Chadlee Skrikker | Hand Off / 2019

shanghaied on his way to coming out

by Douglas Messerli

 

Chadlee Skrikker (screenwriter and director) Hand Off / 2019

 

Of the four gay fantasy films I’ve chosen to discuss in this essay, the one that perhaps irritates me most is Chadlee Skrikker’s Hand Off (2019), about a pair of South African rugby players, one of who discovers he has fallen in love with the other.

      Skrikker begins his story where so many others end up, with a young gay sports player Jaco (Andahr Cotton) admitting that he’s broken up his girlfriend Em to his buddy Willem (Arno Horn). When Willem asks what happened, Jaco vaguely tenders the issue by admitting, “I told her something.” When Willem probes further, he admits that he told her “That I have feelings for someone else.”

      Most directors, simply to develop the drama, would leave it there to spin out gradually over the course of the film until finally the character, desperately in love with his straight mate, would have to admit that fact, the consequences determining the ending of the tale. But I have to give credit to Skrikker for having his character so quickly leap into the fire:

 

           Willem: Shit, do you cheat on her?”

           Jaco: No man, that’s not...

           Willem: So, what’s the girl’s name?

           Jaco: It’s not...  ...It’s not a her.

           Willem: Fuck. Listen, I’ll always be here for—

           Jaco: Willem.

           Willem: Yes? [silence] What?

           Jaco: It’s you.

    And when in the next frame we see Willem marching away from his friend with hardly a look back, when Jaco follows, you can almost hear a collective gasp of recognition for what we might all have predicted. And when Jaco shouts out, “I’ll see you tonight,” we recognize just how naive this character is, while recognizing that for the next half hour or so he’ll be forced to suffer through some very painful moments to explore just how deep his friendship truly runs. Will Willem “be there for him” if that is precisely what his friend most desires?

      At least you can say that Skrikker’s film is not predictable, at least not precisely. For while Jaco most certainly does have to suffer those long moments of utter fear that he has lost not only his best friend but his potential lover, the director radically intrudes upon his own narrative, taking us into new territory.

       Jaco begins his journey by simply attending a college party where he has been scheduled to meet up with Willem. Instead, he runs into his former girlfriend (Rebecca Patrick) sitting alone in a room. She hugs him in sympathy and perhaps with a little hope of reviving his heterosexual lust, but in the end hands over a bottle of liquor with which, presumably, she was herself attempting to swallow away the taste of her recent rejection.

       For a moment I even imagined that perhaps our director was taking us into a corner of an LGBTQ movie that I have long sought out, possibly exploring how the other half of a relationship handles the news upon hearing that his or her companion is more interested in the same sex. No such luck, for in the next frame our young sufferer, having evidently consumed too much of the medicine Em provided, wakes up to discover himself in gay fantasy all done up in gold and ornate paintings where a beautiful genie-like white robbed boy with gold-leaf appliques upon his face, rings on his fingers, and rows and rows of gold-plated bracelets tells him: “Words don’t really mean much in places like this.”

       I’m sure they don’t. In the place it seems to be, a kitsch palace of gay dreams, designed as one of the movie’s respondents described it by a drunken window dresser, Jaco is hugged, kissed, pampered, and introduced into a harem of gay boys who look a bit like something out of the gay commune to whom the worn out queer hero of Rosa von Praunheim’s It Is Not the Homosexual Who Is Perverse, But the Society in Which He Lives is proudly introduced after he has explored all the other sexual avenues available to gay men.

     However, Skrikker’s fantasy world is very much perverse, particularly since these pretty Aladdins’ idea of relieving his loneliness, longing, and disorientation is take him into a Louis Quartorze piano room in order to bathe him in an orgiastic imitation of love and anything that looks like gold.

     I suppose if you gotta suffer, cooking up a fantasy in your imagination that fulfills your longings is better than just sweating it out. But if this is a young gay neophyte’s vision of gay life, I’d keep my hands off him as well—especially if I were playing the most touchy-feely sport of all, rugby!—while handing him off to a good shrink instead of leaving him in hands of this little blue boy cult.

   

     To abandon an innocent, who’s just discovered he likes boys by asking him to sign up for this preposterous fantasy is truly derelict. It’d be one thing if Skrikker were somehow undermining the genre with a good dose of campy satire. But sorry to say, it appears the director truly believes these golden-mangled angels will help our hero to survive his crisis while Willem and the director go silent for twenty some minutes before the former buddy comes round to say, it’s okay, I’ll still be your friend.

     In other words, Skrikker, just like the other fantasists I write about, gives up on his movie the minute when he might have dug down deep into the psyches of his central figures, in this case Jaco, Willem, and Em all three, in order to find out what’s truly the problem besides the superficial homophobia that they’ve been taught to rely in such strange situations.

    Given the choice of the suggested therapy or coming to terms with what I most fear, I’d choose the poison pill any day. But none of our so-called characters get that choice. And we never do find out how they come to terms with the real-life situation or what happens when Willem and Jaco walk arm and arm off into the land of nod and shake hands to just being friends. Does poor Jaco even get a kiss? Did he get a chance to pull off all that damn gold leaf before meeting up with the team to swig down a drink?

     Perhaps this director, after his brilliantly horrifying film about homophobia, Beyond Repair just one year earlier, needed to create a more lovely alternative for his gay figure; but I strangely find this fantasy as bad as the previous film's attempted cure.

 

Los Angeles, June 7, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2021).

Tyler Reeves | When I Grow Up / 2019

connor’s confusion

by Douglas Messerli

 

Tyler Reeves (screenwriter and director) When I Grow Up / 2019 [5 minutes]

 

US director Tyler Reeves 5-minute short When I Grow Up is perhaps the most fun of the fantasies of which I’m writing. A family has gathered at a local restaurant to celebrate their daughter Ashley’s (Lauren Elyse Buckley) acceptance to college where she intends to study creative writing.

     Mother (Varda Appleton), Father (Jonathan Fahn), and Ashley’s younger brother, Connor (Noah Dobson), slightly uncomfortable within his own slightly chubby body, all toast to the girl, her parents expressing their excitement that she gotten into the school of her choice. The moment they toast, Connor suddenly observes two gay men enter the place and sit at bar table behind him.

      A moment later Connor is caught up in a fantasy of the couple working backwards from their now seemingly pleasant workaday lives together, to their marriage, the marriage proposal, their first drink in a bar, their early meeting and first kiss, one of the two telling his parents he is gay, and back into their high school days when it seemed like he would never meet anyone who might like him, as the camera pans back to the boy conjuring up this imaginary voyeuristic voyage into another’s couple’s past—while in the process conjuring up a future which he hopes someday will be his.

      It’s a rather remarkable, if hard to believe, fantasy trip for such a young man to make, drawing as it does upon the hundreds of LGBTQ “coming out” films since the 1990s, while still managing to include a lesbian-in-the-making and featuring a gay Asian-American lead. It’s clear our young man must have been secretly watching dozens of videos that he parents know absolutely nothing about.

     Obviously, it’s unlikely that high school freshman or a possible middle school student would know all the tropes of those various genre films but it doesn’t truly matter, does it, since it’s a fantasy about some future, any future which will whisk him away from the world of heterosexual normalcy in which, as a child, he is now forced to endure?

     It’s actually a kind of cute gimmick. But it’s not an honest film. Coming out, easy or difficult, cannot be reduced to a moment of sitting down to tell your parents you’re gay. An image of an erased text message does not fully express the pain and doubt of trying to tell someone you love them before deciding not yet to admit that feeling. A gay wedding cannot yet be summed up in a photoshop pic of the cake, etc. In short, fantasies cannot truly represent life and, as such, unfairly represent the imagination of any young boy hoping and praying for a day in which he might begin to live the life he feels necessary for his happiness. Even in this little family gathering, Connor is already an outsider, so the director’s cooking up a fantasy that might be summarized by the trite phrase “It gets better” is a kind of cop out.

       When asked by his parents has he thought about his future Connor replies “Not really,” which we know absolutely to be a lie. But that might have been the starting more for a truly honest movie. As it is, this film is not about our young uncomfortable teenager, but about the director posting the good news for a possible future that probably will have far more suffering in it that these simple gay scrapbook fantasies.

      Fantasy, once more, has been used to renounce the serious job of a writer/director as he refuses to create a story that explores the truths, joys, and fears of the figure he has created. Cheerleading the character on is not the director’s role. If I had my way, I’d start over at the moment his parents ask him to come out of his reverie to join them in conversation, titling it Connor’s Confusion. Maybe his creative writing sister might be able to provide him with a script.

 

Los Angeles, June 6, 2021| Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2021).

 

 

Sumir Pawar | Khawaaish / 2018

man with gay umbrella

by Douglas Messerli

 

Sumir Pawar (screenwriter and director) Khawaaish / 2018 [7.5 minutes]

 

Indian director Sumit Pawar’s 2018 film Khawaaish begins with a sort of silent declaration. A young man, evidently locked in an either parentally or maritally controlled household—made up evidently by the two children sitting near him on the floor—ties his shoes and takes up his gay  “rainbow” umbrella determined to go out in Mumbai to discover a more compatible world. By bus and rail he travels to the famed Mumbai harbor, looking out over the waters as it begins to rain.

     He puts up his LGBTQ rainbow umbrella to protect him from the rain, but just as suddenly closes it, allowing himself to grow miserably wet, half enjoying the encounter with nature, but also suggesting his attitude toward himself, an unprotected lonely man staring off into space with no specific vision ahead but the rolling waves.

     Suddenly turning his head, he glimpses a handsome man sitting nearby also allowing himself to get wet. He joins the man, sitting next to him, his umbrella now rolled up. The man turns toward him and openly smiles.

      From that moment on the film shifts as the two, introducing themselves, decide to share a soda or some other such drink. They (Sajith Acharya and Abdul Salam Girkar) obviously have made a date, for we soon see them walking together in the bright sun, the one putting his arm around the other. At another moment with the beautiful skyline of Mumbai behind them, we see one of them waiting for the other in what is obviously a second date.

     Soon after, again looking out over the harbor, one of them pulls away, takes out a wedding band from his pocket, bows down, and asks the other to marry him.

     They enter the second man’s apartment, lit with fanciful lights and candles, almost like the rooms were themselves a shrine. They lay down on his bed and cuddle. Everything seems so very pleasant.

     In the next scene, however, the two men are sitting on the bench where this story begin, the second not necessary even aware of the presence of the other. He soon stands and walks off, leaving the original boy with the umbrella behind.

     Obviously the 7-and-a-half-minute film is a pure fantasy, the wishful thinking of a lonely gay Mumbai man who, attracted to the other, spends a few idol moments to imagine a life that seems out of his reach.

      Pawar’s work is well-filmed, the scenes quite evocative and the two actors, despite the fact that they are given no lines, appear to be quite charming. But what are we to make of this? To me, alas, it seems to represent simply a waste of time. We never get any deep insight into either of these figures, so we have no way to identify with their feelings; and what feelings are in evidence come mostly from the imagination of the first man, who seems almost enervated even before the film begins.

      I realize, particularly given India’s familial binds that finding another gay man, particularly given the slightly older age of these two middle class citizens, is extraordinarily difficult. Even though our original figure is obviously “out,” evidenced by his umbrella, to be found in a gay bar by an acquaintance might bring shame upon his family, and even more so if he might be the father of the children we spot on the floor next to him in the very first scene. Perhaps dreaming of what life might be or might have been is the only alternative our “hero” has available.

      But why doesn’t Pawar tell us that story, of how he has come to be in that position, instead of cooking up something that reveals nothing but the wishful thinking of his character? Perhaps we might, at least, come to feel some real empathy with the lonely boy. As it is, his daydream is simply that, a dream that provides us with very few clues, other than his desire for a gay relationship, of how it relates to his real being.

      As anyone who has read several of my essays might tell you, I am not at all committed to realist narrative. But neither am I committed to empty pipe dreams that do not even allow me enough credence to allow me feel emotion for the characters. As Pawar’s film ends, it makes clear that its truth lies in its single first image: a man with a closed umbrella staring out over Mumbai bay, intentionally allowing himself to be soaked. It’s an evocative photograph with a subtly poetic message. But it is no movie.

      Perhaps if our figure had kept his umbrella up, protecting himself from the raindrops, he might have attracted someone else to join him in an attempt to keep out of the rain who might even had something to say that could have evolved into a true conversation. It might have been the start of something far more interesting than the fairytale world our director has come up with. But then my scenario is just another fantasy as well. Perhaps we need to go back to that original room to explain who are the two children sitting of the floor as he ties his shoes to go out. That, for me, is where Pawar’s film stopped, at the very moment it had just begun. The rest is little more than a TV ad for the LGBTQ promotional piece set against some lovely tourist snapshots. I’ll pass. 

 

Los Angeles, June 7, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2021).

Russell Kohlmann | Window Shopping / 2019

a dream grows in brooklyn

by Douglas Messerli

 

Russell Kohlmann (screenwriter and director) Window Shopping / 2019 [6 minutes]

 

I’m not sure who is the audience this fantasy film wishes to reach. If watching a young man, Sam (Russell Kohlmann) who is shopping at a clothes shop for a new coat, possible shoes or even cowboy boots, and a handsome young boyfriend, Jeff (Sam Stone) to go with them is something that excites you, I guess you’ve found your movie in Kolmann’s Window Shopping.

    Certainly, Sam has seemed to found his man in Jeff, who after an unlikely greeting of “Excuse me, can I help you?” even though he doesn’t work in the shop, Sam quickly cooks up a dream in which the friendly fellow customer invites him out for coffee, which quickly leads to an evening at the local bar, a subway ride home with Jeff’s head on Sam’s shoulder, and, before you can even say Abracadabra, Hocus Pocus, Alakazam they turn into boyfriend’s lounging around the apartment, cooking up little dinners together, a session of deep kissing, and an invitation for a party for family and guests, all of which ends finally in Jeff kneeling in the tradition of offering up a wedding ring.

    Sam is awakened by the actual shop owner/clerk, the boyish looking Michaela Grant. In fact, we quickly discern, Sam and Jeff haven’t even met up, and Jeff’s girlfriend (Ingeborg Reidmaier) quickly comes to kiss and claim her man, Sam stumbling out of the store onto the street in utter confusion and deep depression.

     It’s hard to know if we should feel sorrier for the character or for the audience members like me for having been forced to share Sam’s meaningless fantasy. Even the clothes weren’t the kind of threads I usually shop for so I might have wished writer/director Kohlmann and left me back on the street. There, at least, I might have found someone more interesting to go home with.

 

Los Angeles, March 26, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (March 2026). 

Douglas Messerli | Five Gay Fantasies / 2021 [Note]

five gay fantasies

by Douglas Messerli

 

The wonderful thing about gay and lesbian short filmmaking is that it often allows beginning students the opportunity to learn how to put a film together. Because of the numerous genres available to LGBTQ individuals, and because much of what the narrative might express comes out of or has relevance to their own lives, it allows them a fairly easy access into the mysteries of film direction not always available, it seems to me, to young heterosexual would-be creators. Just the vast numbers of new films issued annually on LGBTQ subjects gives testimony to this wonderful phenomenon. And since it’s still a relatively new form, perhaps only four or five decades old, it

allows for a great amount of originality. Although the specific tensions and difficulties experienced by characters in these films may be evaporating, there is still enough of a cultural gap and a general lack of understanding so that interesting perceptions of gay love and sex are still available.

      And accordingly, when reviewing beginners’ films I have attempted to be rather sympathetic to their sometimes obvious narrative and visual flaws, attending to their use of genre and how they have worked to create an original viewpoint despite the sometimes limited strictures in forms that so many hundreds have already explored before them.

      But several times over the past few months, I have grown irritated by some of the new gay films that I’ve seen, and feel it’s important to be honest about what I have begun to see as a problematic shift that may certainly not serve LGBTQ interests or, more importantly, provide these young directors with the avenues that they might imagine for future filmmaking.

      My biggest pet peeve of late has been what I might describe as a newly-developing genre that certainly has its roots in many earlier gay works, but has now reached what I might describe as a kind of dead end. These films, instead of confronting issues of love, identity, transition, or even utter rejection in a focused and exploratory manner take the route of pure fantasy, which may be somewhat enjoyable while it lasts, but ultimately makes no serious attempt to actually deal with those issues and the sense of loneliness and displacement with which their character is still faced when the credits roll.

      As examples, I’ve just chosen five short films, three of which are English language productions from Canada and the USA, a third released in Afrikaans from South Africa, and the fourth a film without dialogue from India.

 

Los Angeles, June 7, 2021

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (June 2021).

Natalie Musteata and Alexandre Singh | Deux personnes échangeant de la salive (Two People Exchanging Saliva) / 2024, 2025 general release

the killing kiss

by Douglas Messerli

 

Natalie Musteata and Alexandre Singh (screenwriters and directors) Deux personnes échangeant de la salive (Two People Exchanging Saliva) / 2024, 2025 general release [36 minutes]

 

The Theater of the Absurd is still very much alive and well in the dystopian drama, Two People Exchanging Saliva of 2024.

    Set in the grand deluxe upscale clothing shops of Paris’ Galeries Lafayette, it takes us a while to recognize just how disturbed the world we have entered really is. Although we might have guessed that even the world we might already know is obsessed with very strange behavior given the fact that as customers enter the stairs to the shops they are offered, at almost any time of day, glasses of wine or champagne as they hurry off to shop.

     The young girl holding the platter of glasses, Malaise (Luàna Bajrami), is immediately spotted by the head saleswoman Pétulante (Aurélie Boquien) who quickly puts her to work lifting numerous shoe boxes in that department, which she proceeds to drop almost at the feet of one of Pétulante’s best customers Angine.

     Almost immediately the young 24 year-old establishes an almost imaginary relationship with the older woman by speaking to her in the informal “tu” and suggesting they play a game of having long been friends. When it comes time for Angine to try on dresses, Pétulante is busy helping another customer so that Malaise is forced to help her, eating into Pétulante’s notable sales records.

     Soon after we discover one of the strange laws of this somewhat recognizable world. Upon completion of the sales, Malaise takes out a sequined white glove and receives payment for Angine’s numerous purchases by slaps to her already somewhat bruised face, counting down in this case from something like 32. However, Malaise also uses the occasion to almost flirt with her customer, the slaps being not coldly doled out as a kind of punishment as they might surely have been if Pétulante were to receive the payment, but almost as playful, even joyous moments of flesh (even if covered by a glove) upon flesh.

     The bruised cheeks are, in fact, a kind of sign of being chic or least of having wealth. As the shopworkers change from their black and gray outfits to return home, we see them applying makeup that looks somewhat like bruises, obviously a sign of their own well-being outside of the workspace.

     As the shopworkers arrive and leave from work, we also witness another seeming absurdity of this society: they exit and enter through what might be described as human breath analyzers, smelling their breath to make certain they smell badly enough from the garlic that they eat during their lunch breaks and from their lack of dental hygiene. In this strange world, kissing is not permitted and, as we soon discover, is punished by death. Since we associate the kiss with love, passion, and pleasure, we should imagine that along with kissing, any kind of physical affection is also outlawed, although the film doesn’t enter that territory and doesn’t even attempt to explain how this society reproduces. Besides, the film features to children, the youngest woman being Malaise who behaves, in her game-playing rather dangerously like a delinquent.

      Yet that is her very charm, the thing that attracts Angine to her, as Malaise now regularly becomes her preferred salesclerk, much to anger of the top manager Pétulante.

       Over the course of the nine days narrated in this story by the film’s narrator (Vicky Krieps), the two women grow increasingly closer, Malaise even going to far as to purchase a toothbrush and toothpaste from the black market, even there receiving her require slaps, as she moves further to seduce Angine.

       In the bathroom Pétulante overhears Malaise brushing her teeth, a truly taboo act.

     Certainly, Angine knows of the dangers facing her as the two women grow closer. A woman, arrested in the Galeries for attempting to kiss her husband, is grabbed by guards, her head covered in a sack and her legs and hands tied and she is slipped in a cardboard box (designed, we soon discover, by Angine’s husband), sealed up and sped off the ravine into which her body is dropped, left to die if she should happen to have survived the fall.

     Angine, coming across the very space in which the “crime” according, gathers up the contents spilled from the woman’s purse, noticing several “illegal” postcards of famous artists who have sculpted and painted lovers in the midst of a kiss. Angine, keeps the purse and its contents for herself.

     That evening, at dinner, her husband and two of their friends, comment on difficult it must have been for Angine to even encounter such an event, an act which they cannot even imagine naming, Angine finally describing it as a “kiss,” the others appearing shocked as if she has just spoken a profane word.

       Malaise has told Angine that it is to be her 25th birthday and that she shall be serving a cake, almost an invitation for her new “friend” to visit her. And that evening as Malaise bites into the cupcake, there is a knock at the door. Malaise quickly reviews herself in the mirror, straightens her hair and opens up the door to find no one there. At the very end of this film, we see the scene played out from another viewpoint, as we witness Angine, having lost courage, cowering on the steps above.

    For Malaise, however, her enchanted few days are almost over, as the now jealous and bitter Pétulante plans her downfall by approaching her and putting her mouth over the girl, declaring that, in fact, the girl attacked her. Guards arrive quickly, box up Malaise and send her into the ravine.

     When Angine discovers what has happened, she hurries off to the ravine, rushing into the endless pile of box of dead bodies, pulling them open until she finally discovers Malaise, now dead, Bobak Lotfipour’s marvelous musical score swirling us up into the emotional horror of event.

    This terrifying vision of our own possible future as we as a culture turn against empathy and disdain various forms of love, won the 2026 Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film.

 

Los Angeles, March 26, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (March 2026).

Knial Saunders | Solitude / 2023

pagan christianity

by Douglas Messerli

 

Knial Saunders (screenwriter and director) Solitude / 2023 [16.29 minutes]

 

Solitude retells a story that has been expressed hundreds of time before, but seems still necessary in the third decade of the 21st century, supposedly a time when in the US, at least, gay sexuality has come to be generally accepted. But we know the truth to be something different.

    Even today, thousands of US parents believe in a pagan religion, not even close to what they describe as true Christianity, that would prefer obscure and misunderstood laws of an ancient civilization to the well-being of their own sons and daughters. Christ reified love has his primary doctrine, yet parents like Augustine (Marlo Stroud) pretends to love by declaring the very nature of her son Zeph (Jael Saran) to be a sin.

    Zeph, like so many young gay people, is not even sure he is homosexual, but he definitely admires and enjoys being around the artist Sol (Da’Von J. Solomon) who is painting a portrait of the young man with whom he is now clearly in love and who, in turn, is unknowingly in love with him. What does someone in Sol’s situation do when a young man he perceives is gay is secretly developing a crush on you? You can send him away, suggesting he work it out by himself, or help guide him to his own feelings without attempting to sway him into the gay sexuality you are certain he is seeking. Empathetic gay men know just how difficult it is to “come out,” or even to fully express emotions that are so openly being expressed in various ways that are yet invisible to the individual who can hardly contain himself. The idolized being is in the strange position of protecting while gradually revealing what the other feels is still a hidden secret. To reject him would be to destroy his burgeoning love; to fully embrace and encourage it is unthinkable to a caring and loving being admired, whose open encouragement would be a betrayal of one of the very reasons for the other’s love.

     It’s a difficult position to be in, and is not always rewarding, particularly if the family is working, as in Zeph’s case, to undermine the natural process of the individual’s discovery of himself. The decisions that are needed to be made must come from within the innocent through a great deal of pain and solitude, and many young men and women can’t literally “come through” that process of admitting their sexuality against the wall of denial that still today the society attempts to build around individual choice. Many go scurrying of, quickly marrying in a heterosexual ceremony to which they many never be able to maintain or fully commit to. The other, the loved one, is always the deceiver, the dangerous tempter or temptress, the hated other out to get hold of or convert the young innocent. Yet the innocent often cannot come to his own realization of self without the other’s love and support.

     At one point in this tale, Sol crosses the boundary before Zeph is quite ready, attempting to kiss the innocent so desiring his kisses before he is quite ready to accept it as a defining designation. A kiss inexplicably defines, in our society, sexuality. To kiss is to love and identify oneself through the implant of the lips upon another being; yet once a relationship is truly established, heterosexual or homosexual, friendly or familial, we just as quickly come to realize that kisses can be merely gestures, a false expression of love. The mother’s kisses in this film pretend to, as she puts it, love the sinner without being able to accept the sin. But since one’s sexual identity is part and parcel of the bodily sinner, such a concept is an implausible expression of love. The hug and kiss means nothing if it cannot be attached to the body on which the kiss is pasted.

     Zeph’s uncle, come to help and support the mother in altering the boy’s behavior can only express what he calls love with a brutal slug across the face. As Sol later puts it, they have already made apparent that their love and it is not something which a sentient being can accept if he values himself.

   Like so many others before him, Zeph is given no choice but to abandon his home and embrace the man he admires, in this case we are led to believe, a truly worthy choice; but in so many other cases, the first love may actually be a manipulator, a liar, someone incompatible with what the young innocent needs in order to further develop.

    Pagan believers push such sons and daughters out the door, revealing only their own failure to embrace what any true faith must accept, the sexual nature and being of the other. Sexual difference is just what it suggests, difference; it is not a sin, a crime, or an offense. Yet so many men and women describing themselves as religious beings never come to comprehend that fact, proving at heart they do not even comprehend what true belief represents.

 

Los Angeles, March 25, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (March 2026).