Derek Jarman | It's a Sin / 1987 [official video] | It's a Sin / 1989 [Wembley Stadium concert video]

two sinful manifestations

by Douglas Messerli

 

Pet Shop Boys [Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe] (composers and performers) Derek Jarman (director) It’s a Sin / 1987 [remastered, official video] / 1989 [Wembley Stadium live concert video]

 

Let me begin in my comments on one of the greatest hits of the synth group Pet Shop Boys by focusing on the official 1989 video relating to their album Actually.

    In this version of It’s a Sin, directed by queer filmmaker Derek Jarman, the original song extended its lyrical themes with far more action than the lead singer Neil Tennant usually performed. In this version Tennant is under arrest in an Inquisition-like setting, led to bonfires and other spots by his jailer performed by composer Chris Lowe who is attached to his fellow performer by a metal chain.

    Various elements of the montage include a group of bored and sinning monks and several women reenacting various personifications of the seven deadly sins, in particular gluttony, lust, sloth, and greed, with a figure with long green fingers representing greed, and the actions of the judge (actor Ron Moody) symbolizing both wrath and pride.

     Arguably, in this vision, the endless sins which Tennant recites that he has been told he is guilty throughout the St. Cuthbert’s Grammar School education, does not necessarily include homosexuality. At this point, Tennant had not yet openly admitted to his homosexuality (not wanting to be defined by his sexuality, Tennant actually came out in a 1994 interview in the UK gay lifestyle magazine Attitude), and the sins of the song seem to be of a general sort, unless it be represented by the frieze of closely gathered young monks:

 

it’s always with a sense of shame

I’ve always been the one to blame

For everything I long to do

no matter when or where or who

has one thing in common too

 

It’s a, it’s a, it’s a, it’s a sin

It’s a sin

Everything I’ve ever done

Everything I ever do

Every place I’ve ever been

Everywhere I’m going to

It’s a sin

 

At school they taught me how to be

so pure in thought and word and deed

They didn’t quite succeed

For everything I long to do

no matter when or where or who

has one thing in common too

 

    After an angry complaint about the song from his former grammar school St. Cuthbert’s, Tennant declaimed the comments of a school staffer as being cowardly in commenting anonymously about a former pupil, citing the embarrassment of his own parents, who still lived in Newcastle, the site of the school.

    In a 2009 interview, moreover, Tennant commented:

 

“People took it really seriously; the song was written in about 15 minutes, and was intended as a camp joke and it wasn't something I consciously took very seriously—sometimes I wonder if there was more to it than I thought at the time—but the local parish priest in Newcastle delivered a sermon on it, and reflected on how the Church changed from the promise of a ghastly hell to the message of love.”

*

 

   The far more interesting performance of this work, however, is the live Wembley Stadium performance in 1989, also directed by Jarman.

    Here Tennant appears in a campy exaggeration the holy red robes of an Episcopalian Bishop, almost literally in drag, altering his role in the original video as being simply a prisoner of sin to being a person of authority both describing and proclaiming Tennant's boyish sins.

 

   In this rendition, the seven deadly sins are much more comically realized as masked and papier-mâché-headed of a pig (gluttony), a green-skirted woman (envy), etc.

 

    While Tennant basically stands and occasionally strolls upon the stage, Lowe is kept busy performing at the synthesizer.

   

     Most importantly, the projected visuals do not just repeat the images on the stage, but flash obviously gay-boy figures upon the screen, and eventually through a wrap-around scrim surrounding the performers in the flames of hell. The sins here are being punished through the tortures of the church, but through the hell-fire of Satan himself.

   Here, it is clear, that homosexuality is most definitely one of the sins of which Tennant has been accused, as the partially nude gay boys dance along with the montage of images awash in flames.

 

Los Angeles, October 24, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October 2025).

 

George Barbakadze | The Bridge / 2005

love torn apart

by Douglas Messerli

 

George Barbakadze and Fleur Cooper (screenplay), George Barbakadze (director) The Bridge / 2005 [8 minutes]

 

Long before the current United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) attempts to rid the US of as many people of color without (and sometimes even with) citizenship as they can round up, ICE still created havoc with many families, particularly young couples not yet married who had arrived in the US to begin a new life, sometimes one being accepted for a green card while the other was rejected.

    One day, one of my best students came to me with just such a problem. He had fallen in love with a beautiful Swedish woman, but they weren’t yet ready for marriage, and despite his father’s governmental connections (he had been a US ambassador to several countries), Immigration had denied her permission to remain in the US any longer. “What should I do?” he asked.

    I was a strong believer in advanced education, convinced that without it capable young men and women would be strongly delimited in their futures. But his love for this woman seemed so powerful that I could only advise him to follow her back to Sweden. “After all, I said, you can always get an education a little later, but if you miss the woman you love, you may never find another like her.”

    He followed my advice, and today, living in Sweden, they are still married some 50 years later.

   Such problems were often were even more difficult (and probably in the US are now even worse, because they can marry) for gay men and women who couldn’t marry. After all, ICE had no interest in bringing queers into the good ole USA!

    Before same-sex marriage was permitted in most Western countries, these difficulties weren’t limited to the US, but occurred in nearly all nations, whose departments of immigration’s decisions of who could stay and who must leave seemed sometimes like a throw of the dice.

    Australian filmmaker George Barbakadze, in his short film The Bridge, tells of just such a couple, Luka (Glen Upton) and Niko (Andre Cunningham), young Georgian gay men who escaped from their homeland in response to its homophobic attitudes.

    Luka has arrived in Sydney first, followed by his friend. Perhaps because he is an architect, so it appears, he soon receives a letter announcing his permanent residency in his newly adopted country.

    The two begin enjoying their life together, Luka constructing his dream home for the two of them and Niko involved with his works of pottery. But one day Luka returns home to find Niko gone; he has received a rejection from the immigration authorities, and to save his lover and himself from a sad series of farewells, has decided to leave immediately leaving only a letter to explain his disappearance.

   The problem with this short work is that there is hardly any dialogue or even developed interplay between the two lovers. We know so little about them and their lives that the only thing we can be sure of is the film’s assurance of their love and the fact that they have been torn apart through governmental bureaucracy, which continues to sadden Luca for the rest of his life.

    This is an important issue, but to recognize the effects it has upon individuals who only seek to find a safe place in which to love one another, we first have to understand them and their love for one another, something that Barbakadze’s eight-minute work does not provide.

    Moreover, it would be interesting to know what happens to people like Niko who must return to a country not at all sympathetic to the reasons why he escaped. Was he arrested and put into prison or even worse?

    Although his director has taken on a truly troublesome and profound issue, he hasn’t done it any service by delimiting his tale to occasional languishing looks between the two men and the moody score by Alies Sluiter. We need to understand more about their lives, hear their voices, however accented they may be, and observe them showing the love we are led to believe exists between them. The old literary saw about showing instead of telling in this work is entirely appropriate. They need to show us more than their coming and going for us to understand how cruel these immigration departments often are in their generalized treatment of individual lives around the world.

 

Los Angeles, October 24, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October 2025).

 

 

Lisa Steen | Stepdaddy / 2019

invitation to dinner

by Douglas Messerli

 

Anna Greenfield (screenplay, based on a story by Lauren Blumenfeld and Max Jenkins), Lisa Steen (director) Stepdaddy / 2019 [7 minutes]

Wyatt (Max Jenkins) has invited his friend from long ago, Patricia (Lauren Blumenfeld) over for dinner. Apparently they have gone to school together, when she had somewhat of a crush on Wyatt, even though she knew he was gay. She still describes their acquaintance as somehow “being together,” and from what he mentions, rather contentiously over the increasingly difficult dinner conversation, it is apparent that she has at one point attempted to suck him off, knowing full well at the same event that he was attracted to a boy at the event. 

    When she suggests that he has never been able to take criticism, after describing his terrible performance at a karaoke bar, he bitchily responds: “I forgot that you drink wine like you give head—with tiny, sharp little fangs that hurt my foreskin.”

    Meanwhile, he has moved forward with his life as a macrame artist—hardly a stunning career— while Patricia can only respond that she has moved away from her intended career.

    Hurt by the way conversation has brought up former contentions between them, she is ready to drive home drunk, pausing in the doorway just long enough to tell Wyatt that the only reason she has accepted his dinner invitation is that she has frozen her eggs, and knows no one other than him whom she might invite to be a sperm donor.

    But at that very moment, her own father (Peter Gallagher) shows up at the door, Patricia being quite confused, but then imagining that Wyatt has called him to give her a ride home. Almost immediately, however, she finds it strange that he would have her father’s telephone number. And it quickly becomes apparent that the person who Wyatt has told her he is seeing is her own father, who now has the difficulty of explaining that he and Wyatt, having in love, are about to marry, meaning that Wyatt will be her….the final word is never spoken, since it is, after all, the title of this very devilish and humorous short film.

     Unless she wants her stepfather to also be the real father of her own children…well that’s for her to figure out when and if she makes it back to her own house sober enough to evaluate the new situation.

 

Los Angeles, October 24, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October 2025).

 

Brittany Alexia Young | Munchies / 2025

i’m sorry

by Douglas Messerli

 

Brittany Alexia Young (screenwriter and director) Munchies / 2025 [11 minutes]

 

You realize that you are truly an old man of many generations earlier when Newfest features a film where several vulgar teenage lesbian girls (Caroline Buddendorf, Regina Chueva, and Brianne Jackson, and Yamini Nambimadom) get stoned, verbally attack one another, and “sort of” make up saying “I’m sorry,” and by agreeing they’re all now starved for sweets and snacks.

     What else can they do but rush over to their nearest convenience store, make a rush through its aisles, giggle when encountering a man with a gun named Cal (Max Castillo) attempting to rob the store, and giggle some more until he threatens to kill them.

     Eventually, they cause such confusion that he drops the gun, the toughest girl of the bunch grabbing it and holding him at bay. Well, not for long. When he moves forward demanding its return, she shoots him dead. For a second they are silenced, but perceive that behind the mask is a man who according to his wallet has a kid who he caring for, perhaps the reason for his bungled robbery.

     Rushing from the place they spot his car, inside of which is the baby, for whom, it appears, they now perceive themselves to be responsible. Why it never strikes any of them to call the police and report the truth, is not explained.

     Moreover, this terrifyingly creepy little movie was defined by the Newfest selectors as a comedy. And even when attempting to raise funds for this short disaster, the creators seemed to be oblivious to the film’s full implications:

 

“Munchies is a coming-of-age story, combining the heart of movies like Booksmart and Edge of Seventeen, with the raunchier stoner comedy of movies like Project X or Superbad. Unlike many coming-of-age films, Munchies has a Black queer woman at its center without her identity being a problem or a source of conflict. At its core, Munchies shows both the beauty and camaraderie that comes with female friendship, as well as the friction that can accompany it. The film explores the central theme that what is done in the dark always comes to light.”

 

    Sorry girls, usually one doesn’t come of age by getting stoned and killing another being, even accidentally.    

    Presuming that he/she speaks with total irony, I agree with Letterboxd commentator Koî Glasscock, who describes the plot as representing “The very relatable situation of getting high with your girlfriends and then accidentally shooting a robber and then getting stuck with his baby when he dies.” But then, since this individual also awarded the film four stars, perhaps he/she isn’t speaking ironically.

     In the Trumpian world in which we now exist, it’s hard to know. But trust me, if you have a mind and even half a heart, no matter how hungry you are, don’t trouble with this piece of tripe.

 

Los Angeles, October 24, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October 2025).

 

Emily May Jampel | Clean Slate / 2025

i’ll take manhattan

by Douglas Messerli

 

Josephine Chiang and Joyce Keokham (screenplay), Emily May Jampel (director) Clean Slate / 2025 [9 minutes]

 

I’m up for a good black comedy any day, but recently I have watched perhaps too many so-called comedies wherein lovers and dear friends blithely do in the other for self-gain, works in which it is hard to even regurgitate a chortle let alone a full grown chuckle. Welcome to the Trump years.

     Josephine (Josephine Chiang) and Joyce (Joyce Keokham) are two non-binary friends (although the movie doesn’t quite satisfactorily reveal why it’s an LGBTQ work other than its press kit statements) who have moved together from California to New York to find acting gigs that might include an Asian non-binary figure.

    Writing in The Daily Californian, Molly Flynn nicely captures what these women face:

    

“On top of this all-too-familiar battle between success and friendship, Josephine and Joyce are entrenched in an industry that can’t even bother to discern the difference between two queer, Asian actors. As they perform their audition pieces, editor Alan Wu cuts back and forth between the two of them reading the same lines, reflecting the director’s inability to differentiate the pair. When the show’s director gives Josephine a callback mistaking them for Joyce, the short film fully displays the shocking expendability with which Hollywood perceives its talent. The endless machine of creation, production and money-making doesn’t have time to learn names and faces. Josephine and Joyce learn this the hard way in Clean Slate making their uphill battle toward fame all the steeper.”

 

    They both seem to get call-backs for the role, but when it turns out that Josephine’s is not really on the list, but her dear friend Joyce is, despite their friendly river-view chats and boba fortifiers, something in Josephine snaps. Joyce, clearly the more grounded of the two, has begun to debate whether it’s worth staying in New York just for the slight chance to get a small role. She tells Josephine that if she doesn’t land the role in her call-back, she’s thinking of taking the plane back home.

    But when, by accident of a dropped cellphone, Joyce discovers that, in fact, Josephine has been pretending to be her, and is planning to attend Joyce’s call-back, something’s “gotta to give!” And in this case it’s as simple as providing Joyce with a route to obscurity via the Hudson River in order to allow Josey a “clean slate” to impersonate her dear former friend.

    At film’s end, we’re left with only one very “would-be” actor standing, forcing us to wonder whether for Josephine it was worth killing off her best friend and, more importantly, whether or not it was worth watching this mean little movie.

 

Los Angeles, October 24, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October 2025).

Timothy Smith | Attack / 2005

various versions of a hate crime

by Douglas Messerli

 

Timothy Smith (screenwriter and director) Attack / 2005 [8 minutes]

Even as the front titles role for this short British film of 2005, we see the aftermath of an attack, a British bobby taking down the report from the head of a local black gang, Steve (Tyronne Lewis) who declares that he and friends were attacked out of nowhere by the skinhead Malcolm (Callum Walker) who now lies unconscious on the ground.

 

   Steve and his gang, including two teenage boys who offer up their statements, one badly bloodied, who claim they were the one’s attacked, can’t believe that the policeman has called an ambulance for both their friend and the attacker. “We’ll take care of him,” Steve insists. A girl from the gang (Maria Mathurin) steps out of the shadows—a bit like West Side Story’s Anybodys—and spits on the downed skinhead.

    But soon we see events spool out a bit differently, as we watch the bloodied black boy, and his friend running down the alley to report to Steve, their gang leader, that he’s just been attacked.

     In another Rashomon-like version of events, it seems to have just been a stand-off, as the black boys discovered and were challenged by the skinhead in the alley.

    Yet another version, makes it clear that they are stalking Malcolm after he has just left a bar, he repeatedly asking them as he tries to move off down the alley to just let him be, that he wants no fight.

 

  And finally, we get another viewpoint, explaining perhaps an entirely different logic. Both Malcolm and his black lover Max (Eugene Washington) drunkenly explode out of the bar, kissing one another several times before leaving for the night, each on their separate ways home. Malcolm begins his journey once again down the alley.

 

    The teenage blacks appear, clearly having watched the interchange, and brutally beat the white gay boy, who attempts to defend himself.

    The fact that we are led to believe that the latter version is perhaps the most credible is somewhat problematic, since it simply reifies the notion that it is always black men who attack the whites, when we know that it’s usually the other way around.

    David Hall, writing in Gay Celluloid, however, sees it less as a variation of events as he argues that it represents a completely backwards telling of events:

 

“Violent by nature, strong by language and yet equally laced with scenes of homosexual tenderness, this in-your-face work questions how one can at times form an opinion on something or someone based solely upon appearance, without knowing the true facts involved. For does camp equal gay? Does a white skinhead sporting a flight jacket and bovver boots equate to neo-Nazi? And did a racist attack really take place that night?”

 

    What this film most certainly does reveal is that not everything, particularly when it comes to gay sexual matters, is as black and white as it may seem. There are multitudes of reasons why such attacks occur around the world, night after night, and it this case it probably may have been the product not only reverse racism but homophobia as well.

 

Los Angeles, October 24, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October 2025).

Dan Aeberhard | Anything Once / 1998

maybe

by Douglas Messerli

 

Dan Aeberhard (screenwriter and director) Anything Once / 1998

 

Dan Aeberhard’s 23-minute film, Anything Once bears a superficial resemblance to Lane Janger’s Just One Time, the short version of which was released the same year, 1998. Yet, while Janger’s work hints at the desire for the two central figures to give someone of same sex a try, this short film involves a challenge to explore the opposite of their chosen genders, Joey (Michael Arenz) dared to undergo a heterosexual experience, while he challenges his friend Mike (William Gregory Lee) to try having sex with another male.

     If Joey is a bit confused how to go about it given that fact that he is seeking a girl who has so many special qualities that he would never be able to meet someone who might live up to his expectations, he quickly learns that, at least as the girl he accidentally encounters, Carmen (Traci Burgard) is concerned, it doesn’t really care if they have anything in common, an attitude more in line with Joey’s friend Mike, who argues that what a girl thinks or likes doesn’t matter, “its sex you’re after.”

    And apparently the simple, if a bit unusual fact that Joey sees her dress as looking like something that Audrey Hepburn might wear and that they both love the film Breakfast at Tiffany’s is enough for her; like Mike who just wants pussy, she just wants cock.

     Accordingly, when she follows up their meeting with a visit, she takes over, almost fucking him; all Joey has to do is lay back, take a good look at the picture hanging on his wall of him and his friend, who in the photo looks a lot like James Dean, and let the sex happen. He’s met his part of the challenge, and discovers it wasn’t so bad—although he doesn’t mention the photograph.

     To help Mike live up to his part of the deal, he takes him to a local Los Angeles gay bar; but by the time he lists the numerous do’s and don’ts—if asked if you’re a top or bottom, say neither unless you know what that means; watch out for those guys who try unzip their pants in public; always say yes to “rim jobs,” but if you’re going to do it to him make sure he’s really, really clean; I guess you can just stick to oral if you want to, but otherwise just be safe; always wear a condom—it’s clear that the gay bar scene is a bit too much for a neophyte to assimilate.

     But what do I do now? pleads Mike. At that very moment a waiter dressed in leather straps arrives with some drinks suggesting “Why don’t you have one on me?” Mike agrees, and the go-go like boy picks up a shot glass and pours liquor over his nipple. “But you gotta lick it off, baby.”

     Overwhelmed, Mike understandably flees the place, with Joey close behind. Joey suggests they just try something else, something mellow. And we suddenly perceive that this film is probably heading in a new direction closer to the genre I described in my essay on several films from the films of 2011-2013, “How to Lose Your Best Friend.”

     Sure enough, before Joey’s even parked the car at their shared apartment, they’re complimenting each other on how good they look. There’s a long pause, as Mike asks, “What you lookin’ at?” to which Joey answers, “You.” Leaning into his friend’s face he slowly kisses him before he backs away. “Too weird?” he asks. There is another long pause before Mike answer’s “uh-uh!”

       In the very next frame we see them in bed the next morning. Mike slowly rises, and Joey serves breakfast. “So I did it, okay?”

     Joey asks, “Well, did you like it?”

     “It was interesting.”

     “So, I guess we’re even then, man.”

     A pause. “Yeh.”

     “I mean, you know, unless....”

     “Unless what?” Pause. “Unless you want to do it again?”

     Mike blows air through his lips as if dismissing even the possibility.

     They stare at each other intensely before Joey cracks a smile, Mike finally speaking, “Maybe we will.”

      Evidently these friends will remain friends while taking advantage of the new kind of relationship that has suddenly developed between them. At least Joey no longer just has to stare at the picture but has the real thing close at hand, and, if nothing else, an actual memory. And evidently we have moved past Janger’s Just One Time.

      If this film is highly improbable simply because it presents such sexual shifts as being easy—as if changing one’s sexual orientation was simply a matter of changing one’s taste like becoming interested in Indian food or suddenly developing a craving for anchovy pizza—it represents, nonetheless, an interesting possibility that Mike, if not both of them, may prove Freud right, that all people are basically “bisexual...and their libido is distributed between objects of both sexes, either in a manifest or a latent form.” I used to believe that nonsense. But having lived now to the ripe old age of 78 without ever having sex with a woman, I guess I’ve proven Freud mistaken. I love women, but have never had a desire, openly or latently, to join them in bed.

 

Los Angeles, July 25, 2021

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