Trent Atkinson and Brandon Stansell | Hometown / 2018 [music video]

out of control

by Douglas Messerli

 

MYLEN and Brandon Stansell (composers), Trent Atkinson (director) Hometown / 2018 [5 minutes] [music video]

 

In the first few minutes of Brandson Stansell’s music video Hometown, the singer confronts a mother packing up for her son, obviously sending him out of their home for being queer. “You brought it on yourself son.” “I didn’t have a choice, ma.” “I don’t believe that,” she summarizes, the common refusal of parents to comprehend that being gay is not a decision that one makes, but that it is made for you by your natural desires. And in fact, it carries with it a force of feelings that most young men attempt to deny, divert, alter at first before finally accepting what they gradually know is inevitable: to admit to themselves and their family that they are attracted to other boys, not to the opposite sex.

     Although Stansell is full-grown in this rendition of the event, we understand it to be a scene he experienced as a young man coming out to his conservative gay family nearly a decade earlier than this song’s release in 2018.

     Beginning as a backup dancer for Taylor Swift, Stansell quickly rose in the Country and Western charts after the release of his albums Dear John (2015), Slow Down (2016), For You (July 2018), and now Hometown. Stansell has quickly risen on the queer Country/Western charts to stand along side such notables as Steve Grand, Chris Housman, Chely Wright, Ty Herndon, and Cameron Hawthorn.

     Since he has shamed the family through his admission, as his mother puts: “You need to go.”

     We see the singer walking down a wet street, bag in hand, leaving home before he starts up his real tearjerker which begins years later as he seems to be contemplating just what his hometown, the place he was forced to leave, actually meant to him:

 

“It’s been a while since I’ve seen you

With your one red light and Baptist steeple

The people hear are hard to face

The memories harder to erase.”

 

     But instead of feeling bitter and angry, the chorus of this ballad is almost a contradictory statement of forgiveness and, even more importantly, recognition that this town is what has made him who he is.

 

“But I can’t change it

That’s OK cause

I’ve learned to let it go

It’s out of my control

It might sound crazy

I should say thank you

Cause now I finally know

Who I really am

And I’m made from my hometown.”

    That last line sounds almost like a strident march, a declaration of pride, despite, as he continues, how hard to is to talk to his father and “My mom I don’t know anymore,” and the fact that “all the late-night talks turn to fight wars.” He’s been able to lay it all aside and still declare his love of town and family.

     In an interview with the Huffington Post with Curtis M. Wong, Stansell reiterates the position in takes in this song:

 

“People in the country sphere and in the South are more open than we give them credit for. …My hope is that [LGBTQ] people ― especially country music lovers who are living in the South ― will see this and realize they’re not as alone as they might feel at times and that people who have LGBTQ brothers, sisters, sons, daughters and friends realize that when those people decide to share their truths, that it’s not an easy moment. It’s an important moment, and it should be treated that way.”

    Wanting to film nearer to his Georgetown, Tennessee home, his director Travis Atkinson and he decided to on Nashville, although instead of following a narrative of small town stores and steeples, Atkinson has chosen, after the initial dramatic dialogue between mother (played by Janet Ivey) and son, to show only one long camera run down a street of lower middle class housing before focusing on the singer himself. There are only brief moments of past memories, observed primarily through windows, from the backs of individuals and odd angles, all of which reassert the outsiderness of Stansell even as an adult, with occasional nods from figures in his past who treat him almost as a passing stranger. As Stansell admits, “his relationships with many of family members remain strained.”

    As Wong’s piece underscores:

 

“It was like having a therapy session on film,” he said. “I was having to relive a lot of things that I’d blocked out.” Turns out, those on-camera tears were legit. By the time shooting wrapped, he said, “My camera crew was crying, my director was crying, and I was crying, so I was like, ‘OK, I think we got it!’”

 

     For all the tears it might still arouse, however, the anthem-like strains of this song remove almost all sentimental aspects of the narrative, as the singer/composer asserts his continued commitment to his roots.

 

Los Angeles, December 1, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2025).

 

 

Anthony Doncque | 1992 / 2016

learning how to love

by Douglas Messerli

 

Anthony Doncque (screenwriter and director) 1992 / 2016 [25 minutes]

 

In this French film from 2016, 17-year-old Martin (Louis Duneton) has received a new Hi-8 camcorder and is taking pictures of everything. What he doesn’t catch on film is the daily shake-down by school bullies who demand money each morning. On this particular morning, they beat him even after collecting what was to have been used for groceries on his way from school. He’s found by another student passed out on the ground, and wakes up in the school infirmary, like many victims, fearful of providing information about the beating. The school monitor, 23-year-old Dominique (Matthieu Dessertine) walks him home.

     Dominique is hoping to become a history professor, but is still fearful about passing the test, meanwhile working for money to pay for his education. Reaching his room, Dominique is impressed by Martin’s camera, picking it up for a look, Martin skittishly explaining how it works; but the two have to be quiet since Martin’s father (Alain Beigel) works nights and is sleeping. Dominique says goodbye and heads back to school, but we can already see that the young boy is intrigued by his older protector.

     When his father later awakens and finds that his son as brought nothing home, he chastises him, Martin simply replying that he forgot. Later, after his father has left for work, we see Martin jacking off to some of the boys playing soccer of whom he has filmed on his camcorder—the recording perhaps being related to the reason why he’s been beaten earlier that morning.

     The next day we watch Dominique at work at the school, rousting some students at the pay phone booth who have been hanging out there too long, and later Martin carefully observing him as Dominque helps in the school library.

     Martin checks out two rather controversial, gay-oriented books, Cyril Collard’s Savage Nights, Stefan Zweig’s Confusion of Feelings, and Yuko Mishima’s Forbidden Colors, the first two made into films reviewed in my queer film volumes.*

     After asking if he feels better, Dominique queries whether the books are on the school curriculum, Martin answering, no, they’re just for his own reading.

     One cannot imagine such books even being in a school library in the US, let alone a young school monitor knowing quite clearly what reading such books indicates, that the reader is clearly gay.

     Later in the day, after locking up, we see Dominique returning to his car. Martin follows and, without asking, opens the door and gets in, the elder boy telling him it was part of his job to take him home the other day, but now he is on his own time, making it clear that he is not the boy’s chauffeur, but also obviously attempting to mitigate what he recognizes is a sexual issue.

     How much do you make, Martin enquires, Dominique answering 3,500 francs, part time.

     I’ve got 150 francs you can have, responds the boy. He quickly puts his hand on Dominique’s thigh. The elder, immediately opening up the door and demanding that Martin “Scram. Get out!”

     He angrily drives off, as Martin trods home alone, downhearted for the clear rejection.

     Yet soon after, Dominique drives past the boy and stops, opening the car door for him to get in.

     “Why did you change your mind?” the boy asks.

    In the very next scene, we see Martin sitting on the couch, full dressed, while Dominique has stripped to his underpants. He takes off his shirt and faces the boy, wondering what it is that he wants. “To play the woman. I sometimes to it like that with my girl.”

  He gently slaps the boy's face, Martin protesting. “Blow me then.” Martin eagerly pulls down Dominque’s shorts and moves into position, but cannot proceed. “Sorry, I didn’t think it was like that.”

     Clearly, the boy wants love without fully comprehending what a demand for sex entails.

     Dominique sits down on the couch with him, asking “How did you think it was?”

     “Not like that.”

     Soon after we see Martin watching a rock dance number on the TV, Dominque smoking a cigarette nearby. Martin moves toward him and kisses him, Dominique this time responding, asking the boy if he is sure that this is what he truly wants.

     A few minutes later we watch as Dominique puts on a condom, kisses the boy’s breast, telling him to put some cream on himself so that bruises might go away, and gently proceeds to the fuck the student, presumably Martin’s first experience with sexual intercourse. If it is somewhat painful, it is also pleasant, the two panting together in rhythm as the elder comes. Martin kisses Dominque.

     And soon after, as we observe Dominique asleep, we see Martin with his camera filming the man’s entire nude body as if he were an obsessive voyeur, perhaps not even knowing what his attempt to get the entire experience on film really means. In his innocence, it is perhaps just for later, an opportunity for later masturbation. Or is it something else, a desire to hold on to the experience, perhaps one of the first truly eventful experiences in his young life, one already shaped by media.

     As Martin later cleans up the cigarette butts and other matter, Dominque comes out of the shower, turns off the radio Martin has put on, and demands he listen: tomorrow he doesn’t know him and he must walk past him.

     Why don’t you kids just act your age, he wonders.

     How do kids my age act? asks Martin.

   “They don’t spend their days filming people. They don’t follow guys down hallways. They go clubbing. Have fun.”

     “I can’t. It hurts my ears.”

     “You don’t party. You don’t smoke. You’re boring.”

     Martin openly smiles. “That’s right.”

     “What time does your dad get in?”

     “7:30.”

     “We’ve got two hours then,” he shifts his tone as he picks up Martin and hugs him pulling him off to the bedroom.

      The next day in French language studies, the professor (Isabelle Vossart) is asking her pupils to read from Baudelaire—again an unthinkable phenomenon in US high schools where perhaps even reading Poe or Whitman out loud in the classroom might be seen today as risky.

       Dominique knocks on the classroom door, announcing to the teacher that the principal wants to see Martin Bouvard.

        Only a few steps later, Dominique madly grabs him and kisses him in the hallway, Martin quickly providing him a blow job.

        At home, Martin’s father takes up his son’s camcorder, turns on the TV set, and watches the scenes he has filmed.

      He is waiting at the kitchen table, dragging on cigarette when the boy returns home, demanding immediately to see him. He has discovered a remnant of a joint, and demands to know if his son is on drugs.

        Martin simply replies, no, it is not his.

      The father angrily opens the refrigerator, again showing him that it is empty and wondering what Martin’s problem is that he cannot responsibly shop for the two of them.

        Over the next few scenes we see the father driving Martin to his job with him. He evidently works as a newspaper deliverer, as he grabs up several large bundles of papers and putting them in the back of his small truck before delivering them up to various small tobacco shop sand newspaper stands. Together they have a morning coffee, where the father ponders that it seems to be good that they have spent some time together, Martin agreeing. “Now you’ve seen what it is like. You can come work with me on school holidays.” Perhaps he can make some extra pocket money, he suggests. These are questions, not challenges or commands, a gentle reaching out to get to know his son better, not at all a reprimand for the secrets he has uncovered about the boy.

        “You know I was once your age, too. We’ve all messed up in our own way. But with everything on TV, watch out. Promise me you’ll be careful.”

       Martin looks at his father carefully, studying him for a moment, replying in what appears to be full honesty and comprehension: “I promise.”

       They smile at one another. As they drive back home, Martin takes out his camera. He finally perceives his father as someone of interest to be filmed.

        This may be one of the most beautiful and forgiving gay coming out films I have ever seen, a young 17-year old learning the joys of gay sex with a handsome, slightly older and eager mentor and a father who not only accepts his son for whom he is but appropriately warns him of the influence of media upon his life.

        I should add that the age of consent currently in France is 16 with sex permissible through consent with an older person as long is that person is not in a position of authority wherein he can control or abuse the younger. In 1992, I believe, the age was 15. Although Dominique works at the school, he has no power over the younger boy such as a teacher or school administrator might and has no control over his future. Moreover, he has asked for the boy’s consent. So Dominque’s responses to the younger boy’s sexual advances cannot be described as pedophilia or any manner of illegal behavior.

      If only the US had such logical and open attitudes toward sexuality as this film argues for. We instead, mentally and, and least symbolically, physically imprison our youths, particularly LGBTQ children, until a magical age upon which they are supposedly released for sexual activity without any intellectual or often physical understanding of the joys and dangers of such acts. Yet given the location of this film’s events in the past of 1992, perhaps director Anthony Doncque is hinting that such open views no longer exist in France either.

 

*Savage Nights (Les Nuits fauves) was made into a film by Cyril Collard in 1992; Confused Feelings (La Confusion des sentiments) was directed for French television by Étienne Périer in 1981.

 

Los Angeles, December 1, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2025).

William Roth | Floating / 1997

sink or swim

by Douglas Messerli

 

William Roth (screenwriter and director) Floating / 1997

 

Van (Norman Reedus), a high school swimming champion, and his family lived in a beautiful lake home in an area that serves as a summer resort. He had plans of going to college, and his life seemed quite perfect until his father (Will Lyman), struggling with alcoholism lost his legs in an automobile accident, with Van’s mother determining finally to leave both behind taking most of their finances and ownership of the lake-front home with her. Van, left behind to care for his father in the run-down cottage where they now live, has basically given up all his plans, somewhat grudgingly befriending two local petty thieves Jason (Jonathan Quint) and Flip (Josh Marchette). Whereas his family were once recognized as leaders among the local year-long residents, they are now seen as outcasts, and even Van’s former girlfriend, Julie (Sybil Temchen), now a college girl, has given up on the boy she considers a loser.

      William Roth’s beach-side version of this “town and gown”-like story pits the all-year locals against the summer visitors whose lovely homes are those whom Van’s buddies regularly burgle using Van’s former family home as a place to stow their stash of stolen TVs, recording devices, computers, and stereos. That is until Van’s vanished mother rents out the place to a university swimming coach (Bruce Kenny) and his family which includes his son Doug (Chad Lowe), a champion swimmer on his father’s university team. To Van, Doug and his family, now inhabiting his former home, seem to represent everything to which he had once aspired.

       Unfortunately, Roth’s otherwise likeable film from 1997 relies far too heavily on the simplistic values of normative society, setting up issues between those with wealth against the lower middle class, those academically educated vs. the working class, and the superficially lawful against those who live by their own rules to be able to thoroughly explore the far more interesting themes of which the movie hints.

     It’s almost as if Roth took the template of Peter Yates’ 1979 film Breaking Away, determining to portray a showdown between that film’s Dennis Quaid character Mike and its hero Dennis Christopher’s Dave Stohler, but forgetting to add in any of the latter’s queer and almost comic obsession with Italian cycling. Reedus has all the brooding charm of Quaid, and Lowe also has a queer obsession—he’s a closeted gay boy—but has little of Christopher’s loony charm. And in this case the one who wants to truly “break away” and go to college is Reedus’ Van, not the already locked-in college boy Doug, who would love to escape the judgmental abuses of his homophobic father/coach. Both boys have father problems, but in the end it is clear that the wheel-chair bound alcoholic is far superior at parenting than the athletically fit and spiritually upbeat swim coach. And unfortunately, that is the box into which Roth has steered his cinematic endeavor.

      If Van and his errant friends first pretend to take a liking to the new boy Doug simply to be able, metaphorically speaking, to “get into his pants”—to find a way into the house in which he lives to retrieve their stolen loot—Van, who has not been directly involved in any of the lefts, takes a special interest in the boy, in part because of Doug’s open-minded friendliness, mostly evidenced in of his desperation to be liked. The two share a love of swimming, but also it is clear that the new boy represents all that Van has dreamed of becoming, a college swimmer with enough financial support that girls like Julie might fall in love with him.

      You have to give the director of this work credit, however, for stirring up the waters just a bit in having their friendship slowly boil over into something else, Doug’s homoerotic attraction to his new friend, and Van’s not even minding terribly when he discovers, through a hidden magazine under Doug’s mattress, that his swimming chum is a homosexual.

       Doug’s father, seeing that his son has taken up with a far more masculine and, in his thinking, “normal” boy, forces a kind of son/father showdown by offering Van a swimming scholarship (talent unseen), which pits Van’s love between the father—who offers him everything he desires—and the boy in the flesh, an unhappily trapped figure caught in the mesh of his family life. But even then Van seems to choose Doug over his friend’s father—or even his own father as he plans to steal his dad’s precious small hand-painted soldiers, worth a significant sum of money, so that he and Doug might run away together.

      That indeed might have made for a truly remarkable movie, the handsome straight James Dean-like figure running off into the void with a frightened gay kid—and without even a Nathalie Wood to come between them. But Roth both narratively and visually throws in the wrench at the very last moment, inexplicably having his hero unable to go through with his plans, narratively requiring Doug to get drunk, and as the police close around them, to drown by accident in the very waters where he once so gracefully swam. Van comes home to a father to which he is now symbolically wed, the older man suddenly able to strap on his prosthetic legs just in time to hobble over and put an arm around the boy he has always loved.

       Another gay man evidently needed to die for the sentimental myth of normative life. Sorry, this just doesn’t float for me this time around.

 

Los Angeles, January 30, 2021

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

 

 

Arthur Hurley | 23-Skidoo! / 1930

get out of here!

by Douglas Messerli

 

Arthur Hurley (director) 23-Skidoo! / 1930

 

In just 9 minutes, this nasty little skit, that serves also as a kind of trailer for a Vitaphone musical, unleashes a misogynist-laced tirade against all kinds of “differences.” 

 

      Otto Ott (Lew Fields) runs a German beer garden where his angry wife (Helen Goodhue) demeans and fires all the waiters, much to the dismay of Otto, who through a series of Yiddish jokes, complains of his sufferings under her yoke. (“You don’t deserve a wife like me!” “I don’t deserve rheumatism but I got it!”)

      She hires a whole new team of waiters, whom Otto interviews, one by one rebuking and mocking the fact that one is too “fat” and laughs far too much to be a snobby waiter and one is too “skinny.” He mocks a third, a little person, for his stature—or lack of it. Meanwhile, he flits with the female waitress Frieda (Gloria Shea) and continues in his attacks of his imperious wife. 

       The final waiter is so “ugly,” “like a creature you see only in dreams,” he doesn’t know what to make of him or how to use him in the busy establishment in which people come primarily to get drunk and down a few brews with their family picnic lunches. Otto throws up his arms, declaring, “I don’t know what you are!”

        Finally, having said nary a word during the entire blast of abuse—the would-be waiter, tall and whiskered, looking a bit like a hobo—with a swishing gush of sibilants, an effeminate pose, and a flurry of hand movements to match, asks “So Mister, where you gonna place me?” “Oh, so that’s what you are!” Otto declaims in Lew’s Yiddish accent that he has also disparaged in his character’s hatred of all “types,” including his fellow Jews.

      This abysmal little film is a revelation of just how low films of the day would go in their expressions of horror of all differences from the male patriarchal presumption of authority. And gays were at the very bottom of even this low slung totem. 

      This short is an embarrassment for everyone involved and anyone who has the fortitude to watch it.

 

Los Angeles, March 12, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2022).

 

Richard Thorpe | The Dude Wrangler / 1930 [Lost Film]

pansy cowboy

by Douglas Messerli

Robert N. Lee (screenplay based on the novel by Caroline Lockhart), Richard Thorpe (director) The Dude Wrangler / 1930 [Lost Film]

 

Director Richard Thorpe worked for years on silent and early sound films that were known for their extremely low budgets. Since he had so little money for his productions, Thorpe generally filmed only one take of each scene, thus assuring the low quality of his movies. In the industry he became known as “Mr. One Take,” and it was not until later in his career, when he directed several of the Tarzan and Lassie films and musicals and comedies of the 1950s and  1960s such as Follow the Boys, The Horizonal Lieutenant, Ten Thousand Rooms, Jailhouse Rock, Three Little Words, and The Great Caruso that he received any significant credit for his talents, yet even these were often grade B movies.

     Most of the critics hint that his 1930 early talkie, The Dude Wrangler, was also a poorly made movie, although it stared some notables such as Francis X. Bushman and Clyde Cook, the later of whom was the director and actor in What’s the World Coming To? of 1926.

     The author of  gay film guide Screened Out, Richard Barrios tells us that no print of this film now exists. But the story is a rather familiar one, repeating elements of Harry Schenck, Edward Warren, and Alice Guy Blaché’s Algie the Miner (1912), Buster Keaton and John G. Blystone’s Our Hospitility (1923), and Fred Niblo’s film of the very same year, Way Out West (1930).

     In all these films either an effeminate male or, in Keaton’s case, a “city slicker” is forced to come to terms with a more rough and rugged world than that to which he is accostomed. In the The Dude Wrangler’s case, the hero Wally McCann (Tom Keene) is described outrightly as a homosexual, one of the film’s flier announcing the works as being “The Story of a ‘Pansy’ Cowboy—Oh Dear!”

    One photograph from the movie depicts Helen dressed in a manly suite with a cigar in her hand while Wally sits nearby on a couch holding a skunk on his lap.

     To put it more subtly, the tale involves Wally, an effeminate young man who spends his time creating embroidery patterns for his Aunt Mary (Margaret Seddon). Helen Dale (Lina Basquette), who breeds ponies for polo games, becomes infatuated with Wally, but is furious with his inability to stand up for himself and be a man. In an attempt to please Helen, Wally buys land in Wyoming near Helen’s farm, intending to become a good farmer. When he finally buys the ranch, he celebrates by throwing a party. But another neighbor Canby (Francis X. Bushman) who also is love with Helen, plots with Wong (Sôjin Kamiyama) to arrange for a stampede of the cattle herd,  from which he intends to save Helen and win the girl.  But having heard of Canby’s plans, Wally fights it out with Canby, winning the battle and Helen’s love.

     Since I was unable to see the film, I don’t know how comedically these scenes were portrayed. But from the posters they look as if Wally had taken some wrestling lessons. Or perhaps he just enjoyed “wrangling the dude.” This is a lost film I truly wish I might have been able to have watched, despite its low production values.

 

Los Angeles, July 24, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2021).