || Monte on a Cycle / 1967 || Monte in the Pool / 1967

 

Suddenly, after a number of performances with Bob Mizer throughout the early 1960s, including his highly homoerotic exercises of Military School Initiation (1963) and his erotic wrestling duo with Tony Gallo (1964)—as well as Mizer’s almost pornographic sex wrestling rapes of Tijuana Bandit of the same year—all performed with the necessary posing penis pouches (almost invisible I might argue, given the fact that even Facebook put me into their monthly prison because of the presumed nudity their algorithmic preceptors couldn’t detect as giving their performers' cover), in March 22, 1967 Monte Hanson went naked, showing off his cock in a determined way to arouse the gay male public that could no longer be described as an expression of aesthetic male athleticism. A couple of years later Mizer would ponder the question of “Why the Wooden Indian Wouldn’t,” but he had already made it clear in 1967 that he would no longer obey the codes of Hollywood productions.

      In that lovely film Monte Hanson the model quickly stripped down and took it all off, revealing a good-looking cock which he proudly showed off for 13 long minutes, an innocent porno film to which Mizer and so many others had been pointing to since they began their male infatuations. Something in this moment changes so radically that I think even the gay community couldn’t quite fully embrace it. Monte Hanson was there for you to love, suck off, even stroke his quite cute butt. He was totally available in a way that no other movies before permitted their male models to be. Monte Hanson had gone full “monte” and was ready for your love and attention. Mizer had broken the code without even bothering to register its existence.

     In Monte Hanson Outdoors of that same year, Mizer moved into depiction of what he was now describing as the healthy life of nudism. But anyone who loved boys knew that nudism in the world of 1967 was not at all perceived as being truly healthy and that Monte’s butt and cock where on the screen merely to please and tease them. The handsome and more than willing Monte begins, as usual now, with stripping off his pants, pouring a little lotion over his body to entice the eye into what you might imagine your hands applying to his muscular motion, and then, breaking down what appears to be a ball of twine intended to tie him up in your arms, into a jump rope which, of course, displays the movement of his balls and cock. Oh Bobby, you’ve gone back clear to the roots of gay cinema in Eadweard Muybridge and the painters before that such as Thomas Eakins.

     Monte lifts weights to help make his cock dangle in delight. The workout movie has become something else, to which any gay man lifts his eyes in recognition of the weight lifted from his shoulders. Mizer winked, and winked and finally put it all up front. “You like this, don’t you, and so do I.” Monte Hanson was there not for any other reason than pure sexual pleasure. The ropes of his possible entanglement become a workout device to excite us further into his sensual pleasures, a development of the muscles and everything else we want to tie him up into for our sexual satisfaction. God, does Mizer know his sexual tropes! He’s been studying them for so many long years.

    And finally in Monte on the Rooftop, this time in color, he gets it all wrong, posing his model on a rooftop of rocks, where he pretends to be a mustachioed muscle builder, showing off the positions of those who spend their entire lives attempting to establish their muscular emptiness as the later Governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger would establish as the substance and sustenance his entire career. Forget it; we already know muscle builders have a lot of muscles (although poor Olson can’t compare with them in that regard), but generally tiny penises, which he has plenty to shout about. But even Monte’s cock seems to have gotten smaller in color. Now he is kind of Saga hero, pulling out a ridiculously sunny sword which doesn’t at reflect positively on him since Mizer has fucked up, mistaken his beefy black-and-white heroes for color-film heroes, something he simply couldn’t get out of his head since his really trashy color films of the late the 1950s such as Aztec Sacrifice and Slave Market. These, the precursors of all of John Waters films, for which I bow down to Mizer in thanks, miss the point of his black-and-white voyeuristic looks at the beautiful post-World-War II boys which shuffled off into this Hollywood palace.

   I wanted to go there and fuck up all the beautiful 1950s and early 1960s boys he put out to touch; but the later the 1960s and 1970s colorized gay boys he presented to me were so far less interesting that I couldn’t have imagined even putting my hand into their inviting unzipped denims. What had happened to sex?

     As Olson makes quite apparent, it’s hard to sit on rocks. The newly identified Monty had to throw away his identity again to become Monte on a Cycle (1967), no gimmicks here. Monte is on his motorcycle, now fully in mustache and long hair, older than in any other movies he made the same year. He puts himself in position as only Kenneth Anger might have imagined him, the slide of the cock to the leather of the bike. He’s ready to ride with anyone who might want enjoy this now slightly older hippie off into the impossible space we recognize is the end of his career. Poor Monte, now merely a representative of his former sexual self-assured cock, an empty shell of what we all know we will quickly turn into when we take ourselves too seriously as he surely now has.

    In the final quick movie, Monte Hansen in the Pool (also 1967) we get another glimpse of his rose tattoo upon his butt, as he quickly struggles back to surface to dangle his penis in our nose, while in the background far cuter new boys seem to present complete hardons. Alas poor Monte is a stringy-haired mess from another generation.

 

Los Angeles, January 2, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema (January 2025).

Lily Dommart | Before You Go / 2019

the open hatred of gay desire

 

by Douglas Messerli

 

Burbs L Burberry (screenplay), Lily Dommart (director) Before You Go / 2019 [13 minutes]

This film, which takes place evidently on the Isle of Man in 1972, begins with Eddie (Joshua Moore) bicycling up to his friend Jack (Liam Rice) to express a notion that repeats throughout the film: “Ready whenever you are.”

     What apparently Jack is not ready for is the imagined kiss that Eddie places on his lips. Jack is heading off to become a fisherman, in all inevitability leaving his friend behind forever as he heads off to the difficult work of sudden indentured adulthood. He doesn’t at all want to be a fisherman like his father, which requires him to move to an entirely other world, on a new island.

    As Eddie asks his friend, “What do you want?” they come together in a deep kiss; but obviously given the repeat of the same scene, that is not what actually happens in the reality of their world. Jack can only reply, “I don’t know.”

     But Eddie tries to push their love just a little closer to real-life experience, noting that he will miss his friend, and “You don’t realize about how much you love something until you are about to leave,” that something clearly including one another.

     Eddie insists that he is not going to forgot his friend, but both know that Jack’s dramatization of the event is serious. Eddie insists, however, that he now needs to go to Paul’s (Jeremy Theobald) to return some books.

     Paul, evidently a former teacher of the two, has loaned out a copy of Orwell, which the intelligent Eddie is not entirely pleased with, not being a fan of dystopias, he claims, while Paul thinks it a semi-realistic viewpoint from the view of 1948. We are obviously talking about his 1949 fiction, 1984, which concerns Orwell’s fears of totalitarianism, mass surveillance, and repressive regimentation of individuals within their societies, a book we might well imagine as significant in 2019, if not the 1972 date of this movie.

     Of course, Eddie’s right in his complaints that even the conception of a state having that much control over what we like, how we think, and what we feel, is unappealing. But what he doesn’t comprehend is that he, himself, is a product of just such an estate. But he is convinced that the government isn’t out to get him.

     Eddie asks Paul what he most remembers about university, Cambridge, to which their former teacher replies: “The people I guess. They were some of the best people I’ve ever met.” He made friends there, although of course no longer sees them. Cambridge was the home of homosexual relationships during the period in which Paul must have attended, the world of spies recruited from the intense relationship between friends. Nothing of this is spoken about in Dommart’s movie, but it’s there nonetheless, just as is the invisible relationship between the would-be lovers Eddie and his friend Jack who is about to be thrown from the intellectual towers into a work-a-day world. 

     This film, as much as it is about homosexual relationships, is also about the British class system, which in 1972 these young men still had to face, a world not that much different, in fact, from E. M. Forester’s Maurice or Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. The Manx boy Eddie is facing just the forces that separated school chums from both Oxford and Cambridge in those now cinematically rendered tales.

      Paul admits that there was someone at school which changed his life, and whom he has loved very much, but hasn’t spoken to for years.

      “Why?” asks Eddie.

      “Because that was the way of things back then,” Paul expresses his cowardice. He never jeopardized their friendship.

      “You could have had that time together,” Eddie insists, while Paul, still the coward, expresses his excuse, “He wouldn’t have wanted me.” Paul suggests that Eddie might benefit from reading some Isherwood, and hands him a book to bring back at Christmas.

 

      But if you might think Eddie, the intelligent student would support his obviously gay mentor, you would be mistaken, and, in fact, we have been wrong in our perceptions all along. It is Jack who argues that Paul has certainly never told anyone else about his sexual desires, and that besides what might they do? Eddie, on the other hand, is invested in reporting him, although he doesn’t want to become involved in anything like this; “I don’t want it on my record.” Moreover, it’s irresponsible for his being around kids, although Jack argues it doesn’t truly bother anyone. To Jack’s insistence, that “He’s never hurt anyone,” Eddie comes back with the terrified and angry: “Jesus, Jack, you always come out with such stupid stuff!”

     The coward is Eddie, not Jack who is about to be sent into the heterosexual workhouse with a woman surely identified as his mate for the rest of his life. It is Eddie, the supposed intelligent and perceptive one, desperately in love with Jack, who cannot break away from the deep, dark fears of the dear, stupid heteronormative Britain.

      Why are you doing this, Jack wonders. “Mr. Kelly practically got you into university, and you’re ready to disown because he’s in love with another man.” Jack points out that he respected him an hour ago, but now he is ready to hate him, although he is still the exact same person, and Eddie is the exact same person, and—he adds, shifting everything in this taught little melodrama—“I am still the exact same person.”

      “What have you got to do with this?” asks Eddie, knowing full damn well Jack has everything to do with Eddie’s homophobic terror. Jack almost moves into a kiss, until Eddie again demands to know about his involvement. Jack stands, picks up his backpack, and answers the only way someone can to the Eddies of the world: “Nothing. I’ve got nothing to do with it.”

    “You just get to leave,” Jack shouts back to Eddie’s pleas to stay, “but the rest of us don’t. We’ve got to sit behind and figure out what to do with the rest of our lives.” Everything is expressed in the image of Jack having to lift his leg over the wire fence of where previously they have sat in appreciation of the homeland’s beauty, he escaping to someplace where he doesn’t truly want to be.

      Of course, Eddie shows up to say goodbye, with a summary hug before he pulls away into a new world that he is clearly not prepared for. To himself, Jack mumbles, “See you at Christmas….Eddie.” But we know that they won’t find a way to truly get together again. In 1992, The Isle of Man decriminalized homosexuality, 20 years after these 18 or 19-year-old boys had permanently broken the love of their childhood. Eddie, perhaps, found his way into a gay relationship, while Jack was stranded, wishing for a past that could never have existed, just as for their teacher Paul Kelly. Class had everything to do with British homophobia, as Forester, in particular, recognized.

     Dommart’s short film is a far more profound study of the British problems with homosexuality than many a feature film and documentary.  

 

Los Angeles, December 31, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2024).

Ryan Turner | Sensual Masturbation / 2014

on the other hand

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jesse Pepe, Gray Musiq, and Sean Sekino (song), Ryan Turner (director) Sensual Masturbation / 2014 [5 minutes]

 

J Pee (Jesse Pepe) and his gang of performers that include Gary Musiq, Daniel Eldridge, Tetris Kelly and Fran, Klaridi, along which his fellow composer Sean Sekino, produced some of the most delightful gay fables of musicland in the second decade of the 21st-century, including I’m Not Gay, Jellyfish, and Sensual Masturbation, among others.

    This 5-minute music video has a great deal on hand, as both Jesse and Gary make dates with their hands for a predictably sexy night, Jesse evidently preferring a bit of S&M action while Gray just determines to lounge in the bathtub and bubbles of his best buddy. The major difficulty that these two roommates seem to encounter is who gets the bathroom for the night. Jesse gives it up to Gary, and both have great fun with their respective visitors, the hand that makes for the sexual partner anyone can imagine.

    As the lyrics put it:

 

“So I'm going to do this right

you know at the end of the day I'll

always come back cuz nobody does me

better than me yeah I'm going do it nice and slow

….right relationships like this take time

to build and I'm here to make sure every

need is fulfilled I've got with cream….”

    Too bad parts of their bathroom encounters, and, particularly, the full dance number with their backup singers had to be cut, but as suggest, director Ryan Turner had to cut the action down to focus on Jesse and Gray’s sensuous visitors, who are evidently on hand most nights for their sexual delights.

    Once more, J. Pee takes up topics which few singers before him have wanted to approach, giving them the satirical and sexual edge that they deserve.

 

Los Angeles, December 30, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2024).

Inabel Selah | The Tailor / 2021

sewing up a new identity

by Douglas Messerli

 

Inabal Selah The Tailor / 2021[14 minutes]

 

We might guess where Israeli director/writer Inabal’s Selah’s short film of 2021 is going from the very first moment. Oren (Koren Solomon) a hirsute tailor is making a dress for one of his gay, transgender clients, all pink and chiffon, whom as a “top” he fucks.

    The would-be clothes designer has also applied to design school, and in the very first few frames of the film is sent a letter that rejects his application, to his devastation and his mother’s (Yael Daniel) sad regret. Mother and son in this movie obviously have a loving a relationship, but how far that rapport will take the now angry and confused dress designer is not quite established.

     Oren shaves his beard, and is interested in going even further, but the intrusion of his mother stops him from applying the makeup that he has discovered in their shared bathroom. Instead, Oren tears down all of his old designs from the wall, and begins to create a new wardrobe for his dummy model that consists of a gown all in white, almost like a marriage gown.

     That costume, we quickly perceives is for himself as, in the middle of the night, he finally is able to the makeup to his face, place the hidden wig upon his head, and dress himself in the gown which he has been sewing up for so very many nights.

     To her mother’s blinky-eyed middle-of-the-night awakening, he presents his newly discovered self, the transgender individual he has been hiding from himself and others for all of his life.

     We don’t even get a glimpse of his new transformation, but we surely guess it might be something splendid. If nothing else, it is the identity that he has been secretly sewing up for years of his closeted tailoring activities. A rejection of his dreams has freed him to become an individual he has for so-long struggled to become.

     There is nothing particularly earth-shattering here, or even amazingly revelatory. But in this short film we have witnessed another being come into her identity, and move into the new recognition of self. What is mother has to say about this is not really important for her grown son, now daughter. But it might, nonetheless, have been interesting to see her reaction and the reality Oren had consequently entered.

 

Los Angeles, December 29, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2024).

Rebecca Ann Bentley | Stepping Out / 2022

coming to terms with reality

by Douglas Messerli

 

Rebecca Ann Bentley (screenwriter and director), Stepping Out / 2022 [9 minutes]

 

In this rather simplistic Australian film, first shown in international festivals in 2022, despite IMDb’s 2024 dating of its release, writer and director Rebecca Ann Bentley presents a rather simplistic view of coming out.

     Will (Will Hutchings) in this short film has just kissed Max (Darcy Smith), the popular soccer player of the elite all-male school which both boys attend, and Max is terribly disturbed since he truly liked it, and has made Will promise to no longer further discuss it.

 

     But Will, who is clearly quite comfortable with his sexuality, can’t resist making further advances.

     There is a tradition of gay films since 2020—perhaps even before—where smart sisters (Tori, in the series Heartstopper is a perfect example) clearly know what’s going on sexually between their older or younger brothers. In this case Liv (McKinely Markham) takes her brother aside to discuss his new “friend” to which he has just introduced her; “What do you know,” hisses her uptight brother. I know nothing she declares, “but if you don’t fuck that boy immediately, I will.”

     Max, however, despite is regular visits to internet gay sites is still haunted by the notion that everything he feels is wrong and rotten, and it takes a visit from Liv, who notices his appetite for young men, to finally get him to realize that there’s nothing wrong with his sexuality, and that even if his soccer-boy friends reject him, that no one should ever reject such deep love. Besides, she informs, she’s pansexual. O the progress (?) that has been made. Rugby player Nick (Kit O’Connor) from Heartstopper didn’t do anything more that blink before he described himself as bisexual. But Max has the problems that most gay boys share, how do I get from here to there?

     His sister Liv is the conduit, and it only takes a good conversation with his sibling and a plate of friendly cookies from his disappeared mother to set things straight, or perhaps we should say, in a crooked way. On the particularly school-day morning on which Max comes alive, we walks over to his clearly disappointed friend Will and plants a deep kiss on his lips. Even the student (Jeffrey Li) notices, and surely it will soon be all over the school. But who cares? The boys have a great deal of love to enjoy in the viewer’s imagination.

 

Los Angeles, December 29, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema (December 2024)

    

Fiume and Juliam McKinnon | La vedova nera (The Black Widow) / 2023

an italian cyclist ends up in french porno hell

by Douglas Messerli

 

Fiume and Juliam McKinnon (screenwriters and directors) La vedova nera (The Black Widow) / 2023 [20 minutes]

 

A nasty little French film in which a sweet Italian bicyclist (Siro Pedrozzi) speeds presumably back to his home, only to fall into a seeming concussion in the trip, and who is then compelled by an apparently nice gatekeeper to enter an S&M porn theater, where a number of sexual beings hang out in the corners of the theater and the aisles, although the most dominant figure sits down next to the boy in an attempt to seduce him.

      The movie seems to be about a young handsome gay boy seduced by a man who wears a ring of amber in which is embedded the “black widow spider” of the movie’s title; but the boy is finally tempted by his seducer’s retreat into the bathroom, he eventually following only the discover a man has brutally killed another sexual partner with blood oozing from his body, matching the film’s quite evocative red décor. He rushes from the room seeking an escape out of the theater, but finds all doors locked.

      Upstairs he attempts to get into the room where the film is being aired, only to discover that the film itself has become a kind of monster which attacks him. Meanwhile, the terrifying stalker tracks him down, as he again attempts to find an exit in which all door seem to be locked.

     Another of the theater’s gay visitors is discovered to also be a corpse, and our young Italian youth desperately clings the last exit as the monstrous slayer comes closer.

     He escapes into the gentle arms of what I have described as “the gatekeeper,” but we quickly recognize, given that our young hero is now wrapped up in a sling, naked and probably dead, which quickly becomes a crystalized corpse ready for the spider’s palette, that our gatekeeper is also one of the bloody sodomites who destroy all those who enter the hell they have created.    

     What this little horror film is trying to tell us I have no clue. Perhaps it’s warning us of youthful digressions, about the effect of on-line porno. That might be far too easy of an answer to the horror of this story resulting from a simple bicycle spill. If the images are memorable, the plot is clearly queer terror without any possible resolution. And I can’t suggest anyone take the little torturous trek down the aisles of the porno theater, whether in a concussion or a living desire to experience the delicious tortures of messy sex. Don’t go here, I advise, knowing, of course, that many will track down this film simply because of my disdain.

 

Los Angeles, December 27, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2024)