Levan Akin | Geçiş (გადასვლა) (Crossing) / 2024

making connections

by Douglas Messerli

 

Levan Akin (screenwriter and director) Geçiş (გადასვლა) (Crossing) / 2024

 

After the relative success of his truly splendid 2019 film And Then We Danced about the near impossibility of being openly homosexual in the country of Georgia, Swedish director (of Georgian heritage) Levan Akin turned his attention to an even more fraught issue, being a transgender person within that same culture.

     The work begins in a rural community where a divisive family run by a fairly macho and unthinking brute married to a submissive woman who together dwell with the man’s younger and somewhat rebellious brother, Achi (Lucas Kankava) who mostly fights with his sibling and participates in quasi illegal activities such as running people back and forth between the nearby Turkish border with his brother’s rundown car.

     Suddenly a familiar face appears outside their hovel, Lia (Mzia Arabuli) the man’s high school history teacher, for whom he obviously still has great respect. She has come in search of any knowledge of a nearby encampment of trans women, one of them being her sister’s transgender son.

     Her former student denies any knowledge of them, except that one day they all packed up and left; but his brother, who later reveals that his elder sibling may have possibly visited the transgender prostitutes, suggests they moved across the border into Turkey with the destination of Istanbul. When Lia leaves the house, Achi runs after her, claiming to have an address to where she was headed. He also begs Lia to let him join in the search, so desperate is he to get out from the mean tutelage of his brother.

     Lia is a sceptic who, taking one look at the boy, realizes his presence will probably result in more problems than help. But he insists that he knows some English and perhaps even a few words of Turkish and will be a quiet guide for her.

    Lia, who has promised her sister to seek her child, now named Tekla, is certainly not at all thrilled about her mission, but she is determined nonetheless, and finally realizes that perhaps even an unreliable young guide like Achi might be helpful. She orders him to go home, pack up his belongings, and meet her early the next morning, but before she has even gotten halfway home, Achi appears again, this time in his brother’s stolen car, insisting that he will drive her home and then on to the border where they will catch a train to Istanbul.

     Again with some reluctance she agrees to his suggestion, and so begins an “on the road” adventure with the seemingly authoritarian yet committed Lia and the unreliable but highly likeable Achi, undertaking a voyage to a city even more wondrous and confusing than Oz on a search for what neither of them are afraid they might find. In Georgia trans people are almost nonexistent, only occasionally do you hear a story about a father who accidently killed his son while cleaning his rifle. Transgender individuals almost always slip across the border and disappear forever in order to survive.

     Achi, as we might suspect, has lied. The address he claims was Tekla’s destination was in fact a location for trans prostitutes he got off the internet, none of the prostitutes having ever heard of a Tekla. He knows not a word of Turkish and his English is sketchy at best.

     Fortunately, Lia has come prepared with at least a day or two of basic provisions and enough money to get them a few nights in a tawdry hostel with a shared bathroom in the hall. Neither of them has a clue where to look or who to even contact.

     Yet somehow, despite the fact that Achi one night takes off and gets drunk at a party to which he is invited to by two girls on the street, resulting in Lia’s ousting him from her room, these to lost lambs bond and, amazingly, find fortune is on their side.

    Actually, Akin’s tale is a marvel of almost Dickensian coincidence, as we follow  Lia and Achi, two street children—one of whom plays an instrument and who together beg for their daily meals by offering up their services, including at on point guiding Lia and Achi to the trans prostitute house—and a transgender woman Evrim (Deniz  Dumanlı) who works of a LGBTQ help center—at one point freeing the street boy from jail and eventually helping Lia find a brothel where, at one point Tekla worked, leaving behind some of her possessions.

     With a camera that seems as busy and crooked as Istanbul’s cat-ridden streets, we observe how our central characters keep crisscrossing paths with the others, along the way allowing us to get to know the children and Evrim, the latter of whom finally gets a degree from the University of Istanbul which allows her to become a legal assistant while also falling in love with an unlicensed taxi driver (Ziya Sudancikmaz). Evrim’s encounters with the two children, moreover, reveal her importance to the lives of Istanbul’s vast population of outsiders, and her abilities to help track down Tekla’s previous whereabouts, demonstrates her savvy and endless patience. If there is any figure in this film that helps to open up narrow minds previously skeptical about transgender individuals, it is this remarkable figure, and it is Evrim, in part, who utterly changes Lia from a dour determinist to a loving human being.

     Yet, we experience all of the figures as being on the cusp of remarkable changes. Throughout the film, Achi spends a great deal of time just eating, suggesting that he perhaps he has never before been given enough to whet his appetite, but also hinting at his absolute hunger for life.

     For Lia, the experiences she newly witnesses are almost all gathered in the corners of her eyes. She silently observes it all, unable to communicate in Turkish, for the first time in her life, perhaps, becoming the student rather than the teacher. And we see her grow almost moment by moment as we observe her taking in new visual, aural, and tactile experiences she has never before quite imagined.

    We also are witnesses to several other encounters that Lia and Achi have in the city that help to change and heal both them. At a restaurant the duo meet up with a friendly business man, formerly a Georgian, who properly wines and dines them as Lia, hoping in part that he will help them but also somewhat charmed by his attentions, for the first time reveals a whole new aspect of her personality, rising to dance a traditional Georgian folk piece and, darting into a bathroom, for the first time putting lipstick to her lips. By the time she returns the businessman has run off, perhaps as Achi argues, having scared him off in her sudden transformation, but utterly charming us and Achi, who admits he now sees how she was once a beautiful young woman. Later, when Evrim takes them to a restaurant, mostly closed because of a wedding party celebration, she once more is asked to dance, this time by Achi, Evrim eventually joining in, as we suddenly realize that our now beloved characters have been thoroughly embraced by the heterosexual wedding party.

     By film’s end Achi determines to stay on, having found work at the hostel, while Lia begins the long trip home alone. But suddenly in a kind of transcendent moment of imagination discovers Tekla on the Istanbul streets, the two recognizing each other, and demonstrating their delight in finally seeing one another again. Early in the film, Achi has challenged the older teacher by asking her what she intends to say to Tekla once she finds her; Lia had no answer.

     Now, she fully invokes a wisdom that she might never been able to express before meeting up with the many transgendered prostitutes and having the opportunity to encounter Evrim: “I would tell her that we failed her. Her mother and I. We did nothing for her. We lost so much time. We only cared about what people would say about us. That’s what I would tell her. Despite of everything, I would tell her that I love her too.”

     Despite all the miracles of discovery people make in this film, Lia has not miraculous discovered her niece. But she has come to discover the language of love for when that time comes. And she now determines that she too will stay in Istanbul and keep looking, that she will not abandon her responsibility for loving as she has in the past. Perhaps she will even, once again, hook up with Achi. The two of them, after all, have made a pretty powerful if failed approximation of detectives, a rather absurd version of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. Yet somehow, in this city that links Europe to Asia, they make the necessary connections to bring love and meaning back into their lives.

     Finally, this is a film that must be experienced; there is no proper way to describe it. What happens is all expressed in faces of the central characters, a raised eyebrow, a stare of amazement, a slight smile. By film’s end, not only the fiction’s characters but the audience themselves have made the significant crossing over that people like Tekla and Evrim had been forced to make, a recognition that perhaps what we know of learn of ourselves from the outside is not really who we are within.

     Levin never preaches; he demonstrates, confabulates, imagines connections that might never have otherwise existed. And in the end, were too learn, forgive, and accept.

     This film received the Teddy Award from the Berlin International Film Festival.

 

Los Angeles, January 28, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2026).

Fernando Lopez | Novena / 2022

prayers for a lost soul

by Douglas Messerli

 

Fernando Lopez (screenwriter and director) Novena / 2022 [16 minutes]

 

Manuel (Jonathan De La Torre), his sister Carina (Kriss Dozal), and others are sharing one of the nine days in memorial and prayer for the loss of their mother when Eddy (Joseph Mercado) knocks on the door apologizing for not having been able to make it earlier in the week.

     Although Manuel sends a slightly glowering look at Eddy as they sit on the couch to continue their prayers, when they finish he grabs Eddy’s hand, thanking him for coming. Eddy declares that his mother always treated her as one of her own and could not imagine not paying his respects.

     Given that the house is darkly lit for the funereal Novena, most of director Fernando Lopez’s film is very murky, both in its images and story, and we must feel our way around the edges of this work to comprehend the relationship and past events between the two protagonists. What is already clear is there are some bad feelings between the two men.

     We quickly learn that Eddy’s stay is brief since he announces to Carina that he flies out tomorrow morning. When Eddy finally joins Manuel in his bedroom to talk, he asks after Hector, apparently Manuel’s brother, who he’s told has still about 2 ½ years left, presumably of a prison sentence.

      When Manuel offers Eddy a slug of beer, Eddy asks if he has something stronger, his friend pulling out a pint of liquor. There’s obviously some resentment, Manuel responding that it looks as if Eddy has done pretty good for himself these days. What his friend had once declared he wanted, he evidently now has, Manuel conjectures; but as Eddy himself admits, he has had “to leave a lot a shit behind.” One wonders whether his relationship with Manuel was part of that “shit.”

       Evidently, Eddy has been away for a long time, years in fact, hating to have to return only at such a sad moment.

     In that moment Manuel turns on him, arguing that he is not like Eddy, the friend retaliating by asking if he’s like his brother then—clearly a reference to his imprisonment—which leads Manuel to his violent response, demanding he say nothing further about his brother. Eddy admits that he barely recognizes his former friend, Manuel retaliating, “What did you expect? I’m not going to let you suck my dick if that’s what you came for!”

        At last, we know something of their former relationship, perhaps the reason why Eddy hung around Manuel’s home and family long ago. And we know that the long time Eddy has been away has led to a deep resentment and now rejection by the man who might have been Eddy’s former lover.

       Eddy clearly has no choice but to leave. Yet Manuel is also clearly sorry to see him go, and as Eddy leaves the house calls out him to ask where he staying. Eddy admits that he hasn’t figured it out.

       The situation changes almost immediately, as Manuel offers him a ride that ends in the parking lot of a local motel. Suggesting that his friend might want to listen to some old CDs he has in his glove compartment, Eddy pulls out what is clearly a collation of long-ago favorites of theirs; “I soundtracked all our bad choices,” confesses Manuel. And the mellow jazz sounds of “Tres Boletos” brings smiles to their faces and obviously memories of their past times.

       By the time they reach the motel lot, Manuel is ready to apologize and admit that he’s proud of what Eddy has done. But Eddy recognizes his reasons for that resentment. Manuel must now take over the role of family leader, and both recognize without either speaking if that it means that for him there is no escape to the world where Eddy has evidently gone.

      Eddy reaches out to help to relax his buddy’s tension, Manuel sighing heavily several times, perhaps, in part, just to feel Eddy’s touch after all these years. Before long, the two are embracing, Manuel almost breaking down into tears.

       Soon after they’re kissing. After a break in the film’s image and moment a quietude, the screen opens on what is clearly the next morning, the two having spent the night together in the car. Manuel zips up his jeans and Eddy rebuttons his shirt.

       Eddy opens the car door and exits, leaning into the open window to say “I’ll try to come around more often,” Manuel shaking his head while answering, “Yeah.”

       Manuel drives off, stopping at another point beside an old couch someone has tossed away. He simply sits in place, on the verge of tears, looking ever so often to the now empty seat from where his lover has just had sex with him. He hugs his coat close, finally breaking it to tears, knowing that there can never a time “more often,” that it is over between them.

       The prayers of the Novena were not just for his mother, but his soul as well.

       This film was featured in a collation of short film in NewFest 2023.

 

Los Angeles, October 16, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2023).

Peter McDowell | Jimmy in Saigon / 2022

missing saigon

by Douglas Messerli

 

Peter McDowell (screenwriter and director) Jimmy in Saigon / 2022

 

Peter McDowell was only 5 when his eldest brother died in Viet Nam in 1972. Although his brother had served in the military previously, he did not die as a Viet Nam war hero. In fact, Jimmy, who began as a young war protester in college, was drafted, served in the War, survived his horrific experiences, and returned to the family home in Champaign, Illinois becoming a pacifist, a viewpoint that he had debated embracing even before his number came up on the draft.

     The family was delighted he had survived and had come back to them. As Peter describes him, “He was sort of a hero to my brothers and sisters as a kid.  Because there were six of us, he was kind of like an adjacent parent to the rest of the family.”

     But something vague and unsettling drew Jimmy—as the family members called him—back to the country which in terms of his military service he couldn’t wait to leave. As Peter obliquely observes, “He really went back because he loved the country. He loved the people in general, and he loved specific people as well.” If nothing else, it was clear that Jimmy did not love the US to which he returned and that he was missing something that he’d found in Saigon.

     He lived there as a civilian, writing only a few letters home before the news came of his death. Something had happened that made his father even visit Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) in attempt to uncover the truth—without success. Growing up, Peter sensed that something mysterious must have occurred since, after his father’s death, his mother and older sisters didn’t want to talk about it. Clearly, he guessed it might have something to do with drugs.

     As the years passed, Peter, who now lives in Los Angeles working as an independent documentary filmmaker, grew increasing curious about Jimmy, particularly about why he returned to a country at war, evidently living in a suburban area of the city that was not generally even visited by Westerners for fear of being killed by the growing hatred of Americans. Jimmy had worked as a reporter, translator, and various other jobs, but didn’t seem interested in developing a full career. He claimed to have a Vietnamese girlfriend, whose picture had been sent to the family, but little else was known about his private life. All Peter could determine is that there was some sense of shame connected with the beautiful young man he’d seen in family pictures.

      Coming out to his family as a gay man, and being involved in music and opera, Peter perhaps could not resist the sheer drama of it as he begin to explore what the family did not at all want to confront. For over 10 years, with travels to France, Viet Nam, and throughout the US, Peter McDowell slowly tracked down the details that began with family photos, letters, and unspoken clues that family members hadn’t been interested in following.

       McDowell, for his part, is as often as unforthcoming throughout the first third of the film as was his family. He is obviously a patient and carefully probing man, certainly not quick to make some of the conclusions that many of us watching this “mystery” are much quicker to draw. There is only one moment early on when he suggests a sense of frustration about his family’s refusal to further help in the full exploration of what happened to their son so many years ago.

       Yet when he speaks to the mother and his sisters, even a brother briefly who it is intimated may have his own serious drug problems, they seem reasonable, well-adjusted Midwesterners, who despite their basically conservative values seem to have dealt well with Peter’s sexuality and even with many of what become increasingly apparent were Jimmy’s quirks.

       The mother, indeed, had her own suspicions which she never shared until carefully probed by Peter. After his death, the girl in the photo, Luyen, evidently wrote Jimmy’s mother, explaining that she hardly knew Jimmy and was certainly not his girlfriend; but she added that Jimmy was very close to her brother Dũng, with whom he lived.

     But even then Peter does not leap to obvious suspicions, particularly since Jimmy and Dũng are described only as very good friends.

      But at least the plot has opened and in the fairest, most open-minded manner possible, Peter moves forward with his explorations, discussing his brother with a good friend in France who later inhabited the same area in which Jimmy lived, helps look for traces of Dũng and Luyen in the backstreets of the suburb, asking everyone he meets whether they have ever seen the brother he shows in a picture with Dũng on the beach.

    Gradually he uncovers friends and family members who identify both men and knew the sister, telling him that Dũng had died, heartbroken evidently after Jimmy’s death, and Luyen, in another photo, had moved to the US.

      Yet years pass before Peter is able to track down Luyen in Des Moines, who reiterates the truth that she was not Jimmy’s close friend; it was her brother.

       But even then, after numerous testimonies of how close the two men were, how everyone imagined them being a couple in love, Peter still will not commit fully to the brother being gay. Even though, after talking with a doctor who was there when Jimmy died in the American hospital, he is told than Jimmy did not die of heroin as the medical records read, but of a severe staph infection, Peter will not rule out heroin as a cause since it appears Jimmy occasionally smoked it, as did numerous of the US soldiers stationed in Viet Nam. Perhaps because of smoking it he was not capable of realizing of how serious his infection was, postulates O’Dowell.

     Jimmy’s extreme hesitancy to describe his relationship with Dũng as being anything but that of friend is attributed to the times, particularly given the attitude about homosexuality in Viet Nam during the 1970s.

      I might certainly bow to that fact, but why Jimmy still felt that he could not possibly discuss his sexuality with his family doesn’t entirely hold water. I realized that at his death in 1972 I would have been 25, just a few months older, and by that time my companion and I had been together for two years already, revealing our sexuality openly, even to my own midwestern somewhat conservative parents. It is as if Jimmy, having remained out of the US for such a long period had not fully comprehended the changes that occurred regarding being gay back home. But living in the closet in Viet Nam did not mean that he necessarily had to remain there in his homeland, and surely knowing that truth would have helped to relieve his parents’ confusion and mistaken notions concerning what seemed to be his perverse reasons, attributed in his own writing to “hedonism,” for his returning to the country where he hated serving in the military.

      Yet, of course, McDowell is well aware that everything in his film makes quite apparent that Jimmy was gay and had returned to the country after falling in love with the young Vietnamese jeep driver, perhaps 16-18 at the time of their meeting. Perhaps in his very respect for the privacy his brother had fought for, McDowell has been a bit too coy. One wonders whether he doesn’t share in some of his family’s reticence to embrace the full truth. But, obviously, no good documentarian rushes to assumptions. And there is no question that someone who has devoted over 10 years searching for truth is not obfuscating, but merely not making easy presumptions.

      But we do make those assumptions, and feel some anger and hurt that such a truly beautiful looking young man should not only have to suffer, as did so many thousands of US young men, the terror and horrific experiences of that meaningless war, but on top of all that had to hide the one thing that may have helped to regain his sense of balance, his love and his sexual relationship with Dũng

     Eventually even Peter cannot resist offering up an animation at the very end of the film, wherein the two young men squatting on that beach in Viet Nam, stand, embrace, and walk together along the ocean shores.

     Returning to Ho Chi Minh City, Peter attempts to see the city it has become today and even is able to visit the very apartment in which his brother lived, looking out over the city of so long ago.

     I wished he had explored just of few of the other charms that his brother Jimmy had written home about. Perhaps they have all also disappeared. But it would be worth knowing what the war-time Saigon offered to Jimmy beyond the boy he so deeply loved. But then perhaps we need read Graham Greene to imagine that lost world of imperialist intrigue and confusion, wherein innocent Americans just like Jimmy cause total chaos.  

 

Los Angeles, October 26, 2002

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2022).

 

Jacob Tierney | Heated Rivalry (Season 1, Episode 3: Hunter) / 2025 [TV series]

let’s make love

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 3 “Hunter”

In this third episode of the already quite acclaimed TV series Heated Rivalry, the focus utterly changes. And, in some sense, the fairly radical cinematographical perspectives of the work become more apparent. Not only do we get repeated incidents set in a new location, as if the story has itself forgotten where he had previously been (a tactic occasionally used in Fassbinder’s works), but time becomes disjunctive, at moments images jumping ahead while simultaneously playing out a former scene.

    The break away from the story of Shane and Ilya is itself a rather radical device. The new characters featured in this episode did not even truly exist in the previous two episodes, but receive a love story every far steamier that the central figures. Once they hit the sack, these boys immediately know what it is they want—and get it. Here there are now longer any long impatient flutterings of the heart. It is as if the motor of the movie has gone into a kind of stutter before cranking up into an entirely new gear.

   A scene from “The Olympians” is almost repeated with the same figures, Scott Hunter (François Arnaud) and Carter Vaughn (Kolton Stewart), but this time instead of being at a café in Sochi, Japan during the Olympics, where the focus was entirely on Shane, it occurs in a small smoothie bar in New York, where once again, they encounter Shane, and somewhat casually comment on the bravery of the Russian gay figure skaters, but this time with the camera focusing on Hunter, making it quite clear that the observation has specific meaning for him that the others cannot imagine.

     And Hunter, the captain of the New York Admirals, who has not been having a very fulfilling season with absolutely no goals, soon after enters a local health bar where he meets up with the shop employee named Christopher “Kip” Grady (Robbie G.K.), a beautiful hunk of a man, to whom Hunter, rather amazingly given the fact that we have had no clues of his possibly being gay, appears to be attracted. Reading his badge, he calls him “Kip” twice, while the barista suggests the Blue Moon special (which obviously calls up a major lyricist celebrated in a move of the same year, the gay Lorenz Hart) to which Kip suggests he add a banana—the perfect sexual picker-upper that becomes necessary, we soon discover, for Hunter to regain his mojo and start winning again. As the synopsis blandly declares: “That night, Scott finally breaks a scoring slump.”  

   But any gay perceiver of this film, and all the woman who have embraced this narrative sense almost immediately, as well, I should add as Kip’s loyal (best girlfriend) Straw+Berry co-worker Maria Villanueva (Bianca Nugara) perceives, there’s something going on between the two rather emphatic acknowledgements of the barista's name and the return of Hunter to the smoothie shop for another order of the Blue Moon before the next game, even if Kip knows absolutely nothing about hockey and hasn’t a clue who Scott Hunter is.

    You can describe it simply as superstition, but the flirtation that Kip senses and Maria openly recognizes is quite apparent unless you are a dumb straight man sitting in the corner. If this had been Heartstopper little electric and heart shaped emojis would have danced across the screen.

Thank heaven Heated Rivalry has the wonderful jibes of Kip’s coworker and the members of his local gay pub to make obvious what even the barista can’t admit until he’s actually invited by Hunter to a hockey game and catches the man’s obvious nod and wink.

     And even his challenging hockey members notice that something is in the air, particularly after Hunter, losing games against the Raiders and the Metros, brawls on court, after the game, when Hunter cannot help but poke Shane’s so very secretive romance by comparing him to Ilya, the two breaking into a brawl.

     The tempest is about to explode even the politest of New England teapots when Hunter encounters Kip at another venue where the overworked barista is attempting to makes some extra money, only to discover his newfound heart throb is in attendance. They go home together, have glorious sex, and, as the saying goes, never look back as the recognize there is not going to be any turning back, that they are already wed as a couple.

    Yes, such events to happen. My companion Howard and I met, moved in together by the end of the week, and are still living together 56 years later!

     That is not to say there aren’t incredible problems. Neither Howard nor I, at least, were not famous athletes for whom, like Hollywood stars, such a relationship might mean the complete relinquishment of the lives they worked so hard to create. One could never imagine or more accommodating and comprehending companion than Kip, but, as his dear friend Maria whispers

into Hunter’s ear in a dance at another celebratory occasion, he is desperately suffering. How to remain silent about what one is driven to desperately shout about with joy, having found someone with whom you are finally desperate in love? How to pretend a perfect romance? Everything that gay couple does reveals their exceptionalness, we are special because there are still so few of us, and when we fall in love believing in the impossibility that we have been taught our very existence denies, how can we remain quiet?

    In a brilliant cinema moment, director Jacob Tireney, portrays Hunter delivering a truly inspiring speech about how, after his parents were killed in a car accident, the very organization that he is celebrating and seeking for further support helped to make him realize that he had another family in the world sports—with lover Kip and his best female friend Maria in attendance—at the same moment interweaving scenes of his Hunter and Kip’s return home and the latter’s first recognition that he must, at least temporarily, get away at least to revisit his beloved father. It is a bit like witnessing a train wreck while watching a film in which the speaker is praising the wonders and pleasures of train travel. Both are realities that cannot be denied, but how can one ever reintegrate the realities faced.

    Kip celebrates his birthday with his own friends at the gay bar, away from the person he so desperately wishes were there to celebrate their new life together. He falls into tears in his father’s arms without the truly caring father knowing how to even explain the phenomenon. Kip is happier than he has ever been in his life. Kip is more miserable that he has ever been in his life. That is, obviously, the central torture of deep love. It is no longer an issue of choice; you can only celebrate the pain.

     That a popular series would choose this message for its very third episode, interrupting its major love story with another suddenly intruding love story—perhaps even dominating the sensual first episodes—makes it clear this is not a truly normative soap opera. For one of the first times in gay cinema, the power of sexual allure, the draw of individuals to one another based primarily on bodily desire is placed openly in front of the viewers. These people don’t have complex intellectual interchanges; they are like most of us, animals when it comes to discovering who they love, drawn by forces beyond their control.

     If sex has always been at the sublimated heart of all Hollywood portrayed romances, it has generally been toned down, hushed up, kept steeping in the background, while the narrative attempt to explain what might actually be behind desire, confused moral compasses, childhood and adult abuses, and misinterpreted visions of what society has to offer become the dominant themes. Certainly not at the same sophisticated level, but with the same dynamic force, this work returns to what Tennessee Williams long ago made apparent: desire is something that truly can’t be contained and unless it is openly admitted and expressed, will destroy the individual and all his or her possibilities of love. You can’t hide love is the lesson that these (a)moral tales tell us, no matter how “perverse” the society might interpret that love to be.

    It’s truly interesting that women are behind the re-engenderment of raw sex to the world of gay love, after now so many years of pale male films celebrating our new ability to marry. Now perhaps we can get back to the lust in our souls and stop assimilating what the straight patriarchal world has determined is the right course on which we should proceed.

 

Los Angeles, January 27, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2026).