Matt Tyrnauer | Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood / 2017, general US release 2018

up for anything

by Douglas Messerli

 

Matt Tyrnauer (writer and director, based on Scotty Bowers’ Full Service) Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood / 2017, general US release 2018

Scotty Bowers Full Service (New York: Grove Press, 2012)

 

I should imagine that a great many individuals who have read Full Service—Scotty Bowers revelation of the sexual proclivities of Hollywood movie stars, directors, and other workers in the film industry—or those who have seen the lesser-detailed follow-up documentary film, Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood, might see the writer and performer to be a kind of sordid hanger-on whose “shocking secrets” about the sex lives of celebrities are not only lurid but perhaps fabricated, particularly since he waited until their deaths when they could not themselves respond. Full Service was published by Grove Press in 2012, and Matt Tyrnauer’s film was released in 2017, with a general US release the following year. Bowers died in 2019 at 96 years of age, having outlived nearly everyone about whom he wrote except his wife, Lois J. Broad, who died a year before him.

      First of all, there is just the incredible audacity of his actions, providing boys and girls, along with himself for both sexes, often out of a trailer attached to the gas station where he worked on Hollywood Boulevard. There her “serviced” noted figures such as George Cukor, Cary Grant, Randolph Scott, Katherine Hepburn, Cecil Beaton, Tyrone Power, John Kelly (Orry-Kelly), Walter Pidgeon, Vincent Price, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Leonard Spigelgass, Laurence Olivier, Noël Coward, Spencer Tracy, Rupert Allan, Ramón Navarro, Charles Laughton, John Carradine, David Carradine, Rock Hudson, Montgomery Clift, Anthony Perkins, Roddy McDowall, Somerset Maugham, Raymond Burr, Tennessee Williams, Brian Epstein, and J. Edgar Hoover, to name only a few—these all with same-sex partners—as well as arranging women for Errol Flynn, and personally “tricking” (a word Bowers uses hundreds of times in his book) Bette Davis, Vivien Leigh, and Lana Turner, as well as Ava Gardner in a threesome.

      Although he regularly found boys for most of his homosexual clients, Bowers himself tricked many of them, in particular Spencer Tracy. On top of this, his clients included numerous Hollywood lawyers and visiting businessmen for many parts of the US. That he did this all without a fee will surely put his actions beyond the realm of belief for many.

   Others will equally find Bowers disreputable simply for “tainting” the image that for years of Hollywood front men and women as well as the celebrity magazines had burnished in order to provide Hollywood actors with a credible cover for their private sexual interests, often marrying off gossip-exposed actors such as Rock Hudson and Charles Laughton into relationships with women who were vernacularly described as “beards.” In other cases, publicists created elaborate romantic fictions for their studio favorites such as the supposedly frustrated love affair between Tracy and Hepburn, a couple who in real life often couldn’t bear to be in each other’s company. Tracy, in particular, would get drunk many a night in a cottage loaned to him by Cukor, encouraging Bowers to suck him off after hours of drunken complaint. In short, these readers and viewers argue that Bowers has taken away much of the glamour that the stars signified..

     That Bowers made life-long friendships with a great number of these figures, and was regularly invited into their homes and on trips these celebrities made to places such as Hearst Castle as a friend, and later worked with them as a bartender—his source of employment after he left the gas station—will simply seem beyond belief to some.

     And finally, there will be many who suggest that the very quantity of people he lined up for the stars and others—in the film, for example, Bowers estimates that for Hepburn alone “I fixed her up with every bit of 150 girls”—will make straight-laced normative-behaving individuals feel that he is exaggerating if nothing else.

     Even my husband Howard, when I explained to him what I was reading, said that the book sounded like loop-tape of Hedda Hopper and her ilk.

     I argue that not only do I believe nearly everything Bowers relates, both off and on screen, but highly admire someone who from childhood on—he claims that as a 14 year-old-kid he hooked up one of his lesbian teachers with a fellow girl classmate, and that he willingly allowed a neighbor to jerk him off and shared the bed of numerous priests without regret—was open to multiple forms of sexuality that was nearly inconceivable within the McCarthy era bent of uncovering Communists and sexual deviants in the period during which he primarily worked.

     As the documentary argues several times, Scotty offered an invaluable service for the real human beings behind the masks of the screen legends whose every smile and gesture was under daily scrutiny. And the fact that he did it while working as a lowly gas station attendant, a bartender, and personal friend of these figures trapped in the gaze of millions, meant that he could function in a time when the discovery of their behavior would mean the end of their careers and possible imprisonment in plain sight. He kept a little book of addresses and telephone numbers but never shared his client’s names with anyone, sometimes not even with the friends with whom he hooked them up. Even when the tabloids were about to reveal his sexual tryst with Turner and Gardner, Bowers refused the offer of money and admission of the facts. His “full service,” he recognized, depended entirely upon trust.

      Just for the perpetual doubters—and there have been a number of reputable men and women who have confirmed Bowers’ bedtime stories—most of the actors and actresses he names as homosexual, lesbian, and bisexuals come as little surprise to those in the know. As one of those “not in the know,” but who has extensively read about US cinema and those who worked in it, I knew of and had written about Grant and Scott’s longtime relationship, read extensively of or had encountered several hints about the homosexuality of Cukor, Orry-Kelly, Power, Beaton, Pidgeon, Price, Spigelgass, Olivier, Navarro, Burr, and Laughton. Most of them were Hollywood “open secrets.”

     Others such as Perkins, Hudson, Clift, McDowall, Maugham, Epstein, Williams, and Hoover, along with friends Bowers mentions (Bill Haines, Sascha Brastoff, etc.) have been outed for years through Hollywood histories, biographies, and memoirs.

     The only surprises to me were Hepburn and Tracy, but even here I had heard rumors. I’m sorry for those in Boise, Dubuque, and Fair Haven who are hearing about this for the very first time; but also, I’m pleased, finally, that the genie-in-a-bottle has escaped. Artists of all mediums seem to be particularly inclined to LGBTQ activities. And actors, in general, are well represented by the rainbow. And if that rubs some of the sheen of what some define as “glamour,” we’re better off. If the glamorous can only be limited to heterosexuality, then I want no part of it. Indeed, it seems rather homophobic to me to describe “normative” sex as something more intriguing than LGBTQ sexuality, as well as simply not being true. I’ll take Ramón Novarro, Cary Grant, and Montgomery Clift any day over Clark Gable (who had the original Gone with the Wind director, Cukor, fired because he couldn’t work with a fag; but who, it is rumored, was perfectly happy to share the beds of gay directors and producers in his early, hardscrabble days), John Wayne, or even Brad Pitt. I’m sorry, Rhett, but I don’t give a damn. But then what do I know? I like gay men. Nonetheless, I’m certainly glad to hear that Hepburn wasn’t mooning all those years over the sexually dissatisfied, already-married Tracy.

       As for the sheer inexhaustibility of both Bowers and his clients’ sexual appetites, I don’t have an answer except to recall that during my time as a young gay man in New York City I should imagine that I had sex one or two times with different folks daily for a year. Of course, as I aged that slowed down, as I am sure it did for Bowers’ celebrities as well. He claims to have stopped serving the community after Hudson’s death of AIDS, suddenly fearful that he might be connecting up individuals for sexual encounters that may lead to their deaths. But one might also suggest that many of his best friends and customers were simply dying of age and that with the gradual change of sexual attitudes younger actors didn’t fear the judicial system even if they might still worry about the fans. Moreover, Bowers brought his own wife, Lisa, to the house on Kew Drive he inherited from his former male lover, Beech Dickerson, signifying perhaps that he was ready to retire from active service.

      Lisa, clearly still in love with Bowers in the movie version, seems gutsy if a bit puritanical in her morals, not at all sure that she might have married Scotty if she had knew of his sexual past, and somewhat nonplused by the fact that she has been asked in her old age to sing—Bowers met her a club in which she was performing as a singer—in a gay bar. 

     Bowers himself remains utterly unapologetic for what Matt Tyrnauer and commentators such as Peter Bart, Tony Charmoli, Stephen Fry, Robert Hofler, David Kuhn, and others describe as Scotty’s “pansexuality.” Scotty, himself, summarizes his sexual plurality in his declaration: “You know me. I’m up for anything...anytime.” As Godfrey Cheshire adds in his review on the Roger Ebert site: [Scott was] “Also, perhaps, hypersexual: Scotty estimates he turned two or three tricks a day, seven days a week, for nearly 40 years. No wonder Dr. Alfred Kinsey discovered and used him in researching male and female sexuality (Scotty says he took the good doc to some Hollywood orgies and could tell he was turned on).”

      In the end Tyrnauer’s documentary spends far too much time on book signings for Full Service and parties for Scotty’s 90th birthday in 2013. The fact that Bowers deeply regrets his inattention to his first wife (to whom he was never legally married) and the death through a botched abortion of his beloved daughter is almost ignored in the movie version, while it is repeatedly mentioned in his own memoir. Indeed, Tyrnauer uses the family home to which Scotty seldom returned merely as a location where Bowers picks up phone calls and piles up some of the debris he has since accumulated in that house, several garages, and his Kew Drive cottage, having become late in his life a genuine packrat.

       If that does not exactly detract from my admiration for him as an early facilitator for open sex, it seems as beside the point as his descriptions in Full Service of Hepburn’s terrible complexion and his comments on certain of his clients’ interest in S&M, “golden showers,” or performing as “doo-doo queens”—although I must admit that I found it fascinating that during his sex with the august head of the FBI, Hoover was dressed in drag.  But then these facts also reveal, as Kinsey argued, just how diverse we are as sexual beings, and that such desires which to some may seem as deviant and perverse are perfectly natural to a wide range of our species.

      The documentary also doesn’t name all those men and women Scotty names in his book. But it does show some of the handsome young ex-marine’s friends who he hooked up with his Hollywood acquaintances. And at one point we see a brief porn tape of Scotty receiving fellatio—a sight to behold. Tyrnauer also nicely mixes in appropriate clips from Hollywood films when referencing some of Scotty’s clients.

      Still, I’d suggest anyone visiting this documentary for the first time should read Scotty Bowers’ Full Service beforehand. There’s rumor of a full movie in the making, to be directed by Luca Guadagnino. It will be interesting how the Hollywood of today comes to terms with its own history.

      After all, Bowers opened the book rather widely so that we might be able to better access the needs and desires of those who the studio heads hired to pretend they were just like everyone else. Maybe they were, but even today too few people want to admit what normality might include instead of excluding.

 

Los Angeles, November 21, 2020

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (November 2020).

 

 

 

 

Mark Gasper | An Empty Bed / 1988

no other way

by Douglas Messerli

 

Mark Gasper (screenwriter and director) An Empty Bed / 1988

Mark Gasper’s hour-long film An Empty Bed begins with the evocative strains of composer Glen Roven’s score and a long tracking shot moving from a disheveled bed in which an old man, Bill Frayne (John Wylie) awakens, while in the background we hear news and weather in a radio along with the endless ticking of a clock. The camera sweeps quickly through another room where we see many antique photographs, obviously of another generation of the time when the man was still a child, before the camera moves back into the bedroom as Bill slowly sits up, has a coughing fit, stands, staggers to the living room, and takes out a cigarette—obviously the cause of his coughing

     Suddenly, as if from an echo chamber we hear a voice—who we later in the film come to realize is Pete’s wife, Corinne (Harriet Bass) saying “I think it’s great that the two of you were roommates”—followed by heavy laughter in the same in which a much younger version of himself (Mark Clifford Smith) is sitting with his even younger lover Peter (Conan McCarthy) who presents him with a housewarming gift, since they apparently have just moved in, of a lovely green-glass ashtray, Peter saying “This is our apartment now. We’re going to keep it neat.”

     As the camera pans quickly across the room we recognize that it is now not kept so very neat the elderly Bill picking up the same ashtray and taking it into the kitchen where it empties it into the trash. He lifts a bottle of whisky and carefully marks the line of what is left it the bottle. We can guess that his doctor has ordered that he delimit his alcoholic intake, and we later discover that he has a couple of years earlier had a heart attack.

     Accordingly, we perceive what will be the structure of this bittersweet tale that joggles us between the empty present and a more joyful past, forcing us to adjust to the obvious changes that have occurred in this old man’s life.

     I describe Bill as an old man with some consternation since, having been forced to retire early only a couple of years earlier, as we are later told, the character is probably a few years younger than I am today, watching this film at the age of a few months shy of 74. And I was struck by this film, for that very reason, in a way I might not have been just a few years earlier. This is the story of a man who is nearing the end of his life in total contemplation of how he has ended the lonely cocoon in which he exists. How did that joyfully shared moment of intimate laughter and the passionate sexual pleasures of Bill and Peter result in the carcass of a lonely man crawling each morning out of bed to walk around New York’s Greenwich Village in search of answers to that very question.

      In our COVID-quarantined days of early 2021 I cannot even easily walk the streets, and certainly in the vast stretches of Los Angeles would find little to remind me of friends and events in my own and husband’s life. My contemplations of the past are almost all limited now to what I am just doing, watching films and writing about them. But fortunately, unlike the figure in Gasper’s An Empty Bed, my lover sits just a few feet away from me on our somewhat neatly kept couch and shares our bed.

      Back in the late 1940s and 1950s in which Bill and Peter’s early days seem to be located, gay life was far more difficult not only because of societal strictures and general homophobia, but because of how young men and women had been conditioned to define and express themselves. Young college boys like the Bill we encounter in one of the old man’s memories were not only “expected” to marry and procreate by the parents and societies with whom and in which they lived but because of their own definitions of themselves. Bill comes home each summer from Boston University to spend pleasant picnicking days with his girlfriend Patty (Lenore Andriel), who cannot understand why he keeps returning to Boston when he might remain home, marry her, and attend the local State college. Bill assures her of his love but expresses his enjoyment also of Boston, and we can only suspect that despite the conservative traditions of that city, he is exploring there something he might not be able to at home. What we do eventually perceive is that the next summer, after graduation, he does return to Patty.

      But even when he meets Peter in New York, they date not in a gay bar but in a sort of Beat Club, which has a back open terrace in which to perform poetry and smoke dope, and several side rooms where both heterosexual and homosexual couples can explore their love. They shared their meals in local diners such as the Gus’ local Greek diner, where Bill still eats, ordering up favorites with far less fat and salt that he and Peter shared in their hearty celebrations of consumption.

      We get only a few glimpses of their life together, but we surmise that their friendship was not as easy one, attempting a monogamous relationship at a time when gay couples had few other shared models. Their age difference, Peter obviously the younger man who is unemployed and Bill working for a talent agency, creates tensions. On Bank Street, standing outside the Waverly Inn, he recalls a dinner in which Peter expressed his feeling of having no connection to his lover’s life. “You lie to your mother. No one at the agency even knows that I exist.” Feeling trapped in domesticity, he wonders, with Bill paying all his costs, whether he is simply someone to keep his companion warm at night, characterizing himself as being something close to a gigolo.

      In the elder Bill’s flashes of memory we gather, near the end, Peter had gotten deeply involved in drugs, now needing his partner’s money in order to feed his habit, money that Bill often no longer had or wanted to give him.

      Yet their love, despite its rocky times, seemed to abide which the old man’s stare through a restaurant window at a handsome young man, who clearly reminds him of young lover, reveals. Evidently, however, Peter finally demanded his freedom. And unlike today in which it might mean him taking up with another gay acquaintance or pickup, it ends in a heterosexual marriage, a move to Florida, and children, with whom Bill forlornly is kept abreast, the couple visiting him on a trip to New York which occasioned the comment by Peter’s wife that we heard in the first few frame of the film. Obviously, Peter has felt no need to tell her of the real nature of their “roommate” days.

      As the older Bill shuffles slowly through the Village streets we realize gradually that he has no longer any existence except in that temporarily glorious past, even if he realizes that it might have been worse. Running into an old friend Elmer (Thomas Hill) he discovers that since leaving the agency to represent his own clients Elmer has now suffered bankruptcy—as Bill perceives when his former friend checks his balance he has only $13.00 left in his account—and must continue to work in the hopes of finding enough money just to survive. He has apparently been divorced by his wife.

       Later, coincidentally, he runs into an elder version of his early girlfriend Patty (Dorothy Stinnette) who long ago married, has grown children, and is now teaching again. She declares that her life has been a happy one, that her husband is a fine father and that “she couldn’t ask for a better man.” Yet we also see in her face that she might have imagined herself happier if she had married her first love, Bill. “Sometimes I wonder, what did I do, huh, what didn’t I do? You came back that summer and you changed so. It was like you were a completely different person.”

       “I’m glad you married Al. He’s a good man,” he hesitatingly responds.

       “I got tired of waiting.”

       “I know.”

       She asks the important question of this film, “Are you satisfied with the way your life has gone?”

       “For the most part.” He continues with the most profound statement of the movie, “Believe me, there was no other way.”

       She gives him a gentle kiss on the cheek and is off to finish her shopping.

       Suddenly, in Bill’s statement of acceptance and reconciliation with his gay identity we no longer feel sorry for him. He returns home, hardly able to walk the stairway three floors up to his apartment. And that night we know he will drink another measured portion of the scotch he has left. The next morning he will rise up slowly, have a smoke, and walk the streets where everything reminds him of the choices he has made. But he is no one to be pitied. He has lived a full life defined by who is knew he was and is.

 

Los Angeles, January 13, 2021

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

 

Andrii Zhuravskyi | King of Spades / 2022

cuddling

by Douglas Messerli

 

Andrii Zhuravskyi (screenwriter and director) King of Spades / 2022 [13 minutes]

 

A couple, Ace (Andrew Haughton) and Gus (Callum Lloyd), have been hanging out together for several days now, jerking off in the back of the car, heavily kissing, and getting to know one another, at least that is what Gus imagines.

     As this short film begins, they have now joined up in Ace’s bedroom for what the viewers and Gus might imagine will be a full night of sex, since Gus has expressed his desire to stay over.

     But something’s wrong, particularly when Ace removes the handsome Gus’ hand from his knee and scurries off to the kitchen to make them some ginger tea.

     There he meets up with apparently his housemate, Emma (Katarina Håkansson) who queries Ace if he’s told him yet.

      For first time viewers of such a situation, the question must stymie their imagination. But those of us who have fully engaged ourselves in the LGBTQ+ world recognize almost immediately, even in the characters, name, that Ace is the rainbow abbreviation for asexual, one of the newer additions to the endless list of sex and gender spectrums not folded into the LGBTQ+ community.

      As Ace asks Gus when he returns back with the tea to find Gus now half-undressed, can we just cuddle? Gus, a bit confused, agrees, but hasn’t yet caught on, and soon turns over to kiss and feel for his friend’s unaroused penis.

      When he questions his would-be lover about what’s happening, Ace finally speaks the truth: “Sex just doesn’t do anything for me.”

      That doesn’t mean that he doesn’t “love” Gus, or that he doesn’t want to be with him. It simply means, if this can be described as simple, that he simply isn’t wired for sex.

      Gus quickly pulls his sweater back on and decides to catch the night train out, explaining that he feels he’s been lied to and that he has to think things over.

        We doubt whether he’ll be back, even though Ace has offered him free rein, if they were to become a couple as he hopes, to have sex outside of the relationship, something in which Gus is not at all interested.

       Frankly, I too would have gotten up out of that bed and taken off as quickly as possible. I surely feel sorry for asexual individuals, and I think I can imagine why they might want find a home in which they too were accepted, as the LGBTQ+ flag has seemed to offer them. Certainly, they too are among the sexual queers of the universe.

       But for me, as I’ve written many times in this volume, the LGBTQ community has always been primarily about sex, until issues of gender were further brought into it, transforming the transexual designation generally applied to “drag queens” into one of transgender, even if not all transgender individuals are at all comfortable with their same-sex couples. Once they have found their new gender, many who have finally found the body in which they are comfortable desire what they describe as a normative heterosexual relationship. One need only see Patrick Lang’s 2005 film, One Man’s Treasure, to be reminded that some transgender individuals go out of their way to make it clear that they are not gay, even to one another. See, for example, Alicya Eyo and Sophy Holland’s 2015 short film, Brace.

      But where else might the transgender community find a home? And I understood that even back in the pre-Hitler Berlin days of Magnus Hirschfeld that he had already made room for them in his Sexual Institute. And I am totally sympathetic with any community that must face such sexual shunning and humiliation.

      Yet having no interest in sex seems somehow out of the umbrella, a bit like purposely sitting outside the cover of the umbrella in the rain, or demanding of those involved in a football game that they join him or her in collecting shells or going hunting. I recognize the loneliness they must feel, particularly when they seek out same-sex relationships. And they certainly must have felt as isolated as young boys and girls as gays and lesbians felt in the high school locker rooms. But I doubt that most of them were bullied for simply bowing out of sex. They simply stood outside of the picture, loners surely, but necessarily a threat to the heterosexual jock and his jockeys.

     For me homosexuality is nearly all about the sex, the desire and joy of kissing, sucking, and fucking another man. Living with another man, one realizes, as in any relationship, there are certainly far more central issues if the couple is going to survive; yet sex is always there, just as it is for most heterosexual couples, and when that ceases it either means you’ve turned into an old couple or both gays and straights need to look elsewhere for their fulfillment of their bodies, which is at least half of the body and soul balance we humans are said to represent.

     The asexual being perhaps can only find fulfillment in the arms of another asexual being, or perhaps in a relationship like the one the Ace character in this short film proposes, where his partner comes home from work each day to be with a companion, but seeks some of the greatest pleasures and thrills in life elsewhere, which generally results in a great deal of instability as well as resentment surely on the part of the ace, if not the same feeling of loneliness many a night.

     After watching the character of Tobie Donovan in the TV-series Heartstopper, who spends most of the first two seasons with his head stuck in a book, I did grow even more sympathetic; but I still remain unconvinced. The Aces have seemingly bowed out of looking for the rainbow before the storm has even let up.

     I must admit, however, that Ukrainian-born director Andrii Zhuravskyi, who now lives in London, has presented one of the most sympathetic portraits of the phenomenon I’ve yet encountered.

 

Los Angeles, July 10, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (July 2025).

Ovié Étseyatsé and Ryan Dolan | Fall to the Floor / 2014 [music video]

wanting it all

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ryan Dolan and Wez Devine (lyrics and music), Ovié Étseyatsé (director) Fall to the Floor / 2014 [4.15 minutes] [music video]

 

In the very same year when Eurovision star, pop singer Ryan Dolan came out publicly as gay, he released the single Fall to the Floor.

     In this 2014 recording, the Irish performer Dolan combines what is basically a song of sensation—the chorus repeats his emotional response,

 

But I fall to the floor

When you walk through that door

I fall down, I fall down

I fall to the floor

When you draw your sword

I fall down, I fall down

I fall down—

 

which he combines with a narrative of breaking up, requiring him to show us the departing lover, and admit some of the vague reasons for his lover’s return of the ring, packing up his bags, and leaving.

You say I'm dreaming

And that's why you're leaving

To want it all, is that so bad?

And now we're both hurting

Because we know it's not working

As we watch the curtain fall

We see the writing on the wall

One life one chance, one bad romance

It makes this easy

You can walk away

Now you've had your say

Go and grab your things

Throw away that ring

I don't want this any more

     Overpowered by his emotions, Dolan goes rushing after the car which carries away is lover (performed by Elijah Rowen), and for a moment it appears as if the escaping partner may stop, allowing a sort of reversal of what the chorus intones. But in the end, the narrative wins out as the car speeds away with Dolan now a long distance in the rearview mirror.

      Since 2019, Dolan appears to have dropped out of the music scene; he now runs a pub in County Tyrone.

 

Los Angeles, July 10, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (July 2025).

 

 

 

 

 

Joel Lamangan | Aishite Imasu 1941 (愛しています) / Mahal Kita 1941 (I Love You) / 2004

betrayals

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ricardo Lee (screenplay), Joel Lamangan (director) Aishite Imasu 1941 (愛しています) / Mahal Kita 1941 (I Love You) / 2004

 

One of the very most interesting movies of the first decade of the new century was the Philippines’ historical wartime epic, Aishite Imasu 1941 (愛しています) / Mahal Kita 1941 (I Love You), directed by Joel Lamangan. Even the title testifies to the extraordinariness of this work about the Japanese invasion and occupation of the Philippines from 1941-1945 during World War II, presenting events of the small town San Nicholas from multi-cultural viewpoints through Tagalog, Japanese, and English.

     The major figures of this story are Inya (Judy Ann Santos), Edilberto (Raymart Santiago), and Igancio “Igna” Basa (Dennis Trillo), the three growing up together, Edilberto falling in love with Inya in a community mocks homosexual youth, and Ignacio falling in love in what he recognizes will remain an unrequited relationship with Edilberto.

     Working as a tailor for his “Aunt,” a neighbor who has saved him from his father’s beatings, the beautiful effeminate Ignacio begins to move toward cross-dressing, modeling some of the dresses he is asked to stitch. Ignacio has a lovely soprano voice and, accordingly, is often asked to sing dressed as a female in town celebrations.

     As this film begins Inya and Edilberto are just about to be married and looking forward to beginning a new family. Igna is still a confused boy unable to comprehend his pulls toward femininity when suddenly, the day after Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, the Japanese attack the Philippine cities Manila, Baguio, Davao, Iba, and the Clark airfields, bringing the war to the surprised populace which was still very much under US domination, and who believe that they will be immediately protected by American intervention. In fact, one of the major Japanese arguments early in their invasion is that as a fellow Asian nation they are in a better position to protect the Filipinos than were the colonialist Americans.

     But at the early moments of the invasion, the townspeople of San Nicholas cannot even imagine that they might be worth Japanese attention. To create a sense of normalcy, the Mayor of the town  (Tony Mabesa) attempts to gather the citizens in an annual celebration of singing, dancing, and food. The lead singer, however, does not show up, so Ignacio, dressed up as a woman in preparation for his own later performance, is asked to replace her, appearing on stage at the very moment when the new Japanese commander, Ichiru Hamaguchi (Jay Manolo) appears in an attempt to qualm the villagers fears about the occupation.

     Seeing and hearing Ignacio perform Ichiru immediately is attracted to Ignacio, seeking to find out who she is and how he might approach her parents. To avoid revealing that the beautiful young woman who arouses his love is, in fact, a young man, the Mayor quickly names her Inya, and after the event Ichiru visits the seamstress for whom Ignacio works to seek her permission to bring her back with him into Japanese headquarters. The major city figures as well as Inya, Edilberto, and others meet to determine that Ignacio must continue in women’s dress to perform as Inya, forming a relationship with the Japanese leader in order to spy on the invading forces, feeding information back to an already forming group of Philippine guerilla fighters, one of whose central members is Edilberto.

      At first the fearful Igna refuses, fearing not only that he will not be able to keep up the pretense, particularly if Ichiru should demand sexual activity, but also worried about the consequences if his spying activities were to be discovered, which surely would entail his death. Yet the town leaders convince him that’s it necessary, and he’s soon taken into Ichiru’s circle, just as Edilberto leaves his new wife to join other villagers on the battlefield where they quite successfully take several Japanese soldier’s lives.

       Even though the whole city knows that Igna is not Inya, a boy not a woman even if he now looks like one, they all seem to participate in a kind of game of pretense, no one, not even the local mad street figure or the traitorous Maura (Angelu de Leon) dares to breathe the truth. Maura, a Filipino woman having spent a period of time in Japan, joins with the Japanese to communicate their orders to the townspeople and often to point out potential and likely rebels to the Japanese, who round them up and torture them, even if innocent, as a lesson to the larger community that all rebellion will be met with death.

       At one point she provides information about Captain Edilberto’s family which ends in the Japanese murdering his mother, father, and sisters; and at another, growing disturbed by Inya’s complete acceptance by the Japanese, reveals to one of Ichiru’s associates that Inya is a man, but when he tells Ichiru, the Commander appears to disbelieve it and slaps the officer across his face in public for what he describes as a lie.

       Igna/Inya, in fact, does pass on information at one point to the underground, and a large number of Japanese soldiers are killed, but Ichiru’s lover soon discovers that she is not only become comfortable “performing” as a woman, but that she has begun to fall in love with her captor. Unlike David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly, however, Inya is no illusionist. And, in one of the most shocking moments of the film, after she attempts to delay Ichiru’s demand for sex, he admits that he has known from beginning that Inya is not a woman but a male with who he still desires sex and with whom he is in love. In short, he obviously is like many homosexual men who, unable to or disinterested in admitting his own sexual desires as a queer, chooses to have sex only with transgender men who identify as or feel that they are women.*

      The fact that he knows about and still loves her only intensifies Inya’s love for Ichiru, and the two now share an honesty among their themselves that was previously missing. Inya begins to inquire, for example, how such a loving man can continue to commit such brutal acts upon her own people.

      The other Inya also begins to question how Edilberto, a loving man before the war has now been consumed by his hatred of the Japanese, particularly after the brutal killings of his parents and siblings. But in the process she perceives, she has also lost his love. The baby she was expecting dies in childbirth, and their second child, conceived after a long period of sexual distance between them due to war, is stillborn. Both men, fighting on opposite sides, argue that everything changes in war, and we observe that what they would never have imagined themselves doing in normal times, are horrendous actions upon which they now thrive. 

      In fact, we begin to perceive that almost all the characters in this work have somehow been swept up into what others and even themselves define as betrayals. When Ignacio will no longer spy on her beloved Ichiru, she is perceived as having betrayed the Filipino cause, and Inya is told she can no longer have any contact with her former childhood friend—perhaps the only person remaining with whom she can share her grief over the death of her children and the loss of her husband’s love. Finally, she is herself betrayed by her community as the guerrillas capture and torture Inya when they discover that she has disobeyed her Edilberto’s edict.

       Hurt and angry over her punishment for crimes she has not committed, she, in turn, betrays Edilberto by refusing his love at the very moment when he is attempting to return to some sense of normalcy between them. Feeling feverous and begging to stay home from a guerrilla attack on that very day when Inya choses to reject his love, he returns to the battlefield to be killed after bravely attacking and routing an entire brigade of Japanese soldiers, who finally call on their air defense to help the few remaining soldiers to escape.

       Faced with her own deep grief over her husband’s death and her guilt for her part in it, Inya now becomes a guerilla warrior herself, rising quickly in the ranks due to her almost reckless attacks on the Japanese, to become the notorious Commander Berto.

       Fearful now that Ichiru’s Inya will reveal the true identity of the real Inya and her new identity of Berto, the townsfolk now turn on Ignacio, speaking out about the town “faggot’s” true sexuality to the Japanese, which leads to his immediate arrest and imprisonment, soon after followed by Ichiru’s forced release of command and imprisonment. Surely, his fellow soldiers reason, he must have known about his lover’s true sexuality and continued nonetheless with the relationship.

       Ichiru’s assistant commander, Akihiro (Marco Alcaraz), who himself has fallen in love and impregnated a local girl, helps them escape from prison. The two have nowhere to go but to the seamstresses’ home, where she temporarily hides them. There both Inyas meet up, Ignacio assuring Berto that he has never betrayed her, and Inya finally coming to realize how fully her former friend has fallen in love with the Japanese Commander.

       After the meeting, Inya and Ichiru reconfirm their love for one another, she revealing how she has betrayed him and he admitting that he knew even of that but loved her so much he helped to keep it secret, insisting that she must now escape at the very moment he begs her to leave him alone. In the room next to where she waits for what will surely be her recapture by the Japanese, Ichiru commits Seppuku, the Japanese ritual of suicide by disembowelment, while his cohort Akihiro slits his own throat. 

     Inya is recaptured, taken back to the prison, and horribly tortured through beatings, water dunking, being hung upside down, and other forms of unspeakable abuse. Commander Berto and her forces rush to the prison in an attempt to save her namesake, and finally are able to free Ichiru’s lover from the ropes as they carry her to the town plaza, where, at the very last moment, Inya/Ignacio is shot by Japanese forces who make one final futile attempt to control the town.

       Most of this sad tale of betrayals is told to the contemporary town fathers—who seek to memorialize the World War II heroes so that younger generations might remember them—by a now quite elderly Inya (Anita Linda) for whom such memorials no longer hold much meaning. All she has left of the past is the sad truth, finally revealing to the young woman who cares for her, that her grandmother was the young Filipino woman who bore Akihiro’s child, thus making the young girl half Japanese.

       The generation of town elders is delighted to have discovered the history of San Nicholas’ heroes without quite recognizing the fact that in such a war there were no heroes in the traditional sense, that nearly everyone involved was motivated not only by national hatreds and decrees but by both learned and newly-discovered personal forces such as racism, homophobia, fear, guilt and perhaps primarily by the pulls of the heart. Strangely, only the queer couple Ichiru and Inya/Ignacio never betrayed their love.

 

*This film, which functions through a series of doublings Inya/Inya, Ichiru/Akihiro, Edilberto/Berto, etc. also has another transgender figure, Edna, another seamstress who works with the young Ignacio, who we are told is really man who everyone simply treats as a female friend.

 

Los Angeles, July 4, 2021

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