Norman René | Longtime Companion / 1989

a grand soap opera

by Douglas Messerli

 

Craig Lucas (screenplay), Norman René (director) Longtime Companion / 1989

 

One of the seminal films of the 1980s, Norman René’s Longtime Companion, was released at the end of that decade in 1989, yet through its chronological structure narrates its action by embracing almost the entire 1980s, beginning on July 3, 1981.

     That story begins almost where director Stan LaPresto left us a decade earlier, on Fire Island in 1970, or when René’s movie shifts back to Manhattan, the party with which William Friedkin’s cinematic rendition of Mart Crowley’s The Boys in the Band closed. Yet so very much had changed since then. The ramifications of the Stonewall rebellion had percolated through the 1970s to give even the campiest of gay queens pause in their denigration of the world around them and in their hoots of self-abuse.

      Fire Island was still celebrating its high “teas” with its mix of heavy alcohol, drugs, and dishy putdowns, but there was a newfound gravitas in gay relationships such as that between the affluent couple David (Bruce Davison) and Sean (Mark Lamos) celebrating the 4th of July with friends in their beach house. Sean is a screenwriter for a pop daytime soap opera into which, during the course of the nine years this film covers, will gradually introduce gay characters to the American housewives who sit at home and daily watch his melodramatic plots unravel. His lover David has inherited a great deal of money which he uses to busy himself with trust fund investments. Celebrating the holiday with them are their close friends—in the bond between them, often resulting in people mistaking them as a couple—John (Dermont Mulroney) and Willy (Campbell Scott).

     Meanwhile, back in Manhattan an attractive young partners Howard (Patrick Cassidy) and Paul (John Dossett) wake up from an enjoyable night of sex to face the next day of work and new prospects, Paul works in a successful business as an executive and Howard is an actor about to audition the day after the holiday for a part in Sean’s soap Other People. He gets the job, both lovers celebrating their luck later that evening.

       Yet that morning on his way to the audition, Howard, having read the first report in The New York Times about a new “cancer” (Kaposi’s sarcoma) which has killed forty-one gay men, calls his lover to tell him to read the article, somewhat disturbed by the news. Meanwhile, their next door neighbor, Lisa (Mary-Louise Parker), who owns an antique shop, calls her best friend Fuzzy (Stephen Caffrey) to insist that he too read the article.

       Back on Fire Island, some are worried by the news, others suggesting it must have something to do with drugs, another group thinking it is perhaps connected to the use of “poppers” (alkyl nitrites) that are often inhaled by gay men for the rush and high of sex  because it helps to increase the blood flow and relax the sphincter muscle which facilitates anal sex. (I can recall some of my friends suggesting the same thing at the time.) Some dismiss the entire situation, suggesting that it certainly has little to do with their healthy regimens. John, after all, is a physical trainer.

      As critic Peter Travers wrote in Rolling Stone in 1990: “This group tries to laugh off the report that many of the cancer patients used drugs or had frequent sexual encounters. But the hot atmosphere on this July day has definitely been chilled.” 

    On the beach John and Willy again pass by a friendly but seemingly awkward newcomer to the Island, Fuzzy, who has apparently waved to them in a friendly manner for the days they’ve been there. Fuzzy, nicknamed for his hirsute appearance, shows up at the afternoon “tea,” and, despite the man’s rather clumsy naivete, Willy, who is attracted to hairy men, makes a pass, and he and Fuzzy begin a relationship.

      Even given the context of those early celebratory few days, accordingly, we know that Longtime Companion is not going to be a film focusing on the dating and partnership patterns of these individuals.

      By the film’s 1989 release everyone watching this film knew what that original “gay disease” really meant, and how it would radically effect the lives of thousands upon thousands of LGBTQ and heterosexual individuals. By that year 117,508 cases of AIDS had been reported, with 89,343 deaths. By 2016 that number of infected individuals had reached an estimated 1,140,400, with over half of the cases, 707,100, being caused by male-to-male sexual contact. 58,600 of those men combined with the injection of drugs.

       Only ten months later in the film, April 30, 1982, John contracts pneumonia, which his friends, at first, attempt to downplay as something he will soon get over. But things have clearly already altered, not just in the increasing number of deaths reported but with regard to how the growing “gay plague” has begun to affect people’s lives who have not even showed any signs of being HIV-positive.

       Howard, for example, is presented with a new script written by Sean that reveals his soap opera character is about to become the first openly gay character on daytime TV. While it might be seen as a cause for celebration, he is nonetheless troubled that he will by typecast by playing a gay role which will delimit the other parts he may be offered in the future.* Willy and Fuzzy’s romance has grown into a committed relationship, and they move in together. John, diagnosed with AIDS soon after his being hospitalized, dies.

        One of the few faults of Craig Lucas’ masterful script for Longtime Companion is that as we grow to know more and more about this group of eight close friends and get to like them as characters, we also begin to perceive them also a bit like we might perceive soap opera characters, watching their caring, loving, and sometimes hostile interchanges only to wonder who will be the next to suffer the effects of AIDS, either physically or mentally as the demands it puts upon on gay men, who are now often seen as outcasts in the society in general become almost unbearable. To have, after Stonewall, come out proudly, demanding the respect and equality with the heterosexual majority, only to be once more become shunned and ostracized for a mysterious disease that many feared might be spread by contact was absolutely devastating.

      Just two years full years after the first scene of the film, on July 17, 1983, Sean is constantly terrified at the slightest changes of his body, a mole that he previously had not noticed, a loss of appetite, etc., seemingly fantasy fears of possibly having contracted the disease. Even personal relationships come under scrutiny, as David tries to comprehend his companion’s fears. Since he himself is healthy, he has to wonder has Sean had sex with someone outside of their relationship? Has he injected drugs? He laughs at what appears to be his mate’s newly-developed nosophobia. Yet both know of a sick neighbor on the island who has become a pariah, people going out of their way to steer clear of him.

      Willy, Fuzzy, and Lisa, along with other friends Michael and Bob, gather with David and Sean to watch Howard’s character reveal his gay sexuality on the soap opera, Lisa revealing that the actor who Sean believes is heterosexual is her neighbor who she knows to be gay. It might be a meaningless aside in normal times, but we recognize in her observations that she has perhaps ended Howard’s acting career.

       A little more than a year later, the film dating events as September 7, 1984, the writer of Howard’s script, Sean, is hospitalized, Willy visiting him has become so terrified of contracting the disease that he not only wears a surgical mask and gown which in those days were available since medical science had still not determined precisely how AIDS was contracted, but after Sean kisses him on the cheek, quickly making his way to the bathroom to scrub the spot where his friend had planted the kiss. It is an almost surreal scene as René captures the absurdness of everyone’s, including gay men’s, often unfounded fears and terrors.

      Howard’s lover Paul is also hospitalized, diagnosed as having toxoplasmosis, an infection associated with an infection through parasites. Surely this can have little to do with AIDS the two attempt to assure themselves, without perceiving that the disease most often occurs when the patient’s immune system in ineffectual. Almost like being gay without willing to openly admit it, the two lovers also subliminally realize the reality behind his illness, Howard breaks down into sobs, the victim attempting to comfort his seemingly healthy companion.

       By this time, anyone in this film’s audience with even the smallest shred of empathy, let alone those many who lived through this era (and for some continue to still today in 2020) are in tears. I certainly was. The next scene, dated March 22, 1985, represents some of the most dramatically compelling events in this unforgettable movie. The previously witty and sometimes catty gay man, Sean has fallen into dementia, with his friend David helping to deceive Sean’s studio—they have conspired to escape the observation of his colleagues by creating the myth of Sean taking a temporary retreat to the Island in order to write—by his companion cluing him into what to say, reminding me a bit of the comic scene from the I Love Lucy series in which Lucy, meeting her husband Desi Arnez’s grandmother and relatives for the first time hires a translator hooked up to her hidden headphones to help her pretend to speak Spanish. Yet there is little humor about this film’s scene wherein David tries to get Sean to say simple words like “yes” or “no” in response to far more complex telephone comments from the studio exec. Later, back in Manhattan, David takes Sean for a walk, but when his lover, who has lost nearly all sense of the “real” world in which he loves, urinates in a park fountain, he must speedily whisk him away when an angry nanny caring for her young charge becomes outraged.

      Fuzzy, Howard’s lawyer/agent, argues on the phone with a producer who refuses to hire his client for a movie after having heard that the actor has AIDS, the same rumor that has lost him his job playing his gay role in Other People. Paul has been re-hospitalized after a seizure. Without a job will Howard be able to afford Paul’s treatments?

     On that Friday evening, Willy observes his lover Fuzzy checking for swollen glands. The two briefly talk about their fears and possible deaths. Fuzzy asks “What do you think happens when we die.” to which Willy quips, “We get to have sex again.” Soon after Fuzzy will turn his skills as a lawyer into a force which will help to cope with the epidemic by offering his time in a local AIDS clinic trying to offer the little help available to the hundreds of dying men during this period.

      René and Lucas do not use their film as a tool to openly criticize the society in general for ignoring the crises its characters are facing, often alone or with equally suffering friends. But in hindsight it is important to remind ourselves that as of the date of these scenes, then President Ronald Reagan had not yet even publicly mentioned the disease killing so many gay and bisexual American men. It wasn’t until September 17 of that year that Reagan finally uttered the acronym, in responding to a question from a reporter. He described it as a “top priority,” defending his administration’s response and funding of research (surely reminding us of another lying President still refusing as I write this to deal with another pandemic, COVID-19). It is perhaps no accident that on that same day Regan’s actor/friend Rock Hudson died of AIDS. A month later Congress allocated almost $190 million for AIDS research, $70 million higher than Regan’s administration had requested.

    It is the January 4, 1986 episode of this moving drama that helped Davison to win the Best Supporting Actor Oscar nominating, a Golden Globe Award, the Independent Spirit Award, a National Society of Film Critics Award, and the New York Film Critics Circle award for acting.

     Now incontinent, in constant pain, immobile, and nearly stuporous, Sean attempts to cry out to David that he wants “to go,” his companion positively interrupting it that perhaps the patient wants to go for a walk, but inwardly knowing the truth. Sending the attending nurse on an errand for which he provides a handful of money in order to sit down alone with his lover. With utter calm and solemnity, he tells his friend of so many years that it is all right to let go, and repeating the phrase over and over, soothes the troubled patient into allowing himself to die, holding his hand as Sean breathes his last breath. No tears are shed, no moans or regrets. David simply sits watching his “longtime companion,” as the newspapers will later describe a relationship that has not yet found the language of marriage, seems finally at peace. We know that there are been far too many days and nights of tears and regrets. Now is the time to accept the end that will come to us all sooner or later.

      Willy and Lisa stop by to help out, but David, wanting to be alone just a little longer with Sean, sends them into the other room to select a suit the dead man might wear for his cremation. The ever useful Fuzzy calls the Gay Men’s Health Crisis line to find a suitable funeral home. And together the two attend to the large closet full of the writer’s clothing, discovering in the process an item that surely belonged in the closet, a beaded red dress, which they both grinningly determine would be perfect for the cremation except that it requires, they agree, a hat, “A big Bea Lillie thing!” which Sean evidently doesn’t own. This moment of levity in the midst of so much sorrow is a perfect closing to this character’s life.

      A week shy of two years after Reagan finally spoke the word AIDS, September 10, 1988, friends Fuzzy and Lisa are busy with answering phones at the Gay Men’s Health Center for which they volunteer their time. Willy serves as a “buddy,” buying food and cleaning up for one of the Center’s clients, Alberto (Michael Carmine), who when Willy suggests that he get up and take some exercise is ready to “fire” him until he recognizes that his unpaid “buddy” is simply trying to pull him out of the depression from which he’s been suffering.

   Paul has presumably died, and Howard has now been diagnosed with AIDS. What “public recognition” he has left he offers to an AIDS benefit he hosts in which we witness a loving formal chamber music version by The Finger Lakes Trio of the Village People’s song “YMCA.”

      The final scene of May 16, 1987 is the memorial service for David, with eulogies by his friend Bob (Brian Cousins) and Willy. At the following reception, a couple of friends humorously recall that as a young boy who remained in the house when his entire family were out on an errand, he spied his sister’s wedding dress hanging in preparation for the upcoming event. He couldn’t resist trying it on, but at the very moment the family returned, and in his attempt to run back upstairs to return it, tripped and fell down the staircase, temporarily passing out. They had to cut him out of the dress.

      In an apparent Coda to the tragic events for which the film has asked us to be witnesses, the three remaining longtime friends of the original group of eight, Willy, Fuzzy, and Lisa are walking along the Fire Island beach, talking about an upcoming ACT UP demonstration and recalling—as many of us do today living under the restraints of COVID—a time before AIDS while expressing their hopes for a cure.

     Suddenly in their fantasies of the past and future all those friends and others from their times at the Island reappear, laughing, cavorting, camping, dancing on the beach about them (a character montage that was stolen, I’d argue, by Terence Malick in The Tree of Life). Just a quickly they vanish, as the survivors hug one another in solace.

      After the release of this film which took an almost Herculean effort to get made and produced, many criticized it for concentrating its focus on a small group of white and financially privileged individuals. And there is little question that the group portrayed in this work do not truly represent the broad diversity of those who suffered and continue to become infected and die. Obviously, an argument can be made that such a film would have been weakened had it attempted to show the far broader spectrum of individuals who died and lived through the worst years of the epidemic; the very charm of this particular perspective is that it focuses on only a few people who we come to know and do not simply stand as stock figures. But, perhaps, we might also perceive it as a way of demonstrating that even those who were fairly well-to-do, living what might be described as fortunate lives, were not spared the devastation of this leveling disease.

      Fortunately, this work was only the beginning of a great number of films (along with earlier and contemporaneous plays such as Larry Kramer’s A Normal Heart of 1985, which wouldn’t reach the screen until 2014, and William Finn’s March of the Falsettos [1981] and Falsettoland [1990]) which presented AIDS from numerous perspectives that revealed individuals and the societies in which they lived who were far less able to deal with the ravages of AIDS.

      If the figures of Longtime Companion seem, in the end, able almost to gracefully accept the consequences of the scourge facing almost everyone in the LGBTQ community, many other artistic expressions spoke out a far more argumentative view of people unwilling “to go gentle into that good night.”

      Finally, while seeing this film again, I was struck by my comments in My Queer Cinema: A Prelude: “[My husband Howard and my] early deep commitment to a basically monogamous relationship meant that we not only saved ourselves from the terrible scourge of AIDS, but we were somewhat isolated from the sufferings of the rest of our lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual, and gender unidentified friends.” Almost totally accepted by the heterosexual worlds of the university, art, and literary worlds, we seldom visited gay bars and had little time (or desire for that matter) to cloister ourselves in a gay-exclusive environment.

       While many of my gay acquaintances such as Aaron Shurin, Vance George, Horácio Costa, Jeff Weinstein, and John Perreault—as well as straight friend living in major urban centers involved in music, dance, and theater—commonly expressed guilt for having survived the deaths of so very many of their friends, Howard and I knew hardly anyone who were HIV positive or died of AIDS. I heard rumor that one young student of Howard’s with whom I had once had sex had later died of AIDS, and one day my Sun & Moon Press shipper Mike (who had been a temporary lover of Allen Ginsberg) received an inappropriate and unthinking call from a nurse at Kaiser Permanente announcing that he had been diagnosed as being HIV. He left his position at Sun & Moon about a year later, and I never heard from him again. If I remember correctly a couple of Howard’s colleagues at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art died of AIDS, but they were only acquaintances, not close friends. The only friends who died of AIDS were rather famous for their writings and gay activist activities, Roger Horwitz and Paul Monette.

        In short, I did not precisely feel the “survivor’s guilt,” but perhaps an even more gnawing one, the guilt of being a gay man who was a kind of outsider even within my own community. I think that not only explains, as I previously suggested, my late-life commitment to reconstructing LGBTQ life as expressed through cinema, but my attempts to record, relying on the immense contributions of people like Vito Russo, Jenni Olson, and many others, the history of queer cinema. Maybe a totally sympathetic outsider looking back on what he and she missed can be of some significant value to those who have worked so hard all along from within.

        If nothing else, I can admit to having no protective layers of insider cynicism with regard to this movie, shedding copious tears while I viewed it and even so when writing the words you read above. I think it may be appropriate to openly weep, since I’d argue Lucas’s work, in part, is itself a kind of grand “soap opera,” in the best sense of that genre—an ongoing saga that provides us with enough of the history of its characters and their meaningful interactions with one another that we both anticipate and dread each new episode in a purposeful transference of our own lives to those upon the screen, no matter how outrageous or unbelievable their behaviors or lives might seem to be. It’s more than a “willing suspension of disbelief”; it’s far more like an almost unwilling witnessing of what we must believe in order to atone for our societies’ previous refusal to accept the facts. AIDS didn’t need to have such devasting effects any more than COVID did, except that our government and a large swath of our populace allowed it to kill those so many felt were simply unimportant, even deserving, and surely expendable—lovers and sinners who received their just rewards.

 

*The same year, 1982, heterosexual actor Harry Hamlin played a gay man in Making Love (reviewed above.) As an article in The Hollywood Reporter from 2020 reported: “Harry Hamlin says playing a gay writer in the 1982 big-screen drama Making Love put his career on ice for several years.

     The actor, looking back now, says the film ‘was too early. It was 10 years too early, I guess, and it completely ended my career. That was the last studio picture I ever did. The door shut with a resounding smash.’"

     In the British paper The Daily Telegraph gay actor Rupert Everett commented that being gay stifled his acting career. "There’s only a certain amount of mileage you can make, as a young pretender, as a leading man, as a homosexual. There just isn’t very far you can go. You can only understand the disaster of your own case yourself. You can’t ever expect the world to see everything about yourself in the way that you do – certainly in terms of conducting a career as a homosexual in show business. Not so much now, maybe, because I’m older. It’s not such a threatening problem. But all through my career it was a huge issue.”

     Oddly, one of his most notable on-screen gay roles was in My Best Friend’s Wedding (1997), in which he played opposite Dermont Mulroney who plays the gay man John in this film. Evidently even a decade after Lifetime Companion playing a gay man (let alone being a gay man) did clearly have an effect on an actor’s career.

     A fascinating coincidence is that in that same year in which the character Howard is fearful for his role being transformed in a gay figure, the heterosexual outsider Michael Dorsey (Dustin Hoffman), unable to get an acting stint, put on a dress to become the transsexual actor Dorothy Michaels as the new star of a soap opera in Sydney Pollack’s film Tootsie (1982).

 

Los Angeles, December 18, 2020

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (December 2020).

 

 

 

Frank Meli | Dragula / 2014

how to get attention

by Douglas Messerli

 

Frank Meli (screenwriter and director) Dragula / 2014 [25 minutes]

 

Charles (August Roads) is the second eldest son of the Freeman family, the youngest receiving his mother’s parenting instructions, and the eldest, Spencer, as a sports hero who coach has told him that he should get an agent for placement on major university teams, receiving nearly all of his father’s (Bob Riggle’s) attention. Charlie is basically ignored, even at school where is appears to be a mediocre student in Mr. Newton’s (Cheyenne Jackson) speech class.

    When he suggests he might try out for the student talent show, even his best friends Ben (Josh Brodis) and Phyllis (Allison Page) suggest that the idea is ridiculous since Charles has no talent. But they do end up asking him to join them at a gay club named The End to celebrate Ben’s birthday.

      How such a gay / lesbian bar just happens to be in their town, which Phyllis suggests isn’t ready for radical sexual behavior, is not explained. But the important thing is that it is there the high school boy discovers the drag performer Dragula (Barry Bostwick) who dances and sings, enticing his audience to “Follow me to another land, where the kings are queens who understand,” and arguing how he will help people “turn away from humanity and give in to your insanity” joined by four young dancing boys.

 

      Since he and his classmates are reading Bram Stoker’s Dracula in Mr. Newton’s speech class, the performance truly hits home for Charles, who perhaps for the first time in his life, seems transfixed by something that is completely new to him. It is as if a new door has opened, much in the way that he does for the young gay boy in Michael Beddoes’ 2019 short English film, Sequins. But, in this case, this high school student may not even be gay; he simply loves the drag performance, stopping by after to introduce himself to Dragula.

       Before we know it, Charles has announced to his friends that he does intend to perform at the high school talent show: they are shocked. Will he even get away with it in their small town. But they do promise to help him in any way possible.

       Soon after they teach him how to walk in heels, and Charlie stops in a Victoria’s Secret-like shop to buy himself a black nightie that, as he puts it, “pops.” In his room he begins dancing and singing while dressed up in drag.

       His mother (Missi Pyle), without knocking, enters his room to observe. “Is there something you want to tell me, Charlie?” she shyly asks; “We need to have a talk.” Fortunately, she is the local Avon Lady and you can blink she is showing him how to do his eyes, lipstick, and cheeks.

        Charles returns to The End club, waiting outside this time to ask Dragula’s help, declaring that he wants to become a performer. “Why ever you would want to become that?” he asks, the boy meekly responding that he no longer wants to be ignored. After briefly coaching him on his sense of self-worth, the elderly queen takes him under his wing and clearly does teach him the art.

        Because a few frames later Charles, now dressed in full drag, races with Henry and Maggie into the talent show and before the entire school audience, his own family firmly seated in place since the mother insisted that they attend.

        And yes, Charles does give an absolutely delightful drag performance proclaiming “the best parts of me where just hidden you” and finally insisting upon his own specialness within the legion of drag performers, singing—dancing, and swinging his torso in the manner of a Broadway Gypsy Rose Lee. True it is still an amateur performance, but a truly enjoyable one, so much better than the female dance group that has appeared just before him, where one of the “chicks” has caught the eye of Spencer and his father both.

       The hometown crowd goes wild for Charlie’s performance, as Dragula, now out of drag, cheers him on in the background. Even his father and brother must applaud, although afterwards, they still admit to trying to assimilate his sudden alteration.

       If not much of this really makes sense, it doesn’t matter, since both Bostwick’s and Road’s performances are remarkably invigorating, funny, and just splendidly gay.  

 

Los Angeles, July 28, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (July 2026).

Joren Molter | Dòst (Dust) / 2018

there is nothing in kropsdam

by Douglas Messerli

 

Britt Snel and Matthijs van der Veer (screenplay), Joren Molter (director) Dòst (Dust) / 2018 [41 minutes] [TV movie]

 

Appearing on Dutch television, Joren Molter’s Dust almost approaches a feature film at 41 minutes, and most certainly it has the depth and heft of a longer film.

     This is a story, told so very often in LGBTQ+ movies, about a provincial love that simply because of the world in which it takes place cannot possibly survive. In this case the someone mentally challenged Alko (Henk Jan Doornbosch) and Björn (Liam Feikens) are best friends, and have been clearly from childhood. There is most clearly a love between them which perhaps they both only slightly recognize.

      Besides this is not a world of same-sex love, but of heterosexual normality, with Alko participating in dirt cart dragging, a constant discussion of girls, and possible kisses. Agricultural Netherlands is not the place for a deep love of two boys.

     The movie begins with a down-and-dirty ride through the mud on small open carts hooked up to what appear to be small go-carts. Alko wins the race to the surprise of his friends. He is hugged by Björn and cheered on by the others, despite their general disparagement of him.

      Their conversation is basically about their first kiss by a female, which one of them, when asked, replies, his mother, insisting that all of his friends were probably first kissed by the mothers.

       Here, they grow white asparagus for the world’s best tables, and you see the boys working the fields, carefully pulling up the tender stalks.

       A local girl, Marie (Yamila Huft), clearly interested in Alko, challenges him to an asparagus spear sucking content, in which both of them attempt to put the still quite dirty spears in their mouths, pushing it down as far as they can, obviously imitating the process of sucking a cock. The girl wins this contest.

       And, in some respects. Of these teenage relationships are about contests, who can first kiss a woman? Who can first have sex? Almost everything in this world is a challenge and a game, and if you’re aren’t up for it, you are mocked by your peers.

      Alko evidently eats regularly with Björn and his parents, beforehand which they wash up, helping each other, sometimes playfully, but often tenderly, with their grooming.

       Potato stew is generally the fare.

       Early on in this story, as provincial boys of this age often do, they practice French kissing together since, as Björn insists, the girls expect it, and now Alko has a date with the spear-sucking champion. They begin by simply darting out their tongues between their fingers, but soon explore each other’s fingers, putting a smile on their faces.

     The date between Alko and his new girlfriend goes mildly well, she attempting to explain to him once again how to kiss.

     Soon after, Björn and Alko explore masturbation to learn how it might feel with a girl, Björn jacking his friend off. He dare not show how much he enjoys it. And in that single act, moreover, something has changed. Alko now cleans himself alone, Björn given a turn in the bathroom without the sharing rapport of earlier.

    Alko shows up for a date with Marie, who on this strange date literally bicycles with her heavy-weight friend sitting behind her, through the flat-lands of provincial Holland, facing the head-winds.

     They break into the local swimming pool, now closed, play silly games, and mostly eat, clearly a pleasure they both share. But finally, through a piece of red licorice, which they share from opposite ends, she gets him to kiss her, evening opening up her zipper so that he can put his hands on her vagina. But when he tries to take a condom out of his billfold, she forbids him: “When I’m sixteen.”

    The game-playing, the challenges, the awards are again demanded and promised for any heterosexual boy.

      Now Alko hardly even talks to his former friend, asking only if he knows when Marie’s birthday is. The others boys bicycle past shouting, “Alko, Björn: Lien (Benthe Horlings) is again kissing in the trailer anyone who wants to.” 

      A bit like the whore in Fellini’s movies who titillate young men, Lientje, although much younger, literally chalks up her kissing conquests by scratching the numbers upon her walls. Björn enters first, she kissing him and declaring he was the best.

     But she herself is still only a child, the kissing game is still child’s play despite the fact she is French-kissing all the boys. Oddly, Alko doesn’t even bother with Lientje, since, presumably, he now has his own girlfriend.

      Now, at a local bar they celebrate Björn’s conquest of the local kisser, drinking at a bar, topping beer evidently with what appears to be whipping cream. When he refuses to drink, the boys all ask “Are you a man or a woman,” gender demanding, quite obviously, a certain kind of behavior.

         They each swallow down their drinks, some in one gulp, while Björn stands watching, an outsider to their activities. It is clear that he has begun to recognize the he is not whatever the male models are in his community.

      With the peer pressure upon him, and former teasing for being gay, Alko moves on to become friends with the rowdy group. When Lien shows up behind the bar to ask if Björn has something tasty for her, as Björn walks off.

         As Marie and Alko dance, she whispers that she will be sixteen tomorrow. Björn quickly shifts the music to something that can’t be slow-danced to.

        It’s clear he is hurt and frustrated by the inevitable shift of his boyhood friend’s attention, no matter how Alko may try to remain at least somewhat friendly. And it’s also quite clear now that Björn, the true outsider as perhaps a gay boy, feels betrayed by his friend Alko, surely never a lover, real or imaginary, but someone upon he could count as true friend and companion. That betrayal is what so often hits the gay boy or girl in the provincial worlds in which they grow up. There is ultimately no one there any longer to depend upon.

      Gay boys, recognizing also that they can never be friends with the most popular and successful boys of their crowd seek out those also ostracized or ignored by the society in which they live. Certainly, that was my experience, seeking out friendships with my peers that were not entirely satisfying to either of us. One of my friends, when he discovered I was gay, completely cut me off. Others simply moved away into heterosexual marriages and disappeared from my life as I knew they would. They were temporary friendships formed out of desperation and desire for the other relationships I knew might cost me painful abuse in their mockery and refusals to even imagine a friendship. We gay men do this to ourselves in small-town or rural areas in order to survive, but we also know at the very same moment that our relationships are lies, imaginary replacements for beautiful boys we might wish but fear to seek out.

        In Molter’s work, Alko is the epitome of the gay female hag, a boy friend (not a boyfriend) that serves as a temporary stand-in for what might someday be. But the betrayal hurts as much as if he were the one someone Björn is really attempting to befriend.

    Accordingly, when such friendships collapse, there is not only the pain of the loss, but the recognition of one’s own delusions and, you might even describe it, a kind of abusive friendship that mattered only through accident and coincidence. Moreover, Björn perceives his friend is no champion, now a part of the heterosexual crowd, but a confused youth who has been convinced that finding a girl will answer all of his problems and bring him into the general crowd.

      It’s enough to make a grown man cry. And I did.

    When Alko, worried about the state of his former friend, puts his arm around him to comfort him, Björn leans in for a kiss. Alko kisses him back, but we know and he knows this truly means the end of the relationship. Björn is a fag.

     For the rest of his days Alko will join the rowdy, heavily drinking local party boys, with no room in his life for real love and friendship.

      Björn even goes further, stopping by Alko’s house apologizing for last night and suggesting that if he wants he can “hit him.” Alko’s mild “it’s okay,” however, is in someways even worse, a kind of false forgiveness that never again result in their possibly being together.

    Alko buys a treat of decorated pears for Marie’s birthday. But others have seen Björn’s kiss, and Marie now accuses him of being gay and will have nothing to do with him, bicycling off when, at the old pool, he has attempted to meet up with her so they might finally celebrate her 16th birthday.

    The other boys equally now abuse Alko for being queer and he is mocked by the very ones with whom he thought he might have joined in the club of hormonal heterosexual admiration. Björn, realizing what has happened, can no longer have anything to do with Alko, nor that boy with his former friend. The breach has been made by the community who have outlawed both as perverts. Working side-by-side with the other boys, it is Alko wo receives the brunt of behavioral betrayal, called a faggot. Björn has apparently long been seen to have been “different,” but now one of their own has shown they cannot trust him as a friend, even though he has long been treated with mockery.

     When he attempts to explain to Marie what the situation is, she gives him the finger.

     The entry back into so-called teen normality, once someone is perceived as having left it, is terribly difficult, if not impossible. The truck home from the fields leaves both Alko and Björn behind.

     When Alko returns to the bar, they all scream that Alko is here. For a moment he is pleased, but when the song begins “If you don’t jump now you’re a faggot,” he realizes it is another attempt to mock him. But this boy, never a deep thinker, does begin to jump, even though soon after he is held down by two others.

     The next day at work, when Björn attempts to comfort him in his dejected state, Alko finally screams out to keep his hands off him, to stop trying to French kiss him, etc., screaming out and pushing him away for all to hear that he is not interested.

      All stop work in the midst of their washing and cutting the white asparagus for shipping, as  Björn leaves, no other choice allowed.

      The next day, his so-called friends are attacking another young man (who probably is Björn) for being a dirty faggot. Alko observing it briefly, walks off in another direction.

      Finally, rejected still by Marie, he accuses her, as she makes out with another man, of getting half-raped, which leads the other boys, given the context of his and her words, to presume that it was he who was “half-raped” by Björn, and they go after the gay boy again. Alko hardly resists their actions.

      When they ask if he touched him, Alko cannot respond. And they assume the worst. We have seen the masturbation sequence, a truly innocent act given their ages.

      Björn’s fellow works explode a soccer ball through his windows, Alko contributing to the general chaos, and running away with the rest of them like scared rabbits. Alko is now one of “them,” but he has no longer any place to run to. He will always be suspect in the local community, and he no longer has any escape of friendship with Björn and his family.

      We last see Reinert and the other bully boys on their way to a group field party, drinking small, hotel-like containers of alcohol. They celebrate the may pole, again noting its phallic significance. Singing, as the flames of their usual bonfires go off, about how there is nothing “in Kropsdam,” their imaginary community which director Joren Molter takes up as a subject in another film.

      As Alko watches, he spots Björn with another man, his old friend holding up a young child an showing him love, as he stands alone, finally joining in on the son “There is nothing in Kropsdam.” Clearly there is nothing there any longer for him, where Björn has evidently found a loving community.

      If Moler’s film is not a great work of art, it certainly comes close to it in its bringing up of terribly profound issues about how to live in a world intolerant of gay beings. We might presume that Björn will soon move away and find a new life for himself, while Alko and his gang must remain in Kropsdam, trapped in their nothingness.

Los Angeles, July 27, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (July 2026).

 

Lloyd Reckord | Dream A40 / 1965

justified paranoia

by Douglas Messerli

 

Lloyd Reckord (screenwriter and director) Dream A40 / 1965

 

Jamaican-born British director Lloyd Reckord’s short 16-minute film Dream A40 reminds me a little of a truly intelligent version of the American TV series The Twilight Zone with a plot which Rod Serling and his colleagues never might have imagined to write.

     The time we are about to enter is back in the terrible days before the British Sexual Offences Act of 1967, a final realization of the 1957 Wolfenden Report’s recommendation which had taken those 10 years to come into existence.

    The twilight world that the two young gay men (performed by Michael Billington and Nicholas Wright) are about to encounter lies simply along route of a country road trip down a major highway, A40, that takes the riders from London, through Oxford, and eventually into Wales—that wild and wholly territory which took a couple of other British day trippers into The Old Dark House of haunted horrors overseen by the Femm family, including gay brothers Saul and Horace, cooked up in the imagination of filmmaker James Whale.

      But this time the travelers barely get out of London when an obviously flirtatious woman in her Austin Healey cruises the handsome driver of the Ventura Ford Station Wagon (Billington) encouraging him to speed up and away from her heterosexual gaze.

     His partner, in the back seat, (the much more laid-back Wright) teases him about the unwanted solicitation by playing Eve to his buddy with an apple he’s brought along for sustenance, reaching round to put it into his lover’s mouth before quickly withdrawing it as he continues chomping away on it in his friend’s ear. The driver finally pulls it away from his companion and finishes it off, his mate now casually stroking his arm since they now, symbolically at least, are both sinners about to banned from their paradise.

      Almost at that very moment a car pulls up where a little girl (Beverly Green) stares them down through her the open window of her family’s auto. The act is rather innocuous, although the driver quickly pulls his arm away from where he was stroking his friend. Wright’s character laughs it off, while Billington’s troubled and seemingly paranoid figure fusses “You find that sort of thing funny, don’t you?”

       In this terrible apocalyptic year of 2020, we might all find that trivial incident to be even more of a laughable matter. After all, what is his consternation all about? As his younger riding companion puts it, even if the girl witnessed their minor expression of affection she certainly wouldn’t know what to make of it. Yet the incident has so troubled the driver that even when they pull into a roadside restaurant to get a bite to eat, he finds it impossible to even imagine stomaching a sandwich, and almost as quickly as they have entered the establishment they are back on the road, with the easily flustered driver speeding up clearly over the limit.

       Perhaps to today’s younger audiences the meaning of these insignificant events would be hard interpret. But let us remember, as British Film Institute curator Simon McCallum has written, 1967 was

 

                …crucial period in the fight for LGBT rights in

                post-war Britain, where a rash of prosecutions of

                high-profile gay men evoked earlier scandals, not

                the least the persecution meted out to Oscar Wilde

                and others by the Victorian establishment.

     Careers were ruined and cover-up marriages destroyed. Imprisonment was common, and when locked away in a goal individuals suffered journalistic, peer, and family shaming. As in the case of the significant mathematician and war-time hero Alan Turing, suicide was a common way out.

     For our young tourists the next few minutes play out as almost a cross between a standard gay porn trope and a horror story right out of Franz Kafka, as a motorcycle cop, all in black, silently pulls the gay men’s car over before spiriting them away to mysterious castle wherein other men (and one woman) are already seated on rows of benches as if awaiting to be read out their punishments. A hanging noose horrifically swings overhead.

       The angered Billington character stands in a kind of rebellion, answering his friend’s question as to his destination with a bark of despair: “There must be some way out of this place,” almost as if the dreamworld in which they have found themselves did not reveal its own entry, suggesting they now live in a nightmare world having little to do with the logic they had experienced in the friendly party the night before. A bit like a labyrinth of mirrors, in and out appear to point in entirely opposing directions.

      As he enters another room he sees a great many men gathered around what is obviously urinals in a bathroom, suggesting the cottage sexual activities of many urban gays. But these humorless beings look to be more out of a vampire flick rather than enjoying themselves in group masturbation. He quickly runs from the scene, the director portraying the M. C. Escher-like landscape through wide-lensed views of backdrop porticos. Climbing over a short wall he finally reaches a space where in the distance he sees a human being, rushing toward him.

    The man is a cashier who cautiously lifts a glass barrier to accept a bribe which might free the driver and his friend.

   Yet as our would-be hero returns to retrieve his companion, he finds him half-trapped within the noose, blinking his eyes once before, apparently, he slips away into death. The survivor bends down to pick up and carry away his lover in a manner that can only remind anyone who has seen Whale’s 1932 picture of the Boris Karloff figure, Morgan, spiriting away his master/lover Saul Femm up the stairs of the “old dark house.”

    If the handsome but fret some adventurer had previously appeared to us as inexplicably paranoid, we now recognize it as having been more than a little justified.

 

Los Angeles, September 15, 2020 | Reprinted from World Cinema Review and My Queer Cinema blog (September 2020). 

Stewart Hannah | Listen / 2019

the difference

by Douglas Messerli

 

Stewart Hannah (screenwriter and director) Listen / 2019 [5 minutes]

 

In this very short love story, we meet Adam (Knowe Rata) who is having a difficult time with the fact that his companion of 1 years, Tom (Luka Klindo) has broken up with him to just think things out.

    It’s now been almost three months, and Adam has still not received a full answer for why Tom has suddenly needed to think out what he perceived was a healthy relationship. Adam argues that Tom simply won’t “listen,” evidenced by the fact that he goes about everywhere with earphones around his neck.

     Adam claims he could comprehend if there was someone else involved or if only he had any kind of explanation, but Tom walks away again frustrated by what he describes as Adam’s selfishness.

     Adam follows, finally pulls away Tom’s head phones and refuses to return them, rushing off with Tom on the chase; he trips, however, on a rock and the phones go falling over the cliff into the Australian waters below.

     But if nothing else, he finally gets a full conversation out of Tom, who explains that he knows what pain Adam is going through and he still loves Adam. He’s just not sure of what he wants for the future and needs the time to think it out.

     They hug and kiss, and obviously must both go on their ways into an unsure future which faces so many couples, gay and straight who perhaps entered a relationship too quickly or were simply unready for the difficulties and loss of a sense of self any deep relationship requires. There is often one in the relationship who depends upon its existence for his definition and sense of protection, while the other feels he’s had to give up everything for other’s needs. Until one can be sure that the partnership is more important that the presumed independence and sometimes loneliness which comes with that, the friendship cannot move on, each will always feel difference.

     As Tina Turner might have argued, although certainly with a much more cynical intent, “what does love have to do with?”

 

Los Angeles, July 27, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (July 2026).