Douglas Messerli | Before Monogamy / 2020 [Introduction]

before monogamy

by Douglas Messerli

 

1974, the year of Christopher Larkin’s film A Very Natural Thing, was a year in which the LGBTQ community was, after the events surrounding the 1969 Stonewall riots, occupied with speaking out. Indeed, the 1973 annual New York City Gay Pride March down Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue is featured in Larkin’s movie.

     Nonetheless, in this pre-AIDS era (only the earliest of cases were being diagnosed, the first US case being recognized in 1969 with the death a 16-year old boy, with only a few single cases reported in 1973 and 1976) when, moreover, most US citizens could not yet imagine the legalization of same-sex marriage—for most of the interviewees of the gay and lesbian march Larkin captured on camera, the central problem of the day was to simply achieve acceptance by the society at large—people had highly differing notions about permanent commitments and long-term relationships.

     By 1974 Howard and I, then living in Washington, D.C. were into our fourth year of a complete commitment to one another very much like a heterosexual marriage, and I recall a friend of ours who fearing that he might never find someone who might be interested in a true relationship, even threatening suicide at some future date if he was still faced with that possibility (I presume he long ago forgot that vow); yet many of not most—gays in particular—were happy with the pleasures of open sex unavailable to their heterosexual peers. In urban bars, public toilets, steam baths, parks, beaches, and sometimes even on side-streets, the open sexuality of the day provided an enticement that was difficult to ignore.

     Unlike most heterosexuals who were expected after a normal period of sexual exploration to find a partner, marry, and settle down into a permanent relationship to raise a family, LGBTQ individuals who had already gone through many long struggles to break from the normative values of the culture at large—often endangering their careers, their familial relationships, and even their own bodies—could rightfully argue they had gained the privilege to remain outside those cultural values even if they might now be able to pair together under the banner of being queer. Afterall, part of the definition of having “come out” was to break with precisely the definitions of home and family from which they had escaped.

     Besides, argued many gay men, unlike their straight peers, they had necessarily to be late to their own sexual lives and needed more time explore the landscape.

     As I am about to celebrate with my husband our 51st anniversary early in 2021, so may seem strange to admit that before I met Howard in 1970, I was most definitely one of those believers in completely open sexuality; marriage, either symbolic or literal, was something I just could not have imagined. In my year in New York City and before that in Madison, Wisconsin where I was attending the university, the lure of almost daily sex with other nubile male bodies was something I couldn’t and didn’t even want to resist.*

     Those issues interestingly enough are at the heart of Larkin’s film and another gay movie I recently re-visited, German director Frank Ripploh’s Taxi zum Klo (Taxi to the Toilets) of 1981. Both feature couples who find themselves in a marriage-like relationship in which one the couple feels sexually trapped and delimited, while the other hopes to retain him in a monogamous relationship.

      Both films are also almost painfully honest, although the more literate and sexually less explicit of the two, Larkin’s film, perhaps more thoroughly portrays the issues which any couple of the time had to face.

 

*Perhaps at the age of 73 I can now admit that early in our relationship, Howard and I were not always monogamous, and that we experimented a few times with threesomes, and sought sex outside the relationship.

 

Los Angeles, September 25, 2020

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

Nathan Kim | Crème Brulée / 2025 [music video]

driving them crazy

by Douglas Messerli

 

David Archuleta, Robyn Dell’Unto, Ryan Nealon, and Michael Bloom (composers), Nathan Kim (director) Crème Brulée / 2025 [3 minutes]

 

Another smooth, pop-singing gay crooner, David Archuleta was only 18 when he released his first single, “Crush,” which landed his album at the number 2 position of the Billboard 200 chart. And since then, he has continued to produce singles and albums, some of them exploring old time hits such as The Beatles’ “The Long and Winding Road,” while several others have been original songs that deal with queer life.

     A former member of the Latter-Day Saints, Archuleta came out as queer (gay and “demisexual”) in 2021 and he made in clear in a 2023 interview that he and his mother were no longer involved with the LDS church.

     “Crème Brulée,” a single for his upcoming album Earthly Delights, is a rather self-congratulatory song about his sexual prowess, or at least his sexual draw, as it celebrates, sometimes in Spanish, the fact that one “bite” of the singer, other men will inevitably want more.

The Spanish phrase, “I drive you crazy, crazy,” is repeated several times throughout.

 

Oh no

Another man down

Another heart left on the dance floor

Took a bite, now he wants more

Words flow

Right out of his mouth

Yeah like he's never had sugar before

Don't care bout a main course

 

One night and they're singing my praises

Two shots then the honeymoon phase, it's

Three word phrases, skipping stages

It's all over your face like

 

Oh no

There goes all of your clothes

Speaking words you don't know

Yo te vuelvo loco, loco

Oh no, you want me in slo-mo

Snap me like a photo

Yo te vuelvo loco, loco

I can't help that you don't wanna wait

Ok

Now you've had a taste of crème brûlée

    Like the major analogy of the poem, the sweetness one must break into of crème brûlée, so does the song sweetly brush away the possibility of a long relationship with the narrative voice of the singer.

    Perhaps the most notable aspect of this 2025 video, however, is the group dancing choreographed by Jordon Johnson and Aidan Carberry, featuring Archuleta, Amy Cheng, Nico Lonetree, and Jongo Zeizel.

 

Los Angeles, June 26, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (June 2025).

Ewald André Dupont | Moulin Rouge / 1928

mother love

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ewald André Dupont (screenwriter and director) Moulin Rouge / 1928

 

It’s strange that given its brilliantly-filmed first 30 minutes that German director E. A. Dupont, here directing his first British film, is not given more critical attention regarding his 1928 film Moulin Rouge. Working with his brilliant cinematographer Werner Brandes, more is packed into the first quarter of this 2-hour film about pre-Depression Paris than almost any other film provides. Dupont and Brandes are immersed in the boulevard and café nightlife of the Pigalle in Montmartre more than any film does until John-Pierre Melville’s Bob le Flambeur (1956) and Julien Duvivier’s Boulevard (1960).

     And after diving in an out of the Pigalle bars and nightclubs the film centers around acts that give us what seems to be a fairly accurate picture of the Moulin Rouge entertainment (even though the interior theater scenes were filmed not in the Moulin Rouge but in the Lido and in London), including a wonderful series of vignette’s that capture the various aspects of the theater’s audiences—a gentleman distracted by a nearby female beauty, upbraided by his wife; a young girl terrified by a woman on stage with a large python wrapped around her neck; gawking tourists, including a Harold Lloyd look-alike; and a young man standing next to a sailor, who through the old trick of swallowing a burning cigarette, gets the man to put his arms around him just to check out his health. 

     On stage we get a glimpse of the vast acts that Americans know best through Ziegfeld’s US Broadway imitations, including vast lineups of chorus girls decked out in beaded and jeweled costumes; Arabian scenes in which a sitting sultan dressed is in a thawb so ornate that when he stands, with the camera looking up at his presence, it appears he is costumed in a female gown; racist skits such as an imitation bonsai version of a Japanese Kabuki play performed by little people and a black-face number in which the featured dancer Parysia (Olga Tschechowa)* attempts, unsuccessfully, to outdo the contortions of Josephine Baker; and, of significant LGBTQ interest, a slightly longer sequence involving two obviously gay chorus boys, naked except for glitteringly sequined “dancing diapers” who create a series of “fairy friezes” of the likes of which were seen in US cinema only in John W. Harkrider and Millard Webb’s Glorifying the American Girl, of a year later, which featured similar scenes from an actual Ziegfeld Follies production—pictures of which, when I attempted to post them on Facebook (a quite hilarious incident in hindsight, since it appears that the 2022 Facebook censors felt the 1929 stage performer’s costumes insufficiently covered up their nakedness) got me thrown into Facebook prison for a month!

     But except for these scenes and the sailor and his boyfriend, Dupont’s Moulin Rouge is a strictly heterosexual affair—although certainly one of the most perverted of heterosexual stories put to screen since Charles Bryant’s Salomé (1923).

     Near the end of the acts I have described above, two individuals enter box seats at the Moulin Rouge, Margaret (Eve Gray) and Andre (Jean Bradin) to watch the rest of the performances by the show’s feature performer, Parysia. Andre is a wealthy young man and his girlfriend, Margaret, just happens to me Parysia’s daughter who has returned from years of education in select boarding school somewhere else in Europe, almost unable to recognize the beautiful woman on the stage as her mother.

      She is, however, not the only one taken by Parysia’s beauty, as Andre almost immediately gets an erection for the older woman that is so overwhelming that he must excuse himself for a moment as he runs out to the theater café in order to buy a program with numerous photos of the star. Later that evening, we see him in bed, unable to sleep, as he picks up the magazine which we clearly recognize in today’s parlance he intends to use as “whacking off” material, while the director alternates these scenes with images of the real woman rubbing on face cream as she bemoans her age.

     In fact, Tschechowa was only 3 years older than the woman who portrayed her daughter when the film was made, but the actress convinces us—while still wowing Andre—that she is far older.

     Andre’s infatuation might simply be humorous, but in fact he is secretly engaged to marry Margaret, and falling in love with one’s future mother-in-law was verboten even in the Paris of 1928.

     That doesn’t stop him from attempting to declare his affections to Parysia, who is quite rightfully both somewhat appreciative of his revelations and utterly shocked! And the fact that he is engaged to her daughter, doesn’t stop her from immediately getting in her car and driving off to the family estate to convince André’s father (Georges Tréville) that despite her being an actor it has not contaminated her daughter, and that he should give his permission immediately for the marriage. Just to convince him that she’s serious about the matter, she casually leaves behind her handkerchief, a subtle threat that if he doesn’t go along with her plans that she can make his life quite miserable in the gossip columns. He immediately writes of his approval.

      That is the nearly full substance of this film’s plot. The rest of the story is filled out with melodramatic details as the young boy suffers deeply for his oedipal complex, guiltily sulking around the innocent, and rather empty-headed Margaret, who is so blind to his lack of interest in her that she joins her mother in a lovely outing to a haute couture fashion house for her trousseau and gets so drunk from champagne at a private dinner with André that she doesn’t have to notice his odd grimaces as he compares her handsome face and childish demeanor with the grace and beauty of her mother. Fortunately, cinematographer Brandes captures all the angst in such beautiful tableaux vivants that the film maintains our interest.

      André attempts to write a confession to his father before finally determining to commit suicide. He visits Parysia’s dressing room to leave her flowers and a suicide note, but even backs out of that, arriving instead to the house, where he has scheduled a drive with Margaret to his father with the hope of returning with him to Paris for the wedding.

      André, however, has cut the brakes, and insists that given the bad roads and numerous hills on route that it’s too dangerous for Margaret to accompany him. For the first time, Margaret truly sees her lover as he really is: a frightened and highly confused young man. What is he talking about? Bad roads and hills? Surely that’s not a sufficient excuse to go alone. But when she queries him about his logic, he falls into a faint. And, after she and her mother, get him to couch, she determines to make the drive alone to bring back his father.

       When he is awakened by a telephone call for Parysia, and discovers that she has driven off in his stead, he interrupts the telephone call to tell his mother-in-law that the message will reveal that her that her daughter is dead, explaining what he has done.

        The telephone call is simply from her dresser, reporting a new costume has arrived. But the now furious tigress Parysia demands he take her car, catch up with Margaret and save her, after which he should kill himself.

        The last quarter of this film is filled with action as the two cars speed to and from André’s family home, linking up finally with him attempting to save his fiancée by pulling her from his out-of-control sports car into his sedan en route. It ends with a terrible crash, André badly wounded and Margaret near death.

        Despite the news, Parysia must still go on stage which she attempts in various states of dizzying shock, collapsing backstage at the very moment that Margaret pulls through in surgery, the doctors announcing that she will live.

       Evidently in the process of nearly losing Margaret, André has rediscovered his love for her and been cured of his oedipal infatuation. This time, as Parysia later puts it, he’s been given an opportunity to rectify his behavior. The two rush off on their honeymoon as Parysia sends flowers, unable to see them off, since she is once more onstage delighting her audience with her youthful beauty.

      If Dupont’s story is negligible, the way he and Brandes tell it through their photographic images is so brilliant that I’d suggest that critics take another look at this work to reevaluate its place in film history. And if it doesn’t offer much in the way of specific LGBTQ history, what it reveals about outsider love is utterly fascinating.

 

Los Angeles, February 18, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (February 2023).

 

Todd Flaherty | Chrissy Judy / 2022

decline and fall

by Douglas Messerli

 

Todd Flaherty (screenwriter and director) Chrissy Judy / 2022

 

I’ll confess, never having been personally interested in or particularly fascinated by drag queens, I find that world somewhat entertaining, and obviously writing this book I have entered that world in terms of cinema numerous times. But I still have felt apart and removed from it, finding it difficult to imagine what a female impersonator does throughout his or her regular day. Is it a world totally devoted to that role-playing or is there another self, another being who alternates or even dominates the periods off-stage?

     I’m not sure of the total credulity of Todd Flaherty’s 2022 gorgeous black-and-white film Chrissy Judy, but it certainly has given me a better sense of that world and of the individuals involved in it through the film’s characters, the energized and almost magnetically appealing Judy (played by Flaherty) and Chrissy (Wyatt Fenner), and if there was ever a film that might help one enter that world and empathize with the gay and straight men who are involved in drag it is surely this movie.

     Let us begin with the language or the patois used by these individuals. The effeminate chatter we witness on stage and in the movies when the character is in drag is similar in this film, reminding me of a gay patter that used to be employed, when I was first coming out, by many gay men gathering with others of an evening: an exaggerated, queer female-oriented banter—most participants were awarded like the characters in this film female names—and the language was  purposely camp, an over-the-top rendition of reality that included numerous words, expressions, and metaphors known only to gay communities, sometimes even limited to the local chapter. It is also a language of wit, demanding that each participant throw off statements and comebacks that seemingly “put down” or “dismiss” the other participants, offered in part as evidence of one’s knowledge of their weaknesses and well as their strengths, and positing the idea that your love for them is based on knowing both their failures and gifts only too well. And finally, it depends on the moment, who enters the room at what moment, what has just happened the world about gleaned through news or gossip, and whatever history (individual or political) that is appropriate to the moment, bringing that into the world of cut off, separated, and dissociated world into which the speakers belong. It short, even speaking is an utterly exhausting experience.

     For the outsider, moreover, it is nearly impossible to assimilate or even translate since it is precisely meant to keep others out. It represents a private world fought for tooth and nail by individuals who are not permitted into more normalized living rooms and parlors. Beyond language, accordingly, behavior can also be unusual, outré, or even purposely offensive, particularly if one is told that something is off limits or one is visiting a different clique or outsider gathering. People can be hurt, accordingly, abused because of their relationship to the others.

      It is a world most other young gay men coming of age in the early 1970s and I quickly abandoned, at a time, long before Stonewall, when many of us realized that we were no longer on the outside mocking ourselves for our position in the world, but actually were beginning to be  accepted into the heterosexual communities from which we had so long been banned. Talking in patois of our creation, accordingly, no longer made sense. Even behaving badly to prove we were after all the bad boys that society had defined us as, was no longer useful.

      In many respects the drag world, a least as presented in this movie, has retained a sense of otherness that most of the LGBTQ world has long abandoned, particularly those of us who have been comfortably accepted in the heteronormative worlds of arts, education, entertainment, and other fields of endeavor who, at least outwardly, have seemingly assimilated the quirks of LGBTQ individuals.

      And in large part, that attitudinal difference is what the film Chrissy Judy is all about.  Beautiful as a male specimen and able to attract sexual partners, Judy is still of the “old school,” a gay man surrounded by his own kind and also, in that respect, trapped at going-on-30 in a world that is gradually disappearing. He (the pronoun I’ve chosen since most of the time “Judy,” real name Jack, performs as a sis male bottom) lives with his long-time friend Chrissy in a world that is made up of close gay friends. At one point, indeed, another friend of theirs, Samoa (James Tison) declares that she no longer even has time for heterosexual beings.

      The drag team of Chrissy and Judy begin the film with a familiar trip to Fire Island, a weekend celebration where Judy hopes to get to kiss another man and both hope for a deep tan and perhaps even a little rest in their schedule which is a busy one without much financial renumeration.

       Mostly what these early scenes simply reveal is the intensity of their friendship, as they drunkenly dance together declaring that there is no one in their lives that they love better and insisting that if by 40 they have still found no one to whom they can devote their love they will marry one another.

       But here also, Judy begins to perceive that Chrissy is not his usual self, and soon after discovering him at a dive bar where they are performing, he realizes that his life-long friend is about to abandon him, to go out into the real “gay” world that has grown up around in order to try out a relationship in Philadelphia with his long-distance boyfriend Shawn (Kiyon Spencer). Judy cannot believe that his friend would truly leave him, and when it happens his world begins to fall apart.

       First of all, his drag act is stale. No one is interested, he is told, in the old drag act of singing campy versions of vintage songs as he does. Today drag queens dance!

       Judy attempts a dance class with a younger group of individuals, but is out of sync—as well as out of rhythm—and gets winded when the others are just ready to continue.

       A visit to an older friend Samoa who has become a successful businessman (or woman, since we cannot quite discern whether Samoa now identifies as fully transgender or as a cis male who dresses daily in drag and as Judy retains his female name at all times), drops him into different world of patois, filled with faux-psychological, spiritual, new wave, and other babble that is as radically inexplicable to Judy as his “sissy talk” is to some others. Feeling as isolated in this world as others feel in his, he behaves badly, letting himself be fucked by Samoa’s “hands off” boyfriend, Marcus (Joey Taranto) who happens to also to have been a member of the audience in his last drag performance who dismissed and totally ignored his act.

       In some respects, Judy’s behavior is a reaction to both Samoa’s and Marcus’ disdain and disrespect. But at heart it is obviously a performance in anger for Chrissy having gone off and left him alone. A phone call from Sissy in the closet where he has just had sex, with as he informs him “cum dripping from my ass,” livens him up, especially when Chrissy invites him to come and share a Thanksgiving barbecue with Shawn and others in the city of brotherly love.

       But that visit proves even more disastrous as Judy is forced to look on at the apparently kissy-lovey life of Chrissy and Shawn, surrounded by gay men who are so conservative and uninteresting—who talk in yet another language about their bird-watching habits, sports, and jobs—that they might as well be married heterosexuals. Getting drunk, Judy performs in this “polite” society an act that Bette Davis might envy as he mocks the city and its values, their empty conversations, and performs an almost drunken Medea-like dance of disdain. Even Chrissy cannot bring him to his senses, and Judy is shipped off in the very next greyhound bus.

        Gradually, Judy’s world as he knew it is collapsing, a sort of decline and fall of his drag-centered empire. Without the ability to find new drag venues, he is forced to take part-time jobs such as handing out samples in stores. For his bad behavior, most of his friends seem to have abandoned him or left for the “other” worlds they have realized that it is time to embrace. Trying out a sexual tryst with Marcus once again, Judy realizes that he is a “fuck ‘em and leave ‘em kind of guy,”—no sleepovers for him—finishing up his sex and telling Judy that paper towels are on a nearby table while he goes upstairs to shower. He is startled when he comes out of the bathroom that Judy as strayed on the balcony and curtly sends him off.

     Out of despair, Judy dresses up in drag, seeing “herself’ in the mirror finally as a washed-up figure from a time that no longer even exists. Trimming away his beautifully peroxided hair, he finally takes a job he once mocked as a latrine-scouring, bedmaking houseboy in a Provincetown bed and breakfast.

      Now a shortly shaven jet-black haired young man he behaves as seriously as he can earning a living in P-town while enjoying the company of his fellow houseboy-servant Pedro (João Pedro Santos). Pedro would certainly like to break the rules of the B&B owner, but for the first time ever Judy follows orders, allowing himself fun with the cute boy with whom he works, while staying out of his bed.

       Besides, he’s now busy, working nights at Ryan Landry’s famed gay performance space preparing a new drag act as Sweet Lorraine (a new persona suggested by Marcus) who now sings seriously—and I might add quite beautifully through Flaherty’s performance—old torch songs.

       On the very day he is to finally premiere the act, Chrissy turns up in town. The two spot one another but don’t dare acknowledge each other’s existence. Yet Chrissy does show up the performance and is clearly moved by Judy’s new show; after all her act wins Landry’s “Miss Congeniality” contest, and Judy is mobbed by admirers after.

       It’s the last night in P-Town for Judy, and Pedro convinces him to celebrate in a bar, but Judy leaves early, wandering the beach where he unintentionally on purpose confronts the waiting Chrissy, who admits he’s gone on vacation alone since Shawn had no more free days left. But we  also recognize that he has gone off alone to think things out.

       Now recognizing that his friend has, after all this time, found himself, he wonders if he has discovered his own purpose in the relationship to which he has seemed to be so devoted. But as Judy admits, he too has no idea what the next day will bring. For both of them, it has become another world than the one they formerly inhabited, a world which doesn’t have the safe corners of clique in which one feels fully at home. The family members have fled one another, leaving each on his own to discover who they might possibly be or who they might become.

     Chrissy and Judy, once so close you mightn’t ever imagine them apart, share the ferry back to Boston. Chrissy, clearly not the happy “married” man he once seemed to be, lays his head upon his friend Judy’s shoulder. But it is not an invitation to renew the past, but simply a recognition that they have each gone their separate ways to places they no longer recognize.

 

Los Angeles, October 19, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2022).

 

Mike Hoolboom | Frank’s Cock / 1993

the body believes only in the present

by Douglas Messerli

 

Mike Hoolboom (screenwriter and director) Frank’s Cock / 1993

 

Canadian director Mike Hoolboom had done several short films in the 1980s devoted to different aspects of the body, including White Museum (1986), From Home (1988), and Eat (1989). But after being diagnosed with AIDS upon attempting to donate blood, Hoolboom became involved with a Vancouver based group of “People with AIDS” (PWA) where he met a young man whose lover was dying of the disease, and Hoolboom began work on a script about the new friend and his sense of humor in relationship to the disease which Joey (or by some accounts Alan) maintained throughout what he described as a mostly joyous and happy relationship.

      Retaining that sense of humor, the resultant work, Frank’s Cock, narrated by then unknown actor Callum Keith Rennie is almost shocking in its straightforward expression of a gay couple’s meeting, sexual activities, and growing sense of finality.

      Shot in a split-screen format, Hoolboom combines an image of the narrator in the upper right corner along with three other panels in color pulled from studies of human embryo formation, popular culture, and gay pornography which created what the director describes as a “fragmentation of the body” which many AIDS sufferers experience.

      The unnamed narrator characterizes himself as a teenager who when he came out wanted to be the "Michael Jordan of sex" or "Wayne Gretzky with a hard-on” until he met Frank at a group sex session, older than him, almost 30. Interested in fantasy Frank gave the young man several alternatives for what their relationship might constitute: “Coach/rookie, sailor/slut, older brother/younger brother, father/son.”* “I picked ‘older brother/younger brother,’ and well, we’ve been together ever since.”

      The narrator goes on to further describe his new lover, hinting at his partner’s love of exaggerated story-telling in his recollection that Frank never had a problem being gay. He began his sexual activities as a baby, so he claimed, while trying to wank-off the baby in the next wicker basket. 

    “My parents weren’t big on gay. You remember the ad with the preacher holding a shotgun standing beside his son? The preacher said “If I found out my son was gay, I’d shoot him.” And the son said “I kinda think he’d like to shoot it in me.” Well, it was kind of like that.” He had a girlfriend in high school named Donna, he tells us, and when his parents found out he was gay they blamed it all on Donna. “Like she was an ambassador from the country of women, and she’d fucked up somehow.”

    With his new lover, so our narrator tells us, he felt immediately “at home” with Frank’s rather large penis firmly planted in his ass.

    But Frank also evidently did serve as a kind of older brother for the young man, showing him how to open a bottle of beer, as any Canadian can, with his teeth (some of which he evidently loss in the process of learning). He showed him how to build a box-kite, and how to make an omelet “that would rise to the size of a man’s head.”

 

“Frank had a thing for omelets. I guess he got it from his dad. His dad signed for Viet Nam and he got caught behind enemy lines in Phnom Penh and got bread and water and a hole in the ground, no light, no food, no people. And you know how he managed? Eggs. He thought of every way you could cook them, bake them, boil them, fry them, souffle them. And when he got out he went to a restaurant. He ordered an omelet, a six-egg omelet. He ate it. Had a heart attack. Died right there in the restaurant. Frank always said it was a good thing, because the rest of his life would be such a let-down.”

 

     The two apparently have great sex, Frank often making appointments with his younger lover to have sex for the entire day. The narrator truly enjoyed the seemingly endless sexual activity except that Frank insisted upon listening always to Peter Gzowski's “Morningside” radio show during sex, making his friend sometimes lose his concentration.

     These and other short tales represent the brilliance of this work in its mix of the serious and the mundane, reminding one very much of the joyful and sometimes humorous tales the central character of Bressan’s Buddies tells of his lover while himself dying of AIDS.

     But the end, as one might expect, is painful as the narrator tells us that he and Frank have now been together for nine years. “In December will be our anniversary, our 10th. But I don’t know if Frank’s going be around to see it. ...He’s lost a lot of weight. He’s got these marks on him, that’s the Kaposi. But when you talk he’s inside the same as ever. I talked to him this morning. He said “The body does not believe in progress. Its religion is the present, not the future. ...He was always saying crazy things like that.”

     The engaging story-teller ends his 8-minute tribute to Frank with two simple sentences. “I’m going to miss him. He was the best friend I ever had.” And through his gentle unwitting eulogy, by the end the viewer also feels he now knows something about Frank and certainly shares the joys and sorrows of the handsome young narrator so brilliantly portrayed by Rennie.

     Hoolbloom’s film received numerous Canadian and international accolades. Critic Janis Cole of Point of View described the work as an "extraordinary experimental documentary" that is "as bold as the title implies" and a strong argument for the widespread dissemination of short films. And scholar Thomas Waugh in How Hollywood Portrays AIDS argued that the work was one of a  "great AIDS triptych," together with Hoolboom's later works Letters from Home (1996) and Positiv. 

     

*The alternative fantasies that Frank outlines are once again examples of a few of the tropes of gay pornography deconstructed also in films such as Francis Savel’s Équation à un inconnu (Equation to an Unknown) (1980) and Constantine Ginnaris’ short work Caught Looking (1991).