Lamont Johnson | That Certain Summer / 1972 [TV movie]

honesty, decency, and integrity

by Douglas Messerli

 

William Link and Richard Levinson (screenplay), Lamont Johnson (director) That Certain Summer / 1972 [TV movie]

 

Over the brief period of the last days of 2020 and first month of 2021 we lost two major creative figures, William Link, a writer and producer who, through his involvement with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, was an acquaintance, and Hal Holbrook, who in his role of Mark Twain was everybody’s friend. Holbrook played on Broadway and films in many roles including in Lincoln and All the President’s Men but was most noted for his many portrayals throughout his career of Twain.

     With his longtime collaborator, Richard Levinson, Link wrote and produced the series Columbo, Murder, She Wrote, and Mannix along with other TV and cinematic productions. But these two came together most notably in 1972 in one of the most important of early TV LGBTQ productions, That Certain Summer, written by Link and Levinson and starring Holbrook as a divorced man, Doug Salter living in San Francisco with his gay lover Gary McClain (Martin Sheen). It was the very first sympathetic TV portrayal of homosexuality, in fact one the first to mention the word on the small screen that lit up so many American homes. Holbrook notes that the gay characters represented people of “honesty, decency, and integrity,” and recalls that many years after people would stop him on the street and remark, “it [the movie] meant a lot.”

       Holbrook at first turned down the role, feeling that, perusing the script, nothing really happened in the story. In some senses he’s right, which is partly what makes this film so absolutely groundbreaking; no truly calamitous events occur to the loving couple at the center of this work and there were no gay bodies littered upon the stage by the time the credits scrolled down after the ABC production of November 1, 1972—although it was the day that US poet Ezra Pound died. After describing the work to his wife, however, she responded: "You're going to get on the phone and call Hollywood and tell them you want to do this part before they give it to somebody else."

       Martin Sheen was immediately enthusiastic upon reading his script. "I thought it was wonderful. There was a great deal of freedom in it because it wasn't about advocating a lifestyle or a sexuality. It was about two people who adored each other, and they weren't allowed to have a relationship that involved their sexuality"—although I’d argue with him that the couple was certainly “allowed” to have a sexual relationship and indeed had one, they simply weren’t permitted to openly reveal it to others. But I love Sheen’s reaction to the now tiresome question about whether he wasn’t afraid that in playing such a role it might affect his career: "I'd robbed banks and kidnapped children and raped women and murdered people, you know, in any number of shows. Now I was going to play a gay guy and that was like considered a career ender. Oh, for Christ’s sake! What kind of culture do we live in?" We should remind ourselves that Sheen later went on to play the President of the United States in The West Wing, in which Holbrook also played a minor role.

      Link describes it as one of two of his favorite contributions to cinema literature, but also describes the difficulties of getting such a movie on TV. This was a time when gays were still being horribly prosecuted with police still regularly raiding gay bars—although this was after Stonewall, and certainly I never feared for the police once during my late 1960s stay in New York. But the TV studios were still not interested. NBC, so he reports, wouldn’t touch the work with the proverbial “pole”—apparently no matter how long its length. But at ABC Barry Diller, who was rumored to be gay, took it under his wing and fought hard for it, even having to sit through visits by psychiatrists pummeling him with their horrific evaluations of homosexuals, who they still argued were mentally ill. The always dreaded Standards and Practices Committee required Link and Levinson to add an “everyday” character, Gary’s brother-in-law who stood up for family values and patronizingly invited Gary to visit them with his “friend” (the Holbrook character) any time. They also required the speech late in the film where Doug confesses to his son that if he could have made a choice we would never have desired to be gay, which brought an outcry in the gay community; but as Link reminds us, that statement represents, in fact, the feelings still of some gay individuals; perhaps it is a small price to pay for such an otherwise intelligently informed film. And by this time in the work, we know that Doug and his companion Gary have a loving and enjoyable relationship, even if, as a divorced man, he may still have some regrets.

      The work begins, under the excellent direction of Lamont Johnson, with Doug reviewing some old home films with quick glimpses of his former wife, Janet (Hope Lange), but mostly of his toddler son, Nick (Scott Jacoby), who soon, we discover, is about to fly up from Los Angeles for what evidently is an annual visit since his father left them three years earlier. A doting father, Doug, as Gary later describes it to Nick, has “practically been checking off the days” on the calendar until the boy’s visit.

      Faced with the short stay of a 14-year old, the lovers decide that Nick is perhaps too young to be faced with the full reality of their life together, forcing Gary to decamp to his sister’s house, although they plan for him to join them at dinners.

      Their fears appear to have been right when Nick seems to give a cold shoulder to Gary’s appearance at their father-son dinner, refusing to even take a bite of the special celebratory cake Gary has purchased for the occasion. Nick keeps repeating that it’s not his birthday, despite Gary’s insistence that everybody should have a second birthday each year, and his father’s attempts to get him to at least thank Gary for the gesture—all without success. They can’t determine whether or not he resents Gary for the intrusion in their familial relationship or that Nick perhaps suspects something about the other man so openly sharing his father’s company.

      What is clear from the moment they come together is the deep relationship between Doug and Nick, particularly as they humorously enact scenes from The Maltese Falcon with Nick playing the Peter Lorre role and Doug tackling the Humphrey Bogart part. Nick has even brought his father a special present of a gift-store black falcon. Their rapport, in fact, reminds us of the wonderful interactions of Murray Burns (Jason Robards Jr.) with his nephew, another Nick (Barry Gordon) in the 1965 comic film-version of Herb Gardner’s A Thousand Clowns.

      And much like the 12-year Nick of that film, Doug’s son is clearly precocious—as Gary keeps reminding his lover—spending much of the film picking up signals about his father’s sexuality that he finds confusing and even frightening.

       There’s the moment in the car when, after Doug has admittedly pumped Nick for information on his ex-wife’s new sexual life, Nick suggests to his father “I guess you’ll be getting married again to someone.”

       Doug’s answer reveals more than he intends to the curious kid: “Nick, if it means anything I don’t think I’ll be marrying again.”

       Nick innocently asks “Why?” But the answer, “A lot of reasons. It’s very complicated. We’ll talk about it sometime,” clues in the boy that it is an adult situation: “That means when I’m older,” which all children know means that it is something adults aren’t yet ready to talk about, which further hints at danger.

      Later, he finds shaving cream in the bathroom cabinet, knowing that his father uses an electric razor. When he asks his father about it, Doug becomes somewhat flustered and spirits his son off to bed.

      When they visit Gary the next day at his job, he’s a sound engineer, for a moment when Nick discovers that his father’s friend has worked with several famous pop performers like the Jefferson Airplane, it appears he might almost take a liking to him, particularly when Gary suggests, since they both play the guitar, they might want to play as a duo later that night; but again Nick pulls away.

       As they move on to lunch nearby, we also see tensions rising between the lovers, Gary insisting that Doug should talk to his bright son about the facts, and even suggesting that Doug himself has not completely come out, particularly since he still fears any obvious public display of male-on-male love. Nick picks up any stray comments and their body language.

       And the next afternoon when Doug throws a party with his neighbors and other mostly heterosexual friends, he further discovers that they all know and speak of his father’s friendship  with Gary. Finally, when quite by accident, he finds his father’s watch on the counter where he has left it after reaching into a fish aquarium to save one of his pets who has been “beaten up” by other fish, Nick knows the truth when he reads, engraved on its back, “To Doug with love, Gary.”

       The next morning Nick is missing, with Doug and Gary immediately going on the search, unable to find the boy who has taken the ferry from Sausalito to the city, there to ride the trolley cars endlessly back and forth in contemplation.

        Finally, Doug sees the errors of his way: “I should have talked to him. I ignored him, too damn busy telling myself everything was so nice and normal.”

        A kindly trolley conductor (James McEachin) spots the troubled kid, recognizing him as someone attempting to work out problems through the voyage and takes him to dinner before finally returning him home.

        Meanwhile, since Nick has called his mother to suggest he might want to return home early; she, worried as she might be by his state of mind, gets on a plane and turns up at her ex-husband’s door to encounter, evidently for the first time, her husband’s gay lover. The encounter, at first, is not a pleasant one as she righteously queries him about who they invited to the party they threw for Nick and how involved Gary might have been in Nick’s visit.   

    Attempting to explain to her that he has been temporarily staying at his sister’s does no good in calming her wrath. And he lashes back with the truism that if she had simply encountered another woman in her husband’s house the stranger would be perfectly accepted, but as a gay lover.... Her answer hints, just for a moment, about how much the two have digressed from the real subject at hand, her and Doug’s missing son. “If you were a woman,” Janet hisses in her best Joan Crawford imitation, “I’d know how to compete with you.”

     Fortunately Link and Levinson go no further down this avenue, and while waiting for Doug to return the two eventually make friends. The three of them, soon after, as she comments, making up “quite a threesome.”

      Upon Nick’s return they all race forward to embrace him, Doug determining to take him for a walk to have the open conversation that he should have had all along.

       With all the time that Nick has spent in deep thought over what he has learned, we might hope that the boy has finally found some way to come to terms with his father’s “difference.” A Chinese fortune a couple of days earlier had hinted “Be true and trust each other and all will be well.”

       But Johnson’s film does not have a Chinese fortune-like script, and despite Doug’s attempts to explain to his son that he loves Gary and lives with him in a kind of marriage, Nick attempts  once more bolt from the truth. When finally Doug struggles to tell him that a homosexual is something other than one hears about in the schoolroom hallways and alleys, Nick turns away in tears, being held by his father in the hopes of making him comprehend that what some see is a sickness, a thing to be put down with jokes, is something worth his love particularly since it represents the father whom still loves him.

      Nick leaves soon after with his mother, unable to even look at Gary and resenting even the touch of his father’s hand. “Give him a little time,” Janet attempts to assure Doug moments before she and her son pull away in a taxi.

      We believe her. Nick is a bright kid, and we feel he will come through the dilemma stronger with a new comprehension of what it means to love.

       But that does not salve the tears that roll down Doug’s eyes as he sits on the stairway awaiting his lover’s return from retrieving the clothes he has left at his sister’s house.

       And the tears say everything, Doug and Gary still hold love for not only one another, but for those who momentarily cannot even accept it or may never be able to lay down their prejudice. As Rosa von Praunheim might put it—and did, a year earlier— “It is not the homosexual who is the perverse but the society in which he lives.”

       The script for That Certain Summer was nominated for an Emmy. The New York Times Critic Marilyn Beck described it as “one of the finest pieces of drama you’ll see this year on large or small screen.” Judith Crist proclaimed that was “a giant step for television,” the Los Angeles Times critic Charles Champlin championed it as “the best movie for TV I have yet seen.” A script for the Kojak series won the Emmy, but in fact the entire LGBTQ community won far more in its honest depiction of how difficult it is to live within a society than cannot accept all expressions of love while embracing nearly every form of hate and mayhem. Today lots of kids have two mothers or two dads or a father who lives in another city with another man, a mother with a woman friend. But the bigotry still exists, and movies such as That Certain Summer help to heal that hurt.

 

Los Angeles, February 13, 2021

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (February 2021).   

Colton Tran and Todrick Hall | I Like Boys / 2019 [music video]

THE SHOUT OF OUT

by Douglas Messerli

 

Todrick Hall (performer, composer, and artistic director), Colton Tran (director) I Like Boys / 2019 [3.21 minutes] [music video]

 

The always revelatory Todrick Hall finally confronts his own mother (played by Luenell Campbell) in what hardly is a surprise to any of us who have long watched his over the top music videos: “I like boys.”

    He sits his mother down for “the big reveal,” a kind of strutting, stuttering, overstated coming out in which his poor Bible-reading mamma goes into a visual meltdown as before one even knows it Hall, in full drag in the desert, walks through a door—no closet on either side of this symbolic gesture—as he continues to torture the poor “bitch.”

Mama come, come doll, take a seat

There's someone you know that you've got to meet

So brace yourself for the big reveal

He's about my height when he's not in heels

Some boys play basketball

He played house with ratchet dolls

It's not Santa Claus, it's time for applause

It's comin' out the closet

Mama, I like boys, I like pecs

Like them arms when they flex

Like that print in them sweats

Tell them girls, "Thank you, next"

I like when they text me sexy pics of 'em

Like them abs when there's six of 'em

Tell them girls I'm sorry

I like boys

Mama, boys like me (I like boys who like boys)

Mama (I like boys who like boys)

Work (I like boys who like boys)

Mama (I like boys who like)

Boys like me, yeah (boys like me)

Yeah, they do (boys like me)

Ooh (boys like me)

Motherfuckin' boys like me (bitch)  

     And for a long 3 minutes and 21 seconds Hall reiterates his total pleasure in the male body, as boys, dressed and half-dressed jump and dance in the desert, revealing next to everything. It’s glorious epic scene wherein Hall is carried on camel, a white door, and male shoulders across the screen.

    Unlike so many pretty gay boy singers, Hall never leaves you wondering, shouting out his sexuality in nearly all his musical videos to the high heavens and taking his marvelous dance routines into technicolor absurdity.

     Hall is high camp, which I’ll take any day over the pleading of a gay aspirant for love from what might be a male or even a female admirer.

 

Los Angeles, June 17, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (June 2026).

Hobart Henley | Night World / 1932

leaving happy

by Douglas Messerli

 

Richard Schayer (screenplay), P.J. Wolfson and Allen Rivkin (story), Hobart Henley (director) Night World / 1932

 

You might describe Night World’s roving camera as a kind of low-budget rehearsal for the 1934 film Wonder Bar, which also takes us gradually through the regulars’ and backstage dancers’ machinations showing that there’s no true “happiness” in such a night-world bar, even if this one,  run by “Happy” MacDonald (Boris Karloff) is named Happy’s Bar. As the doorman, Tim Washington (Clarence Muse) observes, the people come out sadder than they go in, and “everyone loves the wrong person,” which leads the local cop to describe him as a philosopher.

       Washington has good reason to be sad given that his wife has just had an operation in the hospital—for what ailment we’re never told—and he can’t get any straight answers from the nurse who responds to his phone calls with stock responses such as “She’s resting” or “She’s doing the best she can.” MacDonald won’t let him take off for the night, and he’s rightfully worried; by film’s end he discovers she has died.

      MacDonald has long been unhappy watching his double-timing wife, Jill (Dorothy Revier) try to keep her love affair with the bar’s stage director, Klauss (Russell Hopton), secret. Even the chorus girls see through her ruses, and it’s clear Happy is not blind to facts. He lies to a husband with whose wife he has obviously spent time while the man was out of town on a business trip. More importantly, the mob is after him, and, although he’s got a good quick punch, he knows he needs a gun to settle this score—which his wife has emptied of all its bullets.

     Bar-going husbands lie to their wives, and wives to their husbands. One date spends the entire night giggling so obnoxiously that by the time the couple is ready to leave, her companion is almost ready to strangle her so he won’t have to accompany her home.    

     Most of the savvy chorus girls nonetheless are just hoping some wealthy of good-looking customer will scoop them up for the night. But after their clumsy hoofing during which they share the intimate knowledge of their customers with one another, Klauss orders a rehearsal after closing hours, frustrating their bedside dreams as well. Even choreographer Busby Berkeley can’t get these girls to properly line up for the camera riding under their spreading crotches.

      A handsome young man enters Happy’s Bar and proceeds to nip on his “under the table” bottle  for the rest of the night, forgiven because everyone knows he’s Michael Rand (Lew Ayres), the son of a society gorgon—a role perfect for the later nasty right-wing gossip columnist Hedda Hooper—who shot the boy’s father for just seeking the pleasure of a kinder and caring woman. That other woman, also at the bar this evening, is Edith Blair (Dorothy Peterson), who drops by his table just to tell him how much she and his father were in love and remind him that his father loved him. It surely doesn’t improve the boy’s spirits much.

      And then there’s the standard bar loners and wanderers, the gay patron (Bryon Foulger) who looks so effeminate that you might think him to be a female transvestite. When one of the chorus girls, trying to interact with her audience, sings out “Hi baby,” he responds, “Mister Baby to you!”

      Another jolly drunk wanders about the bathrooms and the dance floor trying to find someone who, like he, is from Schenectady. When he asks a fellow bathroom patron, the man lisps back, “No, Syracuse is where I was born.” When Schenectady takes his search to the women’s room, Syracuse scolds him for trying to enter when men are not permitted, perhaps hoping to lure back in the men’s john. But in the meantime, the women have doodled up his face with lipstick, so that, as he turns around to speak with Syracuse, the pansy screams out “Frankenstein!”—obviously an inside joke since Karloff had created the role in James Whale’s masterpiece that was released only 7 months previous—as he skedaddles off, Schenectady calling after, “Relax, you powderpuff.”

       Other than the doorman Tim, only the club’s singer Ruth Taylor (Mae Clarke) appears to be a decent human being, joining up with the increasingly confused Rand, and encouraging him to stop his endless thirst: “You know they can make it faster than you can drink it.” She’s just sung “Prisoner of Love,” which obviously is now her position with regard to Rand, particularly when, after the boy gets violent, Happy slugs him out cold. In the bosses’ office she nurses Rand back to health, to sanity—when his mother seeks him out he suddenly vents the spleen he’s obviously been holding in for months, finally cutting off relationship with the viper—and finally lures him into love.

       But just as the two are about to run off the Bali and Washington is about to rush off to the hospital to retrieve his poor wife’s body, the gangsters show up, shooting down the doorman by mistake and killing the now defenseless Happy and his double-crossing wife. Discovering the two love-happy kids still in the back of the bar, the mobsters determine to do away with them as well. They are saved by the return of the cop, checking up on his friend Washington, who takes them away in the paddy car for questioning. They could care less as long as they remain in one another’s arms for the night. And for the first time someone has come out of the bar happier than they went in.

    There’s not much here in the way of edification for the LGBTQ audience, but at least we know that Happy’s contains a couple of sissies. And in the 1930s they were to be found, evidently, in every bar and theater in New York or any other big city.

 

Los Angeles, August 30, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2021).

Philippe Reypens | L'Échappée sauvage (Escape into the Wild) / 2017

a visual tone poem to childhood love

by Douglas Messerli

 

Philippe Reypens (screenwriter and director) L'Échappée sauvage (Escape into the Wild) / 2017

 

A young French-speaking boy is being chauffeured along country roads, a small sitting near him as he either being returned to his country estate or being taken to relatives in the country. His scrubbed ruddy complexion and worried look give him away as a wealthy schoolboy, although obviously we know little actually about him.

     Suddenly the car conks out, stopping in the middle of the road. The driver pops open the engine, gets out and checks it, frustrated that we perhaps cannot find the problem or sees that it is necessary for him to go get help in order to continue the trip.

      He takes off his hat, fans himself with it, and walks to the back of the car where he opens up the trunk and takes out a small petrol can, obviously the problem. He briefly speaks to the boy, a conversation to which we are not privy. It’s clear, however, that he telling him to remain in the car while he walks to a gas station to bring back enough gas to continue the journey.

      The boy falls into a doze, only to be awakened by two young almost feral looking youths, a boy and a girl, staring in at him, pounding on the window which he has previously rolled up. He attempts to ignore them, but the naughty kids play games, the boy running to other side, opening the door and quickly stealing the boys suitcase before they run off back into the golden-lit woods.

     Through the now open window he watches them disappear. He seems to have no choice but to leave the safety of the car and run after them. He finds the children together and the boy hands him back his suitcase as they stand taking in each other. The two walk off, while the traveling boy sits down the suitcase, smiles slightly, and follows them.

      They are now on the run, the new boy after them. He soon discovers pine cones, watches the two, brother and sister(?), fence with sticks, and race off again. The two feral children overtake a drunken man, pushing him to the ground, but when the boy still in his tie passes, the drunk looks up, smiling, almost as if he recognizes the slow look of the stranger as being somewhat sympathetic, out of the ordinary. Perhaps he recognizes him as belonging to the local estate? Or maybe he is simply enchanted by the new boy’s true beauty.

      The three soon reach a stream, a kind of swamp where the new boy suddenly perceives he is now walking on grass saturated by the water. He stops, unsure of proceeding, but moves on nonetheless, seeming to follow.

     Yet suddenly he has reached another road. Is it the same one in which his car has been traveling? Now there is no car waiting. He has now reached a farm where the two wild ones suddenly burst out from under a pile of straw, but soon show him how to feed a young calf. The feral young boy, also a true beauty, rests in a pile of straw, almost languidly, the image suggesting almost a sexual position.

   But soon he is pushing his sister, this time in almost parody of such rustic utopias, on a hay-cart. It no longer matters, because soon after the girl has been replaced by the city boy, and the pleasure on both of they faces expresses the sexual joy of the moment. A moment or so later in this youthful childhood utopia the two boys have found they way up to a tree limb where they sit, the one with his arm around the other, as the girl below almost tosses festoons of straw at them.

   When the city boy attempts to return to the ground he sprains his foot in the short fall, and the girl surrounds it in a wrap, now given her own time to flirt with the newcomer, her brother standing by, quite clearly somewhat jealous. The farm boy quickly moves forward and pulls up the city boy, taking him off to his own territory.

   The girl now sits alone in mute silence.

   The local boy takes the newcomer to a real river, revealing the beautiful spot as if it were a personal treasure, shoving him off the rock before realizing the new boy cannot swim and diving in to save him.

     Now stretched out almost naked in only his underwear, the city boy smiles as the feral young boy stands over him with what appears to be almost a look of pleasure and satisfaction. He has clearly won over his new friend and they have become deep comrades, even if as children they do not quite yet understand their actions as being sexual.

    Finally, the driver, petrol can in hand, arrives back to the car only to discover his charge missing.

   By this time the two boys have whipped themselves up in the dying light into almost a frenzy of joyful play, the city, still without a shirt, jumping on the shoulders of the other. This is most definitely the play of sexually engaged innocents. It is truly love without a name.

   The two boys arrive back at the car, jump into the front seat together, with the farm boy driving off, only to stop a few feet later for the girl, who joins them in the backseat. God knows where they are going, perhaps to heaven.

  Belgian filmmaker Reypens’ film, broadcast on French TV, is a visual tone poem to childhood pleasures, with all the sexuality that those experiences involve. Although there is nothing overtly gay about this, it is clearly recognized by most gay film individuals as being stuffed with childhood versions of queer sexuality, and appears on most LGBTQ+ lists.

 

Los Angeles, June 16, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (June 2026).

Tamer Ruggli | Cappuccino / 2010

poor boy

by Douglas Messerli

 

Tamer Ruggli (screenwriter and director) Cappuccino / 2010 [16 minutes]

 

In Swiss filmmaker Tamer Ruggli’s 2010 film Cappuccino we encounter yet again another sort of coming out and semi-homophobic film, not really one or the other since our young hero Jérémie (Benjamin Décosterd) has hardly had enough experience to either fully announce his homosexuality, nor does he encounter the intense bullying that we have encountered in so many other films.

     The problem with Ruggli’s Cappuccino is that it consists only in a slight event that may be of great importance to the shy teenager who dreams of having passionate sex with his beautiful classmate Damien (Anton Ciurlia), but is so truly insignificant on the larger scale that we have difficulty to totally emphasize with his now-standard tearful admission to his more than sympathetic and loving mother, Gina (Manuel Biedermann) that he likes boys, not girls.

     Damien is one of those “straight” boys, always more knowledgeable about sex than any gay kid, who is perfectly willing to take advantage of the boy he immediately perceives has a crush on him. He quickly agrees to meet up with Jérémie in order to get an easy blowjob. What can a gay boy do but oblige, even if it isn’t the deep romantic encounter or even the remarkable fuck he might have wished for?

     He’s just happy to have been offered up the chance to suck up the semen which he declares tastes somewhat like the sweet drink his mother offers him every morning, cappuccino (not what the English translation declares to be “coffee”). But when he goes to kiss the self-satisfied recipient of his homosexual gesture, he is immediately pushed away and called, indirectly in this case, a “fag”: “I’m not a fag!”

     Compared to a gang of boys or even one straight homophobe threatening to beat you every day, the expletive seems negligible, something he even might have expected. But for Jérémie, it dashes nearly all his young dreams and hopes, leading him to such a flood of tears that when his mother merrily bounces home in her sequined gown, she still discerns his wet cheeks.

     She offers him one of her cigarettes and hugs him to her inquiring about how his date with a new girlfriend has ended in such a fuss, while he, letting loose with a new flurry of tears, admits the “she” was actually a “he,” and…well, in this case he doesn’t even have to explain his dilemma as she quickly swallows him up in her arms.

       All we can say is, “O the travails that still await this poor mamma’s boy.”

     Of course, we feel for him. But we might have suggested he watch a few other coming out films before making his first date. Hopefully, that’s what young boys can now share that in my generation was impossible.

      I couldn’t even imagine that a straight boy might have enjoyed, now and then, a good gay suck. Or that such “gay boys” often pretended they were straight, even to themselves. And certainly neither my mother or father would have held me in their arms while I cried out after having been described I was a fag. There was nothing to do but take the beatings, run away from bullies, and pretend that everything was “normal,” when you knew inside everything was all fucked up.

 

Los Angeles, June 16, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (June 2026).