Bernard Natan | Le Ménage moderne du Madame Butterfly / 1920

queering the opera

by Douglas Messerli

 

Bernard Natan (scenario, based on the play by David Belasco and the opera by Giacomo Puccini with libretto by Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa, and director) Le Ménage moderne du Madame Butterfly / 1920

 

Madame Butterfly, in this amazingly odd film from 1920, Le Ménage moderne du Madame Butterfly—lonely and tired of waiting for her lying and philandering husband Pinkerton (this Butterfly has no child)—has developed feelings for her maid Suzuki (here called Soussaki) with whom she has developed a lesbian relationship, not only gesturally expressed as we might have imagined of a 1920s film, but in this case, quite literally shown to us through a pornographic presentation of the two making love, completely naked, with Soussaki licking Butterfly’s vulva.

     Given this film’s pornographic intent, we might imagine a series of rather washed-out frames with a hand-held jittering camera. But this film, credited generally to Romanian Jewish director Bernard Natan,* is well-lit and quite sophisticatedly edited as we cut to the harbor of Nagasaki which reveals the return of Pinkerton’s ship, before the director cuts further to reveal quite crafted scenes of Nagasaki street life and returning us to Madame Butterfly’s mountain home, at which Pinkerton has just arrived with no one there to greet him, his wife obviously still involved with her lovemaking with Soussaki.

     After the handsome Pinkerton rings a small hand-gong for someone to greet him, the servant-boy Pink-hop (played by Nathan) hurries out and, as penance evidently for his inattentiveness, begins unbuttoning Pinkerton’s jacket, the Captain smiling with surprised joy at his attentions.

     Undoing Pinkerton’s white sailor pants, he pulls out his cock and begins to suck it into erection. Pinkerton pulls him around, Pink-hop lifting his robe, and presenting his ass for the Captain to fuck him, which he quickly proceeds to do. Clearly, the sailor feels a great sense of relief and regeneration from the act as the intertitles announce “L’infidèle est enfin revenu...” (“The infidel is finally back.”).

    Pinkerton finally asks to see his wife, to tell her evidently that he has since married an American woman.

      Despite his long absence and the sad news he bears, Butterfly is still highly attracted to him, and quickly begins a long embrace and kiss, as Soussaki begins to unbutton his pants, the two of them pulling him down onto the tatami mat, where he performs cunnilingus on Butterfly as Soussaki sucks him off.

      In the next scene we see him fucking Butterfly while Soussaki keeps his penis in position, Pink-hop masturbating and visually cumming on screen as he watches the sexual act.

     At this point, the film version I was watching, from the Bruce Farrahday Collection available on The Internet Archive through Vimeo, ends. Perhaps there is a second part, however, since the Wikipedia entry describes a continuation of their sexual activities, suggesting that Pinkerton goes on to engage in oral, anal, and vaginal sex with Soussaki before they are joined by US consul Sharpless, who along with Pink-hop engage in an orgy of sexual intercourse with the three others. Later Pink-hop also fellates Pinkerton and Sharpless, the film ending with Pinkerton waving to the audience.

     Bernard Natan acted in at least one other pornographic film prior to this one, and between 1920 and 1927, after emigrating to France the year of this film, Natan produced and directed at least 20 further porn films, many times appearing in them. A number of the films included homosexual and bisexual oral and anal intercourse actions performed by Natan.

     Le Ménage moderne du Madame Butterfly, however, has the distinction of being one of the very first of films, particularly of such high quality, depicting lesbianism, gay sex, and bisexuality all in one work.

     This film and Natan’s other contributions to the genre, however, were far from the first pornographic films produced. The first known example seems to have been made in 1908, with about 2000 hardcore films, about 600 prior to 1960, screened by 1970. Commentators guess that about 10 percent of these mostly “stag films” contained some homosexual activity, from a simple hand on the shoulder, thigh, or hip during hardcore anal or oral sex to more complex LGBT references, but most were presented in the context of heterosexual normality, accordingly rendering them into essentially bisexual acts.

      Not only are scholars impressed with the high quality of the lighting and camera movements of this work, but the costumes and sets are relatively lavish. The fact that Natan, moreover, even felt willing to risk the inclusion of homosexuality activity suggests that he recognized that here was an audience interested in such cinema. It’s even more startling that Natan produced, wrote, directed, and performed in such hardcore films given the fact that only nine years after making Madame Butterfly he would become the owner of Pathé, the largest mainstream film studio in France.

     Except for a few examples such as this remarkable film, I have basically steered away from pornographic movies, although that is increasingly becoming more difficult to do given the blurring of lines between the two aspects of LGBTQ filmmaking and the increasing quality and narrative sophistication of gay and lesbian porno films. The few examples I have included in the My Queer Cinema volumes point to the increasing overlap of what once were thought to be oppositional genres, which given the increasing openness of sexual expression have begun to blend. Of course, at one time all of the thousands of films I speak of in these volumes might have been perceived as pornographic by the heterosexual hegemony.

     Arguably, Natan and his crew had more fun even than the Marx Brothers in queering up serious opera.

 

*Some have argued that this film was not written by Natan, nor was he a performer in it.       

 

Los Angeles, April 12, 2021

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (April 2021).

Bubba Fish and Doug Locke | #ThisCouldBeUs / 2014 [music video]

lamentation for lost love

by Douglas Messerli

 

Bubba Fish and Doug Locke (director) #ThisCouldBeUs / 2014 [4 minutes] [music video]

 

This music video was the featured song on Los Angeles singer Doug Locke’s 2014 album, Blue Heart.

    The cinematic narrative directed by Bubba Fish begins with an older version of Locke (played by Billy Mayo) visiting the house of his long ago gay lover, Ben (Robert Fleet), now with a breathing apparatus in his mouth and obviously not that far away from death.

     For most of the rest of the work the narrative shifts between the older Doug’s visit of Ben and their younger selves at a time when Ben (Bradon Loyd) worked as a lifeguard on a beach, coming to the rescue of Ben, who comes out of the water breathing, the two quickly falling in love.

     The song, by Doug Locke and Eric McNeely, is basically a lament for what these two men have lost. The two might have become a couple, have lived their lives together, and spent their later life looking after one another had it not been for Ben’s choices.

      The lyrics, sung by the younger Doug standing outside of the older Ben’s house express the romantic longing, particularly the second stanza and chorus:

 

I need a parachute

Cause I was falling for you

I gave my heart too soon

Now its black and blue

You take me to the moon

When you’d kiss me that way

Had me going insane

But now I’m chasing fumes

Since you went away

I only want you to stay

CHORUS:

 

This could be us but you playin’

Driving up the coast and singin’

Drinking on the beaches naked

Oooohhh

This could be us

But you couldn’t be the one I needed

Oh I don’t wanna lose this feeling

Dancing til moon is sleepin’

Oooohhh

This could be us

This could be us but you playin’

 

   The vision of their youthful selves dancing and kissing on the beach is deepened by that fact that even the older Doug still wishes that they might have lived their lives together. But obviously Ben couldn’t commit, and eventually he married, his elderly wife (Barbara Oilar) breaking the spell of Doug’s lamentations at the end, announcing the time for him to once more leave his now old lover behind.

     As Locke responded about the song to James Nichols in the Huffington Post: "We all have those former loves that, while life may have lead us in different directions, we find ourselves reminiscing over, daydreaming about what could have been. I'm a firm believer that once you give a person a piece of your heart, you never truly get it back."

     The single hit no. 32 on the iTunes Hot 100 chart and this video went viral with more that 1.3 million views to date, heavily embraced by the LGBT community.

 

Los Angeles, January 22, 2026

Reprinted in My Queer Cinema blog (January 2026).

Pascal-Alex Vincent | Candy Boy / 2007

how good boys learn to become bad

by Douglas Messerli

 

Martin Drouot and Pascal-Alex Vincent (screenplay), Pascal-Alex Vincent (director) Candy Boy / 2007 [13 minutes]

 

 

After his study of film history at the University of Paris III, Pascal-Alex Vincent worked for a while in the distribution of Japanese films in France, most likely where he developed his interest in anime, to which his 2007 animated short seems to be a tribute.

     I don’t know to whom this film in shown in France, but I’d like to imagine that what is now clearly adult oriented material in the US might become a wonderful children’s film not only revealing the problematics of Catholic orphanages, but expounding on the dangers of our eco-system, the joys of queer love, and the reasons for bad-boy behavior. It would be perfect entertainment for kids!

     I’m afraid, however, it would be banned in most of the nation’s red states these days, and perhaps in even some of the blue ones. We’ve retreated into a time when such wonderfully perceptive visions aren’t allowed to be spoken about let alone viewed by the young.

     The central character here, Candy Boy (voiced by Julien Bouanich), is a model student, a slightly older boy in an orphanage who serves as the perfect leader for the younger boys, the sort of older brother you’d dream of. The nuns love him, particularly La mère supérieure (Marie-Christine Darah).

     But one day, while out playing with the younger boys, he observes along with them that most of the fish that swim in the local stream running through the orphanage property are dying. Our vigilant and valiant Candy Boy will most certainly be looking into the matter.

     Except at that very moment, a new boy, closer in age or even older than Candy Boy, suddenly is introduced into the community, Samy (Aymen Saïdi) a tough kid, who smokes, gambles, and, in general, is up to no good. And, even worse, he seems to particularly dislike the do-gooder Candy.

      Of course, his bad boy attitude, like a contemporary James Dean, immediately attracts some of boys and girls. Indeed, Samy threatens Candy Boy’s status—although Candy still beats him in a competitive foot race, perhaps because Samy’s not in the fittest of conditions.

     Candy Boy soon finds some of his peers missing from their dormitory beds at night, hanging out in the bathroom where they’re corrupted into gambling and smoking by Samy.

     Yet, Candy Boy can’t help but be attracted to the new figure, who brags of having refused to be force-fed at the previous orphanage from which he’s been evicted.

     But meanwhile, Candy decides to concentrate his energies upon discovering why the local fish are dying, and even more importantly, why some of the younger boys are suddenly getting sick, in response to whose illness the Mother Superior describes them as faking, particularly when they plead for Candy Boy to come comfort them.

     Cigarette butts have been found in the school toilet, and Samy is taken away for detention, locked up in an orphanage cell. Candy Boy assures him that he hasn’t told anybody about his night-time activities, but all Samy can mutter is “Open your eyes, you might learn something.”   

      Two large smokestacks in the distance certainly hint of the matter. When he tells Mother Superior of his suspicions that the McManus Company is causing the local water pollution, he is told that McManus pays for his uniform, for the fish they have each Friday. Who has put such sordid ideas into his head, Samy? She grounds the boy, refusing to believe any of his accusations.

     That night Candy Boy sneaks out to the McManus plant only to discover Samy is already there as well, the two observing the plant workmen pouring toxic waste into the waters, which is why the orphanage boys are getting sick, so Samy tells him. “You shouldn’t be here Candy Boy. You’re a good pupil,” Samy declares.

     He offers Candy a cigarette and soon tosses his own fag into the waters, an immediate conflagration flaring up, burning down the plant. As the employees rush out, ready to explore what has happened, the boys run off, falling into the bushes on top of one another. For a moment as they regain their composure, Samy insists that Candy Boy has “no place with us,” before the two quickly embrace and quite literally ascend as two entwined, kissing bodies rise into the stratosphere. Who “us” is, is never quite established, but he is certainly taken off to “queer heaven.”

     Candy Boy wakes up naked in a pasture, eventually showing up again at the orphanage with happy greetings from his fellows. He looks for Samy only to discover that he’s being taken off by the police, the Mother Superior insisting that the river contamination was simply an accident. When Candy Boy argues that she’s lying, begging Samy to tell her the truth. But he merely puts his finger to his lips and the paddy wagon rolls off.

      In the very next frame, Candy Boy is at his window where he lights up a cigarette. Mother Superior appears and demands he put out the cigarette and go to bed immediately. Candy Boy simply turns and blows smoke into her face.

      That’s what happens to all good boys who learn the truth about themselves and the society in which they live.

       If every animated feature was as enduring as Candy Boy, I might become a fan of anime as well.

 

Los Angeles, May 30, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (May 2023).

 

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).