Ian Wolfley | Bug Chaser / 2012

risk

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ian Wolfley (screenwriter and director) Bug Chaser / 2012 [20 minutes]

 

This little 2012 “horror film,” I must admit, originally made me quite angry! The story of a young gay couple arriving at an “expensive condo” (one of the characters brags about just how expensive his condo is) to engage in sultry gay sex is certainly an “attractive” beginning. The new boys, Nathan (Brenden Gregory) and Ryan (James M. Arthur) seem a good match, ready for a hot night in bed. But then, as they begin ripping clothes off of each other’s body, Nathan observes something unusual: a spot on Ryan’s pants; asking “What’s this?” his friend replying that it must be “cum.” But Nathan it doesn’t look like cum, “It looks kind of like a butterfly.” Both ignore it, however, as the smallest and most insignificant of signs; besides it’s on Ryan’s pants, not his cock.

     Soon after, however, Ryan discovers a far greater problem when he goes to fuck Nathan, a significant growth in his anus, which Nathan, after quickly inspecting it, has never before noticed. All sexual contract is immediately suspended as Nathan returns back to his ramshackle apartment, attempting to get a better look at his growth, which seems to be expanding by the moment. First, he attempts to lance it, without success. He reads up about such growths on the internet: possibly a wart. He drinks heavily, attempts to sleep. He awakens in a sweat and quickly grows physically ill, whether from the alcohol he’s been consuming or the growth, we can’t tell.

      If nothing else, one has to give high praise for actor Gregory’s commitment to the role, which keeps him mostly naked with deep inspection in a varied-colored growth in his ass, to which Wolfley’s camera serves as endless voyeur.

      Finally, Nathan calls up Ian (played by Wolfley himself) who works as a nurse and obviously is ready to stop over and have sex with Nathan anytime he’s invited. But Nathan obviously wants only to have him take a look at the growth, the likes of which Ian has never before witnessed. He suggests his friend immediately visit the emergency room or that he make an appointment with a doctor. When Nathan admits that he hasn’t any insurance and little cash, Ian even offers to pay for it. Nathan inexplicably rejects the offer and Ian leaves, as Nathan, taking up a scissors, begins the horrific process of attempting to cut it away by himself.

      Surely this is a kind of horror film, a real-life imposter film ripped out of the pages of the last three decades of the 20th century. Men with AIDS found revealing signs crop up daily across their bodies, and had to determine how to approach them. Doctors, particularly, in the early years were not as helpful or benign as one might hope. And of the course the death sentence of doctoral pronouncement was not something many young men, in the prime of their lives, easily sought out.

      So almost until the very end of the film, I was fairly impressed, eager to discover what happens when one imagines, fruitlessly, that one can take care of such things by themselves.

      Flashback to the couple in bed, the spot on Ryan’s pants, as the couple resume their sexual intercourse with a giggle over their momentary fears.

      I was angry! No one of my generation could possibly have made light of such a horrific situation. No one younger than 23 could have suggested, well I’m glad that’s over, as this movie seemed to imply.

      I quickly discovered, however, that my peeve was misplaced. Wolfley, in a 2013 interview on the internet blog HorrorNews.Net recounts that he made this movie after working closely with a group of filmmakers who called themselves the “HIV Story Project,” working on a series of shorts about HIV and AIDS:

      

“I’ve been making short movies for about ten years now. When I moved to San Francisco I got lucky and I met a group of film makers that called themselves the HIV Story Project and their goal was to make a feature length film comprised of a series of shorts where we got different directors and got them together with someone who had HIV or AIDS or was a caregiver with a compelling story to tell. Then they would collaborate on a short film together. I was actually volunteering for them but I convinced the producer that he should let me help them and I became an associate producer on that project.”

 

The interviewer also describes that his daughter clued him in to what the title really meant, at least in urban parlance: “a person attempting to acquire HIV, regularly having sex with unprotected partners.” And that definition obviously changes everything. The horror of the scene we’ve just experienced is an overstated possibility of what Nathan and/or Ryan are perhaps personally allowing to occur to their own bodies.

      Wolfley suggests as much in his comments in that 2013 interview:

 

“IW: That makes total sense & I totally hear where you’re coming from. I called it Bug Chaser and it seems that most people think it’s literally about a person who’s chasing bugs around. My intention was for the title to be much more allegorical; the rationale of these people is that it’s going to happen anyway so they just want to get it over with. What I was trying to do is play with the idea of risk. Nathan has this horrible fantasy trip & at the end he has the opportunity to continue doing what he’s going to do or as we see it’s possible that it can end very badly. So the question becomes “Is he going to do it or not”? And he still decides to do it. It’s more about the times that we do things that we know are going to end up badly and do it anyway.”

 

     One commentator from The Bay Area Reporter suggested that he had laughed his way through the heart of the movie, and expected his viewers would do the same. But not I. And I don’t think that was Wolfley’s intent. It was not some paranoid fantasy that Nathan was having in an age where we now recognize that AIDS can be controlled if not cured. It was a real horror story, a very frightening one to which the risk he takes might have truly taken him.

 

Los Angeles, October 15, 2022

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October 2022).

Bill Mullan | Disclosure / 2012

revelations

by Douglas Messerli

 

Bill Mullan (screenwriter and director) Disclosure / 2012 [22 minutes]

 

An attractive gay couple, Tyler (Bryan Fox) and Ryan (Derek Viveiros) have been together for two years now, and are considering adopting a child. Indeed, as the film begins with Tyler looking somewhat distracted, Ryan arrives home with several packages, including a new stuffed toy for their impending child.

     But Tyler seems moody, wondering aloud “What if they don’t think I’ll make a good dad?” Ryan reassures him that they’ll love him, and he’ll be the perfect father. Tyler continues to cook the meal. But after eating admits that he has something to share with his lover.

     The shock, accordingly comes early in this 22-minute film, as Tyler reveals that he is not only HIV-positive but that he has known about it for five years.

      Bill Mullan’s film Disclosure (2012) doesn’t try to sidestep the situation, immediately displaying Ryan’s anger, his disbelief that his companion has been so cowardly that he has not found it possible to tell him before, as well as his terror for having endangered his own life.

       Tyler assures him that he has made sure that Ryan has been safe, meaning presumably that he has always worn condoms when fucking his partner. And he explains, when Ryan asks who else he has told, that everyone who has told has left him, and he didn’t want to chance that happening again being so very much in love.

       Tyler’s parents, moreover, apparently won’t speak to him, and when he attempts to call home soon after to tell them the situation, his mother refuses to even have a substantial conversation.

       So too is he given the cold shoulder by his lover, who immediately schedules an appointment with his doctor to be tested for AIDS. Ryan also suggests that it is Tyler who must move out. Obviously, his hurt is deep and justified, and there is no easy resolve for the years of Tyler’s silence.

      Yet, once he has seemingly severed himself from his companion, things subtly shift in this intelligent film. At his long-time family doctor’s office, when he explains he would like an AIDS test, Dr. Radlciff (Bobby Reed) immediately replies that could get such a test in any local clinic. But when Ryan explains he wants it immediately at his doctor’s office, the elderly gentlemen curtly arranges for the test but suggests that his schedule has now gotten so very filled that he plans to arrange for Ryan in the future to see another colleague.

       With his doctor’s refusal to be further involved with anything to do with AIDS or homosexuals, Ryan has encountered his first major sign of rejection, perhaps in his life.

       Depressed, he stops by a local gay bar, starring into space while moodily drinking. Another young man buys him a drink, moving in to talk by using the obvious come-on that Ryan looks like he could use another drink and it appears he needs someone to talk to.

       Although Ryan recognizes the ploy, he obviously is in need of company, perhaps seeing the opportunity to have sex with another man as the beginning of his punishment to his lying lover. In the car, however, as the stranger (Brian Lloyd) begin to kiss Ryan, the latter reluctantly moving forward with the foreplay before backing off, explains that he can’t go through with it.

     When the stranger demands to know why, Ryan admits that he’s HIV-positive—which we must recognize is a kind of lie that stands as a mirror-image of Tyler’s lie to him—his would be partner quickly pulling away before suddenly turning on the driver and severely beating him before exiting the auto.

       Ryan returns to the apartment to observe Tyler laid out on the bed in deep despair, asking only, upon witnessing his face, what happened to him. Again Ryan lies with an odd half-truth: “I got into a fight.”

       But as he sees his lover devastated by his having also abandoned him, he lies down beside him, demanding further explanation of how he acquired the condition that leads to AIDS.

        It appears that after a night a heavy drinking with friends, he almost blacked-out, his friends allowing him to leave with an utter stranger, only to wake up in a strange hotel room alone in bed.

     A few months later, he began to get sick, discovering that he had HIV. When he told his current lover, he immediately left. And now, after finding someone he truly loves, Tyler was terrified that such events would be repeated.

       This “explanation” is perhaps the film’s one major flaw. In attempting to ameliorate the situation the script has turned Tyler into a kind of innocent, someone who was abused instead of simply an ordinary gay man who become HIV-positive for having open sex. Had Tyler not been totally drunken, would Ryan’s empathetic reaction to the situation been any different? Or, more importantly, should it be?  He has, after all, in just a few hours come to realize what happens to those who have contracted the dread disease, often shunned and beaten by those they might have previously trusted.

        Unfortunately, but more understandably, the script has Ryan receiving a call from the doctors soon after reporting that he is HIV-negative. At least there will be someone there to nurse Tyler if he becomes ill again. For Ryan has found a way to forgive his companion as the two fall to sleep in one another’s arms. Tyler’s admission of the facts is far more than a mere “disclosure,” but a startling revelation of how many men and women, homosexual and heterosexual, were and still are treated after acquiring the immunodeficiency virus.

     When he wakes up, Ryan finds Tyler missing. But soon encounters him in the next room with the nephew who, as the dialogue has told us earlier in the work, would be visiting for the day. Watching his lover entertaining his young nephew, Ryan realizes that indeed Tyler would make a good father.

    The film, alas, does not explore the future consequences that both must face, the fact, for instance, that perhaps it would be best, given Tyler’s possible early death, that they give up their dream of adopting a child. Nor does it explain that Ryan’s love in the future will be sorely tried if he will be forced to watch the man he loves slowly die.

     By 2012, however, there drugs that were making significant differences in that future, and we hope for the best. One can only appreciate that Mullan’s film was still considering these issues at such a late date,* and attended to them with such honesty and compassion.

 

*In 2011, the year Mullan was perhaps writing this script, the World Health Organization estimated that 1.7 million people had died of AIDS-related causes, with a total of 34.2 million people infected.

 

Los Angeles, April 22, 2022

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (April 2022).

Douglas Messerli | AIDS after AIDS [Introduction]

aids after aids

by Douglas Messerli

 

One might have thought that with the public announcements beginning in 1997 when the first approved combination of anti-HIV drugs came onto the market as Combivir, and even more importantly after the development in 2010 of PrEP and Truvada which lower the risk of each becoming HIV-positive, that, as many doctors announced at the time, there should no longer be the general fear of, or even more importantly, the stigma that had been attached to individuals who found themselves HIV-positive or were suffering from AIDS.

    But clearly that didn’t happen. Many young males and females in Western countries where the medicines were easily obtained continued to suffer over the possibility that their sexual lives had led to disease and suffering.

     In many countries, moreover, these drugs were not, and still are not, readily available, and even when they are, young HIV-positive individuals cannot afford them or do not yet fully comprehend how they might change their lives. Furthermore, with Combivir there are still side effects for some patients, although there are now at least a dozen antiretroviral drugs on the market.

      Although there has been remarkable progress since the first reports of young men becoming ill in New York and California in 1981, HIV-positive results and AIDS has not disappeared and to many represent a terrifying prognosis.

     As the films I’ve chosen below reveal, the horror of AIDS and being HIV-positive still very much continued to haunt the minds of gay film makers and individuals long after the new drugs were approved. And, more importantly, becoming HIV-positive often revealed outside sexual activity for individuals in marriages and close relationships that helped to destroy those situations. As I suggest, at one point, medical information became something close to the police in the days of closeted gays, intruding upon their lives and revealing their own indiscretions and sexual behavior.

      As director Matthew Puccini, the director of one of the best of these films, described the situation, discovering that one may be HIV-positive was still a “scare.” As he observed in Huffington Post:

 

“A close friend and I both had HIV scares last summer. I remember sitting in the cramped waiting room at the Gay Men’s Health Crisis in midtown Manhattan, with my mind racing through all of these crazy hypotheticals, all these conversations I was dreading having to have. It felt important to make something that reflected our experience [and] showed the HIV screening process in a detailed, contemporary light.”

 

    And AIDS, of course, has not disappeared. As I note in one footnote, in 2011, the date of one of these short films, The World Health Organization estimated that 1.7 million people had died of AIDS-related causes, with a total of 34.2 million people infected.

    I describe the six films I have selected—Bill Mullan’s Disclosure (2012), Ian Wolfley’s Bug Chaser (2012), Sean Devaney’s Bare (2012), Matthew Puccini’s The Mess He Made (2017), Giorgio Volpe’s StandBy: l’attesa (2018), and Kyle Jumayne Francisco’s Gulis (Lines) (2019)— as the “Five R’s,” since quite coincidentally, over a period of several years, I had unconsciously titled each of these essays with a single word beginning with “R,” without even imagining I might someday wish to join them together under a shared theme: “Revelations,”  “Risk,” “Remembrance,” “Removal,” “Reckoning,” and “Reconnecting.”

 

Los Angeles, October 30, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema (October 2025).

Sean Devaney and Brandt Miller | Behind the Blue Sky / 2009

love restrained

by Douglas Messerli

 

Sean Devaney and Brandt Miller (directors) Behind the Blue Sky / 2009 [5 minutes]

 

This very short work that lists no writer and whose actors are hidden under the traditional blue death head-wrappings (khadag) of Inner Mongolians to hide their identities, is not truly a narrative as much as it is a visual ode to the land and hidden queer people of the Chinese controlled country.

 

    With a score by the Mongolian folk-rock band Altan Urag, the film explores the love between two Mongolian boys, one, so we gather from the brief scenes of a city, is urban, while the other is from the truly beautiful outlying country.

    The country queer shares his experience of goat herding as well as a vision of wild horses on the run through the rugged green mountainous landscape.

 

   They come together at several locations, under a large electric tower, in a disserted field, and finally in a bedroom where they briefly remove their blue veils and kiss one another before making love. 

     As their love-making continues, we soon see a knife about to slit a goat’s neck, and in the very next moment men enter their room pulling one of the men away from the other, and hauling him off. 

 

    As the ode comes to a closure, both men are now seen wandering alone, the city boy seemingly locked out of his own urban world by walls constructed of wooden slats. Interspliced with these scenes of the men now alone are images of former Soviet monuments, remnants of the Post World War II Communist world before the Chinese Communist Party conquered the region, turning it into an autonomous region. A small part of Outer Mongolia still exists under Russian control.

     What we perceive is that these actors are wearing the khadag not only to hide their identities, but as a symbol of their spiritual and sexual deaths.

     This film was created for an exhibition of the Mongolian National Modern Art Museum.

 

Los Angeles, October 29, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October 2025).

Hugo Kenzo | 外賣仔 Delivery Boy / 2019

finding his way through the door

by Douglas Messerli

 

Hugo Kenzo (screenwriter and director) 外賣仔 Delivery Boy / 2019 [15 minutes]

For reasons a bit inexplicable, the young Hong Kong delivery by ChunHo (Cheuk Piu Champi Lo) has fallen almost desperately in love with one of his customers, an expat lawyer living in Hong Kong, Eric (Phillip Smith) who several days a week orders up the dumplings from the stand for which he works.

    He literally dances down the street in delight in imagining a relationship with his heartthrob.

    As ChunHo makes clear to his friend Jasper (Thisby Cheng), he is determined the next time he meets up with Eric to begin a conversation, but each time he knocks, the lawyer is on the phone in exasperated conversation with his major client, presumably George (Mike Leeder), a crude CEO who has no patience for any human niceties and demands every document immediately, even when it’s been sent.

    Jasper warns him that it’s always dangerous to cross cultural lines in Hong Kong, to even imagine that the white elite will take the Chinese citizens of the city seriously.

     Finally, ChunHo, through the accident of witnessing Eric’s bag of fruit break open and helping him to retrieve the bag’s several lemons, wheedles his way into his customer’s apartment, expressing his sympathy for Eric’s frustration over his employment, and in a kind of wild presumption, telling him that he too hates his job, suggesting, somewhat facetiously, that they both quit and start up a band.

     When Eric—a bit startled by the delivery boy, engaging him in this imaginative conversation, but enjoying the boy’s logic nonetheless—suggests that it might be a disco group, Eric drops the needle on a record already on his player, a 70s disco song. The next step is to find a name for their nonexistent group, and Eric finally makes a dinner appointment with the young delivery boy to discuss the matter.

       Once more, Jasper, fearful that his dear friend will have his heart broken, warns him against the meetup, but now the Asian boy is convinced that he has his love’s attention, even though he is still not sure that he is even gay.

        When ChunHo arrives at the apartment, however, he finds a sign on the door announcing to arrivals to follow the music to the rooftop, where, as the boy soon discovers, Eric is throwing a well-heeled party. Obviously Eric has forgotten about their date, and is rather startled at the boy’s

appearance. His client George suddenly appears beside him demanding to know who the young kid is, Eric reporting that he is his delivery boy, George immediately holding forth that he should create a service to deliver booze, it would make fortune, he insists.

       So does ChunHo get permission to remain, but obviously, knowing no one of this almost totally white community, feels more than a little uncomfortable.

       When he finally follows Eric and others back downstairs, he finds George and Eric arguing about the fact that they’ve run out of vodka. George, seeing ChunHo on the staircase, immediately demands that Eric send him on a run for Vodka and other bottles of liquor. Not quite knowing how he should respond, Eric capitulates to the bully, handing ChunHo a large bill and sending him, as if he were his own personal delivery boy, on a run.

      Angrily and emotionally crushed, ChunHo takes the subway back home, crying his eyes out before his friend Jasper.

      A few days later, while at work, ChunHo again gets a dumpling order he is to deliver to Eric. He refuses and convinces Jasper to go in his stead. When Jasper arrives at the door, he hands over the dumplings telling Eric off for his dreadful behavior, Eric begging him to tell him how to reach ChunHo, insisting that he has been trying to contact him for days and is sorry for what happened.

But Jasper can only respond with his hate for having so hurt his friend.

    Finally, Eric tracks ChunHo down, trying to explain that he has been working with such inhuman people such as George for so long, he has forgotten how wonderful and good-looking the actual people who make-up the heart of this city are. He begs the boy to hear him out, insisting he must join him for dinner since they haven’t found a name for their band.

   ChunHo eventually forgives him, but insists that he has promised this evening to Jasper with who he is planning to attend dinner with the money he’s been given for the vodka. But he will be available later in the week. For the first time Eric actually gives him his private phone number, writing it on his hand. And they kiss. It looks like the start of a true relationship, one of the first times possibly that a young man has been able to cross over the cultural and social lines of Hong Kong.

     Most of the amateur commentators on this film, we’re buying it however, one Letterboxd commentator, with the moniker CutUncut2021, noting:

 

“Short and sweet, this simple tale could easily be developed into something longer, giving more rein to young Cheuk Piu Champi Lo and his sprightly cohort Cheng, but maybe without the creepy Phillip Smith, whose charmless performance marred the entire tale.”

 

     Frankly, I’d like to see Eric and his new friend really develop a relationship and break with the class and social codes that hold back most of the relationships between the colonizers and the city’s actual citizens. If Eric was just a little less uptight and gifted, I might even imagine them really starting up a band that drifts away from disco into an eclectic mix of musical styles Western and Asian. But, like Jasper, I can’t see that really happening; the lines are too difficult to cross. But at least Hugo Kenzo’s short rom-com tried.

 

Los Angeles, October 29, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October 2025).

     

Douglas Messerli | Deliverance [Introduction]

deliverance

by Douglas Messerli

 

Throughout these queer cinema volumes I have attempted to gather my discussions of individual films into small segments that present variations of a particular film, subject, theme, or genre, without even attempting to make these small gatherings all-inclusive or to argue that all of my small groupings actually might be represented as a new genre of LGBTQ+ cinema.

     The fact that these gatherings include films spanning several years, will certainly confuse those who prefer or are simply more accustomed to chronological comparisons; yet to delimit every film to the year in which it was released (and even then there is often a difference between when films were made and when they appeared in theaters, sometimes with several years between the two events) would result in a missed opportunity to show broader influences, connections, or simply the zeitgeist of queer filmmaking.

     Yet I must admit that even I balked, at first, at creating a small section concerning “delivery boys.” The question, first of all, depends a great deal on what the deliverer is delivering and to whom. One might argue that a broad spectrum of gay filmmaking is involved with someone delivering up sex to another waiting human being, particularly given the development of computer and cellphone services such as Grindr, where men and women await the arrival of someone else bringing them pleasure and sexual release whether it be a prostitute or just someone he or she hooked up with on the internet.

     I would argue, moreover, that sexual pornography, both queer and straight has long depended upon the arrival of new boys and girls in town, plumbers, phone installers, milkmen, animal caretakers, singing telegram performers, masseurs, and just plain neighbors to deliver something far more exciting than their specified occupations. In other words, the trope is behind almost all our sexual encounters with people we excitably encounter for the first time—family, dear friends, and even casual acquaintances generally being seen as off the grid.

    Accordingly, I have been very narrow in my definition of what the delivery boy is supposed to be delivering other than the potentiality of love. In the five films I’ve selected the boys are literally hired simply to deliver food, water, or documents, with the age, social, and cultural gaps between the two generally being seen as unbridgeable when it comes to what those who have ordered up their services and those delivering them.

     In each of these cases, at least one, if not both individuals, see their possible ability to bridge that gap as something of a deliverance, a solution that will resolve their sexual dilemmas along with numerous other problems they face.

     But, finally, the real problem (except for the Thailand-set movie) in simply getting through the front or office doors.

     The films I have chosen represent once again many different countries: the French-Canadian director Jean-François Monette’s Take-out (2000), US director Eric Mueller’s This Care Up (2003), the unknown Finnish director’s commercial advertisement for Kingis Ice Cream (2010), Danish director Lasse Nielsens Lek and the Waterboy (2010) located in rural Thailand, and Brazilian-based director Hugo Kenzo’s Delivery Boy set in Hong Kong (2019).

     None of these delivery boys or their waiting customers end up completely happy in these comic-dramas, and in Monette’s case the hero ends quite sadly, although he has, at least, become wise to her personal desires. But in each film there are moments of great possibility in the delights of the two entities meeting up that go far beyond what it is they are actually paid to be delivering, even when it comes to the ice cream the company is hoping to sell. One can also be certain that in each of these films the waiting customers are terribly unhappy with their lives and can’t wait for someone to deliver them up from their situations, just as the delivery boys, dissatisfied with their line of work, are hoping to meet the one who might deliver them from having to make their arduous trips. In both instances, these figures are waiting for the delivery to be a deliverance as well.

 

Los Angeles, October 29, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October 2025).