Publico Groupe | Müller Mile High Club / 2002 [commercial advertisement]

Müller Love

By Douglas Messerli

 

Publico Groupe (director) Müller Mile High Club / 2002 [31 seconds] [commercial advertisement]

 

Playing on the bisexual airline porn romp of 2001, Chi Chi LaRue’s Mile Bi Club, the British yoghurt makers, Müller, present a man and woman, sitting beside one another on a plane (it’s never made clear whether they are strangers, friends, or a married couple) who decide to try out sex in the plane bathroom.

    The male goes first, stripping off his clothes almost the moment he enters the small chamber. The woman rises to follow him, but at very moment the stewardess passes by with a tray of Müller yoghurt cups, offering her a strawberry container.

      The woman finds the idea very appealing and sits back down in her sea as she begins to savor the delicious treat, seemingly having completely forgotten about her sexual rendezvous.

    Meanwhile, the male now naked awaits; a male steward pushing his way into the open door of the bathroom, is greeted immediately with a kiss, and smiles in delight. This is definitely going to be a homosexual romp.

    The now truly fulfilled female announces the joys of “Müller love.”

 

Los Angeles, February 24, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (February 2026).

Jason Sakaki | Ramen Boys / 2025

the lifeguard delivers up the slipper

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jason Sakaki (screenwriter and director) Ramen Boys / 2025 [13 minutes]

 

Canadian director Jason Sakaki’s Ramen Boys is a charming but absolutely empty-headed comedy about a recently out Asian boy, Kevin (Brendan Koyanagi), desperately—although maybe not so hopelessly—looking for a dream lover to just walk down his street one day, enter is house, and sweep him off his feet.

    He even lays out his summer’s dreams to his bestie female friend, Marianna Zouzoulas, who when she expresses in her incredulity he explains that he has already spotted a hunky lifeguard James (Johnny Wu) to passes by the house every day at about 3:00. Having questioned him about why he hasn’t called out to him, this Rapunzel in his tower, realizes it is about 3:00 once again, and rushes to his balcony.

    Finally he does call out, but when the lifeguard (recognized as a pool guard by his T-shirt) doesn’t hear him, he tosses a slipper at him, attempting to cover up his blatant come-on making up a story about a huge insect which he was attempting to kill.

    Still, his ludicrous story works like a charm, as the lifeguard visits him to return the shoe. Within minutes, our crazy gay hero has discovered that the big-chested savior is not gay—happily discerning, however, that he is “bi”—and is ready to serve him up a meal of Ramen, the lifeguard quoting Lady Gaga’s off-hand observation: “There could be a hundred Asians in the room, and 99 don’t believe in using a kettle for the ramen. But all it takes is just one who believes.” Even James has to agree that Kevin’s kettle heated ramen is quite special.

    And within moments both boys, feeling it has been very difficult to find the right person who really cares, find themselves kissing and falling in love.

    The film ends in a truly meandering and meaningless scene in which, after Kevin summarizes his wonderful summer with James, the female bestie Marianna begins to explain her special summer with a Greek boy.

     This is lite, very lite fair with a fair amount of cliches and one zinger about Asians meeting up with white gay boys. Most of the white boys who are attracted to Asians, the concur, have just returned from Japan showing pictures of them in a kimono. But these young men are so attractive that you’re happy they’ve found love. Too bad it couldn’t have been in a more intelligent movie.

 

Los Angeles, February 24, 2026 | Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (February 2026).

Isaiah Henderson | Balloons / 2025

hot air

by Douglas Messerli

 

Isaiah Henderson (screenwriter and director) Balloons / 2025 [9 minutes]

 

The director of this short student film lets loose with nearly every cliché in Gay Film 101 stock book to tell the tale of two boys, played Keller Kennedy and Braeden Stelle, in a story about a “fleeting romance.” Like boys in love in a thousand short films, they run across the golden-steaked beach, pick up and twirl each other about, and generally grab hold of each other’s body every chance they get. How strange, but I’ve never really seen any man do that in real life.

    But we know something’s up (no pun intended) when writer/directed Henderson suddenly introduces the metaphor of balloons used to symbolically celebrate so many occasions: birthdays, weddings, baby showers, etc. Balloons, so we are told, can are so delicate they can pop at any moment, and rise up only to be trapped in a wire or a tree.

    So too is these boy’s relationship, particularly since we notice one of them constantly looking over his shoulder at nearly every moment to be sure no one’s watching their gay lovemaking. And eventually, we just know it, he will have to say something terribly profound such as “I just can’t do this anymore.”

    He goes out and quickly finds a girlfriend who together make it difficult for the now lonely queer boy just to survive, writing “Faggot” across his dorm door and basically mocking him as he passes by, even if there are moments with his former partner tends to stare after him a little bit longer that disdain permits. We just know that someday he will have to come home to his unhappy wife to declare: “I just can’t go on.”

   Our remaining blond-haired queer has fortunately saved two balloons, one red, one blue so show us at the very last moment, that sometimes balloons do actually “reach the sky.”

     Someone should have clued Henderson in that he was sentimentalizing a trivial affair by using the most tired of cliches. But several commentators on Letterboxd thought this movie was actually quite profound. AcomsDave Community Journalist even gushed: “Isaiah Henderson’s Balloons isn’t just a short film; it’s a gut punch wrapped in eight minutes of raw emotion. If you’ve ever navigated the treacherous waters of a love that’s vibrant behind closed doors but shrouded in fear in public, this one will resonate deeply.”

    So many gay filmmakers and their audiences these days seen to have forgotten that gay boys don’t just hug, run, and kiss on a beach before pouting and slouching off to bed in tears; many of us still think, question, and challenge the world around us in far more complex ways. And a relationship is not always the first thing on our minds.

 

Los Angeles, February 23, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (February 2026).

 

 

Gregg Araki | Mysterious Skin / 2004, 2005 US

confusing love

by Douglas Messerli

 

Gregg Araki (screenwriter, based on a work by Scott Heim, and director) Mysterious Skin / 2004, 2005 US

 

A perfect double bill of the gay cinema of abuse might be Marcel Gisler’s 1998 work Fögi Is a Bastard and Araki’s Mysterious Skin, very similar in some ways, except that the early work is about an older boy who willingly enters into an abusive gay relationship perceiving it as a kind of love, while the New Queer Cinema director Araki focuses on pre-adolescent boys, in particular, Neil McCormick (Joseph Gordon-Levitt playing the older version and Chase Ellison playing the younger boy) who also sees it as wanted attention and love instead of abuse. In both cases the affects our similar, both the young boy in Gisler’s work and Neil becoming teenage prostitutes whose future as adults seems unsure and confused. Both boys survive and realize their misunderstandings, although in a strange way still remaining vaguely in love with their abusers.

    The second figure in Araki’s film, Brian Lackey (Brady Corbet) is far more tortured, unable to even remember the one evening of abuse he suffered when Neil introduced him to the Little League baseball coach, which resulted in him being found under a home crawl space, his nose bleeding. Unlike Neil, who immediately identified as a homosexual, Brian seems to have no sexual identity, left with only the feeling that at sometime he has been abducted, perhaps, even by aliens. For all the difficulties of Neil’s life, a few of which I will later recount, at least he is fully cognizant of what has happened to him, and able to even know how he was involved, even if he cannot escape the vortex into which those experiences have thrown him. Brian, whose parents are most neglectful, his father finally leaving the relationship, remembers only a vague rainy afternoon when, after no one picked him up, he awoke in the crawl space, with no memory of the intervening five hours.

    Although there is no question of the abusiveness of Fögi in Gisler’s film, his relationship with the younger boy can still be seen as a kind of confused attempt at love turned dangerous with his use of alcohol and drugs. In Araki’s version the coach is a textbook case of an adult pedophile whose selfish involvement of these young boys in his sexual activities basically destroys their lives, even if Neil confuses the feelings with love.

    In Neil’s case, the boy living with an irresponsible mother whose love of her son almost borders, at times, on the incestual, the coach simply encouraged a young boy’s own sexual confusions, providing him with an older friend living in a house filled with foods and candies loved by children—one might almost say like the witch in Hansel and Gretel—and someone perfectly willing to play child-like games, even tape recording him shouting obscenities. After a ridiculous event of emptying, in a child-like fury, entire boxes of rainbow-colored Fruit Loops over their heads, he engages in sex like it were simply a natural part of childish misbehavior. For Neil it feels good, with him finally at the center of someone’s attention, unlike his father who shows his disappointment with both his son and wife as he scowls away from the house. Neil’s later involvement with prostitution with older men leads almost naturally from his short involvement with the coach before the man leaves town, now clearly fearful that word might get out about his dangerous activities.

    Fortunately, for Neil, he has very early on bonded with a fellow student, Wendy Peterson (Michelle Trachtenberg as the adult and Riley McGuire as the child), almost as wild as he is, to whom he can tell the truth and share his sense of alienation.

     When she moves to New York City, he eventually follows, she having found a job and trying finally to ween him away from the big city horrors of male prostitution. Two events, one in which he is severely beaten by a john and another in which he meets up with a man dying of AIDS who simply hires him to touch him, no sex involved finally bring Neil to his senses, as he finds a job in a subway shop and begins his slow climb back into some normalcy, with Wendy’s help.

    Brian has no such possibility, since he experiences only a void, a strange hole in time that he somehow knows is crucial in comprehending who and what he is. Reading about individuals who claim to have been abducted by aliens, often with a strange blue light and a total loss of memory, he increasingly believes he may have suffered a similar experience, and contacts a young woman, Avalyn Friesen (Mary Lynn Rajskub) who claims just such an abduction.

    She writes him back, inviting her to come visit her not so far away in a nearby Kansas town. From what we see of her isolated conditions and the appearance of her almost mad-looking father, not at all appreciative of his daughter having visitors, she may have been abused by her dad, veiling the experience with the alien story. Araki, however, is not interested in pursuing her experiences, and his film makes no such assumptions. What is important is that Brian finally finds his version of Neil’s Wendy Peterson, and the two bond; she invites him back to witness a dead cow she has discovered, believing that it too is the product of alien acts. Strangely, she encourages him to feel up into its severed intestines which Neil does with a great sense of fascination.

    But when Avalyn suddenly shows up at his doorstep with the secret intentions of making love to him, he is horrified. What the childhood experience has left him, perhaps, is a kind of horror of sex, particularly with a female.

    Brian has also been encouraged to reach into his dreams, in which a young boy in a baseball uniform often appears. Through a bit of research, he is able to find a picture of the baseball team, spotting a boy who looks vaguely like the one in his dream, Neil McCormick.

     Coincidentally, Neil has promised to his mother to return home for Christmas, and does so, just after the incident I mention above, when he is beaten by a client. He tells his mother that he has been beaten and robbed at the airport.

   And finally, when the two boys meet up, Brian begging Neil to help him remember what has happened, the slightly older boy takes him to the house, now owned by others, where the coach once lived. Since the family is out, it being the Christmas season, the boys break in a back way, and Neil shows him the room where everything happened. With Neil’s help Brian is able to restore his memory, how the boys visited the coach together, where encouraged to have sex with one another, and finally were asked to fistfuck the coach, which explains Brian’s fascination with innards of the cow. Finally, he realizes the awful truth, laying his head down in tears on Neil’s lap as carolers, hearing people within the house, begin to sing “Silent Night.”

     If Gisler’s work allows some equivocation regarding Fögi’s behavior, Araki makes it perfectly clear how the abusing coach has helped to destroy these young boys’ early lives. We can only hope that they can now begin to heal themselves. But the crime is just that, childhood abuse that can effect children far beyond their formative years. And what isn't brought up again in the story, is another scene in which Neil equally abused Brian on Halloween by setting off fireworks held in the boy's mouth; the abused often go on to abuse others as well.

    The director was also careful to let all his audiences know that the younger child actors were not present in any of the scenes with suggested abuse or spoke of the adult themes of the cinema. What he did was create two scripts, one completely innocent with daily proofs approved by the children’s parents. Their actions, however, often accorded with the ones he used in the different context of the film itself and were slipped into the more complex adult story, without any direct interchange with the actual dialogue.

     Critics praised the film for its brilliant handling of such difficult scenes, and psychologists such as Richard Gartner proclaimed it as an accurate portrayal of the long-term effects of abused boys.      

     To me the work appeared just a little too ploddingly obvious in its inevitable spin into where the abuse left these children as their grew into young men. Of the two, I found Neil’s trajectory to be far more interesting and intelligent than Brian’s whose current sexuality is left vague, and whose character left me a bit confused of how the void in time and his recurring nose bleeds could play such a dominating role in his youthful life. Perhaps Araki could have given him a bit more complexity instead of letting him simply wander off into the land of hoaxes.

     It still, however, remains a strong piece of film-making daring to engage a subject most directors would not dare. Once more, I encourage the double viewing with Gisler’s film which brings even a clearer focus of the variances of abuse.

 

Los Angeles, February 22, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (February 2026).     

 

Jacob Tierney | Heated Rivalry (Season 1, Episode 6: The Cottage) / 2025 [TV series]

the boyfriend

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 6 “The Cottage”

 

Scott’s very public coming out is even more openly discussed as he accepts the MVP (Most Valued Player) award, in which he speaks of how he has long recognized that he was one of the different people that his fellow hockey players made fun of in the locker room, and that his lover Kip finally made him strong enough that he could break through the loneliness and exhaustion of having to keep the secret.

      The event has completely changed Ilya’s and Shane’s life, the Russian finally determining to spend several weeks with Shane in his so-called “cottage,” actually a beautiful home built deep in the woods. Both reveal that neither has had sex with anyone else since the months they were last together, something once more than sounds less plausible for handsome testosterone-driven young men than it might for women, but then it is, after all, Rachel Reid’s story, and apparently she sees their abstinence as an important symbol of their commitment to each other, much the way monogamy traditionally defines a heterosexual and many a gay marriage. In any event, they can hardly wait to fuck.

     Finally, both hockey players can truly begin to share their own pasts and difficulties, which the brief meet-ups they previously encountered did not allow. Ilya is able only now to share the trauma of his mother’s death by suicide and his full anger with both his father and his brother, who, as we have previously discovered, are both Russian policemen, the brother often depending his Ilya for financial support.

    They also briefly discuss Rose Landry, of whom it’s clear Ilya is somewhat jealous until Shane makes it clear that their two attempts at sex were both disasters.

   It’s clear that Ilya is ready to seek a US passport, and suggests that perhaps he should marry Svetlana in order to obtain one.

    Now it is Shane’s turn to feel rather jealous, wondering whether, since Ilya actually likes women, that perhaps Svetlana is not the one he truly should marry. Ilya agrees that he likes women and is often surrounded by them. Yet, he has one problem, there is this freckled faced man with a weak backhand that he cannot stop thinking about. “It’s a terrible problem.” Emotionally reacting with a deep swallow, Shane asks: “Do you want that problem to go away,” to which Ilya answers, “I don’t ever want that problem to ever go away.” The double use of the word “ever” may show Ilya’s slight discomfort with the English language, but it truly emphasizes that he now sees their relationship as a permanent thing.

     What’s clear, even if they’re not ready to that to tell the world of their own love, is that they want to be able to spend more time openly with one another, and they are truly in love. Shane, after some thought, suggests another route, although somewhat complex. What if they gradually begin to turn their noted rivalry into a friendship. He suggests that start up a charity of some sort, perhaps for the prevention of suicide, while Ilya changing to the Ottawa team might move closer to Shane. Whether or not that might work, what is clear and what they now finally confess is their open love for one another. What began as a powerful sexual attraction, providing release to both men, they now perceive as gay love, both admitting that they are now homosexual, not just bisexual men who have found an easy sexual release in one another.

     But suddenly everything shifts as Shane’s father (Dylan Walsh) shows up to pick up something, from within the house watching the approaching couple returning from a swim as they pause for a deep kiss.

   The father quickly drives off, but Shane suddenly goes into terror mode, declaring it a fucking nightmare, and burying his head in the couch, an action he will repeat several in the rest of the episode. Williams has explained that he played Shane as being somewhat on the autistic arc, and we now see that in his sense of horror, his inability to even know quite how to handle this new situation.

    We now see how important it is to have someone like Ilya in his life. Ilya suggests that he go to his parents and talk, but Shane is ashamed of having lied to them for so many years. He repeats that it is his “Fucking nightmare,” but Ilya suggests that maybe it’s simply time to wake up.

   Together they drive to his parent’s home, and as they meet with them the entire work begins to someone tilt away from being a hidden rom-com with mostly dark overtones, into being a true comedy.

    As they enter, it is his father who first apologizes, reporting that he had gone to the cottage simply to get a charger to fit into his phone. But Shane quickly changes the conversation, assuring him it’s okay, announcing that he’s gay, and in a quietly humorous manner introducing his friend to his hockey savvy parents as Ilya [pause] Rozanov. But then you know that.” As Shane begins mumbling something about him visiting, and we’re…," Ilya interrupts, putting his hand upon Shane’s shoulder and declaring: “Lovers. Hi.”

     Shane’s mother (Christina Chang) reminds her son: “But, you hate him.”

     Shane: “Yeh, I mean I get that but I mean I actually…I love him. …Can we just sit down please?”

    Together seated around the family dinner table Shane’s parents try to puzzle out the whole story.  Both Shane’s mother and father first reveal that they had certainly thought it possible that their son was gay. In fact, his father observes that they have felt that about their son for quite a while. “What we did not expect is that you were were a friend with Rozanov.”

    Shane suggests it’s a long story.

  “When did this happen?” asks Shane’s father. “Wait. The Allstar game. You two had so much chemistry.”

     “No, it was before then.”

     “Wow.”

     “So when?” inquires his mother.

     “Since a, rookie season.”

     His mother is even more astounded. But Ilya interrupts to remind it that it was actually the summer before.

    “In love since…” begins his now truly incredulous mother.

    “No. No. No. No,” both men agree.

    “Just….” They try to get Ilya to complete the sentence, obviously, “just sex,” but Shane's mother interprets it to mean “Just lovers,” Shane insisting that no one is allowed to use that word again.

     At this point Mrs. Hollander decides it’s time to break out the vodka.

     “And there were no other men in Montreal?” asks Shane’s dad.

     Soon after, he asks the important question: “So you plan, what, to just keep doing this in secret until you’re both retired?”

   The two players look at one another, as confused now as Shane’s parents, Shane answering, “Probably, I don’t know.”

     But we do know that something has changed. First of all, their love is no longer a secret, and Shane, if nothing else has come out after all these years, admitting he is gay.

     Ilya concurs, Shane explaining: “We just can’t come out and announce it.”

    The father throws into another coal upon the fire, “Ilya, have to say I’m surprised. You have such a reputation as a ladies’ man.”

      “It’s not untrue.”

     Shane adds, “Ilya likes both.”

     It’s true, Ilya admits but adds, “But I have only been in love with only one person.”

     Shane answers, “Same here.”

    Suddenly Mrs. Hollander stands up and walks out to the terrace, tearing up a bit, as Shane follows. Shane begins to attempt to apologize for his being gay, explaining what so many gay men have said over and over through the last century, “I really tried very hard, but I just can’t help it.”

    But his mother immediately insists that he has nothing to apologize for. Her sorrow is about the fact that she had made him feel that he couldn’t tell her. As they both openly cry, she declares that she is so proud of him. And again she begs his forgiveness. There have been similarly understanding mothers in the hundreds of gay coming out movies I've seen, but I haven’t yet experienced one so honest and loving as Yuna Hollander.

     But when they return for dinner she is already plotting on how they might represent themselves to the public, moving far beyond any plans they have made. She also wonders if Ilya would leave Boston for Shane, Ilya insisting that yes, he would, even though they drafted him. This is one tough hockey mother, and Shane now grows even more uncomfortable with the whole discussion. And as the conversation turns to Scott, Yuna wondering whether Shane has talked to him, Ilya admits that he has, but he said nothing about Shane and himself. But all agree that what he did was very brave.

     Again, however, as the conversation gets increasingly complex Shane shows his inability to handle all the details, slumping down at the table, burying his head once more a bit like an ostrich unable to cope with it all. Ilya tries to rouse him, explaining “You’re good here. Your family is here. Your boyfriend is here.”

      This episode need go no further. Ilya in those words has established that everything has changed. He now fully acknowledges his love in front of Shane’s parents. Shane is now in good hands.

      Shane raises his head a little. “My boyfriend?”

      “Yes. I mean I think so. Probably.” He lifts Shane’s head and kisses him.

      It’s hard to describe such a beautiful comic moment that it leaves you in tears.

 

Los Angeles, February 21, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (February 2026).