Phil Connell | Kissing Drew / 2013

twisting love

by Douglas Messerli

 

Phil Connell and Genevieve Scott (screenplay), Phil Connell (director) Kissing Drew / 2013 [9 minutes]

 

Phil Connell’s short film Kissing Drew begins with an early scene where we once again see demonstrated the ineptitude of most classroom teachers. Middle-high eighth-grader, James (Eden Ocean Sanders) is being bullied by one of the most popular boys in the class, Drew (Ben Hargreaves), who torments the boy by constantly insisting that he’s sexually interested in him. Although we know that the tormented kid should probably should just acknowledge the fact and point out that Drew seems awfully fascinated by that possibility, as a 13-year-old teen he can do nothing other than deny it. Yet the moment he speaks up, the teacher (Chris Handfield) pulls him out into the hallways suggesting his just ignore Drew’s taunts.

    But how can you ignore something you know, in your half-hidden thoughts, is true, and that the constant reminder of it simply reiterates how queer and unfit he is. Even the teachers would rather scold the bullied boy that call out the boy who does the bullying, since clearly we would cause them problems as well: those who bully others don’t stop with their fellow peers as we all know. They pick out the weakest aspects of everyone and go straight to the heart in pointing out their weaknesses.

   Being called a faggot, however, for anyone under the age of camp, is intolerable, and after Drew has taken over his cellphone, refuses to return it, and calls him one of the most painful of homophobic terms, James goes after him in the classroom. But even then, as Drew slaps his face, he can’t help feeling a sense of slight euphoria from his very touch. As so often happens, the relationship between the bully and his victim always contains elements of envy, admiration, and, yes, even love.

     When I was a few years younger than James, I was also confronted daily by a schoolyard bully named Jimmy. It got so bad that I wouldn’t even enter the playground, but stood back in the shadows of the one of the doorways fearful that Jimmy might even spot me there and point me out to the others as evidence of an idiotic timidity. Yet when Jimmy was hit by an automobile in our small town on his way back from the grocery store, I cried, not because I loved him, but he now seemed far more vulnerable and in danger than I was.

     As expected in this film, it is James who is sent to the bathroom with a bloody nose. And it is he who is first sent to the principal’s office, while even as Drew is called in, he still finds a moment to give James a small punch on his way in. Meanwhile, Drew’s girlfriend Amy (Kitty McVicar) sits down in the principal’s office to wait for her boyfriend to be released.

     James asks he what she really likes about Drew. Her response is evasive: “Hey this is weird.” But seeing that she’s determined to wait for Drew’s release, James suddenly gets the brilliant idea of joining her—after all, isn’t it he whom Drew keeps insisting is really hot for him?  What do you like about him? asks James. Amy is convinced that he’s pretty nice guy, and, moreover, argues that it James who started the fight.

      At that very moment, Drew walks out of the principal’s office along with the teacher. Without any hesitation, James turns to Amy and begins to kiss her, to the shock of everyone in the room, himself included. All right, so in his head he’s really kissing Drew, but now Drew has to rethink everything. Is she how being courted as James’ girlfriend? If so, then he’s not really waiting around in the bathroom to see Drew’s dick, which is evidently what Drew likes to imagine is happening. It is Drew who is now diminished; he has evidently lost both of his potential lovers, the front he’s been representing to others, Amy, and perhaps the one he most desires and tortures because of it.

     James goes running out of the school before he can even imagine that maybe, for once, he has aimed at just the right part of the body where the bully is truly vulnerable.

     This work is most definitely light entertainment, but presents a nice twist in genre at the end.

 

Los Angeles, December 7, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2025).

 

Thijs Verhoeven | Ruben / 2012

gay films for straight kids

by Douglas Messerli

 

Hans Arendshorst (screenplay), Thijs Verhoeven (director) Ruben / 2012 [14 minutes]

 

The Dutch film Ruben represents yet another sad situation of high school bullying, made to help students, presumably, develop empathy for boys like Ruben (Erick Brons), who mildly walks through the school halls without even bothering to verbally speak up for himself as his peers mock him and eventually, when they actually photograph him kissing a boy he’s hooked up on the internet, beat him. At least, in this instance, his parents eventually show some sympathy.

    Do such educational films really help or just exacerbate the situation, perhaps even providing the bullies with a few new tactics and reaffirming their notions that being queer is definitely something to feel depressed about?

    There have been a number of gay movies where the young boys have used their verbal dexterity to turn the tables, so to speak; but of course, not all or even most 16- or 17-year old gay boys attempting to come to terms with their sexuality have yet discovered a language with which to define what they feel, let alone defend themselves against such bullying tactics, which evidently are something learned by straight boys at home or taught at school by an errant coach. Although I later learned that my father was a homophobe, he never taught me, I thank him, to hate anyone different from myself.

      Even though I am certainly now a man of language who can more than stand up against any queer taunts—something fortunately I experienced seldom in grade or high school, since simply being different was hard enough—I am sure that as a kid I would have had no way to logically defend myself or even stand my ground. I was called a “homo” a few times, but I didn’t really know what a homosexual was; just something I certainly didn’t want to become.

     The real problem here, that seldom gets talked about, is that given the atmosphere of youthful hostility against being different, it is also hard for any other being like you to want to chance a relationship. Although Ruben meets a perfectly nice boy is his age, Mike (Karim El Kadi), with whom he might have shared his fears, rid himself of loneliness, and even begin to learn how to love, he isn’t given a chance to develop the friendship without further abuse. In my day, gay boys his age could not even imagine that anyone else their age might also be having similar difficulties regarding sexuality; today the internet making it far easily to reach out and find that there are others.

    Yet, as this short film reveals, that is often not enough since if both boys feel the pressure to keep below the radar, they lose out all those years on what their straight peers practice nearly every day: how to find someone compatible and how to engage in social and sexual relationships with others. Queer kids lose out during all those years as they lay in wait to escape to different worlds where they might begin that process; but they’ve missed out on one of the most important things about being young, learning how to fall in love and how survive the inevitable skirmishes and breakups.

    If straight kids may fall into the trap of thinking they have found their perfect other too young in their lives, discovering years later that perhaps marrying their high school sweet hearts delimited their experiences and choices in a life-time companion, gay kids must start four to six years after all the others while facing a much smaller pool of possible mates.

    If sex seems of inordinate importance for many young gay men in their early 20s, it is in part because they’ve never been able to experience it in their teens. I needed a year in New York with a new sex partner nearly every night just to get the joy of sex out of my system.

     No “educational” films that I’ve seen are really aimed at queer kids. They’re mostly just a pitch to heterosexual girls and boys to tread easy with us weirdos because, “after all, we’re really no different from them.” But we are different. In this case Ruben is forced to care for his sister because the parents can’t afford a babysitter. And while that may help him to be a good father later in his life, he will never have a chance to learn how to be a good lover.

    What bullies do is not just scare budding gay boys from walking down the halls of high schools and gymnasiums throughout the world, they temporarily steal these boys’ (and girls’) lives away from them, putting everything on hold for a time “when things get better.” Actually, things won’t be better if you don’t learn even how to go out on a date, become thrilled over the presence of another human being, and maybe even try out a sweet kiss or a good fuck. Jumping into the gay bar scene in college or a large urban center is bit like tossing a newcomer into a room of seasoned whores and saying, go to it kid. Go to what?  

    Maybe that explains why today in so many gay films the knowledgeable “out” gay boys are already seeking husbands to hook up with, as if marrying, now that it’s legal, was the natural course of things. It seems to me that instead of another gay narrative for straight kids we ought to be thinking of educational films for gay girls and boys, and, in particular, for bisexual guys who have to learn how to find that rare individual who is truly open-minded about all kinds of sexual possibilities.

     That said, Ruben is not a bad movie, but is simply a sad one. The poor boy in this film simply must put his life on hold, even if those intolerant trolls of the hallways should one day decide to leave him alone. When they describe him as a loser, they don’t know how much they’ve contributed to that fact.

 

Los Angeles, December 6, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2025).

Tom Chomont | Oblivion / 1969

december song

by Douglas Messerli

 

Tom Chomont (director) Oblivion / 1969

 

Before we can even experience the wonders of the 5-minutes of the experimental film by Tom Chomont titled Oblivion, it might be best to know what it is that we are actually seeing. In this instance it is a portrait of a young neighborhood hustler, with about 30 images repeated in various combinations and completeness. Canadian filmmaker Mike Hoolboom describes the actual film process:

 “Approximately thirty images comprise Oblivion. Most obsessively repeat themselves. Although the images appear to be solarized, the film was actually contact-printed, combining high contrast black and white negative with a colour positive of the same image. The high contrast accounts for the tendency of shots to flood. Images in the film swell and contrast, often disappearing into pure colour… Oblivion employs extremely rapid cutting. Some of the images last as briefly as two frames. The fact that we see so few frames, that a shot is representationally ambiguous, or shown upside down and sideways, often causes the viewer to project his/her own fantasies… When Jean Genet was asked to what end he was directing his life he responded, “To oblivion.” (J.J. Murphy, Reaching for Oblivion).”

    But even that very specific summary of Chomont’s process doesn’t tell us very much. Perhaps it is useful to contextualize these images within what filmmaker Jim Hubbard has described as Chomont’s fascination of the commonplace that functions to as expressing both spiritual and a sexualized worlds in a parallel universe.

     It might help to know that in his later decades this filmmaker suffered from Parkinson’s disease, and later because a devotee of S&M culture. Tragically, Chomont could not get financial help for his Parkinson’s until in his very last years he was diagnosed as HIV-positive when finally some aid could be expended on both diseases which plagued his body.

     For me this beautiful eye-blink of a film begins with an image of a highly sexualized boy that gets broken down again and again into its fragments, coming alive to shoot bodily shards across the emptiness of the frame. The body is there perhaps waiting in anticipation of its pleasure as the screen bursts into what appear to be archeological patterns and fountains of light, but again and again disintegrates, flies into bits and pieces, decomposing before our very eyes. If this is, in part, a testimony to sexual pleasure and love, it is simultaneously a statement of its transitoriness and the oblivion of all life.

     The film, accordingly, alternates between a palpable reality and an abstract entity, a thing grounded in space that flings itself into forms and shapes.

     If the film ends in a beautiful image of the natural world, it is also the cold and frozen world of winter, the end of the almost Christmas-colored (red and greens) testimony to what is the living being at the heart of this tale of passion and death.

     Yes, this is a highly sexual work. Yes, this is a statement about the end of things, the cessation of the loving heart. As Ross Lipman observes: “At the intersection of eroticism, mysticism, and the everyday one finds Tom Chomont.”

  Chomont made 40 short films between 1962 and 1989, and Oblivion is one of his best.

 

Los Angeles, December 6, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2025).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mustafa Boga | The Drama of Everyday / 2011

just waiting

by Douglas Messerli

 

Mustafa Boga (screenwriter, based on a story by Oscar Nao), Mustafa Boga (director) The Drama of Everyday / 2011 [12 minutes]

 

The intentions of this short film which the director and his team describe as an experimental work are perhaps well meant. After all, it is important to realize that violence also haunts the gay world; and in this case, evidently, the central figure of the film, Tim (C. J. Chew) waits at home for his violent partner who leaves him alone for long period of time for returning and violently beating him.

    Yet, we never see this violent man, and have utterly no idea what provokes him to such violence. Nor do we comprehend why the lover Tim waits for long periods for his return only to be rewarded with violence.

    We do observe what Tim does to fill long days of loneliness, wandering around the house in his underwear, watching sex tapes, picking up a handsome local boy Joe (James Joseph O’Boyle), masturbating, taking long baths, and cooking.

     The director, Mustafa Boga, also provides us with long stretches in which we simply stare at the nearby woods or wander them in the black and white nights of our hero Tim’s dreams.

      All of this may be very tantalizing, and at moments the cinematography is quite beautiful, but ultimately we too grow bored with the waiting—in our case for someone with a dangerous personality that we can’t even comprehend. While we may momentarily sympathize with our patient lover trapped in the domestic routine that might remind some of the companion of a sailor or worker who spends long days on the road, we also don’t get to know enough about Tim to really care. Even if we grant that his love for the missing monster is stronger than the fear, or that, just perhaps, Tim is into a bit of sadomasochism, we still don’t have enough information to have much empathy for him.

     And frankly, except for a few fames of accelerated video, which leaves only the traces of action behind, I see little here in the way of real cinematic experimentation unless the experiment lies in a kind of test of just how patient a viewer might be for a story to unfold.

     I liked the music, but I was ready to turn off the film long before it was over, particular since this director hasn’t yet learned how to properly adjust the levels of his sound so that we might clearly hear the few words of narrative our central character utters.

     In this case the drama of the everyday, so absolutely brilliant in a work such as Chantal Ackerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles of 1975, becomes in this 2011 short British film, simply a matter of ennui. This character is not waiting for a Godot, just a brute to share his bed.

 

Los Angeles, December 5, 2025 | Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2025).

Joel Schumacher | Man in the Mirror / 2011

the choices we make

by Douglas Messerli

 

Treviny Marie Colon (screenplay), Joel Schumacher (director) Man in the Mirror / 2011 [17 min.]

 

If the some of the shorts I review above bear a similarity to educational campaigns about LGBTQ difficulties and rights, the 2011 film Man in the Mirror by Joel Schumacher, with a script by Treviny Marie Colon is truly just that, a film produced by USA Scenarios who, working in US high schools with the “What’s the Real Deal” curriculum, help to express responses to such issues raised by students. Schumacher’s and teenage writer Colon’s work, however, is so professional that I felt it would be almost irresponsible for me not to include it in my vast collection of LGBTQ filmmaking.

      The issue here is a common one for young secondary and, particularly, high school kids in the US, whose major heroes are the school players of various sports. And some of the issues here were explored in greater depth in the 1998 British film by Simon Shore, Get Real, in which the handsome gay hero, Steven Carter, falls in love with the school jock, John Dixon. Both share a scene very much like the one with which this short ends, a seemingly necessary beating of the gay boy the jock figure loves to prove his heterosexual masculinity to his bullying buddies. In Shore’s film, Dixon pretends to beat Carter behind closed doors with the latter screaming out as if in pain as the jock slams his fist again and again into his school pack-back.

       If this situation might appear as a somewhat unbelievable, I might add that when I was a sophomore in high school I fell in love with the high school football team captain, Doug Reed. One night he asked if he might drive me home after drama practice, an invite from a senior to a sophomore that clearly implied sexual intentions. But I was too scared of its implications to go through with what surely might have been my outing. Nonetheless, had such a relationship ever gotten out to others about my 1962 classmate, it would surely have meant the end of his reign as the Prom King. And I might well have imagined just such a scene being played out, either symbolically or actually. I had already been a target by others for beatings just for the possibility of my being gay, even though I had never had a sexual encounter.

       The jock in Man in the Mirror is named Jason (E. J. Bonilla), a Puerto Rican basketball hero who is currently dating Ellie (Samantha Tavares) and is obviously one of the most popular boys in the school. His fellow team players, Peter (Julito McCullum) and Mike serve has his bullying attendants, the latter of whom accidently witnesses Jason’s gentle locker room encounter with the openly recognized school gay boy, Eric (Ben Newell).

        Yet even before that event, Jason, who has been secretly meeting up for sexual encounters with Eric for some time, has been deeply questioning his sexuality. Often this inner probing results in sudden homophobic outbursts as when his older cousin, an openly gay man, returns from California for a short visit. When he reminds Jason of their childhood activities and invites him to go shopping (a bit of stereotyping in what otherwise is a film that for the most part escapes simplistic characterizations), Jason explodes with the hateful words “I don’t want to be hanging around with some fag,” which results in Sully (Joshua Cruz) pulling away from his formerly close friendship with Jason.

       Jason, however, is internally suffering the emotional quandaries of any young gay man, particularly one who is so deeply entangled in the normative societal values. As he tells Eric, he’s being scouted every week by college agents for a chance for a scholarship, “And, honestly, what college basketball team wants a homo?”

      Most importantly, although he clearly loves Eric, he refuses to describe himself as gay. When Eric attempts to tell him that he clearly is homosexual, Jason pushes it aside: “Eric, I like you a lot. But I’m not gay. And whatever this is it’s fun, okay, and it’s...it’s great. But I have a girlfriend, all right?” “Doesn’t hiding bother you?” Eric queries?

      Obviously, it does. Deeply pondering his situation, he comes as close as possible to coming out as he describes his situation to his open-minded sister, Michelle (Delia Cariño), who promises him that no matter what happens she will be there for him.

     Yet returning to school he is met by his intolerant friends who have already been preparing the showdown in the locker room where they have captured Eric and await Jason to prove that he is truly not gay by “beating the fag out of him. What choice does he have?”

      The film ends with a simple written statement, obviously the solution that these well-intentioned students and their sponsors what to express: “You always have a choice.”

      One feels, however, a bit let down by the simplistic adage. The question is not really do you or do you not have a choice, but what choice do you finally make and how do you come to terms with it? In Get Real, despite being able to elude the beating, John Dixon still makes the choice to keep lying to himself about his sexuality, leaving Steven Carter to come out to the entire audience of parents and students attending the final class ceremony. Carter, we know, will get on just fine without Dixon, but Dixon sadly may have to face a life of deep denial and conjugal despair. Many years after I left my hometown, Doug Reed took a gun to his head and, as his cousin reported to me, “shot it off.”

      I don’t expect that high school students should be able to provide a ready answer to the questions they have so profoundly and skillfully solicited. But it might have been interesting to explore more fully how Jason chooses to react as he stares into the face of love with the horror of seeing his whole life about to be swept into chaos. Perhaps a simple action, visually expressed early in the film, might answer this impossible dilemma. After his school mates have been making fun of Eric in the hall, he quietly asks them to stop picking on Eric, turning back to his girlfriend Ellie to plant a kiss upon her lips. She pulls him on down the hall, moving off to the right; but just before Jason leaves the camera’s view, he looks back down the hall at Eric with an expression of pained love that is so deeply felt that the viewer knows everything that Jason has not yet been able to admit almost before the film has begun.

 

Los Angeles, November 2, 2020

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

 

Anders Helde | Drengen der ikke kunne svømme (The Boy Who Couldn't Swim) / 2011

finding a friend instead of a mother

by Douglas Messerli

 

Anders Helde (screenwriter and director) Drengen der ikke kunne svømme (The Boy Who Couldn't Swim) / 2011 [33 minutes]

 

No sooner does the cute boy from the country Rasmus (Sebastian Elkrog Sørensen) arrive in the Copenhagen train station than another boy of about his age rushes up to him handing him a small package and asking him to meet him out front 15 minutes later, while he rushes off, chased by adults. Obviously, he has stolen something and dumped it temporary on the innocent visitor. It turns out to be an ipod.

     But actually, it ends well for Rasmus as the robber Nicklas (Jonas Wandschneider) offers him a ride in the large front basket of his bicycle, cycling with him all the way the affluent suburb of Hellerup where Rasmus has the address of a woman evidently who he has discovered is his actual birth mother. But simply catching a glimpse of the well-to-do woman as she appears on her door stoop sends him running; realizing who he is in relationship to the world in which she lives, he realizes that perhaps it was not such a good idea to come to the city to meet her.

     Nicklas returns him to town where Rasmus decides to visit the zoo, eventually convincing Nicklas to join him as his guide. The two began to enjoy their day. Rasmus explains the story of his mother who had put him up adoption soon after he was born; and they share other stories, Rasmus admitting he doesn’t know his parents either, his father disappearing when he discovered his mother was pregnant and she dying when he was one year old. Niklas admits he lives in Staden with an older man, 35 or 36, but “he’s not my lover.” Staden, also named Christiana, is the so-called “freetown” of Copenhagen, an international community that was begun by squatters on a former military base.

     Nicklas now bikes his new friend off to see Staden, but on the way Rasmus suggests that they should go swimming in the bay. In Staden, Nicklas introduces him to his older roommate Carsten (Christian Damsgaard), who while Nicklas is inside tells Rasmus that his friend doesn’t know how to swim so that he will probably have to save his life a couple of times.

     Meanwhile Nicklas stops by the drug pusher (Danny Thykær) for whom he’s stolen the ipod. He jokes at seeing Rasmus, “Who’s that, your new lover?” obviously opening up even further questions about Nicklas to his new country boyfriend.

      He pays him a pittance and the two ride off. At the water, Rasmus dives in while Nicklas watches. Meanwhile, Nicklas has taken out a marijuana joint and offers it to Rasmus who has never before smoked, Nicklas telling him that it might loosen him up. At the water’s edge Rasmus also finally decides to toss the letter he has written to his mother away, even though Nicklas offers to take him back to Hellerup, perceiving that perhaps it was all a bad idea in the first place. “I don’t think she’d read it.”

      Rasmus quickly puts his hand on Nicklas’ leg and kisses him, with the other asking what he’s doing. Rasmus answers: “I don’t know. I just felt like doing it. I guess I loosened up. Was it that bad?” “No, try again,” answers Nicklas. “Why?” “It felt good.” They kiss again and once more, bringing a slight smile the normally dour Nicklas’ face.

      The time has come for Rasmus to return home, and Nicklas takes him back to station where they first met. Rasmus promises there will be a “next time.” Perhaps they’ll look for Nicklas’ father and he’ll teach him how to swim. As the train pulls away, Nicklas rushes upstairs for an overhead view of the train pulling out of the station, as the lovely score by Bo Andersen swells.

      Rasmus’ voice tells us that he didn’t write his mother a new letter or even think about her anymore. Nicklas came to visit him, “but it was different. It wasn’t like the day we met. He still couldn’t swim.”

      While Danish director Anders Helde’s short film is not profound, it presents such a simple and touching situation of two boys, both of whom clearly have felt unwanted in the world, who found one another if just for a day, and realized in those short hours a kind of deep love which helped them, surely, to survive. This is one of those films that you hope never to forget.

 

Los Angeles, September 15, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2023).