Maria Freidman | Merrily We Roll Along / 2025 [filmed version of the 2023 stage production]

words without music

by Douglas Messerli

 

George Furth (play, based on the play by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart), Stephen Sondheim (composer), Maria Freidman (director) Merrily We Roll Along / 2025 [filmed version of the 2023 stage production]

 

Let me begin by stating that Merrily We Roll Along is neither a gay film or a gay filmed stage production. Yet it ought to be; and seems to be.

    In fact, despite my love of his oeuvre one of my major criticisms of Sondheim is that almost none of his works have gay characters; this from a gay composer/lyricist is almost shocking, particularly given the popularity of his works within the gay community and the theater-going world that would readily accept gay characters. There are a very few bones tossed toward his audience, the suggestion of one of the male figures in Company suggesting that Bobby might try out a gay sexual encounter; or the reprise to “Lovely” sung to a male in drag A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. But Sondheim and his writers, many of them, like Furth, also gay, hardly ever created a truly homosexual figure. Arthur Laurents, also gay, created a possibly trans character of Anybody’s in West Side Story. Only in the gender-shifted version of Company, a creation of director Marianne Elliott where two males actually marry do we actually see gay characters. But basically, Sondheim steered clear of his own kind—which I would define as a real failure in a complicatedly emotional man who even created a TV musical, Evening Primrose, for his then-lover Anthony Perkins, playing a straight man.

     But in Merrily, he really missed his chance to redeem himself. If only he had given one brief chorus of “Not a Day Goes By” to Franklin Shepard’s (Jonathan Groff) best friend, Charlie Kringas (Daniel Radcliffe), a song that expresses the female characters’ love of Frank. For it is actually Charley who is the oldest and deepest friend of the charming conniver Frank.

    As anyone who loves Broadway theater who hasn’t been hibernating for the last several decades knows, Merrily tells the story of Franklin Shepard’s theater and movie success backwards in time beginning with a scene that shows him probably at the top of what has become a fairly empty career, having just finished a movie everyone—at least those asslickers who surround people who smell like success—agrees is sure to be a “popular” production, his praise sung by the guests (hangers on who follow Frank throughout the work called “the Blob") in the song “That Frank.” I should mention that a couple of the Blob dancers appear to be gay, at least in Friedman’s version.

     In attendance, but getting drunker by the moment, is Mary Flynn (Lindsay Mendez) Frank’s only remaining friend from his old days, Charlie Kringas, having publicly attacked Franklin for wasting his talent as a composer on movie productions and other evasions. Mary is not only disgusted by the party guests’ shallow behavior but by Frank’s abandonment of his true talent, composing, has been banned from Frank's life. Mary drunkenly proposes a toast to Frank that mocks his new-found fame before she falls down drunk, hastily making her leave, his last friend from the old days now gone.

     Frank must also face the anger and frustrations of his second wife, the actress Gussie Carnegie (Krystal Joy Brown) who is now being replaced by Franklin’s new mistress, Meg Kincaid (Talia Robinson), featured in his new production. Recognizing that her husband has been cheating on her, Gussie, pretending to apply iodine on a small cut Meg has received, splashes the ointment over her face and storms out, their marriage now also over.

      Frank can only admit that he has pursued financial success at the expense of his friendships, loves, and career.

     Charley, we briefly hear has a new play on Broadway which is a true dramatic success; and if nothing else Mary has written and published a full novel, but the musical talent of Franklin (a role that puts him in a position similar to Sondheim’s) has been sold out to other concerns.

     The play continues in its move backwards it time, this production being especially careful to delineate the various periods the musical inhabits, as we explore Frank’s developing relationship with Gussie, his separation from his loyal and loving first wife Beth (Katie Rose Clarke) and his estrangement from their son, Frank Jr. (Max Rackenberg).

     Over the years we see Franklin, beloved by Beth and friends Charley and Mary, put off, lie and cheat his way out of truly exploring his talent and his emotions after his and Charley’s first small musical success. If Franklin grows richer, he is most definitely poorer as a human being as his simple relationship that he early established with Charley involving typewriter and piano grows to incorporate "Franklin Shepard, Inc.," the most complex song of the work in which Charley, having grown disgusted with the loss of Frank’s talent and—unspoken—his love, lacerates Franklin publicly on a TV show. That number, which demonstrates Radcliffe’s true musical genius, finally forces a break between the two, from which the musical itself never recovers.

   It also makes it clear that although the two truly caring women who have come to love him (Beth and Mary), sing the most memorable song in the musical, “Not a Day Goes By," that the heart of the work is centered on the relationship between Franklin and Charley, often simplistically summarized, along with Mary, in their attempt to keep their friendship going in the several versions of “Old Friends,” a lively ditty which seems to patch up the several cracks until both Charley and Mary realize there is nothing left to hang on to.

      In responding to questions in Interview, Groff (himself gay) has argued even though Frank is straight, the dynamic between Mary and Frank is, “to me, a very gay guy-straight girl relationship. There’s an intimacy, but it’s never going to go into romance.” Later in the same interview, he expands: “I don’t think that he’s [Frank] gay, and I don’t think that he’s a repressed gay at all. He’s straight. But two gay men wrote him. And the emotionality and the interior life of the character feels incredibly gay to me, and so relatable. That line of his, “I spent my life saying yes when I meant no,” feels pretty gay to me, as a guy that was closeted until I was 23.”

    To me, it is also apparent that, despite the fact that he is also married, that Charley has long had a crush on his composing partner, which is why he so brutally attacks him in “Franklin Shepard, Inc.,” making it almost the equivalent of Frank’s angry departures of his wives.

    Particularly, as we skip back in the last scene of the musical to the first moments in Charley and Frank’s life together, making their way to the roof to watch the first spacecraft, Sputnik orbiting the earth—where not only do they first meet Mary but Charley’s future wife, who is absent throughout the entire work except for a quick moment in this scene. There they join up as partners to write a political musical. The ballad “Our Time” is about two youths coming to realize that it is their time to speak out and make meaning in the world, but in its constant reiteration of giddiness and even dizziness, the world spinning around them both, it is also a true declaration of their love for one another. The “me and you” of this new coupling, we sense, is far more that a meeting up of lyricist and composer, but a kind of marriage sung with emotional confusion (“feel how it quivers, on the brink”):  

 

Something is stirring, shifting ground

It's just begun

Edges are blurring, all around

And yesterday is done

Feel the flow, hear what's happening

We're what's happening

Don't you know, we're the movers and we're the shapers

We're the names in tomorrow's papers

Up to us man, to show 'em

It's our time

Breathe it in

Worlds to change, and worlds to win

Our turn, coming through

Me and you man, me and you

Feel how it quivers, on the brink

What?

Everything

Gives you the shivers, makes you think

There's so much stuff to sing

And you and me, we'll be singing it like the birds

Me with music and you the words

 

    Franklin may abandon this same-sex “marriage” like he does all the heterosexual marriages in which he temporarily engages, but in my thinking it is, nonetheless, a true marriage despite its never being named, a relationship which fails for the very reasons that all marriages fail: the positioning of the self over the other, the pronoun “I” transcending the survival of the “we.” As in so many of the failed relationships Sondheim analyzes, the demands and commitment of the one are simply not concomitant to the needs of the couple. The “company” suffocates the single selfish self. Sondheim’s delusion that you can “marry a little” represents a true lack of vision. The wonder and the tragedy of real “marriage” (as opposed to the symbolic ceremony and certificate) is that you become someone else.

     I have now seen two live productions, a documentary about the original production, and this filmed version of a Broadway production of Merrily We Roll Along. All of the have been quite moving, but this one is by far the most successful in capturing what seems to me Sondheim’s and Furth’s original vision.

 

Los Angeles, January 21, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2026).

 

 

Tristan Scott-Behrends | The Man of My Dreams / 2021

dress rehearsal

by Douglas Messerli

 

Tristan Scott-Behrends (screenwriter and director) The Man of My Dreams / 2021 [4 minutes]

 

Whatever led Criterion—usually very choosy as to the films they show on their site—to find  Tristan Scott-Behrends’ 4-minute dream-like landscape of the particular pockets of Manhattan where actors Henry Bae, playing Christopher, and DJ Reed (appearing and reappearing as his lover) traipse around in the newest trans outfits provided by the Swedish H&M (Hennes & Mauritz) and Zara clothing enterprises, to be of significant interest I can’t imagine. At least it’s nicely filmed; but the cinematic voice droning out a truly empty narrative about the love Christopher imagines one day encountering and by the end of their brief rouge-lipped kiss-fest actually does, is truly amateur stuff.

    There’s nothing at all even slightly profound about this work. And who it might have been made for totally stymies me. Are gay men and women just dying to see a couple dressed up for a poor man’s fantasy of a Met ball riding the empty subway where Christopher intones “His beautiful red lips would whisper, ‘I love you,” and “How quickly stranger’s stares turned into love when they recognized the love radiating between us?” I guess we have to imagine that we’re the strangers traveling along on their imaginary journey to nowhere.

     But then I have come to learn that I’m simply not the right audience for Tristan Scott-Behrends’ makeup fantasies. I have to admit that I find his filmmaking almost embarrassing. If nothing else, this is certainly better than Lilac Lips, Dutchess County released the same year, which equally flummoxed me when it appeared on Dekkoo.

 

Los Angeles, January 20, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2026).

Todd Haynes | Velvet Goldmine / 1998

celebration

by Douglas Messerli

 

Todd Haynes (screenwriter and director) Velvet Goldmine / 1998

 

It is rather intimidating, I must admit, to write about a film that pretends it is not portraying what it truly is. You’d think that having written on dozens of pre-1960s movies in which LGBTQ behavior was hidden underneath and within narratives that claimed to be about heterosexual behavior I’d find no difficultly about speaking of gay director Todd Haynes’ 1998 extravaganza, Velvet Goldmine, in which sexuality—whether gay, bisexual, lesbian, transsexual, or undetermined—is quite openly portrayed—would be a simple matter.

      In this case, however, director Haynes, having planned to celebrate the glam rock scene of the early 1970s through a character very loosely based on David Bowie and his friends, Iggy Pop, and Lou Reed, was stymied in his attempt by Bowie’s threaten to sue if he went through with it.

     Bowie, as we all know, had long since passed on to several other personae and was surely disinterested in his more than indiscriminate past. By 1984, the time in which this movie is set, Bowie had moved far away from his flamboyant and androgynous Ziggy Stardust alter ego to become a serious film star and to collaborate with yet another gay icon, Queen, in his 1981 album Under Pressure. By 1998, the time of the release of Haynes’ film Bowie had shifted to soul, jazz, hip-hop and, most importantly, electronic music of Black Tie White Noise and The Buddha of Suburbia (both 1993), and “Let’s Dance,” before working with Brian Eno on Outside (1995) and was quickly moving on to aging celebrity status by being in inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1996 and “awarded” a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1997.

      How would it help him to now be reminded of his crossdressing jumps into the sack with Mick Jagger, Iggy Pop, and god knows how many others, as well as his drug addiction and his declaration in 1972 of being gay (in an interview with Michael Watts in Melody Maker) and his reassertion of the fact in his 1976 interview in Playboy: "It's true—I am a bisexual. But I can't deny that I've used that fact very well. I suppose it's the best thing that ever happened to me."? By 1983 Bowie had rethought the whole issue, suggesting in an interview in Rolling Stone that his public admission of bisexuality was "the biggest mistake I ever made"; "I was always a closet heterosexual."

    Just a few weeks before the shoot, according to actor Jonathan Rhys Meyers, his character was transformed from a Bowie-like figure to an amalgam character, Brian Slade, patterned after Bowie, Jobriath and, to a lesser extent, Marc Bolan. Moreover, there would no longer be any music by Bowie accompanying the story.

     Yes, Slade, like Bowie shacks up in Berlin with his now favorite singer, Curt Wild (Ewan McGregor)—a character now incorporating elements of both Iggy Pop (who like Wild grew up in a trailer park) and Lou Reed (who was sent by his homophobic parents to get “cured” through electroshock therapy)—totally unphased by dropping to the ground, going nude, having sex, and taking drugs in the middle of his concerts, who totally wowed the as yet unestablished Slade, whose dropped-jaw appreciation of Wild’s on-stage nudity he expressed to his wife: "I just wish it had been me. I wish I'd thought of it.”

      Slade, still seeking a persona for himself develops almost a worshipful relationship with Wild, while, in reverse, by taking on the Iggy/Lou figure helps to return some sense of stability to Wild’s life—even if it ends with Slade’s ultimate rejection.

      But then Slade eventually feels the need (just as Bowie obviously had) to reject himself, hiring a mock murderer, Jack Fairy (Micko Westmoreland) to assassinate him at the height of his career. Is it any wonder than ten years later, when the truth comes out, Slade’s fans have nearly all forgotten him?

       Enter British reporter Arthur Stuart (Christian Bale), now working for a US music rag, whose editor suddenly assigns Stuart to dig into Slade’s past in an attempt to discover whatever happened to the dead man who still, apparently, is living—which might be read almost as an enchiridion or even a method book on how to read Haynes’ film, which, like its characters, in turn is itself beholden to the books of Oscar Wilde and Jean Genet, both pleasure-seekers who help to destroy themselves.

       At first simply irked that he has been yanked away from another story to write about Slade, perhaps simply because he is British and younger that the rest of the staff and is expected to know all about “that stuff,” the reporter sets out on a journey paralleling Orson Welles’ character Jerry Thompson in Citizen Kane. Like Thompson on the trail of the meaning of “Rosebud,” Charles Foster Kane’s last word, Stuart sets out to interview the figures closest to Slade, including his wheel-chair bound manager Jerry Devine (Eddie Izard), reminding us of Joseph Cotton, Slade’s performer friends such as Jack Fairy, and Slade’s former wife, Mandy (Toni Collette), who like Kane’s wife, Susan Alexander Kane, is now an alcoholic willing to spill her guts in a nightclub where she sings.

     Through these interviews we gradually get a vague kind of portrait of Slade and his alter-persona Maxwell Demon, accompanied by a soundtrack featuring a lot a great music from numerous musicians with whom Bowie worked and by whom he was influenced (Little Richard, T. Rex, Venus in Furs, Roxy Music, The Stooges, Lou Reed, Brian Eno, Steve Harley and more), while also gradually coming to the recognition that behind Slade, just as Ziggy Stardust, there was no real person dressed up in the outrageous costumes, dancing out the sexually charged motions, and plaintively singing those anthems. Slade-Demon-Ziggy, perhaps even the Iggy of those days had to die because they never truly existed. Like the glam heroes of Haynes’ film, they were all fictions.

      Yet what these celebratory chimeras accomplished was a complete sexual and social revolution for their audiences. In this film the sexual energy behind those performances is conveyed in Slade’s and Wild’s—as well as the fictional duo and Meyers’ and McGregor’s—18 second on screen kiss (others, not me, have timed this), not to ignore their playing out of their newly-discovered emotional relationship, as in Haynes’ film The Karen Carpenter Story, with Barbie dolls.

      But the “real” action so to speak, was always on the other side of the stage, screen, or whatever other world they momentarily inhabited: in the nubile bodies and newly opened-minds of their fans, represented by the “Rosebud” of this picture, the reporter Stuart himself, who we gradually discover, as a homosexual kid dared to purchase a Slade record and dress up in glam-like drag, awkwardly entering his private real world as a transformed being instead of the weak faggot his father assessed him to be.

     Stuart’s later encounters with Wild, his adult meeting with the washed-up singer who insists upon presenting him with a ring given him by Slade that once belonged to Oscar Wilde, and a brief youthful sexual coupling with the same man—may or may not be fantasy.

      It doesn’t matter, figures like Wild and Slade have long ago passed into his body. By the time he realizes what happened to Brian Slade, his New York editor has nixed the essay, reassigning him to follow the new singing sensation Tommy Stone (Alastair Cumming), who Stuart has come to recognize is a lesser version of the man from which he has been reincarnated.

 

Los Angeles, September 21, 2020

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

 

M&C Saatchi ? | Mile High Club / 2007 [commercial advertisement]

clique click

by Douglas Messerli

 

M&C Saatchi ? (director) Mile High Club / 2007 [45 seconds] [commercial advertisement]

 

The now defunct British airlines SilverJet created a 2007 work advertising the first airline with “women-only loos.”

    The ad is so audacious it might at first appear almost to be a Saturday Night Live commercial, except by this time that nightly series was already losing its sense of humor. In this ad we see a full view of the women’s bathroom along with an airline steward serving customers nearby.

 

     The door clicks partially open and a rather disheveled woman exits, returning quickly to her seat.

    The airline steward continues serving wine, as we again here a click, the bathroom door open and another fairly disheveled woman exit and immediately take her seat beside the previous one. We must presume they weren’t simply helping one another in a time of illness, but were taking care of other business.

 

    That’s clearly why they have suddenly become members of the “Mile High Club.” Since SilverJet went bankrupt, I presume they didn’t have the opportunity to introduce their “men only loos.” One might guess that straights complained, and the airline went under. But meanwhile, I am sure, some customers had a lot of fun. I certainly laughed at the wit of this ad.

 

Los Angeles, January 20, 2026 | Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2026).

Young & Rubicam | C'est la Vie / 1998 [commercial advertisement]

left in the lurch

by Douglas Messerli

 

Young & Rubicam (director) C'est la Vie / 1998 [commercial advertisement]

 

In the 1998 French ad for Kronenbourg 1664 beer, a sexy young man enters a busy disco, spotting a beautiful woman dancing on the floor, moving over to her with the self-confident ease of a satisfied cis gender sexist male who whispers something into her ear, assured that she’ll easily follow his commands.

    At the bar, moments later, he orders up two Kronenbourg 1664 beers, presumably one for each of them. But she quickly picks them both up and walks away handing one of them over to her lesbian girlfriend.

  “C’est la vie,” blinks a neon club sign, and underneath it in English, the tagline: “The best lager premium beer in France.

    This was one of three Young & Rubicam ads paid for by the French beer company to fight its arch-rival, Stella Artois, which went with an image of being just for ordinary folks. Here the beer courts a young hip gay-loving crowd. Even the man left in the lurch has to smile at the audacity of the female beauty’s actions.

 

Los Angeles, January 20, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2026).

Jacob Tierney | Heated Rivalry (Season 1, Ep. 2: Olympians) / 2025 [TV series]

without even a goodbye kiss

by Douglas Messerli

Jacob Tierney (screenwriter and director, based on the novel Game Changers by Rachel Reid) Heated Rivalry / 2025 [TV series]

Season 1, Episode 2 “Olympians”

 

By this time Shane and Ilya have long been sexting one another under female code names. And sexually there is a long, somewhat unbelievable gap of two long years since their game in the fall of 2013 when they finally meet up again at Shane’s apartment, now one of several places he owns, where Ilya have the promised anal sex for the first time with Shane.    

     For all of his previous quick decisions and sometimes almost dangerously quirky moves, Ilya turns out to be a sensitive lover, checking several times whether or not his sexual penetration is actually hurting Shane, not something one might expect from the rather temperamental Russian, learning how to pleasurably bottom.

     And that seemingly tempestuousness seems to be much in play at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Japan, when Ilya begins to ignore Shane’s texts when the Russian Hockey team loses.

      We can only suspect that it has something to do with his return to Russia, the appearance for the first time of his much decorated and somewhat mentally afflicted father (Yaroslav Poverlo) who is obviously far more disturbed by his son’s failure to lead his team to success than are the Russian authorities.

    Moreover, the appearance of the Russian Minister of the Interior, a former goaltender, and his daughter, who turns out to be Svetlana Sergeevna Vetrova, Ilya’s occasional sex partner, cannot help matters. Although she suddenly appears, this time quite elegantly dressed at the formal embassy party, pulling Ilya away from the older men, the room into which she leads him is just as dangerous, inhabited as it is by Ilya’s former boyhood male sexual partner, Sasha (Kaden Connors), a heavy cocaine user who also happens to be the son of Ilya’s former coach.

    As Sasha hangs out in an empty bathtub inexplicably located in the middle of room, Svetlana almost appears to be delivering Ilya up to him and to his past in Russia, leaving the two men together soon after. Sasha tries desperately to rekindle old times, and almost succeeds, before Ilya turns him away, reminding him that they are no longer children. Sasha hardly seems to be phased, however, as he hurries off to another party, where, with all the beautiful athletes in town, he declares he will surely find another sexual partner.

    The danger Ilya faces for having once been sexually active in Russia is made even more apparent when, soon after, while Shane meets up with his friends Scott Hunter (François Arnaud) and Carter Vaughn (Kolton Stewart), captain of the New York Admirals and Scott’s best friend, casually comment on the bravery of the apparently gay figure skaters performing from conservative Russia.

    Shane attempts to again support Ilya in person, but is met with total hostility and sent away so that they will not be see together, reminding us of Shane’s paranoia in the first episode.

    If there is any hint of illogic in this series resulting from the female-created romance, aimed primarily at a female audience, it is the long periods in which the moody men remain sexually separated from one another. One has the feeling that in reality, most males—particularly those involved with the necessarily quick determinations of star athletes—would have long ago given up on one another, no matter how delightful and fulfilling the sex has been. If they had not needed to be so closeted by this time, like Sasha, Ilya and Shane would have sought out the company of other sexy athletes in the year just before gay marriage was legalized in the US and had already been in many European countries.

   In this case, however, Ilya continues to ignore Shane’s texting attempts as he now reproves his athletic abilities, helping his team with the MLH championship. Finally in the summer of 2014, while backstage at the MLH awards, Shane openly expresses his frustrations for Ilya’s distance. The two openly joke with one another as they serve as hosts to the event, Ilya even challenging Shane to provide him with his cellphone number, Shane responding in the negative to continue their myth of being distant challengers.

     But when the two immediately after meet up in the bathroom, the kisses return, Shane finally making some demands, including that Ilya get down at that very moment on the floor to suck him off. But Ilya, always the wiser and far more sophisticated of the two, suggests that instead of dirtying his tux, why not return to the “boring” affair, but not before betting on his winning the player of the year award. If he wins, Shane must do what he commands, otherwise he will obey Shane.

     Despite Ilya’s obvious fears, he has met all the challenges it has taken to put his team back in first place, and the year does belong to him as this time he is chosen as the winner.

    In the beautifully lit hotel room high above the city where he takes his lover after the ceremony, he demands that Shane strip and he plays the voyeur before the two once more engage in almost rapturous sex.

     In a brief time of actual communication, Shane wonders if he will return to Russia again this summer and, even more intensely, attempts to ask about how difficult it is for Ilya in his native country, suggesting perhaps that he need not return. But once more Ilya shuts down, insisting that he get his sleep and sending Shane off into the night.

     In the elevator, Shane begins a somewhat angry response before quickly deleting it. He begins a new message: “We didn’t even get to kiss one another goodbye,” but deletes that text as well. It appears that they will now have to wait once again until the new season.

     

Los Angeles, January 19, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2026).

Sean Patrick McCarthy (Shon Keane) | The Prom Queen / 2000

shower curtain meets closet

by Douglas Messerli

 

Sean Patrick McCarthy (Shon Keane) (screenwriter and director) The Prom Queen / 2000 [18 minutes]

 

Shon Keane’s The Prom Queen is frankly a movie that’s hard to love, despite the fact that the two central figures Corey (Todd A. Corvo), a punk rocker high school student who is apparently cis male but daily dresses as a transvestite who hangs out with the school nerd, Michael (Ben Provo). Both are the school losers and are bullied, particularly Corey, which is why we feel anything for them.

   But the situation even at the turn of the Millenium is totally unbelievable, since Corey plans to go to the prom with Michael, and as they go to rent a tux for Michael, Corey, sensing an attraction from one of his bullies, Peter (Jacob Garrett White), ditches his regular and takes Peter out to the “rock” for a good suck and fuck session, which Petey apparently quite likes.

    If you still believe in the logic of this short film, you will naturally predict that although it appears that Peter is a closeted gay boy who finds Corey to be “beautiful,” he is, in reality, dating the school bitch, Sara (Emma Welch), who might remind you of somewhat of Tracy Flick in the 1999 movie Election except that she lacks Tracy’s dogged intelligence. Peter and Sara obviously will be this year’s king and queen of the Prom.

    Corey ultimately does attend the school prom with the bland, red-shirted Michael, Corey accessorizing in a plastic shower curtain as both dress and a robe, arriving to the prom in regal style, whereupon he attempts to out Peter to his girlfriend and his bully gang in front of the entire senior class in a literal brawl between, as one of the general descriptions of the film put it, “shower curtain and closet.”

     Inevitably, the punk boy is taken out and beaten, befriended at film’s end only by his nerdy “boyfriend.”

     All of the events are fairly predictable, and nothing in the film—except perhaps for Corey’s whimsical costumes and hair coloring—are even slightly of interest. Corey and Michael are maybe just the most unlikeable of lost gay boys you might even encounter, in some ways as obnoxious and unappealing as the heterosexual bully boys. At least Peter is cute in an odd short of manner, and one wishes that the film had more closely followed him to explore just how much he was forced to suffer in having to date the bitchy Sara just to keep the dread secret of his attraction to the punk homo trash world Corey represents.

     Usually in such outrageous teen fantasies at least the gay boys have the opportunity to save the day, right the situation, or resolve their own high school tortures; but by the close of The Prom Queen Corey and Michael sit side by side with Corey in tears, even his temporary infatuation with the prom king having proven to be pointless. And in the end we have to wonder what was all the fuss about.

     Collected in a DVD anthology with several far more charming and ambitious films of the period in Boxer Shorts, it is hard to see today what attracted the several audiences of the gay festivals in which it was lauded (it won an award at the Hamptons International Film Festival). Clearly the sheer ludicrousness and tenacity of its hero inured it to some viewers. I just found it to be shrill, but then I’ve never liked a single movie that was about a high school senior prom. I purposely attended mine with a female who was the school photographer, a large camera strapped about her neck the whole time. I brought her an orchid, but when I think back I wonder if she could have even worn it with that contraption bouncing on her breast. And a couple of years earlier the school prom king, also the captain of the football team, was secretly a gay boy I would have died to have gone to the prom with, but in 1961 no one could even imagine such a possibility. And fortunately, I lived; while he took a gun to his head a few years later.

 

Los Angeles, January 19, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2026).