Victoria Warmerdam | Korte Kuitspier (Short Calf Muscle) / 2019

the lovely gnome

by Douglas Messerli

 

Victoria Warmerdam (screenwriter and director) Korte Kuitspier (Short Calf Muscle) / 2019 [13 minutes]

Dutch director Victoria Warmerdam seems to offer up a wonderful absurdist-like comedy. Anders (Henry van Loon), a rather tall gay man, is visiting the doctor (Lucretia van der Vloot) because of a pain he has in his calf muscle. She reports that there is nothing wrong with his leg, although they see this problem quite often, she reports, in “his kind.”

     What possibly might she mean, he wonders. Has she somehow sensed he was a gay man? Even she suggests that she doesn’t mean to discriminate.

     He next visits a baker (Beppie Melissen), asking for a whole wholegrain loaf, sliced. She challenges him saying, “Are you sure you don’t what half, my small friend.”

     Has she run out of full loafs? No. Well, then he’d like a whole loaf please. She suggests we might prefer “a bag of cut mini currant buns?” No, just the whole loaf.

     She stares at him endlessly, with a smile pasted to her face.

     Eating lunch with his colleagues, one asks him how his physio therapist when, Anders commenting that it went fine. He received a small injury while running, he reports. He has a short calf muscle.

      That must be common his “his kind” another colleague responds. Anders is confused, announcing that his doctor also responded in that manner. Surely “The fact that I’m gay doesn’t relate to my physique, does it?”

      After a rather uncomfortable pause, one of his colleagues finally speaks up: “I think he was referring to the fact that you’re a gnome.

      Anders, just as any sane man might, laughs. But they don’t join him, the manager finally adding “Of course it doesn’t matter. We don’t mind at all.” Besides he’s a good worker and they get extra subsidies by having him on their team, just as they get for including Fatima (evidently of Middle Eastern birth) on their staff.

      Yet one of the colleagues even wants to carry the discussion further, now that they’ve brought up the subject. “I was wondering what it was really like to become invisible? Or is it a myth?”

      Anders pretends to go along with the joke, even pondering the issue of invisibility. But they want to know is it done consciously or is it metaphysical. And would he do it for them?

      Anders finally can only answer that he is not a gnome. When they persist, he mutters that he really doesn’t find their game-playing funny. “Short legs, short fuse,” one of his fellow workers comments.

     Back home, he confides with his lover Paul (Loes Schnepper) that it went on like that all day. “I can’t laugh about it anymore.” It just went on and on. “You should know when to stop.”

      But Paul wonders that he can’t take teasing anymore. But, this makes utterly so sense, Anders argues.

      Since when was this a problem with you, Paul seems astonished. But what can Paul possibly mean, answers the confused Anders. “Your figure, darling.”

      “I’ve never made a problem with the fact that you’re one of them, have I?”

      This time, Anders is clearly fed up. Must even his lover now carry on the ridiculous joke?

      Paul would have thought by this time his lover would simply have accepted the fact. That’s what made him attractive. Paul proclaims.

      “I’m not a mythical creature.”

      “No. You’re a lovely gnome.”

      If you thought it couldn’t get worse for Anders, his own parents confirm that he was adopted and that they knew this day would finally come, surprised, in fact, that it didn’t arise a lot sooner.

      But the film, once we realize the nature of this perverted absurdity, has nowhere else to go. Anders is flabbergasted and confused and simply can’t come to terms with the reality the others presume, reminding us not only of the ridiculousness of the prejudices imposed upon others including the LGBTQ community, but the strange beliefs of many MAGA supporters who have created absurdly fantastical lives for their political rivals.

      Yet, in the film gays seem to be easily accepted and assimilated. Being gay is not the problem, but looking different, in this case being “a legendary dwarfish creature supposed to guard the earth's treasures underground.” Even his parents confirm that their son is now a “double minority.”

      But it’s at this point when the film seems to truly fall apart. Comparing Anders’ second role as a minority figure having to do with his appearance takes the short movie down a very different avenue that is not at all the same as being sexually different.

       When the police finally take him down as a radicalized gnome, Warmerdam’s work strikes up the Staple Singers’ version of a song about black children facing discrimination, “Why (Am I Treated So Bad),” taking it down a truly illogical path.

       Like it or not, most gay people are able to live lives, if they so desire, without being perceived as being sexually different. That’s precisely why for so many years gays stayed, so to speak, in the closet, hid out, amongst themselves, invisible to the world at large.

      But being someone of color, unless of very light skin and with a desire to “pass” as a white, is not something a black man or woman, most Asian individuals, and many Hispanics can imagine. Despite Ralph Ellison’s social and cultural metaphor of “the invisible man,” people of color are hated by bigots precisely because of what they look like, not primarily for how they behave, even if their culture and traditions are occasionally different from caucasians. Being a gnome, if such beings were to exist, is not truly comparable with being a gay man. As one commentator observed, such a comparison is “boneheaded and insulting.” Yes, the discrimination, even if not mean or openly spoken, is absurd, something of which no truly intelligent human being should be capable. But when your skin color or size is “different” there is very little possibility of pretense or simply having failed to notice.

     It is why the biggest difficulty for most gay and bisexual individuals in “coming out,” expressing their differentness openly to others. One of the reasons that we LGBTQ+ individuals gather for Pride Days and other such occasions is to remind ourselves and others that we do still exist, that we are different even if we don’t look it. People of color don’t have that problem. The hatred heaped upon them is justified simply by their appearance, something of which they are reminded of every day of their lives.

     We can comprehend that Warmerdam’s film was well-intentioned; but unfortunately, it was not well thought out. This film really has no meaning for gay men and women, or, for that matter, black individuals, Native Americans, Asians, or many of those of American-Hispanic descent. It might mean something only to mythical gnomes, putti, or cupids.

 

Los Angeles, January 30, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2025).

 

 

Wrik Mead | Hoolboom / 1999

we are the geography of all we know

by Douglas Messerli

 

Wrik Mead and Mike Hoolboom (screenwriters), Wrik Mead (director) Hoolboom / 1999

 

In 1999 Arts Toronto commissioned local filmmaker Wrik Mead to make a short film about his fellow gay filmmaker Michael Hoolboom, which Mead did working at points with the subject of his film.

    Hoolboom, born in 1959 just three years before Mead, is also a Toronto filmmaker and like Mead gay. He had made a substantial number of films by 1999, beginning in 1980. He first gained national attention for his filmmaking in 1986 with White Museum, but it wasn’t until Frank’s Cock in 1993 and Letter to Home in 1996 that he began to produce openly gay films. He freely admits, however, that his diagnosis of being HIV-positive in 1988 or ’89 gave what he describes as “new urgency” to his works, and his productions increased significantly after that period, all among with his now large body of work.

     By the time Mead worked with him on Hoolboom, the director had just released one of his major queer works, Panic Bodies (1998), which I discuss elsewhere in this volume.

      Mead’s film is not so a film about his friend as it muses on impressions of Hoolboom in relationship to issues of the body, self-awareness, and the art of filmmaking itself.

     The film begins with an almost ritualistic like act, a young naked man with a knife cutting open what appears to be a mummy. When he finishes cutting to open the other young man, covered with flowing blood—seemingly a mirror image of the boy—he sits up and hugs his savior whose body also begins the profusely bleed through what appear to be cuts and gashes.

      A man, dressed in protective gear, spray paints the word “responsibility” on the side of a wall.

    A narrator asks, “What if the revolution, you know the one that is going to be televised, the one that everyone’s been waiting for doesn’t involve the grip of communists at all, or the poor, the disenfranchised, the bearers of racial, sexual, and linguistic difference? What if the revolution begins closer to home? With our own limbs?” The voice wonders what if one day the hands were granted independence and decided they’d had enough of taking orders from nerve command central and decided to leave? He suggests that each of us might become our own Lincoln, granting emancipation to our various parts, letting them settle back into the world of independence. “We are, after all, the geography of all we know. Imperfect is our paradise.”

      That last two lines seem to hint at the way the rest of his 5-minute film will progress. Suddenly the young man we saw in the first scene, appears with a camera madly spinning in various directions, alternating with a paintbrush in hand.

      A face suddenly looms up much as in a talking head documentary, the image of Hoolboom himself floating atop a picture we can only assume to be Hoolboom’s the group portrait from his elementary school days. “Quite by accident,” the head begins, “he uncovers the secret joy of disappearance.” He describes the figure of whom he is speaking almost like Woody Allen’s character Zelig, moving into rooms so that no one notices, wearing a wardrobe that blends in with everything around him. “Everywhere he goes no one takes notice.” He describes the hundreds of animals in the wild that in fear of alerting their prey, move without moving. “He’s like them, storing memories like others store rations in case of nuclear collapse.” “…It was not the end of the world, he figured, but its beginning.”

       Clearly the spoken metaphors of this quite different kind of testimony are about Hoolboom’s cinematic methods, his willingness to let his hands, his entire body take him where they might go in order to embrace thoroughly other beings and places in his films. No Hoolboom film presents his view, but assimilates in a remarkable chameleon-like manner the other about who and with whom he collaborating in his film presentation. There is less a Hoolboom “style” or even a particular “subject”—only a hand full of his numerous films are about LGBTQ life, although many feature gay men—than a cinematic assimilation of scene and person in an attempt to present the constantly shifting others of his oeuvre.

      Like the figure in the first image of the film, Hoolboom becomes the other and takes on his or her personal pains, sufferings, and even diseases. Hacking into subjects thought to be dead, he brings the “other” alive in a way that few filmmakers are able to. Time and again, his works are titled by the interviewee’s name, the subject his film explores, or the geographical location. Abstract words that seem to indicate one thing are transformed through his filmic searches to mean something different. Instead of forcing the figures to come to him, he moves ever so gradually toward them, imitating their manner so that his work becomes the subject, the other.

      This film, not so coincidentally is not like any other Mead film, but more like a film which Hoolboom himself, who co-wrote the script with Mead, might make. At our best, we are not beings in statis, but individuals defined by the territories we have explored, the “geography of all we know.”

 

Los Angeles, November 16, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2022).

Andrew Abrahams | Casualty / 1999

making waves

by Douglas Messerli

 

Andrew Abrahams (director) Casualty / 1999

 

Dance and LGBTQ filmmaking often go hand-in-hand. From the transformation of military exercises into dance in Claire Denis’ masterful Beau travail (1999), to representations of eager young gay dancers in works such as A Chorus Line (1985) and Billy Eliot (2000), biographical works of major dancer’s lives like Herbert Ross’ Nijinksy (1980), Ralph Fiennes’ The White Crow [on Nureyev] (2018) and Levin Aiken’s And Then We Danced [on the Georgian dancer Merab] (2019), movies about dance such as Alan Brown’s Five Dances (2013) to, finally, queer group dance celebrations such as those in The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), Macho Dancer (1988), and Deadman Walking (2017) dance and the queer experience have quite often shared the stage. But never until a few moments ago had I have ever seen a gay short film, only 5 minutes in this case, represent a gay dance under water!

      But that is precisely what director Andrew Abrahams presents to us in his 1999 work, Casualty.

   Featuring two underwater figures, Eric Newton and Hogan Vando, the movie shows first one approaching from stage left, reaching for a rose that suddenly appears to float before him; above we can see the reflection of a row of erect Cypress trees. He smells the rose as another male approaches from the right. The first embraces the other around the neck. Or is he chocking him? As the second pulls away, the first grabs his wrist, as he reciprocates. Or is he now grabbing the wrist of the first in order to pull away?

     The second swimmer now has the rose in hand, lifting it to his nose as if to smell it. But in the very next instant, we see the rose floating in the water alone, the swimmers both having gone their separate ways. As the accompanying description of this short asks on the Open Eye Pictures site, where it can be seen for free, “Comfort or conflict? A gift or deception? ...This mythic and dreamlike piece highlights the unraveling of an intimate relationship.”

      This water dance reminds me a great deal of the dance in artist Robert Longo’s performance piece, Empire, in which one cannot tell whether the two male dancers are engaged in a series of loving embraces or are wrestling in mortal combat.

      Abrahams’ work was an official selection of the Planet Out Short Movie Awards, the Breck Film Festival that occurs annually in Breckinridge, Colorado, and the Queens Museum of Art Film Series.

       The film was later included with nine other gay dance works in Courts mais Gay: Tome 3, released in France in May 2002.

 

Los Angeles, December 28, 2020

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

Broderick Fox | Love, Death, & Cars / 1999

BEST FRIENDS

by Douglas Messerli

 

Broderick Fox (screenwriter and director) Love, Death, & Cars / 1999

 

This short film begins with Max (John Fairlie) and Haley (Michelle Beauchamp) arriving late to Max’s friend Kyle’s (Larry Sullivan) book reading in Los Angeles. Indeed, he’s already finished, promising to read only one more short work, not really a poem or a story, but a kind of brief memory of his and a friend’s trip to the Grand Canyon, a journey never completed, but during which he discovered what love was.

       Kyle is delighted to see Max, who introduces him to Haley, who Kyle discovers—evidently for the first time—is Max’s companion. A dark tension immediately is expressed about their relationship, with Max, evidently surprised by the short work, telling Kyle to leave his life out of his writing, Kyle arguing that it was also his life.

       What we already suspect, with the help of quick images of flashbacks of the two beautiful boys, the hot golden sun, and Max’s red Cadillac Le Mans is that on that Grand Canyon trip, as they later describe it, is that Max kissed Kyle: “we screwed around and everything’s been screwed up since.”

       We immediately grasp that Kyle, who moved off to New York, is gay, and Max, despite his loving relationship with Haley, is now a medical doctor, still having difficulties regarding his gay and bisexual feelings.

        What this reunion accomplishes by the bringing of the two back together, is that Haley, incognizant of their previous relationship, invites Kyle to stay with them. Quickly, however, she figures out what his bothering her lover and insists that he take up Kyle’s suggestion to make the trip they never accomplished to the Grand Canyon.

        Kyle evidently has an interview regarding his new book on a local TV station, and Max, now a photographer, is opening a new show. But in the midst of the opening, Max gets a call: Kyle has passed out on the air. He rushes to the hospital to find Kyle basically all right; yet he tells him his previous cancer has returned and he doesn’t have long to live, the reason evidently for his return to Los Angeles and his visit to Max.

        The trip to the Grand Canyon, obviously, must be repeated if the two are to sort out their emotional and sexual problems. But Max is still terrified that he might lose Haley in the process.

         What Broderick Fox’s well-directed short makes clear is that Max has indeed loved Kyle from their high school days, comparing every woman he meets with his friend. Yet when he met Haley he felt truly comfortable with her and in love, a sign I might suggest of his true bisexuality, but a situation not fully explored—if often assumed—in those earlier days of LGBTQ cinema. When he finally admits his love, but demands of Kyle to tell him what he wants of him, the solution suddenly appears to be quite simple. Kyle simply wants his continued friendship. They once again turn away from their destination both returning to the doctors in their lives, having finally been able to lay their fears to rest. They can remain best friends without sexuality being the central issue. And Max, perhaps, can finally recognize and admit to Haley his bisexuality and his love for her.

        I find this film one of the most honest portrayals of bisexuality I’ve seen. Too bad, however, that the gay boy has to once more get sick, with death on the horizon. Couldn’t they have come to terms with these issues without killing off another queer?

 

Los Angeles, August 29, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2022).

Kun-young Park | 정말 먼 곳 (Jeongmal Meon Gos) A Distant Place / 2020

an unforgiving landscape of beauty

by Douglas Messerli

 

Kun-young Park (screenwriter and director) 정말 먼 곳 (Jeongmal Meon Gos) A Distant Place / 2020

 

This film begins in a kind of quietude of country life with a sheep rancher, Jin Woo (Kang Gil-woo) living on a ranch with his seeming daughter, Seol (Kim Si-ha). Woo works for Joong Min (Gi Ju-bong), a tolerant rancher who appreciates his employee’s hard work and is sensitive to the fact that his own daughter, Moon Kyeong is sexually attracted to him. Furthermore, Seol, kept from kindergarten school by his father, who feels it beneficial for her to remain in the natural world in which they exist, has a close relationship with Jin Woo’s own aging mother, who is suffering from the early stages of Alzheimer’s Disease who can best relate with Jin Woo’s lovely and totally innocent child.

   The relationships between these individuals, accordingly, are constantly changing as represented through the film in their dinner-time activities in a manner that might remind other Asian enthusiasts of Japanese director Yasuijrō Ozu’s great films. But this Korean film presents an even more complex situation when we soon realize that the loving, responsible Jin Woo is also gay, and that his lover Hyun Min (Hong Kyung), a teacher of poetry, arrives from Seoul in order to be with his beloved friend. And it is not only at the dinner table but in the child’s own relation to the landscape is rapidly changing.

     Both Joong Min and his daughter Moon Keyong quickly assimilate to the situation, perhaps even pretending, despite their own visual evidence, that it does not truly exist. The two men, moreover, quickly escape away for a truly bucolic relationship on an island retreat encampment. In fact, much of this film, with its beautiful countryside images that include both Seol and the grandmother, and the two lovers reveal the absolute delights of this world, despite what we soon recognize are the surrounding society’s dark limitations. The grandmother attempts a near-suicide as she disappears into the nearby woods. But she is eventually discovered and is brought back into this basically loving and accepting world of what one might describe as coherent and necessary relationships, the longing Moon Kyeong, the admiring older Joong Min, the links between the older grandmother and the young Seol, as well as the truly loving commitment of Jin Woo and Hyun Min. Indeed, this intensely loving private world might have continued on quite nicely, particularly since Hyun Min has now been hired as a quite popular poetry teacher—who unlike so many such professorial and teacher roles in US films which I find utterly unfamiliar and even hostile to my own teaching methods, seems to really have something to offer his mostly older students.

    Yet this “distant world” is soon visited by the serpent, Jin Woo’s twin sister, when Eun Young (Lee Sang-hee) enters the scene, demanding back the daughter Seol, who she has abandoned so many years earlier and has never before even bothered to visit.

     She has now resurrected her life, so she claims, found employment, and insists that she is finally ready to assimilate the young girl back into her life. Jin Woo is not at all assured by her declarations, and is generally troubled by her intrusion into what might be described as an idyllic life.

     The already strange gender and social relationships these people share—Seol describing Jin Woo as her “mommy,” are further tortured by the new “real” mother and her not-so-very-subtle intentions. Seol’s deep relationship with the grandmother is also put into jeopardy, as the old woman finally winds her way into death.

    Jin Woo is clearly not receptive to his twin sister’s attempt to “reclaim” a daughter who she’s basically abandoned, and Eun Young is not at all truly accepting of her brother’s sexual relationship with Hyun Min. In a terrible public expression of her anger, she destroys the gay couple’s possibility of maintaining a hidden love affair, and turns the entire rural community against her own brother, forcing the gentle and lovely Min out of his job and, basically, out of Jin Woo’s life.

     But even Eun Young also realizes that she can never replace the young Seol’s love for her “mommy,” as the two, finally, remain as a kind of warring couple in the “distant place” in order to provide protection to which Jin Woo remains, and from which his lover Hyun Ming has understandably retreated. The film ends in yet another adjustment that the always accepting and innocently loving Seol must yet again endure, even if she has now been cured of he female/male gender recognition of her loving father and her now returned mother.

     And soon after, Seol herself goes missing in the forest in search for the missing “grandmother” who has sustained her connection with the older generation.

     There is no true happiness to be found in the location in which both siblings and their child reside. It represents, rather, a truce, a world in which Jin Woo’s sexuality is put on permanent hold, an absolution for his sins of preferring a man in a world that that cannot comprehend his love.

     Park Kun-young’s film is a sad reflection of yet again another gay relationship not permitted by the society at large. Any kind of family connection, outside of heteronormative traditional values in this isolated world is basically rejected. A father’s love for his adopted daughter, an errant mother’s love for her previously rejected daughter, a gay lover who seeks a local farmer’s sexual commitment, even a woman’s secret admiration for a lonely farmer, a fatherly bond established between a hard-working employee, a lonely old woman’s love for a young girl and that young girl’s innocent love of the elderly woman are not permitted in this restrictive world of isolation. Love is a punishment for all those who do not fit into the narrow confines of a heterosexually-defined society. “A distant place,” despite its deep beauty, is not somewhere caring and loving people should want to commit their free-minded lives. Such a beautiful word is not a society of openness and forgiveness.

 

Los Angeles, January 29, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2025).

Christopher Ashley | Jeffrey / 1995

pilgrim’s progress

by Douglas Messerli

 

Paul Rudnick (screenplay based on his stage play), Christopher Ashley (director) Jeffrey / 1995

 

Like so many young active gay men, Jeffrey (Steven Weber) absolutely loves sex, as he declares almost simultaneously with the titles, “I love sex. It’s just one of the truly great ideas. I mean just the fact that our bodies have this built-in capacity for joy—ohh, it makes me love the body.” The only problem is that it is 1994, the culmination of AIDS-related deaths. If in 1992 AIDS had become the number one cause of death for men in the US aged 25-44 years old, by 1994 it had become the major cause of death for all US citizens of the same ages.

     The film begins with Jeffrey having incredibly good sex—that is until he announces that the condom he is using has just broken. His sexual partner suddenly goes into torturous reaction of horror and hysteria. His next date demands that they “just cuddle, like rabbits or babies.” Another date requires medical tests to prove that Jeffrey has not been HIV-positive within months, days, and even hours before their sexual get-together. Another comes wrapped totally in cellophane. These are just a few of writer Paul Rudnick’s wildly humorous cartoons that fill the screen with metaphors of the difficulties of gay men sexually enjoying themselves in the tenth decade of the 20th century. As the fears grow exponential by the day, the man who evidences that he might even be oversexed suddenly grows so frustrated that he spins out into another hemisphere, determining to become celibate.

     Many of the critics have argued, as Roger Ebert puts it: “Now Jeffrey (Steven Weber) finds his sex life so frightening that he decides to swear off—to become celibate, and find other interests. It's not so much that he fears becoming HIV-positive himself, although he does; it's that he fears falling in love with someone who will die.” But to stop his sexual desires, it seems to me, misses the whole point of Rudnick’s movie—a film that in its devotion to dialogue and incident, belongs far more to the actor, in this case, than to director Christopher Ashley’s.

      Although the author does put AIDS front and center in this film—who could not in a gay movie being shot in New York in 1994?—Jeffrey is not a film about AIDS, not even a comedy about AIDS, which is how it bills itself. AIDS, which probably transformed the LGBTQ community more than any other event, even more than Stonewall, is here simply a metaphor for all the things that are beginning to make gay men like Jeffrey unable to understand their community and their role in life.

        Before AIDS everything had been so clear. Mythically speaking, gay men were outsiders, hated or loved, free to behave in a manner that was unthinkable for other men, the overtly expressiveness of their emotions to admit to disappointment, joy, and the feelings about others. Unlike most heterosexual men, they permitted themselves to go on the prowl, to have sex every day, several times each day if their stamina might let them, along with partying just to have fun. Work was simply a necessity to pay the rent. Gay men had few other major responsibilities except to their lovers and friends, free of the restrictions of husbands and children, and the rows and rows of other activities that forced heterosexual men to take shelter in their offices and cozy houses. Gay men, primarily an urban phenomena, lived in apartments and cozy cottages while heterosexuals were defined by the suburbs and small towns in which gay men pretended they all lived. The major responsibilities left to gay men, other than to have fun, was to keep the body fit and dress as best as the pocket book permitted.

    Since Jeffrey is still uninfected and in good health, why not turn his attention away from sex by focusing on his own body: “no sex, just sweat.” Joining a gym, the slim-built man asks for some help with lifting the weights. The man who immediately comes forward is a strikingly beautiful specimen of the species, Steve Howard (Michael T. Weiss), who so totally wows our hero that he can hardly speak without going up another octave. Standing with his well-endowed pants crotch over Jeffrey’s head, Steve encourages the groaning first time weight-lighter, to pump it, to want it, to keep going, just a little bit more, further and further until those gay men sitting in the audience might wish to cover their erections. Just at the moment of his greatest need of fortitude, Jeffrey meets the man that might possibly make him happy for the rest of his life.

      He escapes from the gym with hardly enough energy left to stumble on to a visit with his best friends, Sterling (Patrick Stewart) and Darius (Bryan Batt), a gay couple who have been together for several years and, upon hearing with shock about the change he plans to make in his life, advise him to settle down with someone as they have, which certainly is a better and safer way of having sex. Being a couple, you don’t, even evidently, have to think about sex.

      That, in fact, became the solution for thousands of gay men who before that period would not even have imagined their lives being restrained by monogamy, but who soon began fighting for marriage which finally resulted in the official acknowledgment of the rights by the government and society at large, another significant alteration in the previous world of gay men.

      Sterling is an interior decorator who, a bit older than Jeffrey and his own younger lover, who purposely maintains the stereotypical behavior of his profession, tittering and camping his way through life, in part, to entertain others and hide his own fears and sorrows behind a shield of irony and wit that also will soon become a relic of the past.

      Darius plays the air-headed gay boy who, as a dancer in Cats, has found a delightful job that will keep him employed for most of the rest of his lifetime and, again true to type, has nary a worry in his empty head—although in one of Ashley’s many moments of stop-action camera, Darius turns to his audience to argue the fact that he is as not stupid as they might think, and by the end of the film becomes the voice of wisdom. Moreover, what this perfect couple don’t yet make apparent is that despite their would-be protections of monogamy and wit, Darius is HIV-positive, and before the movie closes will die of full-blown AIDS and a cerebral hemorrhage. Obviously, we later discover there was something on his mind.

       Hearing of their friend’s meet-up with Mr. Right, they spend most of the rest of the movie attempting to bring the two perfect lovers together, mostly without success.

       Unable to get any acting roles other than small parts of just a few lines playing gay characters, Jeffrey continues to work as a catering waiter, once again meeting up with Steve, who it is now revealed works primarily as a bartender at a celebrity cowboy and Indian celebrity gala  headed up by Ann Marwood Bartle (Christine Baranski) where the film’s writer and director get  to play out Steve’s gay fantasy which turns into a musical hoedown with the catering boys performing choreographic wonderments that suggest Hello, Dolly!, gay male strippers such as the boys in Montreal’s Stock Bar, and sexual couplings that might have been played out by the gay disco singers of the Village People. Didn’t I mention that this movie is also a musical romance? This time around Jeffrey can’t quite escape Steve’s lasso, agreeing to a dinner date.

       Regretting his decision, Jeffrey turns to an evangelical-like gathering headed by Debra Moorehouse (Sigourney Weaver) who as the love evangelist demonstrates how to hate nearly everyone unlike your beloved self, freeing her congregation from their traditional habits of loving and forgiving. Despite the fervor of her congregants, it simply doesn’t move our doubting Thomas, particularly when she begins to suggest that disease is the result of the absence of love, which quickly comes close to sounding very much like the traditional evangelical community’s blame of the gay community for the AIDS that had infected them. Either way, loving or failing to love, it appears that the LGBT world had it coming.

      But even more disconcerting is the fact that Steve has revealed to Jeffrey that he is HIV-positive, although not yet showing any signs of disease. But once more the news sends Jeffrey reeling as he leaves a message of Steve’s answering machine that he can’t meet him for dinner, lying that he has another catering event, an act which devastates the man who loves Jeffrey most. The anger Steve feels for Jeffrey’s behavior threatens any chance for either of their happiness’ for the rest of their lives.

     Only more than a third of way through the movie, we are left for nearly other hour of Rudnick’s and Ashley’s weaving through fascinating variations of the gay community in the manner of Woody Allen movies, the Saturday Night Live comic sketches, Leo McCarey’s An Affair to Remember, and Rob Reiner’s When Harry Met Sally, to which Rudnick’s script tips it hat.

      In his attempt to wipe away any footprints of his previous gay life, Jeffrey seeks out a self-help group, Sexual Compulsives Anonymous, who like AAA members testify about their behaviors as a first step to their cure. Dave (Ethan Phillips) who is the first up readily admits to his obsession, the group responding in unison before he reveals that it’s probably caused by the fact that he has a constant 24-hour erection and his penis is 14-inches long, the group responding,  “oooooo. Hi, Dave.”

      Jeffrey runs into Steve on the street in what appears to be their final acrimonious meeting, where Steve finally calls him out on his failures to get together: “I can understand about the HIV thing. It’s not easy. But I don’t like lying about it. Not anymore.” Jeffrey’s being sorry has no weight for him. “I can take being sick. I can fucking take dying, but I can’t take this.” Soon after, he sarcastically provides him with “all the information” that Jeffrey argues was previously withheld: “I’ve been positive for almost 5 years. I was sick once. My T-cells are decent. And every once in a while, like 50 times a day, an hour, I get very tired of being a person with AIDS, a red ribbon. So sometimes I forget. Sometimes I choose to forget. Sometimes I choose just to be a gay man with a dick. Can I forget again?”

      But Jeffrey’s sad answer says everything, “No.” It is at this point we almost lose interest in the man who lost his way so completely that we are fearful that he will ever find his way home.

      Wandering off again, increasingly severed from his own world, Jeffrey meets up with a trio of

thugs who beat and rob him, somewhat ironically, because he’s a fag. One has to wonder if a celibate homosexually-inclined human being can truly be described as being gay.

       Disconsolate, our dumb Pilgrim enters a cathedral, gets down on his knees and prays. A priest (Nathan Lane), moves up beside him, also kneeling, and begins to goose his butt. Startled by the act, Jeffrey rises as the priest, Father Dan, signals for him to follow, our hero needing spiritual  guidance, following after. Once he gets him in the chapel, Dan jumps him demanding sex. When Jeffrey escapes his clutches, claiming he doesn’t understand what’s going on, Dan makes it clear: “Maybe you didn’t hear me, I’m a Catholic priest. That falls somewhere in between a chorus boy and florist.” Before long Dan is showing Jeffrey his confession box wherein the walls are covered with Broadway musical album covers, his answer to the question of where is God and why He is allowing evil into the world.

      In the meantime, Darius collapses on the stairwell after the ballet he’s attended with Sterling and Jeffrey. Things are getting worse.

     When taking a run through Central Park, Jeffrey once more meets up with Steve, who’s evidently the manager of the Pride Day Parade, which Jeffrey has forgotten about despite the floats and people all about ready for the start. We imagine now finally this lost fool might come back to the fold, many of his community having gathered in the same spot. The occasion creates some other rather comic situations as Olympia Dukakis, playing the mother of a transsexual female lesbian who asks where they should go for the start of the parade. Jeffrey is asked to take a group photograph. But instead of having come to his senses, he seems more lost than ever, telling Steve that he is moving back to Wisconsin. Steve meanwhile introduces him to his new boyfriend, Sean. The opportune time for their romance seems to have forever passed.

      More than anything, however, what this scene achieves is a magnificent Arthur J. Bressan-like compilation of clips from the Pride Parade, which in the context of all the other types we have encountered so far in this movie, makes it transparently clear just how wonderfully crazy, confused, conflicted, yet utterly beautiful and ebullient the LGBTQ community is in its messy amalgamations. I realized more than ever just what a remarkable world we have created that is so very different from everything else around us. And indeed these scenes brought tears to my eyes for its celebration of difference and waves of anger for many in that same community seeking today to totally assimilate and smooth out the differences as someone like Jeffrey and so many  other post-AIDS survivors have attempted to do. Would those who, like Bressan, fought so hard for that identity and died, in part, because of it, even recognize the LGBTQ+++++ world of today, the gay and lesbian bars nearly empty or filled with straight girls and boys, the often self-righteous outrage of some of its members for sexual excesses and outré demonstrations of public nudity, the continued ostracization of the effeminate despite the near-universal acceptance of drag behavior, now performed by as many heterosexuals as homosexuals? It is for some of those very reasons why I am writing these pages. A great deal of our current acceptance has come at the cost of our heart and souls, as well as our collective identity. 

     Rudnick even in 1993-94 when he produced his play and worked on this film, clairvoyantly perceived, I would argue, what filmmakers like Bressan, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Bill Sherwood, Jerry Tartaglia, Derek Jarman, David Wojnarowicz, and many others realized: that sex and gender is at the very heart of the LGBTQ world, not tangential issues requiring us to imagine we are no different from heterosexuals. We are different and that’s what makes us interesting and important in the larger society. Realizing that our difference has do with our bodies and behavior, does not mean that we need or even can abandon our intellects or spiritual values. It is a life lived through those differences that often accounts for our intellectual and spiritual acuity, and most certainly our empathy for all others.

      Finally, that is the lesson of the celibate-in-training Jeffrey learns. When Darius dies, Sperling is no longer in the mood to hear of Jeffrey’s sympathies or attempts to ameliorate his suffering. For the moment, Sperling reveals, he hates Jeffrey for his unspoken betrayal of his own self. As Sperling argues, “You’re not a part of this. This has nothing to do with you.” Behaving differently in terms of both sex and gender has been the manner and matter of his life, if perhaps the cause of his current pain which is also the source of all his joy and meaning.

      Sperling tells Jeffrey that Darius once said: “You are the saddest person he ever knew.”

      Jeffrey, taken aback, asks, “Why did he say that?”

     “Because he was sick. Because he had a fatal disease. And he was one million times happier than you.”

      “You loved Darius. You want me to go through that with Steve?”

      “Yes.”            

       It takes a hallucination of Darius returning to life for Jeffrey to finally comprehend, as Darius puts it, in the vulgate, “Go dancing. Hate AIDS, Jeffrey, not life. …Think of AIDS like the guest who won’t leave. The one we all hate. Hey, it’s still our party.”

    Jeffrey, finally ready to party again, invites Steve to dinner via a phone message. He has booked the entire dining room of the Essex Hotel. Improbably, Steve shows up but, even though he has broken up with his boyfriend, is still cautious about Jeffrey’s seeming change of heart. Jeffrey must convince him that he will return the next day after safe sex, that he will risk his life for love.

     I have to admit, I wasn’t convinced by Rudnick’s metaphor of a balloon which, earlier in the film was explained: when someone lets it loose there is always another who strives to catch it and protect it from its inevitable bursting. I more fully believe his assurance that this time he will not leave, “Because I’m a gay man, and I live in the city. I am not an innocent bystander. Not anymore.” He has returned to us.

 

Los Angeles, November 13, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2022).