James Burkhammer | Starcrossed / 2005

hooked

by Douglas Messerli

 

James Burkhammer (screenwriter and director) Starcrossed / 2005 [14 minutes]

 

Offhand I’d claim that the most common of LGBTQ family films involve two brothers who become sexually involved. It is clearly a major theme of queer cinema which shows up in various ways time and again in both short and feature films, in part because of the allure of yet another layer of forbidden sexuality that is attached to the already forbidden experience when it comes to the issue of incest.

     But I’d argue that it also seems to be an issue that inherently seems unjust when it comes to legal restrictions, just as LGBTQ individuals justifiably felt about such laws created to restrain their sexuality were.

      The incest laws, as I read them, are based on two-fold cultural fears: the first having to do the issue of age, since commonly one of the two blood-related figures is older than the other; it is clear that in those instances the younger may have no full awareness of the sexual emotions that arise and the results of those physical and emotional ties, and they may easily be coerced or forced into such relationships, physically or mentally, by the elder without their full willingness. Incest laws also have a great deal to do with the genetic issues of inbreeding, which result in illnesses of body and mind the children produced from such relationships that endanger their lives.

     Yet often brothers may be close of age, perfectly willing and aware of their love and sexual desires for one another, and obviously will produce no inbred offspring through participating in gay sexual activity. So why are these laws still applicable in such instances? Often it stems simply from the cultural taboo concerning the idea that families might also be sexually involved in any manner, a strange emotional response, one might argue, given that many younger people spend more time with family members, particularly today when parents are more fearful about permitting their children to roam freely, than anyone on the outside. But, of course, that fact in itself may be perceived by some as a problem in need of correction. And obviously the taboo is also grounded in homophobic fears.

     In any event, a great many films have concerned themselves with sibling relationships, two of them documented in this gathering, and both leading to quite similar tragic results.

     I have previously reviewed another such short, J. C. Oliva’s Brotherly (2008), in which I bring up some of these same issues and, in what almost seems to be a subgenre of gay cinema, the sexual relationships of gay twins in which I focus on Florian Gottschick’s Zwillinge (Twins) (2010) and Adam Tyre’s In Half (2012). There will certainly be several others along the way.

      In US director’s James Burkhammer’s Starcrossed the subject is put front and center, beginning with a scene in which it is clear that the father, preferring his more gifted and physically able son, Darren (J. B. Ghuman, Jr.) over his younger son, Connor (Derek Sean Lara/Marshall Allman) resulting in verbal abuse of the weaker of the two. Much as in Brotherly, this only results in the elder perceiving as his role to protect the younger, and that brotherly love and protection quickly pours over into physical and in this case a deep spiritual love between the boys.

     Basically, we see them trying to live somewhat “normal” lives, participating in sports, dating girls together, and generally interacting with society in an outwardly pleasing manner. But we recognize even through the one instance that the film shows of their interactions with girls, that their fondness for one another has boiled over into something much different. As the two sit in the movie in the position of girl, Connor, Darren, and girl, we witness that at the very same moment their girlfriends attempt to illicit sexual responses of their boyfriends, the two brothers are superstitiously holding hands and sexually engaging in the kind of pre-sex activities that in a teen date movie would be focused entirely upon the heterosexual pairing. 

      In his 14-minute film, Burkhammer doesn’t waste much time in moving them from Connor’s

original unexpected kissing of his brother to the two joining one another under the covers involved in deep hugging and fondling before engaging, symbolically, in what we recognize is sex. And the boys themselves quickly recognize that their love, given the strictures of their parents and the world around them, is doomed, even though the younger assures the elder—with the natural optimism of the innocent—that he will protect their love.

      Clearly, that is a claim that cannot be met, particularly when their mother enters their room to find her sons bodily entwined in their sleep.

       Their father’s angry lectures—represented in the film from a distance with mostly mute gestations, allows us to imagine the actual fury—merely leads to their attempt at escape. In the car Darren takes to the road with Connor to an unknown destination which first appears to be simply a motel room where they might continue their love making, but we suspect will end where so many “on the road” travels wind up. Consider, for example, other LGBTQ examples such as Ridley Scott’s Thelma and Louise (1991) or Gregg Araki’s The Living End (1992).

       It doesn’t take them long to realize that what they are doing is so outside of societal norms that there is no way their intense feelings will be permitted to survive. Soon a policeman arrives at the motel, obviously in search of the boys. But not even knowing of his arrival, Connor, who despite is younger years appears to be quicker in grasping the patriarchal forces of the world around them—arguably because he has suffered more abuse from those forces—holds up a hand-cuff (we’re not supposed to ask where he has acquired it) which serves as emblem for the elder who immediately knows what he is demanding of them.

      As the policeman closes in, now searching their room, we see the two boys at the edge of the motel pool ready to jump. When they do so they drop to the bottom, kiss one another, and cuff their hands to the lower rungs of a pool ladder, assuring that they cannot escape their fate from drowning in one another’s arms, an image similar to the first in the film, in which Darren saves Connor from the same fate.

      This work from 2005 eerily foreshadows Marcus Schwenzel’s work of 2009, Bruderliebe (Brotherly Love), which I describe below, where the elder brother of a pair of such sibling lovers ends his life also by drowning.

 

Los Angeles, September 22, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2021).

Júlio Maria Pessoa | Em Nome do Pai (In the Name of the Father) / 2002

a gay incest fantasy

by Douglas Messerli

 

Júlio Maria Pessoa (screenwriter and director) Em Nome do Pai (In the Name of the Father) / 2002  [17 minutes]

 

Brazilian director Júlio Maria Pessoa’s 2002 film In the Name of the Father, to put it quite simply, is a gay incest fantasy.

    I report this knowing that almost immediately a battalion of critic do-gooders, rightists and left-leaning LGBTQ supports equally may descend upon me declaring that this film, is in fact, a tale of pedophiliac abuse which, ending in the murder of the mother (Denis Weinberg) and the entrapment of the young son (Leonardo Miggiorin) by his father (Elias Andreato), is a despicable work that shouldn’t have even been included in these pages.

    It will not help in the least to remind these critics that in this case the son is not only pleased and excited by his father’s attentions but strongly encourages them throughout, lounging about in short running pants most of the time, and purposely showering when his father returns late from his nights out, generally drunk. At one point, the boy purposely locks his door, evidently not interested in sex that night or recognizing that his father is particularly drunk that evening. An IMDb commentator on the film reports that in an earlier version the door was not locked the first evening and the shower scene of the second evening was considerably longer than in the final 17-minute version we have available today. My guess is the second, the “locked-door version” was introduced so that we could recognize that, had the boy chosen, he could have had control over the situation. And, of course, we do not know how long the relationship may have been going on previous to our introduction to this dysfunctional family.

      In the shower scene, in particular, the son asks his father to bring him shampoo to engage his father in the act, the father sending the beautiful boy to near total ecstasy with literal shivers of pleasure as his father moves his hands from his cheeks down his body and at one point clearly masturbates the boy.

    On another evening or perhaps that same night, the mother, mostly passive, finally dares to check in on her son’s bedroom only to discover father and son both in bed together. She vows the next morning to take the son and her baby Caio away, determining to report her husband to the police in order to imprison him. As she now is determined to control her own future, she climbs upon a high stool to change the light bulb her husband has refused to deal with, while the son quickly slips out to unleash the pet dog who hates his mother and of whom the mother has complained throughout, the dog rushing immediately toward the house.

     In the final scene the mother is missing, presumably killed in her fall or from the dog’s vicious attacks. The father, son, and the baby all sit at the table, with the son happily feeding his baby brother, having obviously taken over the mother’s role, turning eventually straight toward the camera as if to say, “it’s better this way” or even displaying a cocksure attitude of “what are you going to do about it?”

      The commentator reports that in the early version a suspicious police inspector does show up near the end, but is ultimately satisfied with what has been previously reported. That scene is missing from the later version, making the film even more abstract, and placing the “family” even more out of touch from the rest of the world.

     The righteous gathering will, of course, point out that the son has been long groomed, not having left the house except for school for long periods of time, the mother mentioning, in fact, that he has no friends and hardly leaves the house. Even if the boy might have escaped the situation, they will remind me, the father still controls this basically patriarchally-controlled world in which the son has been caught up and now devoured. And they will most certainly point to the basic misogynistic tone of the entire work. Surely the misogynism and matricide will eventually destroy this young boy.

     It won’t help explain that this is not a psychologically realist work, but as I noted in the first sentence of this essay, is a “fantasy.” But it will surely not help at all to point out that such incest fantasies are actually not uncommon for gay boys. If Freud is to believed that the normal pattern of the heterosexual son is to create just such an incest fantasy between himself and his mother, the child replacing the father in his mother’s eyes—a fantasy well-known through Sophocles’ great Oedipus plays—for many gay boys the fantasy is altered to exclude the mother, replacing it instead with the father’s love.

     And the mother here is played purposely as shrewish-bitch, at one point wondering aloud to her son if she shouldn’t return back to work, he having to remind her that her child is still too young for that, since clearly this poor family cannot afford hired help to care for the baby. Her death for the boy becomes like a dream wish in order to fulfill his gay fantasy. Or other’s gay fantasies. For those very reasons, indeed, I can’t quite resist liking this work

      The IMDb commentator describes some of my own feelings about this work: “I was enthralled, fascinated and shocked.” Pessoa offers no apologies, and in the end, I couldn’t help but chuckle with faint pleasure.

 

Los Angeles, September 17, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2023).

 

Ben McCormack | Family Outing / 2001

a true story

by Douglas Messerli

Ben McCormack (screenwriter and director) Family Outing / 2001 [5 minutes]

 

Australian director Ben McCormack’s 5-minute short in black-and-white condenses a story about a young boy (Michael Curven), obviously having realized he was gay, determining to visit the baths for sex for the first time in his life.

     Like so many people who find bathhouse activity intimidating, this kid finds the showering, cruising, sweating bodies of mostly elder men attractive, but is clearly uncomfortable with the public and voyeuristic aspects of most of the sex others try to illicit in the showers, the steam rooms, and the open doors to cubicles which invite him in.

     Finally, he selects to the most common and least public form of sexual intercourse, putting his penis through a glory hole in the wall between his booth and the next, thoroughly enjoying the cunnilingual sensations provided by man a within the next cubicle (Leo Bradley) while imagining the juxtaposition of images, like snapshots, we have witnessed as he stalked the Brisbane spa upon arrival.

     Satisfied, he leaves the cubicle only to encounter the man who sucked him off on leaving his own room. As he looks up into the man’s face, he gasps out the words, “Dad?”

     The film stops there, forcing us to imagine all the resultant difficulties of his sudden revelation. Fear, hatred, disgust, horror are all possible emotions, as well as a possible understanding comprehension of things previously unexplained at home, acceptance, and maybe even love—of whatever kind is possible given the situation.

      Porn films have tread this territory; it is after all one the most severe of cultural restrictions, and accordingly an inevitable pornographic attraction. Yet this small film takes it on with all seriousness with no comfortable prurient readings encouraged since the sex itself is never represented and only hands and facial gestures are put to screen, the fingers of the father seen as he invites the boy to put his cock through the hole, and the face of the boy in obvious ecstasy of his sexual release.

      Some of these same issues have been explored in feature films such as Tanuj Bhrama’s Dear Dad (2016) and Álvaro Delgado-Aparicio’s Retablo (2017), although in both these cases the son is not gay and we witness a resolution that is missing in McCormack’s work.

      The film, however, takes its subject into even more serious territory by declaring at film’s end a documentary-like admission: “This is a true story.” which forces us to put it into the context of actual speculation of what might happen to the two individuals when such a thing occurs? No one was at fault, no abuse intended. Yet deep secrets, we are certain, have now been revealed, and they always leave spaces in the realities we have created, sometimes simply to cover over the gaps we sense in our knowledge of one another. There may be release, there may be hate; there may be anger even violence, or reconciliation, a new secret to be shared out of familial love—possibly an ever greater rupture in family life. But the notion of family will surely never again be the same.

 

Los Angeles, September 17, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2021).

Douglas Messerli | Family Secrets [essay]

family secrets

by Douglas Messerli

 

I think we can safely say that other than one’s innate sexual inclination and personal desires, the greatest impact on one’s sexuality comes from the family into which one was born and raised, even if that is not a truly unified experience. Parents, however one defines them, and siblings help determine one’s sexuality and the ability to develop relationships that one either readily accepts or works against if contrary to a person’s innate sexual feelings. It is no accident that throughout LGBTQ cinema, families play an essential role, often helping or thwarting the coming out process or the simple maturation of the individual. Sisters and brothers, older and younger, moreover, can help either be models to emulate or hindrances, in some cases actually helping to shape and define one’s sexual orientation.

       Sexual attraction to siblings, while often natural given that the close relationships with brothers and sisters are some of the earliest connections we make with other human beings, and can also terribly effect and delimit one’s own sexual identities. Parental sexual abuse can obviously destroy one’s faith in sexual relationships or confuse a child to such a degree that he or she finds it difficult to maintain healthy and effective relationships later in life, although it does affect all individuals in the same ways.

       And abuse can also consist of simply being narrow-minded about the varieties of sexual possibilities or unaccepting of those possibilities when manifested in one’s own children. And the greatest fears and devastation of self-worth can arise from lack of parental acceptance. Although we generally tend to think of community as being one of the most central reasons why young men and women prefer to stay closeted, it is generally the fear of confronting parental disdain and even hate and rejection that keeps many youths from being able to fully come to terms with their sexual feelings. While those issues most often are centered around a young person identifying as part of the LGBTQ community facing strongly heterosexual parents, it can exist in reverse and, just as devastatingly, effect young men and women whose mother or father are themselves secretly closeted when their children face similar feelings.

      These issues can extend, moreover, to other family members beyond siblings, including uncles, aunts, grandparents, and even cousins.

      Throughout these pages I have written numerous essays, too many to even selectively mention—although it is obvious that the grouping of films that bear a deep connection with the trio of longer films about family sexuality that I discussed in George Stevens’ Shane (1953), Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Teorema (1969), and Harold Prince’s Something For Everyone (1970)—that demonstrate the complexity of how family life effects a young or even a slightly older person’s sexuality.

       In this essay I have chosen 12 short films from 2001 to 2020 that deal with only a handful of the numerous familial issues that complicate and sometimes destroy the individual’s sexual life and possibilities for adult love.

      All of these involve “family secrets,” in most cases not just sons and daughters hiding their sexuality from their parents, but a far more intricate and complex linking of secrets that when revealed sometimes lead to greater openness and freedom but just as often end up in terror and even suicide.

      I was tempted to discuss these in connection with the subject of sibling sex, but in the end felt it was simply more logical to discuss a far wider variety of familiar situations in chronological order of when the films were first released; but I will interlink each of these films with the others when appropriate.

      These films, produced in many different countries and societies reveal to us that often the transgressive behavior of family members, although not always destructive, is connected with their children’s or even the adults’ behavior. The issue at heart here is the necessary secretness of any such sexual acts as well as numerous other secrets the family has hidden in shame or obfuscation, which only further mystifies the very young men and women involved.

      Although not included in this discussion one might cite one of the most extreme examples in the case of the TV series Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menedez story from 2022, created by Ian Brennan and Ryan Murphy, which I write about in that year.

   The films included here are Australian director Ben McMormack’s 2001 film Family Outing; Brazilian director Júlio Maria Pessoa’s 2002 film In the Name of the Father; US director’s James Burkhammer’s Starcrossed; the 2008 film from US director Gregor Schmidinger The Boy Next Door; another US film, J. C. Oliva’s Brotherly also from 2008; German film director Marcus Schwenzel’s 2009 work Brotherly Love; Brazilian director Caru Alves de Souz’s Family Affair of 2011; the Spanish film by Venci Kostov, The Son from 2012; Spanish director Miguel LaFuente’s My Brother of 2015; another 2015 film by Costa Rican-Swedish director Nathali Álvarez Mesén, Filip; Hong Kong filmmaker Ray Yeung’s Paper Wrap Fire, also of 2015; New Zealand director Welby Ings’ Sparrow of 2016; Brazilian director Caio Scot’s After that Party, released in 2019; British director Maj Jukic’s My Dad Marie of 2020; and in the same year, the director from Czech Republic Dominik György’s The Touching, which almost summarizes the issues at hand.

       But there are many, many others. Anna Kerrigan’s Cowboys of 2020 and Alan Ball’s Uncle Frank of the same year might be described as filled with sexual family secrets, or even Pedro Almodóvar’s 2023 short, Strange Way of Life. The list is nearly endless. This series of essays is but a dive into a foreboding and hidden subject. Family life is also about sex whether or not it intends to be. Fathers and mothers are not inseparable from their sons and daughters sexual dires, and the children cannot be removed from their own desires even for one another. Incest and family destruction goes back to Greek drama and before. Let us be honest: families are a sexy mess mixed up with every child’s identity.

 

Los Angeles, December 6, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema (December 2024).

Waide Aaron Riddle | Lost Hills, CA / 2010

there’s no place like home

by Douglas Messerli

 

Waide Aaron Riddle (screenwriter and director) Lost Hills, CA / 2010 [5 minutes]

 

A very short rather meaningless pean to what is self-described in this film as white trailer trash, a now middle-aged man (Waide Aaron Riddle) and his momma (Robbin Ormand), in a chartreuse trailer.

    The only difference in this instance is that the son is gay, inviting all of his gay friends over for a barbecue. Some, it appears, head straight for the bed, while the gay boy drinks a few beers with his friends and his momma, whom for some reason that writer and director Riddle won’t explain keeps awarding her with kisses. He’s obviously proud of his mother and his greaseball father’s achievements just to keep a roof over his head. He’s also proud of his new tattoo. He’s happy, he proclaims, as if we might suggest he has no right to be.

    What their gay baby-boy, now with a grizzled white beard, does for a living is never established. Why he’s proud of his lowly life is never explained. This movie appears to simply justify its joyful presentation of life in a trailer park by showing a lot of hunky gay men, mostly shirtless beings easily accepted by the curler-haired momma.  

      This is a narrated tale, with the voice of Jack Geren, without any true characters or dialogue or even story. The pretty down-home boys, it appears, are all you need to make you realize that there’s no place like home, wherever that may be.

      Let me assure you, I have nothing against trailers or the people who inhabit them. I do have a beef, however, with such an empty shell of a movie.

 

Los Angeles, December 6, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (2024).

Tom Speers | Boy Saint / 2018

stem of thorns

by Douglas Messerli

 

Peter Laberge (narrative), Tom Speers (director) Boy Saint / 2018 [8 minutes]

 

I am not a great fan of cinematic portrayals of overwrought poetry, in this case a sort of adolescent outpouring of memories by poet Peter Laberge.

     A gang of boys consisting of actors Finn Gillespie, Lenar Gaffney, Lewis Brophy, Scott Brophy, Harry Eaves, Evan Hamilton, Raymond Scully, run through the wilds of the Irish countryside, behaving like all such gatherings, somewhat destructively, while wrestling, swimming, mocking, threatening, and in the process developing their bodies into manhood.

    But two of the boys, presumably Gillespie and Gaffney, become attracted to one another and longingly stare into each other’s eyes, hoping for an escape from the others to consummate what might be their boyish love.

       In Tom Speers’ endlessly droning action accompanied McKenzie Stubbert’s overwrought musical score and by the late-romantic poetic proclamations of Laberge’s writing (“In the beginning we were one blood. Then the body grew its disagreement like a stem of thorns inside out.”) the boys don’t have a chance. The gang with which they run won’t abandon them to themselves for a moment.

        This short Irish film is all about boylove-longing without any real substance. The boys can only stare at one another with childhood desire in their eyes. The film is pretty to look at, but frustrating to listen to the with elder poet pontificating on his own long past love.

 

Los Angeles, December 6, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema Blog (December 2024).

Beatrice Schreiber | Harley / 2014

the unlikely couple

by Douglas Messerli

 

Beatrice Schreiber (screenwriter and director) Harley / 2014 [12 minutes]

 

Director Beatrice Schreiber’s feel-good drama Harley is both unlikely and rather preachy. But then we’re in San Francisco where such gay stories always seem possible.

     Lucas (Caleb Hoffman), a cute, slightly effeminate gay boy shares an apartment evidently with Harley (Lars Slind) a musclebound beauty performed by an actor who in real life was a football player and model from Seattle. Also sharing the flat is Kira (Hannah Elder) who seems to be convinced that Harley is her man. Both appear to have basically ignored Lucas for several years until one day, in a terrible incident of homophobic rage, Lucas is beaten and raped so severely that he falls into a coma, unlikely to come back to life.

       Suddenly, so we’re led to believe, Harley’s deep homosexual feelings for Lucas come to surface as he writes daily diaristic love letters to the comatose Lucas and works out with the intention to find and kill the assaulter.

       Understandably, Kira perceives the radical change in Harley’s demeanor, attempting to bring him back into her life and reality, since it appears that Lucas is gone. Kira is convinced he will end up in jail.   

   But in a kind of miracle, in which this short film trucks, Lucas wakes up and comes back to life, returning home into the apparently now ready arms of Harley, who forces the boy to read his journal, kisses him and promises to makes things well again.

        Neither Kira and Lucas has known anything about Harley’s interest in boys, but Lucas, after reading his love letters, is only too happy to snuggle up into his new relationship.

        This is pure fantasy, cooked up in the imagination of a woman who suspects, presumably, that musclebound hunks often secretly hunker for sweet nerds like Lucas. Most gay men will surely realize this is just a kind of gay boy’s dream, and not what happens in real life. And that it takes a near-death experience to get there should clue everyone in to dangers of such fantasies.

 

Los Angeles, December 6, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2024).