Ford Fairchild | Laid Back / 2023 [music video]

sunshine dripping like country time lemonade

by Douglas Messerli

 

Chris Housman (singer, lyricist, and composer), Ford Fairchild (director) Laid Back / 2023 [2.50 minutes]

 

Beginning in 2020, with the release of his memorable single, “Nobody,” Kansas-born gay singer, Chris Housman came into the public consciousness. That song, based on his personal experience of a gay breakup, is not included in these pages because it contains no pronouns and no images of any male relationship. But in its country western plaints, it somehow attracted my attention, sounding very much to my ears like a gay ballad. How to explain that is difficult. It could be a tale of any straight man breaking up with his girl, but somehow the depth of his emotional pleading sounded like a wail of gay distress that just doesn’t come through in straight country western plaints.

    By the time of his following album Blueneck with its song “Drag Queen,” the latter written in response to the passage of the Tennessee Adult Entertainment Act, Housman had brought his open sexuality into his music.

     In “Laid Back,” and “Guilty As Sin” in 2023 and 2024—both also from Blueneck, he had made his sexuality quite clear in the images of his videos, both of these video singles directed by Ford Fairchild.

     “Laid Back” is simply about a group of friends “chillin’” together, but in this case with his particular boyfriend, as the other swim in the waters of Percy Priest Lake.

 

Brand new bobbers, hand me down poles

Cooler full of beer to keep the ice cold

Just enough sand, to feel like a beach

Down at that spot we got at Percy priest

 

Y’all can meet us there

Bring your own lawn chair

 

We gon’ keep it laid back

On the back half of a Sunday

Sunshine dripping like country time lemonade

Cold can 12 pack fighting off a heat wave

…No way we ain’t having us a good day

Put the phones down, turn the dial up

Catch a buzz and a bass with a little luck

Wave by wave, our troubles float away, yeah

Cuz we don’t need that

We’ll keep it laid back

Laid back, laid back

 

    And indeed, the gay couple are cuddling in laid-back style, a can of what appears to be lemonade hanging from Housman’s hand.

 

Los Angeles, March 21, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema (March 2025).

James Fanizza | Sebastian / 2017

how to trust the heart

by Douglas Messerli

 

James Fanizza (screenwriter and director) Sebastian / 2017

 

Toronto Film Scene magazine critic William Brownridge described his fellow Canadian James Fanizza’s 2017 film Sebastian as a relatively typical and predictable romantic drama, but I’ve seen very few films wherein within a few moments of the opening credits a young man, in this case Alex (Fanizza playing the lead role), whose boyfriend Nelson (Guifré Bantjes-Rafols) has just left for a week’s vacation, immediately beds down with the boyfriend’s visiting cousin from Argentina, Sebastian (Alex House). Particularly, since Nelson has introduced the two and suggested his lover look after Sebastian to make sure he has an interesting visit, it’s difficult to sympathize with the romantic relationship founded on a cheating heart.

     Alex makes it even more difficult to feel any delight in his new conquest, moreover, by representing his actions as being insignificant since he was about break up with Nelson anyway; at least, Sebastian shows some sense of familial guilt.

     Fortunately, Fanizza’s film gradually reveals its central figure—with whom Sebastian immediately falls in love despite himself—as being far more complex and problematic, taking the film in directions that, in fact, one might have never expected in a romantic drama.

     The central friction between the two sudden lovers, Alex and Sebastien, is that the latter is the “settling-down” kind of gay man, while Alex, as is apparent in his quick abandonment of Nelson, has no sense of commitment, seeming almost happy that the deep sexual satisfaction that Sebastien provides him will last only a week before his cute trick returns home.

      But Sebastien, more than a cute boy with long hair and a Spanish romantic charm, is a kind of honest innocent who asks questions of Alex and insinuates himself into the other’s world so fully that the Toronto boy begins to admit to information he has never shared previously with any friends, including his supposed best friend, drag queen Xenia (RuPaul Drag Race performer Brian McCook, better known as Katya Zamolodchikova)—namely that in high school he had a consenting affair with his married history teacher who was arrested, when Alex’s parents discovered the relationship, and imprisoned for pedophilia.

     Fanizza, both as writer and director, seems to cast this off as simply another piece of information in the increasingly complex portrait of Alex. But, in fact, this might have taken the film on a fully different trajectory, and almost does, when at a visit to his favorite gay bar with Sebastian, Alex runs into the history’s professor’s wife, who when she spots Alex in the crowd, hurries after him and Sebastian just to find out “how he is?”

     Obviously, Sebastian and the film’s audience is perplexed concerning the event, and when we discover, soon after, that in fact the history professor committed suicide in jail soon after Alex’s visit to him and insistence that his love would remain, we can well understand why Alex is afraid to truly fall in love ever again.

    Sebastian, who without permission has leafed through Alex’s sketch book almost as he riffles through Alex’s head, encourages his new friend to further explore his art, allowing his emotions to find a healthy outlet. Inevitably, Sebastian’s increasing sway upon Alex results ultimately in the confused lover pulling away and seemingly breaking off their love affair. And Xenia’s further attempt to hook him up with a gallery owner friend, ends in Alex cutting ties all those who love him most.

     I’d suggest given the truly traumatic events which, unfortunately the feature film does not more fully explore, that the film’s sudden shift to what is more predictable tends to make all that follows rather hollow. Of course, Alex does begin to sketch again, this time including large drawings of his former school-teacher lover as well as Sebastien. Sebastien and Xenia are on the list to the gallery opening, and, as expected, friendship and love are renewed.

     The fact that Alex has been refusing to deal with Nelson’s cellphone calls all this while, brings him back early from his trip as he confronts Alex only to find his cousin in his bed. Alex once more scoffs at the drama, but this time it is Sebastian who storms off insisting that if he doesn’t try to make peace with Nelson his entire family in Argentina and Canada will end up hating and excommunicating him. Fortunately, the aunt with whom he is boarding, is wise and accepting of her nephew’s being gay and his new love.

     Nelson wants nothing to do with either of them, and by the end of the film hints at why Alex may have wanted to break up in the first place. But in a movie titled Sebastian you know the two week-long lovers at least have to make up in time to see the title character off on his trip home.

     Without even knowing it, Sebastian has booked, as all clever Torontoans do, a plane out of Buffalo, which gives Alex another day to tour Sebastian around town, this time in the not so tourist friendly town of Buffalo. They have Buffalo wings, of course, and walk around the old theatre district for the day before it’s time for one more long kiss and a quick drive—Alex, despite his new sense of openness, almost showing his impatience to get his friend on the plane on time—to the airport.

     Sebastian certainly provides him with other possibilities. He could stay on or Alex could come with him to Argentina. And when their borrowed car won’t start, we just know the time has come for Alex to commit to the love to which he has already surrendered. Still, he desperately hails down a taxi and they arrive at the airport, Alex barely even offering up a hug before Sebastian turns to go out of his life forever.

      Fortunately, Fanizza has seen Sleepless in Seattle and maybe even the original version An Affair to Remember, and a short distance after the cab pulls away, Alex orders the driver to stop, jumps out of the taxi, and runs back into the airport to make a choice we knew he must.

      The power of romantic love is restored to its proper place in this gay rom-com.

      But I’m still haunted by how to deal with the death of a man for loving a younger boy who was perfectly aware and willing to return that love, and troubled by what it means for societies to continue to allow such incidents to happen, to destroy reputations, lives, and human beings for feeling the same emotions. Children are not imagined to have logical minds or deep passions, and are most certainly denied the very illogical and somewhat hurtful love which this film promotes.

 

Los Angeles, May 8, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (May 2023).

Ricky Mastro | La tempête (The Storm) / 2017

magnetism

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ricky Mastro and Laura Saulnier (screenplay), Ricky Mastro (director) La tempête (The Storm) / 2017 [16 minutes]

The French film The Storm begins with Léo (Kévin Roze) masturbating to the weather forecaster, interrupted as his entire life appears to be. In fact, the beautiful Léo in Ricky Mastro’s watchable movie, appears to be entirely lost, a bit like a ghoul wandering the streets.

     Soon after he stops by a fast-food stand to pick up some dinner, eating alone at a table. As he wanders away, the server follows him telling he’s left his keys. And so begins a remarkable night, as the two decide to get a drink. It begins with the server, Luca (Maxime Picot) speaking of a phenomenon they are about to experience, the magnetic waves from a black hole that occurred billions of years ago. But even here Léo seems uncomprehending and lost, hardly speaking as Luca tells the amazing story of the present suddenly being caught up in events from the beginning of the universe before the existence of the earth.

   Luca suggests they go for a swim, further amazing Léo who can’t even seem to fathom where there might be a body of water in which to swim. Luca forces his friend to climb a wall, breaking into a private swimming pool of a home whose residents are evidently away.

     Once more Léo seems confused by the events, hardly able to scale the wall, and worried about the weather, fearful of rain which according to Luca has not been forecast.

     But suddenly in the pool the two come together and engage in an almost magical sexual tryst, kissing and holding on to one another as if destined to unite.

    Back on the street, Luca seems cold despite a seemingly now reawakened and playful Léo, arguing that he has work early in the morning. Léo, however, suggests, “One last smoke?”

    Luca takes out only a cigarette, but it might as well be an intoxicating drug given that suddenly Léo announces that he has lost his keys along the way, and now he doesn’t know where to sleep, it being far too late to call a blacksmith.

     He asks if he might sleepover at Luca’s, but his new acquaintance says that it’s not at all possible. When Léo asks if he has a “man,” Luca replies, “No, a chick…and two kids.”

     And suddenly Léo is hurt, angry. He recognizes it not as a “situation,” but suddenly a “problem,” even a lie as if Luca has suddenly altered his entire personality, having, as Léo he puts it “gone weird,” turning against him after their romantic swim.

    Luca finally admits that he is homeless, that he sleeps at the restaurant. “I don’t have an apartment or anything.”

     Suddenly Léo becomes the aggressive one, kissing Luca and racing off with Luca behind him. He introduces Luca to a rooftop paradise, undressing him as the two engage in rooftop sex, sleeping together on the roof until almost dawn.

      Léo awakens first and dresses, slowly kissing his friend awake. Luca suggests breakfast, but Léo, now the practical one, argues that he has to find a blacksmith and get into his apartment. But might Luca wish to sleep at his place this evening instead of the restaurant? Luca agrees that it would be a fine arrangement.

     On the subway, we observe Léo sitting on the bench with a quiet smile upon his face, as if the previous ghost of a body he had inhabited has sprung back into life through the strange events of the night, which drew two unlikely forces together, possibly for an utterly new life.

      Near the doorway, we see the weather man, who observing the beautiful boy on the bench, attempts to maneuver his way closer to him. But this time, Léo does not even notice the former fantasy of his masturbatory urges. The magnetic storm has already swept over his world and changed it.

 

Los Angeles, January 23, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (January 2023).

Asher Jelinsky | Miller & Son / 2019

what’s in a name?

by Douglas Messerli

 

Asher Jelinsky (screenwriter, based on a story by Jelinksy and Taylor Townsend, and director) Miller & Son / 2019 [21 minutes]

 

One of the most assured and understated of transexual films ever made, US director Asher Jelinsky’s 2019 film features a young boy working every day with his father as a mechanic. He’s a wizard regarding everything about cars. In his hands destitute old autos turn into wonderfully beautiful machines again, cars that won’t start, reignite like magic given his skills. His father (Ryan Cutrona) is close to him, in fact quite dependent on his son for his business. Even when his father’s computer acts up, Ryan (Jesse James Keitel) easily solves the problem.

      But by night, at a local club, Ryan becomes someone else, a woman in high heels, dress, and earrings who is trying to come to terms with his/her real identity, a dancer who hangs out with transsexual women and who, cornered in an alley, together scare off the drunken homophobes they encounter. The only problem is that one of the drunken figures in the group is Grant (Travis Hammer), a co-worker in his father’s garage. 

     Ryan scurries back to his car, reappearing as the handsome young man he appears to be each day in his father’s garage. But this time, it’s different. Travis clearly is ready to share his homophobic outrage with Ryan’s father, and finally after a long day in which Ryan brings several cars back into service, he does so.

    The final last long scene, in which the father finally fires Grant, consists of a long remove from his son, who tries to make clear that he loves his father before he blandly attempts to escape him with a simple statement: “I’ll see you tomorrow.

     After a long pause and a lot of internet research, his father finally is able to return a quiet message of acceptance as his own return, “I’ll see you tomorrow,” the camera panning back to show the name of the company in which he works: “Miller & Son.”

     Their worlds may be absolutely opposed, but their dependence upon each other and their deep love rules the cruel world of bigots. In this case if you have to ask what’s in a name, it is everything.

      This lovely short film, was the winner of several awards and a popular film in gay film circuit.

 

Los Angeles, March 20, 2025 | Reprinted from My Queer Cinema Blog (March 2025).

Harun Baysan | Akif / 2018

required identity

by Douglas Messerli

 

Harun Baysan and Çetin Kurt (screenplay), Harun Baysan (director) Akif / 2018 [30 minutes]

 

It’s somewhat difficult to know how to feel about Turkish director Harun Baysan’s 30-minute film Akif since the film’s central character, Akif is a slightly homophobic draft dodger who wants to use the possibility of being gay as a way to escape the military.

     Akif (Bekir Behrem) certainly has good reason. His father (Yusuf Eksi) is seriously ill and has no one else to care for him, being unable to even eat without the careful ministrations of his only child. In fact, Akif has previously saved up to join the military—soldiers in the Turkish military, at least at the time of this film, must serve six months without pay.

     The culture, moreover, which does allow gay men to serve in the military (just as was long true of the US and numerous other countries’ militia), encourages men who will not or cannot serve to seek the escape of being gay. But what that entails, the creation of a stereotypical view of LGBTQ people, is even more terrifying. As the true hero of this work, Ugur (Uzay Gökhan Irmak) explains to Akif, in order to prove one’s own sexual orientation one has to create a notion of homosexuality that has little to do with the reality. And once he has been declared gay many job opportunities are lost and the people at large are likely to despise him, as we have already heard a grocer speaking to a customer of Ugar. Ugur was a school teacher without a job.

      It is to Ugur that Akif turns to help him in what is basically a “gay makeover.” But, in this case, Ugur—who identifies as a gay man, but might be described in his manner of dress and behavior as a transsexual—demands that Akif first learn everything he can about gay culture, assigning him basic gay texts such as the works of Oscar Wilde and E. M. Forster’s Maurice and requiring him to watch a number of openly gay movies.

     But in Akif’s world even being seen publicly with Ugur is dangerous, and in his attempts to buy the underground tapes, he is discouraged by the seller, forcing him to explain that he is buying them for a brother attending the university, yet another ironic level of this hostile cultural milieu in which men like Ugur must live.

     After reading and watching to assimilate some basics, Ugar insists that Akif apply lipstick and makeup and put on heels (that look a bit like Dorothy’s ruby slippers in The Wizard of Oz) to help him learn to walk more effeminately, a requirement if he is to behave as authorities expect him to as a gay man. One scene of the straight Akif putting on lipstick and eyeliner is so sad that it almost brings tears to one’s eyes. Even if he were a macho S&M gay man, it is a requirement to prove one’s homosexuality.

     We see the faithful son alternating between becoming someone else, a man that even he soon won’t be able to identify. The final catch is that there must be a picture, with his face fully visible, of him engaged in homosexual sex. It’s no longer legally required, but the military boards still demands it as proof nonetheless.

     It is at this point that the mild and passive Akif finally balks, demonstrating his own heteronormative cultural assimilation, insisting that Ugar’s entire efforts have been aimed at getting him to have sex, and, in the very worst of assaults, insisting that Ugar is after all still just a faggot!

      Ugar spits in his face, orders him out of the house, and demands that Akif never return.

     The very next day, Akif is fired from his job, his boss having been contacted reporting that Akif is a draft dodger, which no business is allowed to keep on their payroll.

      With no way out, Akif returns to Ugar and goes through the “ordeal,” spitting out the semen and almost vomiting much in the manner of Fergus in Neil Jordan’s The Crying Game (1992) upon discovering that his lover is actually a transgender male.

      Ugar himself sits waiting for the ordeal to end, also in tears.

      Yet Ugar’s lessons and, evidently, the photo succeed. Akif is declared unfit for military duty, which probably will also make him now even more unhireable and a general outcast in his society.

He and Ugar hug.

     The young now suddenly “approved” gay man returns home to attend to his father, only to discover him dead. On the television, the reporter describes how a military unit has saved a portion of the country from terrorists without violence, those saved singing out their ululations for their heroes.

      The mixed feelings I have about this film must certainly emanate in part from my own experience of being called up for military service for the Vietnam War in 1970. Howard and I were already a couple, and even as a gay man I was terrified that I might not be able to convince them that I was gay, an “out” provided by the misconceptions of US culture that LGBTQ men and women were undesirable because they were simply less capable and were subject to blackmail—the deep irony of which was that only in a closed, unaccepting culture which their attitude helped shape, might one have to worry about being blackmailed for being gay. I must have fit all the psychologist’s preconceptions of what a gay might be, for upon reporting that I was gay, he handed a 4F rating, declaring me unfit for military duty. I was relieved, but angry at the same time that those gay men and women who might have wanted to serve might also be declared unfit just because of their sexuality. I felt my sexuality had saved my life, but at the same time it had declared me unable to fully participate in the culture.

     Akif, knowing now that he is a marked man, begins to laugh before falling into tears. I might have begun to cry before, realizing the irony of the situation, but, instead, I began to laugh. I felt freed; whereas Akif knows that he is now imprisoned in an identity that has nothing to do with him. Of course, so was I.

 

Los Angeles, June 13, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (June 2024).

I

Virgile Ratelle | Dog Breath / 2019

cocaine fucks

by Douglas Messerli

 

Virgile Ratelle (screenwriter and director) Dog Breath / 2019 [13 minutes]

 

How do you describe such a movie as French Canadian director Virgile Ratelle’s Dog Breath: a drug film, a rape flick, a story about an addiction to both drugs and sex that has gone beyond logic?

It is actually all of these.

    In three short segments it shows us a passive young man, Alex (Fabien Corbeil), who is followed into a bar by Sam, (Samuel Vollering) both of whom head straight to the bathroom, snort coke and fuck. In the second segment their return to what presumably is a shared house, whose bedroom is constantly busy with occupants, both gay and straight, fucking. This time, with the help of Dave (Jean-François Gagné), they heat up the crack, again go into a kind of euphoric world of dazed behavior and fuck, Dave looking on in masturbatory desire.

     In the final scene the Alpha male (Nicolas Gravel), presumably straight is seen with two other macho cohorts, who brags about having fucked a lesbian and then proceeds the wrestle with another individual whom he describes as a fag (Timmy Haineault).

     In a final snort of coke, Alex falls into a complete coma, the heterosexual braggart picking up his body with the help of another, putting him on the bed, and raping him.

     It’s difficult to glean what message this short film is attempting to convey. Addiction makes you lose of sense of reality? I’m sure it does. Sex is better with coke? Surely not if you’re not even conscious, a condition in which the passive Alex is throughout most of movie. Is this a warning against addiction? I doubt it since the film seems to take almost a voyeuristic pleasure in watching Alex get fucked.

     I can only suggest this is a bit like a snuff film since we do even know at the end whether Alex is still living.

     I certainly can’t recommend this short film to anyone interested in the experience of gay life. This is about addiction and death. I write about this film only as an example of the extremes of the medium. It bears comparison to Paul Morrissey’s 1982 film Forty Deuce.

 

Los Angeles, March 20, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema (March 2025).

Jen McGowan | On the Ride / 2020

the heart of the matter

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jeremy Glazer (screenplay), Jen McGowan (director) On the Ride / 2020 [14 minutes]

 

This lovely short is a real tearjerker that takes the viewer on a ride at the very moment when a survivor of a gay marriage, Scott Long (Jeremy Glazer) goes on a morning bicycle trip after his husband has died of some unnamed disease.

    In his back pack is a letter which he intends to mail, but he finds, as in 2020 we all discovered, the mailbox closed. In his mind, filled with flashbacks of his husband’s illness and death, he loses his focus and narrowly misses an accident with a car in the Los Angeles roads in which he’s riding. He ends up by the side of the road, finally realizing that it is time to take the next step, to visit the family to which has been writing to him, the son Roshawn (Spence Moore II) having received his lover’s heart as a saving live-saving transplant.

 

    The mother, played quite remarkably by Deidre Gilbert, openly greets him into her home, as he finally meets the young black man who has received his husband Todd’s heart. In a remarkable sequence the young man, who now wants to become a doctor, allows Scott to actually listen to the beating heart he has inherited.

    The mother drives the bicyclist home, welcoming him into her family and the noisy world of her son, while he returns home, alone, to celebrate Thanksgiving with alone, yet celebrating his lover who, he claims, endlessly talked.

    If this is not a particularly profound short film, it is certainly an eloquent one, a work which makes you realize the continuation of life is not necessarily spiritual, but a real possibility that exists in the possibilities of community, love, and memory.

 

Los Angeles, March 19, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (2025).