Nik Sheehan | No Sad Songs / 1985

just saying

by Douglas Messerli

 

Nik Sheehan (director) No Sad Songs / 1985

 

1985 was the essential year for the cinematic expression surrounding the growing crisis in the LGBTQ community of Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS), the final stage or “syndrome” of the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) transmitted primarily through blood and semen. That year saw the first full-length film on the subject, Arthur J. Bressan, Jr.’s October 31st release, Buddies, the first television drama about the disease and its effects, An Early Frost, televised on November 11th of that year, and four months earlier, the first documentary about AIDS and the gay community, Canadian filmmaker Nik Sheehan’s No Sad Songs, which might have served as the model of so very many documentaries that followed.

    I say “might” because, alas, very few of the others demonstrated the diversity of narrative approaches and the soul and heart of Sheehan’s amazing production, produced on a shoestring budget. That it was even made is almost a miracle. The movie came into existence only after the AIDS Committee of Toronto realized that they still had $20,000 of grant money they had received for an educational audiovisual project which, if they didn’t use soon, would have to be returned. Kevin Orr, from the Committee, made a call to Sheehan asking was it even possible to make a documentary for that amount of money, and the filmmaker immediately responded that he thought it could be done.

      I should just make it clear for the record, there was one earlier documentary of the same year: the US Public Broadcasting Systems’ production of NOVA: AIDS Chapter One, directed by Thea Chalow. This film, quite informative and even brilliant at moments, however, is mostly focused on the scientists’ work to discover what was killing so many young gay men. Although there are a couple of characters representing AIDS victims, whose momentary appearances are quite moving, this film is basically an objective discussion of the scientific issues—a truly much-needed perspective. But it hasn’t an even a bit of the heart of Sheehan’s work, and doesn’t really detail in any substantial way, the involvement of the gay community in the concerns that were quickly killing queers off. Even the doctors can only admit their own inability to actually deal with the tragedy their patients are suffering, and the physical isolation they were forced to endure.

      The result of Sheehan’s work, on first look, is such a highly eclectic mix of genres, personages, and narrative strategies that it almost seems to be an enthusiastically crazed get-together of Toronto LGBTQ figures asked to ponder, suffer over, and, yes celebrate those in their community suffering from  AIDS—except as you gradually watch the various “acts” appear one by one through the work’s frames you realize that such a first-time effort could hardly resist such inclusiveness, and in hindsight, provides us with a record of how the issues surrounding what was in those days described as “the gay plague” that involved nearly everyone from the hellish bigots to the heavenly saints. Moreover, as reviewer Matthew Hays points out, it captured how people both concerned and confused about the unknown epidemic worked in various ways to confront the issues of the day: “The film stands as a crucial document and an ode to those who were fighting on the front lines, just as the gravity of what was to come was sinking in.”

      Including a gay man from the medical profession (Evan Collins), a psychiatrist (Stephen Atkinson), a sociologist (John Allen Lee), bar owners and an S&M patron (Dale McCarthy), an performing fireman talking about death (David Roche), satiric performers (Henry Van Rijk and David Sereda), a playwright (Sky Gilbert) and his actor (Joe Norman Shaw), British actor and writer Neil Bartlett, two gay drag artists dressed as nuns (Sister Atrociata von Tasteless and Sister Celestial Gates), board members of Canada’s major LGBTQ publication Body Politic (Gerald Hannon, Rick Rébout, and Chris Bearchell), and administrators and a volunteer of AIDS Committee of Toronto (Kevin Orr, John Bodis, Karsten Kossman, and Linda Boyd)—all judiciously woven together with a talking head who informs us of missing facts—before focusing on his central figures of people actually suffering from AIDS, their lovers, close friends, and family members (Jim Black and his lover Kevin, Jim Bozyk, Greg Lawrence, and Martha Cronen).

       Each of these figures, woven in-and-out by Sheehan, of the narrative of his designated “hero,” Jim, presents with a shimmering facet of the kaleidoscopic vision of the entire work. If some of the “performances,” in particular, seem a little amateurish and exaggerated with their satirical educational intent, I agree with the observations from another piece by the reviewer Hays I mentioned above:

 

“When I’ve shown this doc to my queer-cinema class at Concordia, some of the students suggest that some of the agitprop performance art is perhaps a bit hokey. I always argue that Sheehan’s very recording of it—even if it’s occasionally a bit clumsy—is crucial. He shows us the raw, emotional response of queer artists of the time to the brutal onslaught at the dawn of AIDS and HIV.”

     Sheehan’s film begins by establishing some territorial boundaries that later documentaries of latter years refused to declare. Although most people already recognized that AIDS was not just a  “gay” disease—without imagining, however, that years later it would be more common as a heterosexual disease in Africa—the focus of this work was the male homosexual community. And secondly, given that focus, the director and his interviewees argued it was crucial to approach the discussion of AIDS with a complete openness to what being gay represents in its sense of history, its current community, and the various individual definitions of sexuality that often defines it

     As a gay physician Collins argues early in this work that if AIDS often leads to a paralysis, of not knowing how to explain it, cure it, or even help people to live with it, it must be approached as an issue far bigger than a medical one. “The gay community needs to talk and deal with, argue, and have general discourse on how it acts on a social and political level.”

     Atkinson, the psychiatrist, warns us on relying instinctually on notions of “queerness” that come with the territory, particularly as they might be applied to AIDS:       

     

 “Gay people grow up in an environment that teaches us to be afraid of ourselves before we know that we’re gay. We’re afraid of dirty old men, child molesters, some murderers, perverts, all those sorts of things society tells everybody gay people represent. Things we learn about homosexuals before we realize we are homosexual. AIDS feeds into that very much. The whole idea of it being a scourge of God, a gay plague, or some kind of proof that we are bad, dirty, infectious, anti-social type people...can have a personal effect on men who are dealing with AIDS.”

 

     Sociologist John Allen Lee is wary even of the word “homosexual,” particularly in how it relates to the medical profession and dealing with AIDS. He reminds that the word “homosexual”  was created, in part, to rid us of the former depictions of gay men being Sodomites or buggers, and so on. By describing same-sex behavior as “homosexual,” it allowed it to become a medical condition which could be observed and possibly treated. He reminds us that as recently as the founding of the Mattachine Society by Harry Hay in 1950, an early gay rights group, the goal was not to demand universal acceptance but was asking for gays to be pitied and treated respectably. It took years to get the American Medical Association and psychiatrists to stop defining “homosexuality” a disease, and he justifiably fears that if AIDS is seen primarily as a gay disease in need of treatment by the medical profession, there is a strong opportunity to pull the word “homosexual” back into the description of a medical condition.

       The editors of Body Politic realize that the media, in describing how AIDS is a thing that “happens” to gays and that the various effects are seen to “happen” in relationship to having been infected with HIV, that it will create a strong sense of passivity, which may destroy all the positive actions of the LGBTQ community in general and certainly discourage what precisely this film is arguing for, open talk about the need for change.

      Lesbian editor Chris Bearchell feels that, in fact, the gay media has been too passive even in relationship to the general media, making the mistake of reporting each new theory and explanation of AIDS that arises with equal emphasis. “One week it was poppers and another week it was getting it in the ass, and the next week it was something else,” she regretfully recalls. That misled people, she argues, and led to utter confusion. She implores them to move forward with calm, responsible reporting, attempting to let people understand the distinctions between what is known, what is thought, and what is suspected to be the truth about AIDS.

      With regard to the role women might play with regard to AIDS, support volunteer Linda Boyd later in the film expresses her fears that for some time “women in the community did not consider it to be their issue.” But gradually as gay brothers, friends, and acquaintances began to become infected, they realized that as women they might play important roles. “Some men afflicted with AIDS still have difficulty in expressing their fears and emotions to other men but felt more comfortable with women,” probably connected with the mother image she quips.

    Body Politic editor Rick Rébout brings up one of the most important secondary concerns of Sheehan’s film. In the recognition that anal sex is perhaps the greatest method for the transmission of AIDS, the problem arises how to talk about sexuality with regard to gay sex. He rightfully argues that the solution often posited—“You just shouldn’t do that” (reminding me of the campaign to prevent teen pregnancies, “Just don’t”)—is not only naïve but represents a total lack of awareness of what sexuality means to gays in general, and what a particular sexual act means to many.

       Earlier Kevin Orr of the Aids Committee of Toronto argued quite insightfully about what gay liberation and being gay means at heart to many people. Coming out at the age of 17, he got immediately involved in gay liberation, he reports. And since then:

 

“I’ve been fighting to do various things. But it all comes back to being allowed to sleep with other men. So AIDS threatens that very directly. When you fight for that so hard for several years and you end up in bed with somebody, are you going to say to yourself ‘Is this going to kill me? Is this wrong?’ Of course the answer is No. All sorts of people have had to change their sexual practice. Sex in the age of AIDS is probably not as good as it was in the 70s. To have to have anal sex with a condom or not have anal sex at all is a problem. As a gay man one of the first things you learn is you have an anus. And straight men don’t know that.”

 

      Even though playwright Sky Gilbert has written plays that seem to argue against senseless promiscuity, he still insists “The joy of touching for the sake of touching is part of gay culture.”

 

      Finally, what these specialists and commentators realize is that AIDS has also had a very positive effect in further organizing the community and in bringing the entire LGBTQ world into a battle that concerns life and death, while also forcing them that they need the help of the heterosexual community as well. Although many Christian fundamentalists and bigots saw AIDS as God’s punishment, a greater number of heterosexual and even highly religious individuals came forward to help in the battle. As ACT administrator John Bodis summarzies:

 

“One of the amazing things that happened is AIDS further brought the community together to successfully challenge not only the disease but bigotry and much else. But gay organizations, no matter how well organized could not fight the AIDS crisis alone. Coalitions of health care professionals and concerned individuals, straight and gay are necessary.”

 

     Although the film does not go this far, I might add that in hindsight AIDS, despite the early heterosexual fears and refusals to even keep company with gay men—when Sheehan was making this film a critic from the Toronto Star asked him what his work was about: “When I told him I’d made the film on AIDS, he literally turned and ran away. There was so much panic and misunderstanding about it in those days.”—eventually it helped the heterosexual world recognize that gays were not only people of “flesh and blood,” but deserved the same rights as all others, at least with regard to marriage. If nothing else, it brought the community fighting for their lives into the social glare instead of relegating it to gay bars and back streets. Homes and families were suddenly missing gay sons, brothers, and neighbors. You could no longer pretend that they’d simply left home never to return.

      And it is these gay men of flesh and blood about to die simply talking that this film, at its most profound, is concerned.

     Sheehan’s long conversations with Jim Black and his lover/caretaker Kevin becomes the focal point of all the other intelligent and moving observations. And in Jim, Sheehan found a spokesman who reminds me a great deal, in fact, of Bressan’s dying hero in that year’s fictional film Buddies.

      Like Bressan’s character Robert Willow, Sheehan’s Jim has been cut off from friends and family because of his illness. As he describes it:

 

“The family is divided. My father’s caught in the middle. He realizes I’m sick. He knows I have something serious. But also, he will not admit that I have AIDS. It could not happen to his son. He’s taking it as well as can be expected. But father’s 73 years old, he’s in ill health and he’s handicapped. All this is an awful lot to dump on a man in that condition.”

 

      It's amazing that a dying man can still empathize for an aging father who will not quite admit to his own son’s condition, but his brother’s decision that “from here on I no longer exist in the family,” is a bit harder to sympathize with. “They want me to stay away from their children. I will never get to see my nieces or my nephew or my god-child again. It’s hard.”

 

     Like Bressan’s figure, moreover, Jim has become a fighter, who after 36 years of seeing the unfairness of the world while waiting for others to help make it right, he now stands out on street corners to remind others of his and his kind’s existence: “if my name pops up somewhere, they’re going to associate me with AIDS, but I knew that before I started all this.”

     He continues, “The AIDS thing will eventually be like tuberculosis and no one will make a big thing about it. But right now it’s a hot issue and it’s important. And I want to make my life important by helping to get people to know everything they can about this. Because if it can happen to me, it can happen to him, it can happen to anybody, straight or gay. And you can go into a hospital and a blood transfusion and you could get AIDS. You don’t have to be sexual. And it’s up to me to go out there and make a fool of myself, and crack all these crazy jokes and say, ‘look unless I give you a blood transfusion, as long as I sit here and talk about it, you won’t get AIDS from me.’ We have to remove the fear. And the only way to remove the fear is knowledge. And you go and kick the public in the teeth and say ‘Look at me, I am a flesh and blood person. I have a disease you don’t want to talk about. But you’d better.’”

      It’s strange but all the others in this film don’t really think much about death, even the performative fireman who reminds that most of us of think of death coming “after you have lived your life.” But all the gay men dying of AIDS talk about the fact that they are dying now as younger men. As Greg Lawrence reports, he visited his dying friend’s family with him and they had a fierce fight that ended with his friend trying to tell his family that he was going to soon die. Lawrence reports that when his friend actually said it that even he realized that it was really true.

      Jim speaks of it often and mostly quite humorously. He insists that epitaph read: NO SAD SONGS FOR ME FOR I HAVE FOUND MYSELF.

      Appropriately, however, it is the soon-to-be survivors who get the last word in Sheehan’s film, and what they have learned is not only that life without their loved ones will represent an impossible tear and loss in their lives but while their lover and brother still live that it is most important, just as the doctor ordered in the opening speech of this film, to talk and to keep talking, to find out how the dying feel and hope to live out their remaining lives.

     As Martha, whose brother Gary is dying of AIDS, expresses it: “The most important thing is to talk. I have to start talking more about the details. Because you can pretend too much and not talk about what really is happening. What do people who don’t have family, who can’t talk, who can’t share their fears, their joys do?  You have to be together. To laugh and giggle and watch a movie and maybe go for a walk. And have a moment when you’re sad, you’re sad together.”

     Jim’s lover Kevin finally opens up: “I’m preparing myself with the problem of who to hold on to, who to talk to.”

    Obviously, this director loves to hear people talk, to hear about their fears, their expressions of accomplishment, their life stories, the joys they about to lose forever. In his hands these men become far more than hapless men on their deathbeds. There is almost something joyful in their encounters with death. Yet, as he admits, “But of course, it was terribly, horribly sad.” And I assure you that each of the three times I watched this film, I cried. But that won’t ever stand in the way of watching these brave figures talk to me for an hour again.

 

Los Angeles, June 14, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2021).

 

Alex Myung | Arrival / 2016 [animated film]

boy without a voice

by Douglas Messerli

 

Alex Myung (screenwriter, animator, and director) Arrival / 2016 [22 minutes] [animated film]

Arrival is what I would describe as a very strange coming out film. But given the version B of the genre to which we have grown accustomed, in which a young man must verbally declare his sexuality of friends and family, in this animated film without any dialogue, the declaration remains entirely unspoken, expressed only in the camera photographs, a habit our young hero as acquired since he was a child living in a pastoral paradise with his mother.

      The mother, in fact, is the central figure here. She supports her son in a provincial world with no evidence of how they survive. But she, like her son, takes photographs, clearly doting on her only child and perhaps the only reason she seems to have to survive.

       The son, like most young boys, however, grows up and desires the bright lights of the city, which could be any major metropolis, but appears in this film to be very similar to an amalgam of San Francisco and Manhattan. He moves there, spends a few difficult days or months (time is irrelevant in this fast-moving fable) before he suddenly discovers a good-looking young man winking at him.

     Obviously, he likes what he sees since again with time almost leaping through the whirlwind of images, he is soon seen regularly dining and running together with the stranger. Within seconds, they move into a rather swank apartment—obviously, his partner is a young executive—and together they hit the gay night-spots.

       Throughout all this time, our country boy keeps sending photos of his new experiences, his food, his apartment, his friends (by not his lover) back to his mother, who answers equally with pictures from his past. He affixes them to long strings above his bed. And almost daily, so it would seem, receives another from her, just as he mails out his photos.

     But eventually the photos from home stop. Presumably, his mother has simply run out of past childhood photographs, while, of course, his are endless. He moves forward, but things have gone somewhat sour between him and his lover, particularly since he has fallen into a kind of funk.

       One night in the bar, his friend joins another boy in the bathroom stall, while our young hick stands alone, returning home to an empty bed.

        In the morning, he finds his duffel bag beside him on the bed with a note prescribing that he return him to visit his mother.

       He drives the long distance, seeking out the lonely house which he enters to find his mother missing. He visits his old bedroom, returns downstairs and places a picture of himself and his lover on a bureau. Suddenly his mother reappears and the two embrace, delighted to be together once again. They share another perfect afternoon as they had when he was a child. But later as they return, she spots the picture, he slight troubled. What will her response be?

        She pulls him off into her bedroom, demanding for him to keep his eyes closed until she has left the room. There upon her all, unlike his at his city apartment, she has strung up ropes of a universe of possibilities, the photos he has sent her hanging in swirls of possibilities lit up with small lightbulbs. She has imagined nearly a world for him, while he has simply treated her photos as treasures and trinkets.

        He returns to his car and drives back to the city, now realizing that whatever world he makes will be treated at home as part of an imaginary universe that will include wherever it might take him.

       Arrival is a beautiful, even if a bit predictable fable of a deep mother and son relationship. But alas, it is just a pretty picture without any depth. Who is this young man? With whom has he fallen in love? What does he do now in his life? How did his mother and he survive? Does he have any true plans for the future? Does he have any interests outside of his mother, running, and his boyfriend? Can the two young men truly reunite after what seems to be a kind of rupture?

     This is a work without a voice, simply a chalk-talk of chronological events, nothing but a surface.

 

Los Angeles, July 9, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (July 2026).

 

 

Monika Treut | Die Jungfrauenmaschine (Virgin Machine) / 1988

alternatives

by Douglas Messerli

 

Monika Treut (screenwriter and director) Die Jungfrauenmaschine (Virgin Machine) / 1988

 

Caught up in sexual relationships between her half-step-brother, Bruno (Marcelo Uriona) and her heavy-set thuggish boss Heinz (Gad Klein)—trapped as you might put it between incest and heterosexual disgust—you can well comprehend why Dorothee Müller (Ina Blum) is unhappy. Imbued with traditional notions of womanhood (“women are the empty receptacles to the male urge to propagate”), she is working as a journalist on the “secret to romantic love.” As a romantic herself, she interviews a hormone specialist (Peter Kern) who discusses the bodily secretion before and during sex of chemicals such as oxytocin, noradrenaline, and dopamine while appearing to be unwrapping a sausage he is about to eat as if were cutting away the stitching on a recently circumcised penis. Like most of the males in this movie he is quite disgusting.

     Dorothee even attempts to communicate with a female chimpanzee to explore her DNA commitments to raising and caring for her babies until hormones overcome her and she seeks out the male pack.

      Understandably, however, she feels her research is getting nowhere, and finally decides to pack up and travel to the USA, in particular San Francisco to where her mother has escaped years earlier—demanding that Dorothee kill her father after she left. Bruno also delivers a message that her mother would finally like to see her.

      Strangely, instead of the male gay bastion by which we define the city today, Dorothee imagines it as an amazon-like community of mostly woman who control everything. To her great disappointment, the women she meets at first is just as crude and mean as the males she has left behind. The landlord at her mother’s apartment announces that she’s owned five-months back rent, and the mother has taken off to god-knows-where. Dorothee’s questions lead to a spew of hateful abuse on the landlady’s part. A black woman standing nearby suggests she saw Dorothee’s mother leaving in a cab, but the girl’s eager desire to find out further information leads even that confidant to order her to back off.

       Have no fear, the doe-eyed innocent (at moments a near look-alike for an early Liza Minelli) as we soon discover this traveler to her own Oz to be, is—as even she describes herself to be— “all ears,” eager to listen to any stories that might come her way. Renting a room in a sleazy San Francisco boarding house, Dorothee sees an ad for a woman who promises to solve all sexual difficulties and immediately telephones, leaving her number.

      Soon after on the beach she encounters fellow German emigree Dominque (Dominique Gaspar) who communicating in German takes the newcomer under her wing. And in another walk down the hill-city’s yellow brick roads, Dorothee comes upon a sex-expert, Susie Sexpert (Susie Bright) attempting to lure men and most women into a female strip show. Susie is particularly keen on encouraging her fellow females to visit the strip-tease shows, and gives the eager Dorothee a  long lecture on the various tools of the trade, including overly-large breasts which keep one stripper working long after the usual age of retirement.

       Soon after, Dorothee borrows a bicycle from Dominique and speeds off around town to engage in the new venues, mostly lesbian, suggested by her friends. Her eager races through the city cannot help but remind us of the New Wave films, in particular Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (1960) and Agnès Varda’s Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962), as Dorothee ventures into lesbian clubs, joins dykes on bikes, and visits various other lesbian establishments.

       Susie also has a large collection of dildoes which she shows off and describes to her new friend. Almost immediately after, Dorothee attends a show of the drag king, Romona, whose male attire attracts an eager lesbian audience as she employs various tools and a bottle of beer that, when placed near her vagina, foams up and over convincingly to suggest male ejaculation.

       Dorothee is particularly interested in Romona, and soon after makes a date with her, excited about their impending meeting at a bar.

       Their encounter might be described as the centerpiece of the film. Ramona takes Dorothee in a stretch-limousine to Fishermen’s Wharf where they snap pictures of themselves together and have them transferred on to t-shirts. After drinks in the back seat of the limo, they enjoy dinner at El Rio, finally ending up back in Dorothee’s room where they have some of the most beautifully filmed lesbian sex since Chantal Ackerman’s somewhat more robust female coupling in Je, Tu, Il,  Elle (1974).

      Totally overwhelmed by the entire experience, Dorothee imagines herself in love and in ecstasy simultaneously, until Romana rudely awakens her to tell her that the price for their get-together—on sale because of how much she likes Dorothee—comes to $500, an extraordinary cost for 1989.

       What is such a guileless romantic to do but to simply lay back and let out a hearty series of guffaws? We love Dorothee even more for her naivete.

       Far from souring her on the lesbian world she has now entered, Dorothee engages in an amateur strip night, closed to all males including the King of Porn himself, and becomes even closer to Dominque and her female friend, the three of them dancing in delight as they prepare a dinner for themselves.

      Soon after, Dorothee gathers together all her German family and previous lovers’ photos and bicycles to Golden Gate Park, where tears them into pieces throwing into the bay. She has found a new home and world that at least promises to meet her romantic expectations.

       Dorothee’s romp through life to discover a new world of delight is both extremely educative to audiences of the day and so much fun that it’s nearly impossible not to love Monika Treut’s slightly punk lesbian and feminist Die Jungfrauenmaschine. As the reviewer for the 2017 Berlinale screening of the film noted, Virgin Machine is "open, cheerful and with a lot of fun; the women in the film go through life and are not only an inspiration for Dorothee Müller, but for all modern women."

       Today the film has become something of a cult favorite.

 

Los Angeles, December 15, 2022 

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2022).

Holly Lawrenson Evans | Swimming with You / 2022

second chance

by Douglas Messerli

 

Paul Davidson, Holly Lasrenson Evans, and Taylor Watson (screenplay), Holly Lawrenson Evans (director) Swimming with You / 2022 [11 minutes]

 

Two boys who have evidently spent the day together find themselves now in a parking lot, locked out of their car. Rhys (Dillon McFarlane) has evidently left his keys in the car, so he reports to the British version of AAA. Lucas (Declyn Tracey) apparently has to be at work at 2:00, and it’s now 1:50. What to do?

     While they wait for the recovery car to arrive, they begin small talk, Rhys suggesting that he did have a good time. Lucas suggests that the could get a bus and walk, maybe. But Rhys then argues he would feel even more stranded.

      Obviously, they are at a standstill; they’re emotions are still pent up inside, and, particularly Lucas, clearly pissed, doesn’t quite know how to respond.

      Rhys dares to ask what Lucas actually does at work, and even then Luca challenges him, cynical about his attempts to really “chat.” Yet finally, he admits that he mostly just “plays music over the speakers, stocks the shelves and that sort of thing.”

       As for what music he likes, Lucas admits “mostly indie” stuff.

       Lucas asks if Rhys knows “The Blue Moons,” Rhys wondering does he dress like someone who would know “The Blue Moons?” Nonetheless, Lucas argues he should check them out; he might like them.

       Lucas finally asks Rhys what he “gets up to” on his days.

       “Just studying. Hanging out with my friends. Usual student stuff, you know.”

       Suddenly, we perceive the two have met up with other intentions, given that in his next sentence Rhys replies: “Nobody really knows about this side of me.”

       We now know the two have met up in this wilderness spot from a hookup on Grindr or some such internet connection. The snafu has been on top of their own fears and sexual frustrations.

        Rhys continues: “I’m just trying to figure out what I want, who I want.

        But Lucas pretends to have no knowledge of what his friend is talking about, Rhys quickly responding that he’d appreciate it if he just kept it to himself.

       Lucas responds rather positive, suggesting he might send him a playlist to see if he like it.

      And now even humor enters into their conversation when Lucas points out that Rhys has re-buttoned his shirt improperly. The boys have evidently had some sort of sex or at least a serious make-out session before this disastrous end.

       Suddenly the recovery vehicle arrives, driven by a quite likeable and forceful woman, Lorna (Carla McNeil), who immediately inquire whether they’ve been locked out of their car. Marching forward, bag in hand, she peers into the car, laughing evidently perceiving even by the position of the car seats that the boys have been up to something.

       “So what brings you guys out to these lovely parts?”

       She quickly opens the door, but forces them first to sign some paperwork.

      And suddenly as Rhys moves to his upper pocket of his coat, the keys fall out. He has had them with him the whole time.

       “Fuck you, man” is Lucas’ response, as Rhys attempts to apologize.

       Lorna needs his signature, “Before this kicks off between you two lover boys.”

       This wise woman approaches Lucas, “His first time, I assume.”

       “Isn’t it obvious?”      

       This “savior” offers some good advice: “He’s made an effort. More than most boys, right? All I’m saying is, don’t be too quick to throw him away.”

     Lucas, conflicted, nonetheless pauses to think before knocking on the car window where Rhys now sits. “How about that lift?”

     It’s difficult to find a good relationship at any age, but certainly problematic for two young unsure boys such as these is a perhaps provincial territory. Learning to forgive and love is necessary for any young gay boy on the verge of finally coming out.

     This is a wise little work, if somewhat unbelievable. It still stings the way all early love stories do, and thrives in its openness of heart.

      I might mention, yet again, so many of these fine gay films over the last several decades have been helmed by women directors, in this case Scottish-born director Holly Lawrenson Evans. It should be a lesson to Hollywood and other major cinema productions. Why it took three writers to put together a script, I cannot explain.

 

Los Angeles, July 8, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (July 2026).

 

Lonelyleap Production Company | The Redwood-O’Hare Family / 2015 [commercial advertisement]

fathers

by Douglas Messerli

 

Lonelyleap Production Company The Redwood-O’Hare Family / 2015 [2.41 minutes] [commerical advertisement]

 

Later in 2015, Tylenol created two rather straight ads, one about a Nigerian immigrant family, the Ekeh’s, whose son has been offered admission by some of the best of US universities and colleges. This was directed by Adam Hootnick.

     Another ad, The Vincent Family, of August 28, 2015, describes how a young boy’s father was killed in a car accident and then her sister died, forcing to realize at a young age that she needed to adopt their son. Again, Tylenol features a different kind of family to help sell its product.

    But perhaps the most interesting to gay viewers was The Redwood-O’Hare Family, a mixed-race gay couple who have adopted a boy.

     This couple, actor Denis O’Hare and his companion Hugo Redwood, met back in 2000 on line, and immediately felt a rapport, coming together almost immediately. They had discussions about having a family, but O’Hare argues they were on opposite sides. “When you’re a same-sex couple with a child, suddenly you become a sort of walking poster. And I wasn’t sure I wanted to do that.” He admits, having been raised in a culture where gay people were told that it wasn’t right for them to have children, the forces of those values were still affecting him, even though he wasn’t fully aware of it. So, he realizes, he had to overcome a lot of resistance.

     But the moment Declan was put into his arms, he tears up telling it, he was my son. And realized I didn’t need to seek anyone’s permission to fall in love or raise a son. “I don’t need to ask permission to have a family. I have a family.”

     They show the couple walking their son up to a curtain, which when it drops, reveals a full shelf filled with photographs of the boy, who seems quite delighted, as if even that young he knows he is now home, part of the family. “Nobody has got a lock on the definition of a family.” “We’re the Redwood-O’Hare’s, and this is how we family,” speaks a voice as Tylenol finally presents their closing logo.

 

Los Angeles, July 8, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (July 2026).

Lonelyleap Production Company | How We Family / 2015 [commercial advertisement]

MOTHERS

by Douglas Messerli

 

Lonelyleap Production Company How We Family / 2015 [2.06 minutes] [commercial advertisement]

 

What I believe to be the second in the series of Tylenol ads featuring family, presumably also written and directed by Dustin Lance Black, was a 2.06 minute ad featuring only women, each talking about their role as mothers. The first is an Asian woman who simply announces “I’m a mother,” followed by another woman who declares she has two children. The third reveals that she is “a single mom,” and by the fourth revealing that she has a great family made up of two moms.

    Another states that she “did it through a surrogate.” And yet another that she has a “transitioning son.” The original Asian woman argues “There’s so much discussion about what’s acceptable, what’s not acceptable. That word shouldn’t even play in the dynamic of family.” Another argues it all depends upon how much love you give them.

     And so it goes, another woman saying how deeply she bonded when she put her son down to bed with her wife. My son got sick in Brazil, and that’s when I realized “I’m a mom.” “Family is a group of people that create love.” “What makes families stay together, adds yet another, “is love.”

      “I love my son, and I want him to be as happy, as healthy, and successful, as he can be.”

      This moving testament to all kinds of mothers, most of them single or raising their child with a lesbian lover, provides yet a fuller dimension to the notion of family that Tylenol sought out in this series of ads.

 

Los Angeles, July 7, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (July 2026).

Dustin Lance Black | How We Family / 2015 [commercial advertisement]

redefinitions of family

by Douglas Messerli

 

Dustin Lance Black (creator) How We Family / 2015 [30 seconds] [commercial advertisement]

 

Beginning in 2015 and continuing through 2016, the Tylenol company began a series of ads that featured various US families, many of them gay and lesbian. The initial ad from 2015 was created by Dustin Lance Black, asking a central question "When were you first considered a family? When did you first fight to be considered a family?"

 

      The original ad, if I read it correctly, since there were several ads with little coherent documentation, was a 30 second add, simply asking a series of important questions, but featuring white, black, lesbian, and male gay couples, concluding that “Family isn’t defined by who you are but how.”

     Featuring black, interracial, lesbian, and gay families, this ad broke new ground for queer and multi-racial families even as late as 2015 for a major US company.

 

Los Angeles, July 7, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (July 2026).