Peter de Rome | Hot Pants / 1971

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James Bidgood | Pink Narcissus / 1963-1970, released 1971

arthouse eye candy

by Douglas Messerli

 

James Bidgood (creator and director) Pink Narcissus (created from 1963 to 1970) / 1971 (release)

 

For all of its audacious gay scenes (filmed from 1963-1970 by James Bidgood, mostly in his tiny New York City apartment on 8 mm film) the director’s totally kitsch settings serve as a stage to actually preach for a life that—unlike the fantasies of Bobby Kendall, the boy prostitute locked up in a world of cheap gewgaws—returns us to nature. In fact, the film begins in the natural world, following the development of a cocoon and butterfly which flitters around the beautiful boy throughout.

      Locked away in his own cocoon this boy beauty mostly fantasizes a wild world far different from the one the director finds preferable. Bobby first enters a grungy public bathroom ready to be sucked off by others who gather there. Immediately after, the director shows us a frying pan of sizzling steaks and other animal cuts, not so subtly suggesting that such sexual behavior is no better than being treated like a piece of meat to be gobbled down and shit out.

     One by one, the devastatingly cute Bobby tries on other imaginary personae, most attached to generic roles that gay men were once attracted to (today, the figures of a cop, a cowboy, a leather dude, a hard-hat worker, and a native American—in short, the iconic figures featured in the musical group The Village People—might be more appropriate). But Bobby instead sees himself as a handsome matador, who later, seated on a motorcycle runs down his intended sexual victim who ultimately rapes him; a Turkish slave boy who lives at the will of the heavy-stomached sultan; an intensely beaded male belly dancer who, when his dance comes to an end, is sentenced to death; and, finally, as a kind of circus freak whose specialty is taking huge dildos up his ass.

       In between this technicolor fantasia of sexual possibilities, Bobby sips on wine and listens to the songs of both humans and birds, allowing the returning butterfly to twitter gaily around his public hair and cock. But mostly he stares at himself endlessly in the room’s many mirrors, often touching and kissing his own image.

     For all the film’s kitsch-like beauty, it is the darkened tendrils of natural plants in the penultimate scene, filmed in a downtown Manhattan loft of a friend, that is the director’s most dramatic. If at first these intertwining vines and roots seem highly sensual as they interweave across Bobby’s body, they eventually create such a densely woven texture that they almost swallow him up whole, eating his flesh almost as a gigantic Venus Trap plant might. In that scene, it appears, that the boy is born again, free now—at least for the day—to end his sexual imaginations.

      His jailer soon after returns, appearing a bit like the stock figure of evil out of 19th century and early 20th century melodramas. But when Bobby looks his way again, we see that his keeper has been transformed into his own face. The boy’s imprisonment apparently is one of his own making, which clearly suggests that he may never escape this frightening world of sexual power and domination.

      The movie’s Bobby was a runaway whom Bidgood took home, fed, and lived with for many years. Even near the end of the director’s life the two, apparently, remained friends, with Bobby admitting that he had never imagined himself as good-looking until viewing his lover’s film.

       Bidgood was a window designer, musician (he also selected the music for his film), and occasional drag performer who, quite obviously worked on his masterpiece in his spare hours. When the film was finally released he insisted the directorial and other credits read “Anonymous,” resulting in a great deal of speculation among the gay world about who actually made this film, many suggesting Andy Warhol or Kenneth Anger.

       In 1998 writer Bruce Benderson decided to track down the real director, finding Bidgood living in his 14th Street apartment, who admitted to the film’s creation as well as erotic pictures he had published in the 1960s. Arranging for a publication of Bidgood’s work through an agent friend, the images became highly influential to several gay photographers, most notably the French duo Pierre et Gilles, who produced a vast trove of similar work using far more sophisticated techniques.

       Despite any statements about Bidgood’s cinema, however, one can only appreciate it by visually encountering the work. There is no actual plot and, other than the few observations I have made above, no completely coherent commentary can be hobbled together. Pink Narcissus along with its photogenic lead (other roles were performed by Don Brooks and playwright and actor Charles Ludlum) is based entirely on what the eye registers.

 

Los Angeles, August 15, 2020

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2020).

Shawn Adeli | High Heels / 2021 [music video]

questioning gender

by Douglas Messerli

 

John Duff (singer and composer), Shawn Adeli (director) High Heels / 2021 [3.35 minutes] [music video]

 

US singer John Duff has long featured in his music the concept of flexible sexuality, having been targeted for being targeted as a young man as being gay and bullied through high school.

     Actually, Duff reports that today that sexual "I'm on a journey...I've been really curious about my sexuality lately. Really confused, but not any sort of crisis. I'm at peace with it...So, I'm not gay. I'm not bi. I'm not straight. I'm not asexual. I don't even know anymore. I'm just living. Boxes are stupid."

    And clearly in a work such as “High Heels,” Duff is quite ready to explore his feminine side:

 

If I flexed my arms

Then I could hold you like a man

 

But do you think a man

Could ever hold you like a mother can?

 

Call me mom

I take the love

I’ll take it on my lips

My tongue

I’ll breathe it

keep it in my lungs

Hey - I cant get enough

I’ll call you dad

You call me mom

We’ll call it love

If I looked the way that I feel

I’d be wearing high heels

Cause you’ve got me feeling like a lady

If I looked the way that I feel

I’d be wearing high heels

Cause you’ve got me feeling elevated

I’m lifted, baby

 

    Throughout this rather campy video, Duff is featured in an intense montage of shifting images, many of them upside down since the song is obviously about gender reversal. He’s seen wearing sequined bodies, a fluffy pink half-sweater and appears in numerous other female items of apparel despite barring his hairy chest, beard, moustache, and buff masculine body. Some scenes might even remind a queer audience of James Bidgood’s Pink Narcissus.

    Director Shawn Adeli perfectly captures the lyrics and feeling of the song written by John Duff, Anil Sebastian, Max Bergå, Scott McFarnon, and featuring the lyric vocalizations of Lillias White.

Duff also was responsible for the creative direction and styling.

Los Angeles, March 9, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (March 2025).

Bonzo Villegas and Carlos Vilaró Nadal | En el mismo Equipo (On the Same Team) / 2014

beyond the mountain

by Douglas Messerli

 

Bonzo Villegas and Carlos Vilaró Nadal (screenwriters and directors) En el mismo Equipo (On the Same Team) / 2014 [22 minutes]

 

Argentinian filmmakers Bonzo Villegas and Carlos Vilaró Nadal’s quiet film of 2014 En El Mismo Equipo (On the Same Team) is ostensibly another of the many fictional films about gay sports players who have difficulties, given the macho hetero-normative values attached to athletic activities throughout the world. Moreover, Emanuel (Pablo Delgado) plays rugby, the most touchy/feeling male-groping sport in the whole world—except perhaps for wrestling. But wrestlers go after each other one on one, while rugby is a truly team sport depending upon the emotional bonding of the entire group. As South African director Chadlee Skrikker’s 2019 short film Hand Off reminded us, rugby is a difficult sport for a homosexual to play given that the entire team has to be comfortable with physical contact with the gay man.

      Yet Emanuel has evidently a fairly easy sexual relationship with another team player, Tano (Emiliano Monteros) with whom he still hasn’t completely come to terms. As the two escape to the woods after a game, he insists he’s not like his friend, that he thought Tano was the only one with whom he could share his feelings, but now realizes that they’re “different”: “I’m not like you.”

     “Who says?” Tano counters, arguing that Emanuel simply has to relax, to accept life as it is, which will make all the difference. The two make love, but we sense a deep frustration, even anger remaining in Emanuel’s thoughts as we see him in his room later slugging his rugby ball as if it were a boxer’s heavy bag.

        A dinner conversation of his family members concerns, among other things, a friend who has gone away to Buenos Aires and come back as a gay man. Although a couple of those at the table argue something to the effect that it’s not so unusual these days, several, including Emmanuel’s father, appear to feel it’s still “unnormal,” and most of the women side with the gay man’s local ex-girlfriend. One quieter sister, Laura (Verónica Paz) observes her brother and seems to sense his troubled state of mind, particularly when he suddenly leaves the table.

       She too appears on the small porch apparently ready to talk with him, but he has been greeted by a another of rugby buddies passing in a car who insists that he join them in the evening’s pre-game night, since the next day they are playing the team from Santiago. He agrees, although the long shower he takes in preparation makes clear even that choice has involved a painful sense of conflict.

     He arrives at the party only to see his sister is there as well, already fairly drunk, and he is surprised by her presence. Meanwhile his friends force him to speak with a girl, Agustina, of whom he has previously commented. He briefly talks to her and her friends, but soon excuses himself “for a moment” to get a drink; he never returns to continue their conversation. Wandering around the lawn, observing others of his teammates involved in heterosexual flirtation and love-making, including Tano, he seems lost, and finally pulls away from the party, standing apart from the others. He is soon joined by his sister.

       She speaks to him simply: “I don’t know if you know this, but there’s a lot more beyond the mountain. The world doesn’t end at Tucuman or Yerba Buena. The house is not the only place you could live in. Or rugby isn’t the only activity you could do. These parties aren’t the only place you could be at. You could live a life completely different if you decide to do it. But yeah….you’re gonna need a lot of balls.” Not a great English language translation of the Spanish original, clearly, but wise observations nonetheless.

      Through several frames Emmanuel has been seen carrying an airline add advertising freedom, which now makes it clear that what has been holding him back is not rugby, or even his inability to accept his homosexuality. He is after all different from his friend Tano, not in his sexual orientation but in his desire to escape from the small town restraints in which he is entrapped. Many of the problems facing young gay people lies not so much in their inability to accept themselves as gay individuals but in the inertia of having to break with and move away from the normative heterosexual pulls of their lives. It is simply easier to fall into the patterns of nearly everyone else in the world in which you’re born and raised. Some gays can’t come out because it takes the energy of determined self-will to escape what everyone around you defines as the preferable way to survive.

       But in the end, Vilaró Nadal and Villegas’s small gem is not a “coming out” movie nor a movie about the difficulty of escaping from the heterosexual demands of playing sports, but a story about a young man coming to terms with adult life, of defining where and how he wants to live that life whatever it might bring.

     Clearly Emanuel (which means “God with us”) does not sleep that night. And the next morning we see him wandering a wooded road before standing on a small stone wall to stare out over the valley at the rising sun. The camera pans down to see the small travel ad slip from his fingers, and intercuts with a few faces from his immediate past life. When the camera pans back up to the wall, Emanuel is no longer there, having gone only God knows where.

 

Los Angeles, June 23, 2021

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (June 2021).

Manu Morales Contreras | Sombra de ojos (Eyeshadow) / 2019

the witness

by Douglas Messerli

 

Manu Morales Contreras (screenwriter and director) Sombra de ojos (Eyeshadow) / 2019 [21 minutes]

 

The Chilean director Morales Contreras’ Eyeshadow begins with a young man, Pablo (Luis Pinto), standing on the edge of a cliff, looking down into the roiling waters below. He is about to leap, but is pulled back at the last instant by Mirna (Claudio Diaz), an older drag queen who evidently lives nearby and takes the boy to her house, serves him tea, and invites him to stay with her.

    Soon after, we see her collecting money from a prostitute and making a call to meet up with someone else for more money, so that we suspect that perhaps she herself is also a prostitute. But over the weeks or days—the film is purposely vague about time—we hear how so many of her drag queen friends have simply died or “disappeared,” presumably during the military junta rule and the cruel dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, likely helped to power by the US in reaction to the Marxist Allende. Several times we see were watering flowers on a wall shine for the dead.

      They used to call one of her best friends Marilyn, Mirna tells Pablo, and when she disappeared Mirna sought some memento like the dolls she has about her house. Unable to find any talisman to represent her missing friend, she found a picture of Marilyn Monroe in a magazine, cut it out and pasted it to her wall.

      As they lie together in bed one night, Pablo admits that he has AIDS, which is the reason, among others, why he tried to kill himself obviously. Mirna reports that she is also a “carrier,” but sees it less as a wall or a cage, but as a place of carnations and syringes. Clearly she has been taking medicine to help her, as evidently Pablo has as well. She declares she knows someone who can get it for him cheaper. And it now becomes evident why she has so desperately needed the money from earlier scene.

      At one point, she helps cheer up the sad boy, who is utterly fascinated as he watches her put on her makeup in preparation for those days she appears in drag—she protects herself by not appearing in drag when they go shopping—by putting make-up of his eyes, lips, and cheeks as well. Soon after they dance to a sad song about three and then six black tears, each colored by mascara.

      Most of all, however, she advises the young man not to become a victim, a brave statement in a world that has victimized its own people. And even though they both have been sickened by the drugs, she demands that she wants to help him continue to live. I’m an old person, she declares, but you’re still young.

     We see Pablo, soon after, vomiting, sickened again by the disease or the drugs that he’s taken to help prevent it.

        In the penultimate scene, Mirna returns home and calls out to her new friend, but finds him no longer there. In the last scene we see her standing at the same cliff from where she has pulled him back from suicide, suggesting that Pablo, in despair, has finally jumped to his death. Mirna stands once more as witness to the deaths of queer individuals in her country.

       This short film is a painful picture of a world that has suffered so very much, particularly the queer community who found no welcome in the Pinochet regime, and suffered as did most of the world with rise of AIDS in the 1990s, when this drama supposedly takes place—although today Chile is considered one of the most progressive of South American countries regarding LGBTQ rights.

 

Los Angeles, March 8, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (March 2025).  

Jean-François Monette | Take-out / 2000

a space in the bed

by Douglas Messerli

 

Nancy Hughes and Jean-François Monette (screenplay, based a story by Derek Brown), Jean-François Monette (director) Take-out / 2000 [37 minutes]

 

Working after school three nights a week and on weekends, Rory (Gianpaolo Venuta) serves as the Chalet Hut chicken delivery boy, even though as the movie’s prologue reveals, he absolutely hates chicken and even as a child stopped eating it.

      As the movie begins, other than his eccentric reaction to chicken, we know very little about the likeable young Rory except that despite his very normal activities of playing soccer, boxing around his high school chum, Enzo (Benjamin Plener) who works on alternate nights as a delivery boy but on most nights as a dishwasher, and making a film of a girls’ soccer team so that Enzo can might easily make contact with the girls. Indeed, Enzo is one of those young high school braggarts who is always talking about the girls he bedded and inquiring about Rory’s newest heartthrob, about whom Rory remains extremely vague, hinting she’s an older woman in college.

      We also know that he hasn’t a very good relationships with his father, with whom he lives, darting out of the kitchen the moment his car pulls up and shouting down to him that the leftovers he’s brought home for his father are in the refrigerator.

       Other than that, in the first few moments of the film, Rory seems simply displaced, not totally happy much in the way that many teens of 18, still stuck in high school because of a late year birthday might be.

       But everything changes, quite unexpectedly, when he delivers up chicken to a man living alone in a large house, Pete (played by gay Canadian actor, playwright, and director Daniel MacIvor). Pete, a well-to-do lawyer is on the phone when he arrives, screaming out obscenities to whomever he’s speaking with on the phone, which may suggest the breakup of a business friend or personal relationship. All Rory notices is that when he hands him the box of chicken and Pete calls him into the house to get his billfold is that the man has tears in his eyes. Despite his gruff manner, he’s obvious been terribly hurt.

     Pete is otherwise personable and appreciative of Rory’s sweetness toward him, commenting that he’s found the other boy (Enzo) rude, and that he’ll try to remember to order take out chicken only on the nights Rory is working.

       Something, we don’t know precisely what, clicks with Rory and the sad elder but handsome man, who might almost be the age of his own father. And at first we guess that his curiosity about the man—who on his second visit invites him in, asks him to play a question to a board game (“What was Tevye’s of Fiddler on the Roof profession?) and even later wanders out back of the house to observe the man dancing alone—may have something to do with a search for a true father figure to replace his absent dad.

       But we quickly realize, just as Rory does, that it’s actually a case of a love of young man for older man, which just as younger men and girls fall for older women and men, often happens. But it hits Rory, who apparently hasn’t even pondered the possibility of his being gay, a bit like an out-of-season Quebec blizzard. He stops by a roadside grocer and flips through the pages of a gay photo magazine, one of the many popular back in the day, only to be dismayed by Enzo pounding at the window, hiding it quickly behind a nearby male exercise magazine, Enzo mocking him for finding anything of interest regarding sports other than soccer.

      When on his next shift, Enzo describes delivering chicken to the “faggot” dressed only in his track jockeys with an erect cock and playing him with 12-dollar tip—all apparently fabricated since we know that Pete doesn’t like him—Rory nearly goes out of his mind with gay lust, imagining his next visit to him, as a true invite into not only the house but into his arms.

      When he does arrive, he finds a woman in the house packing up boxes, the two of them sorting through their possessions. Obviously the break-up Pete has suffered has not been with another man but with a woman, which means that he is probably not gay. When he invites Rory into the house offering him the board game which he might play with his friends, Rory stares back in amazement, mumbling that he and his “friends” don’t play those kinds of games. When Rory tries to offer anything else of interest he might spot in the house, Rory finally becomes so despondent that he refuses, angry and hurt, even though Peter tries to clear up things offering it instead of tip as a “gift,” in recognition that there has been something between them if only frustration and loneliness.

       Rory hurries off, rushing through the traffic, and making a stop off at his school outside of which, in the dark, he furiously masturbates. A statement perhaps to his old school and his new sexual orientation as well as a much-needed relief from his previous sexual fantasies of Pete.

      When he returns to the restaurant, Enzo suggests they get drunk, which they do, sitting outside a doorway talking. Enzo, again trying to probe about his friend’s older girl friend, demands to know at least what color her hair is.

       Drunk and confused, Rory mumbles “he’s a brunette.” Enzo suggests he must be drunk since he just used the wrong pronoun, not he’d mind really if….  If what, Rory demands.  If you were… If I were what, Rory shouts out, seemingly ready to come out to his friend. “If you were a faggot.”

      Rory pulls away, jumping back into is truck. A day or so later he drives up once again to the now empty house and enters, the door unlocked. In the middle of the living room the board game still sits, with a note, “Rory, it’s yours as a gift.”

     The boy wonders upstairs and into the master bedroom. There he spots the four holes in the carpet which signify the precise location of the bed. He lays down in the center of the space, claiming as his gift a space on the bed in which Pete slept each night.     

       It’s clear that for Rory, regarding his sexuality, there is no turning back.

      Actor Venuta is so very personable and charming and the interactions he has with actor MacIvor so endearing that along with the quite beautiful color photography of the film, that I’d argue that Canadian director Jean-François Monette’s Take-out is one of the best shorts of the year.

 

Los Angeles, November 7, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2022).