AMV BBDO Agency | “Mum” in the Kitchen / 2008 [commercial advertisement]

sweet cheeks

by Douglas Messerli

 

AMV BBDO Agency (director) “Mum” in the Kitchen / 2008 [30 seconds] [commercial advertisement]

 

If we need any further evidence that homophobia still rules the airwaves, then one only need take a look at the truly charming and harmless British gay advertisement promoting Heinz Deli Mayo from 2008.

    A man dressed like a deli counterman, white hat, shirt an apron, stands behind a kitchen counter making sandwiches. A young boy runs into the room, on his way to school, demanding “107 please, Mum.” The man puts a sandwich into the child’s lunch box, responding “Yeah, you got it, kid. And practice tonight,” as the boy runs off.

    His female sibling enters, crying out “Hey, what about me?”

    “Oh, what about you?” answers the deli dad who speaks in a Brooklyn accent.

He has a sandwich already made, it just needs an extra bit of ham, which puts on top, adding as he hands over the sandwich, “Don’t tell your brother.”

     Enter Dad, also in a rush, grabbing up yet another sandwich, adding “See you, love.”

     “Mum” calls out, “Hey, ain’t you forgetting something?”

     Dad runs back to award him a kiss, “Mum,” declaring “I love you. Straight home from work sweet cheeks.”

     Only then does Heinz reveal 4 bottles of their various Deli Mayo toppings.

     According to The Guardian the add immediately received about 200 complaints from the advertising regular of its being offensive and inappropriate. Some of the complaints added that complaints include that the ad was "unsuitable to be seen by children" and that it raised the difficult problem of parents having to discuss the issue of same-sex relationships with younger viewers. Even based on that low of a response, Heinz immediately pulled the ad, claiming that it listens to their customers.

    Mightn’t they have done a survey to discover how many thought the add was charming appropriate and much needed? Obviously, it was easier just to pull it and put their fingers in their ears.

   The British gay rights group Stonewall said it was shocked that Heinz had yanked what it called an “innocuous” ad and urged gay consumers to boycott the company.

 

Los Angeles, February 7, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (February 2026).

Jacob Tierney | Heated Rivalry (Season 1, Episode 4: Rose) / 2025 [TV series]

the women

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 4 “Rose”

 

Just when finally one might have imagined the relationship between Ilya and Shane is deepening, particularly as they hook up again in 2014 to 2016, there begin to be problems. Once more, some of the tension is simply due to the long periods between their love making, during which we are

asked to believe that Shane, at least, remains without another partner. But Ilya also seems to be rather celibate waiting out the periods to have sex with Shane instead of actually carrying out his affairs with other women which are nonetheless gossiped about. That handsome young men of their age are going for long periods without any sexual encounters stretches the series into incredibility.

      Those around them begin to note their constant texting and they are understandably challenged by their teammates for more details. Neither seems to participate in the standard locker talk of their colleagues, and both deny any serious relationships.

      In Boston they meet up at Ilya’s place for a sexual evening that begins to probe a bit further into their lives, Ilya, inviting Shane to spend the night, and promising to make his famous tuna melt sandwiches. But mostly new tensions arise. Ilya is worried about his father’s worsening health, but clearly is also dealing with problems with his brother. The two finally join in a pleasurable moment of frotting, calling out each other’s first names, but in the middle of their joy, Shane, for reasons not entirely explicable but certainly arising from his growing realization of his gay sexuality and the frustration of being in such a relationship that he can't even fully share with his companion, suddenly leaves.

     The act unsettles the entire relationship, spiraling this episode somewhat out of control. When friends finally insist he join them for a few drinks at a local bar where several movie actors have also gathered, Shane can no longer refuse. There he meets the star Rose Landry (Sophie Nélisse), an intelligent woman with obviously far more sexual experience than Shane. She’s also quickly charmed by the noted hockey player, and before Shane even knows what has hit him, they have entered into a very public relationship, with Rose attending many of his games and gossip of the relationship between the couple moving at a faster rate than their real friendship. Although Ilya is a noted “womanizer,” he now becomes jealous.

     After a difficult match in Montreal, they both show up in the same nightclub with friends, basically trying to outdo one another by dancing with and romancing their women, a truly gestural act that threatens, nonetheless, to possibly undo their love.

     This episode closes, however, with what we know to still be the truth, as Ilya masturbates thinking of Shane, and Shane has a frustrating time in bed with Rose.

      In all, we might describe this interlude as the least likeable episode of the series, as the two reveal to themselves and to us that it’s not really women they want.

 

Los Angeles, February 7, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (February 2026).

 

 

 

Valentina Chamorro Westergårdh and Alexander Westergårdh | Bortom (Distances) / 2014

through a glass darkly

by Douglas Messerli

 

Valentina Chamorro Westergårdh and Alexander Westergårdh (screenwriters and directors) Bortom (Distances) / 2014 [18 minutes]

 

The Swedish short film Distances begins with an interesting premise, a mother Eva (Monica Albornoz) who has left her hearing-impaired son David (Gabriel Nal) behind in Sweden returns from her homeland after a long period away to discover her son is gay and has a kind and knowledgeable lover Simon (Robert Ingvarsson).

     The mother-son relationship is openly fraught, mostly because of her abandonment, but also but her still limited knowledge of signing. Even on this visit she has returned mostly to obtain some papers from the Embassy that she needs to remain in her home country. And David’s bitterness in response her irregular visits, her inability to fully communicate with him, and her refusal even to find the time to spend a full day with him and Simon becomes quite apparent, particularly at a barbecue she has arranged with her former neighbors.

     The film might have been a fascinating work is generational abandonment and miscommunication if we simply knew something beyond their current situation. Why does Eva keep responding that she’s done the best she could, when she obviously has left her own son behind? Why has she returned to her home country, and where is that? Was she in trouble in Sweden? Did her husband divorce her or die?

     The questions keep mounting the more she and even her angry son keep expressing their frustrations and cliches.

     Even Simon, who can sign well and has evidently been a stabilizing force on David’s life, is crowded to a busy background, where former friends who we know absolutely nothing about come to dominate the scene.

 

   Nothing is fully explained or even explored, and presumably the mother will rush off in a day or two returning only after long periods. So now that David is well and in a strong relationship why should we even care about his missing mother or, for that matter, even his well-being.

    To give Eva credit, she does indicate that she was simply a cleaning woman in Sweden while back in her homeland she was someone of worth. But we need to know what she means by that, why she continues to stay away from the world her already isolated son inhabits.

     Distances is not only a film not that refuses to explain the relationships of the characters but remains almost impenetrable about its own narrative. It is as if the film itself were demanding we know some language which we have not even been told we needed to unlock the significance of the lives the work is attempting to portray.

 

Los Angeles, February 7, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (February 2026).

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mike White | Year of the Dog / 2007

the unordinary obsessions of ordinary lives

by Douglas Messerli

 

Mike White (screenwriter and director) Year of the Dog / 2007

 

In Year of the Dog an ordinary secretary, Peggy (a part written by scriptwriter Mike White for actress Molly Shannon) lives a regular, if uneventful, life, stopping on her way to the office to purchase donuts for her fellow workers, regularly visiting her brother and his wife, mindful always to bring gifts for their two children. Her warm and inviting home is filled with the energy of her young pet dog, Pencil.

     We quickly recognize, however, that the thoughtfulness of this woman and her seeming joy in her pet, are, in part, a cover for a desperate loneliness and dissociation from the opposite sex. As she later reports, other people (in particular, men) have hurt her in the past; dogs remain loyal.

     But one night even Pencil decides to escape the confines of her yard, going in search of other pleasures in the next door neighbor’s garage, where he evidently ingests some poisonous substance. Peggy hears the dog’s gasping cries the next morning as she awakens, and rushes the animal to a veterinarian, but it is too late: her beloved pet dies. With his death, her world collapses.

     Having met the next door bachelor (played by John C. Reilly) in her search for the dog, she accepts an invitation to dinner. His admission that he “accidentally” shot his childhood pet and that he gets “a rush” from hunting completely repels her, and by the end of the evening she is searching his garage to uncover what she almost seems to perceive as a “murder weapon.” In fact, the hole in the fence and her lack of insistence that the dog return home have been just as responsible for her animal’s death, but, like so many of us, in her sorrow she is unable to recognize her own culpability.

     Perceiving her distress, the veterinarian’s assistant, Newt (touchingly acted by Peter Sarsgaard), suggests she adopt one of his dogs, a formerly abused animal. His need to continue training it results in a friendship between the two. Peggy, it is clear, has found a soul mate and is so desperate to please him that she becomes, like him, a vegan, and quickly begins sharing his passion for helping all animals, including becoming involved in radical animal rights organizations and, against the directive of her boss, mixing those activities with her office work, which extends to signing business checks over to her new charities. Later, while babysitting her brother’s daughter and baby son, she absconds with the overprotected children, taking them on a visit to a farm that saves animals from slaughter, and then threatening to take her young niece to a local chicken manufacturer to witness the slaughterhouse events.

     Newt, moreover, cannot return her growing love for him. White subtly reveals all in a graceful aside: at the moment he is not ready for a girlfriend or even boyfriend, he tells her. He’s currently celibate. Clearly gay or bisexual, Newt has contracted AIDS or is HIV-positive. In his warning to Peggy that each household is allowed only three pets because the human heart is only able to love a few at a time, we recognize that either he or his former companion had perhaps once tried to embrace too many in their sexual activities.

     Newt’s warning is intentionally subtle, and Peggy clearly does not comprehend it. For suddenly, in her emptiness—particularly after her new dog kills one of Newt’s animals and he is compelled to have her pet euthanized—Peggy’s new passion for animals results in what could only be described as promiscuous behavior. A trip to the pound results in her bringing dozens of dogs home.

      Chaos results; her previously ordered existence is overturned with the animals’ literal destruction of her house. Meanwhile, her boss has discovered her fraudulent acts, and when she returns home after being fired, she discovers the city authorities have impounded her new pets. Once again, she blames her neighbor—although we know that Newt, in fact, is responsible for this act. Breaking into her neighbor’s garage Peggy discovers the source of Pencil’s death, a bag of snail poison.

     A kind of madness follows, as she pours the contents of the bag onto Al’s living room floor and grabs a knife from his special collection, lying in wait so that he, like the animals he has hunted, can know the fear of being stalked and murdered. Fortunately, the neighbor grapples her to the floor before she can cause any further damage.

     After a period of recuperation, her life resumes, her brother arranging for her company to reemploy her. Peggy survives the office atmosphere, however, only a few hours before escaping via bus to a new life, a life, which in its relation to animals, she now recognizes defines and fulfills her as a human being.

    In nearly all of the films written by Mike White, oddball characters gradually move from their obsessions to a recognition of their place in life, temporarily losing touch with reality only to later reintegrate themselves into the society at large. In White’s comic masterwork, Chuck and Buck, Buck—unable to separate boyhood male to male sexual groping with his friend Chuck from the fact that Chuck is now an adult heterosexual—believes he can win his former friend away from his current fiancée by presenting the “facts” within a play, revealing the “truth” through art. Obviously his truth is a false one. Only after stalking his ex-lover and insisting they engage in one more night of sexual intercourse does Buck gradually recognize the truth, allowing him  to find a fulfilling role in life.

     In the more mainstream School of Rock, Dewey Finn, kicked out of his heavy metal, rock band, attempts to use school children to return to fame; but in their developing musical abilities and struggle to win a local battle of bands, he rediscovers himself as a music teacher, founding a School of Rock.

     In Nacho Libre, a dissatisfied cook in a monastery escapes into the Mexican world of luchadores to become a wrestler, hoping to raise money for the orphans. Like Buck and Dewey he remains a loser, and when his identity is discovered he is ousted from the monastery; yet he redeems himself, not only by defeating the champion Ramses, but by reinventing and restoring his relationship with his former life, treating the orphans to field trips, accompanied by the beautiful Sister Encarnación.

     White’s new film, his directorial premiere, continues this pattern. In a time when many works of fiction and film embrace the outsider only to the mock the society at large, or cynically champion the society at the expense of those who cannot easily fit into its falsely ordered classifications, it is refreshing that White’s characters succeed in their struggles to have both unusual obsessions while embracing the everyday worlds around them.

 

Los Angeles, April 27, 2007

Reprinted from Nth Position [England] (May 2007).

 

Julián Hernández | Bramadero / 2007

the ballet of lust

by Douglas Messerli

 

Julián Hernández (screenwriter and director) Bramadero / 2007 [22 minutes]

 

Since 1992 Mexican filmmaker Julián Hernández has been writing, directing, and editing films so audacious in theme and so beautifully framed that he has come to be one of the major LGBTQ cinema masters, although to describe him as a primarily gay figure is to unnecessarily delimit his art. Influenced by directors as diverse as Michelangelo Antonioni, Robert Bresson, and Alain Resnais—among my favorites as well—his work no more needs the gay brackets around it than do these significant filmmakers need be described as heterosexuals—although Bresson perhaps was a closeted bisexual as well.

     And it is important to understand Hernández in the context in which he places himself, in the European tradition of serious arthouse filmmaking, as opposed to thinking of his work as being involved in the basically realist dramatic and comic traditions of many contemporary gay filmmakers. Hernández is a true Romantic at heart, embracing genres of science fiction, documentary art, and the popular romance genre itself.  And his films have the lush colors of film artists such Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Schroeter, and Gregory Markopoulos.

      His early short film Bramadero, in fact, confused many viewers who immediately associated it with a kind of realism that we generally apply to pornography, albeit a beautifully filmed version of the usual gritty down-to-earth ménage of desire and copulation. That it was an arthouse-like depiction of gay sex, in fact, added to the critical furor, with as many commentators dismissing it as hothouse soft porn as others were outraged by what they saw as its straight-forward pornographic images. The film’s violent ending further put off many of its viewers who perceived the film as a kind of realist depiction of teenage gay lust, hinted at in its title, a bramadero being either a tethering post for tying up animals or a rutting-place of deer or other wild animals.

      The wild animals of Hernández’s film choose an unfinished high rise on the outskirts of Mexico City for their rutting spot, which contributes all the more to the notion that this is a real location where real gay youths come together to play out their desires.

      I think perhaps we might better understand this work, however, not as a serious LGBTQ film gone astray or even as Gay Celluloid described it, “a piece that boldly goes where no BBFC short has gone before!”; but rather as a cinematic ballet in the manner of Claire Denis’ 1996 film Beau Travail, or even before that, Norman McLaren’s 1983 dance performance Narcissus.

     It helps to realize that since his early 2000 film Rubato lamentoso, which consisted of two men dancing in the desert, the director has admitted to studying the code of dance as something to interpolate into his films. In his 2014 film, I Am Happiness on Earth, one of the three major actors, Alan Ramírez, is a professional dancer and a member of Mexico’s National Dance Company. And the central character of Young Man on the Bar Masturbating with Rage and Nerve is also centrally a dancer, the fact of which becomes central to the action of the film.

     One might indeed break down the episodes of Bramadero into descriptive scenes that are played out often in dance-like gestures, the two boys circling around, towards, and away from one another before meeting head-on each time for the rutting pleasures. Course phrases such as “The Encounter” or “The Meet-up,” “The Investigation,” “Topping,” “Rejection,” “The Suck,” “The Rest,” “The Fuck,” “Transformation” and “Death” might almost be used to chart out the various moments in this sexual dance. These Tristan and Isolde-like figures spend almost as much time investigating each other as they do in actual engagement. And although their sexual actions are highly erotic, their acts of fellatio and anal penetration do not share any of the grunt and grind maneuvers of a gay porn movie. In the midst of ejaculation, the camera itself becomes a character, spinning and twirling externally through space, taking us with it, as fully as the two figures Jonás (Sergio Almazán) and Hassen (Cristhian Rodríguez) must feel internally, a device that certainly pulls us away, as do other brilliant camera movements, from the formulaic close-up, rack focus, and loop tape tricks of a porn film.

     Behind Hernández’s sexual dance, moreover, is the issue of dominance, much in the manner that the male and female partners in a traditional ballet fulfill. But here, with two males as dancing mates, there is a constant shifting of the positions that lead ultimately to that violent S&M like ending.

     A bit like the director’s later 2016 short, Boys on the Rooftop Hassen and Jonás begin with one, Hassen, as the bottom or passive figure, but throughout their various sexual encounters, shift roles as bottom becomes top, passive becomes dominant as they shift back again for the final brutal strangulation and slug fest. One might say that, as on stage, position is everything.

      If we perceive this work as a balletic metaphor for gay male sexuality, the attacks on its violence and pornographic depictions grow quite meaningless. Yes, these two figures reveal their sexual organs and engage in actual fellatio and copulation—in an interview with Paul Julian Smith in Film Quarterly, Hernández argues “I think if you trick the audience with fake sex this produces a rupture in the text of the film”—the goal of Bramadero, it is clear from the beginning, is not to provide its viewers with an erection and a quick jack-off experience.

     This film, through its highly gestural actions, provides us instead with a layered statement about desire and lust, how the feelings of the individual shift into a physical and almost spiritual dual embodiment of sensation and love before returning us each into our own selves. Not so very different from Wagner after all, but strangely from a much more analytical perspective, Hernández reveals the fears, pleasures, and finally terrors of encountering, losing oneself, and finally losing the other that good sex ultimately entails.

 

Los Angeles, April 21, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2023).

 

 

Michael Serrato and Tom Goss | Son of a Preacher Man / 2016 [music video]

response to the corinthians

by Douglas Messerli

 

Tom Goss and Michael Serrato (screenplay), Michael Serrato (director) Son of a Preacher Man / 2016 [6 minutes] [music video]

 

Tom Goss’ and Michael Serrato’s musical revision of the Dusty Springfield standard is both a music video and a film narrative that explores another set of possibilities of the seemingly heterosexual song.

     Oddly, and absolutely incorrectly, IMDb identifies this work—a strange one for them to even include since they basically do not catalogue music videos—as being “a strictly anti-homosexual film concerning a pastor and his son who is love with his male friend.”

     Yes, the work begins with a conservative minister, the father of Billy Ray (Kevin Norman), reading from First Corinthians about the evils of “homosexuality”—a true mistranslation and misunderstanding of the original since the ancient writers did not even have such a concept in their vocabulary, and the concept and word “homosexuality” came into the human language only in the late 19th century—yet even that scene is quite undermined by the eye contact between the preacher’s son Billy Ray and Tom. And seconds later the older Tom (Goss) begins the song that tells of the two boys’ love for one another.

Billy Ray was the preacher's son

And when his daddy would visit he'd come along

When they gathered 'round and started talkin'

That's when Billy would take me walkin'

Out through the back yard we'd go walkin'

Then he'd look into my eyes

Lord knows, to my surprise

 

The only one who could ever reach me

Was the son of a preacher man

The only boy who could ever teach me

Was the son of a preacher man

Yes, he was, he was, ooh, yes, he was

Being good isn't always easy

No matter how hard I try

When he started sweet-talkin' to me

He'd come and tell me "Everything is alright"

He'd kiss and tell me "Everything is alright"

Can I get away again tonight?

     Goss’ version is vastly slowed down, and much more in the tradition of a sung rural narrative as opposed to the jubilant church choir shout of the Springfield tune. For Goss the song becomes almost a somewhat frightening lament that eventually becomes quite wonderfully liberating and ironic at the end when after both boys, having been discovered kissing and after severely being punished and prayed over by their religious parents, come to realize the bigotry and narrowmindedness of the world in which they live.

     At this point in Goss’ rendition the orchestra momentarily takes over creating a far more dissonant and experimental work that challenges the lovely simplicity of the earlier tune. And momentarily, in visual terms, suicide is even contemplated, surely not something the sweet young girl of Springfield’s version could have imagined.

     But, in the end, these two boys come back together, embrace within the church and walk out hand-in-hand, presumably free of the religious homophobia they are leaving behind.

     Goss’ work was sponsored by the Trevor Project, a suicide prevention program for youth.

     In short, the film by Goss and Michael Serrato turns the country song on its head by first inverting it and then making love win out over the hate of the church itself. The opposite of being “anti-homosexual,” it celebrates the boy’s gay romance and challenges the adults to rethink their narrow-mindedness. Although heart-breaking in the fact of how their innocent love was torn asunder by the adult world, it is, in fact, celebratory as the boys perceive their love for one another as being of greater importance than their obedience to religious prejudice. In the end, they literally run off with joy to their new world. The preacher’s son has indeed taught Tom about love.

     As critic Glenn Garner writes in Out, “…the ending provides more home than could be expected.” I would argue, however, that the ending is what should be expected and is precisely what this music video promotes.

     Writing in The Daily Beast Tim Teeman observes:

 

“In singer-songwriter Tom Goss’s moving and beautifully composed torch-song reversioning of ‘Preacher Man,’ the song takes on a darker hue featuring a forbidden gay love affair. The song immediately caused an online flurry of comment when it surfaced a couple of days ago.

     Here, falling for the preacher’s son means two teenage boys run smack up against vicious, evangelical homophobia. The video takes in young love, attempted suicide, parental rejection, religious judgment, and—hurrah—uplifting survival.”

 

     Popular gay singer and queer advocate Goss commented of this work in The Huffington Post: “The story of the video is one that hits home to me. I spent 18 months in seminary following college before I realized I was gay. I also attempted suicide when I was 13. (Goss reports swallowed a bottle of pills, immediately regretted it and told his mother who rushed him off to the hospital). Although it was for different reasons, it’s a place that I’ve been.” And Serrato evidently really did fall in love with a preacher’s son.

 

Los Angeles, February 6, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (February 2026).