Julio Dowansingh | Family Affair / 2023

open to nearly everything

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ernest Anemone (screenplay), Julio Dowansingh (director) Family Affair / 2023 [16 minutes]

 

What do you do when a film or casting director employs a gender-breaking actor to portray a gender-breaking character? Well, in my case at least, you watch the film even more closely aware of not only its themes but how those same subjects shift, ever so slightly, in the portrayal of a character that does not comport with the pronoun designation of the seeming assignment of the person performing that role. Does it really matter? Should we treat it as we often do with racial disparities such as attending a version of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, when the two young Renaissance Veronese teenagers are performed by a black Juliet and an Asian Romeo by simply ignoring what we know to be a factual discrepancy and concentrate on their acting instead of their race? In short, should we ignore gender, something Shakespeare’s audiences were asked to do in almost all of his work, as we are sometimes are asked to be color blind in contemporary theater productions? Or does the recognition of those gender and racial exceptions to our expectations add to the significance of the work itself? 

    These issues, I would argue, are central to Ernest Anemone’s and Julio Dowansingh’s short film Family Affair which begins with a mother named Beverly (Donna Vivino), wearing a dress with the words “Bite Me” stitched over her butt, who is sick and tired of being spoken to as a stereotypical aggressive single mother by an overweight effeminate black gay boy named LJ (Corey Barrow) who has come to pick up her son, Tanner, played by a then-female actor Claire D’Angelo, who looks to be a wanna-be lesbian and who later changed their gender pronoun to the they/them non-binary and their name to Bear D’Angelo. Bev is also evidently doing podcasts that, from the way she greets them on line, may or may not include chats with eager porn-minded males or maybe fellow females.  

     Tanner is on “his” (the pronoun assigned him by her/their role in the film) way to some secret mission which both LJ and later Tanner’s seemingly black lesbian friend Emily (Morgen McKynzie) arguing “isn’t going to end well” for him, and which he will come to regret. Tanner, incidentally, criticizes LJ, who is evidently doing a school project on curing cancer, for not wearing a suit and presenting a power-point presentation, while instead dressed in a floral shirt under a blue sleeveless vest.

      Their teacher (performed by the movie’s writer Ernest Anemone) arrives to class seemingly late, and announces that by a vote the science classroom skeleton has been named “boner.” Emily, meanwhile, dismissingly addresses a nearby gay boy as Simon, whose real name is Kevin, and who we see later dropping his small box of his planned panorama of figures. He seems just as unpopular as many a bullied high school gay boy, although Tanner seems to befriend him when he find the time.

     But Tanner has other things on his mind, phoning off and on all day the mysterious man he plans to meet up with and who himself suggests that Tanner should have revealed his plans to his mother Beverly, who as Emily predicts will murder him when she finds out, something Tanner hyperbolically proclaims as she has tried to do for the past 18 years of his life. Besides, telling his mom, texts Tanner, “would definitely complete her mental breakdown.”

    Meanwhile Tanner is approached by the cute school jock Mike (Luca R. Stagnitta) who wonders if he is planning on attending baseball practice after school, and saddened to hear that Tanner’s mother is still struggling with irritable bowel syndrome problems. He seems almost to have an unspoken crush on his fellow jock Tanner. Tanner promises to be at practice tomorrow for sure.

     We appear to have entered an LGBT queer story from other end of the alphabet, evident especially when his friend Emily drives Tanner finally to his visit to the offices of the man she plans to meet, greeted by a black receptionist who’s busy chewing celery as he explains that he doesn’t have answer for the question someone is posing to him on the phone, suggesting that they simply Google-it.

     The mysterious manager named Tommy (Dan Domingues) greets Tanner with a foreboding reminder that he’s told him to meet him in the parking lot, obviously not wanting to be seen together.

      Tanner’s response is that he wishes he might “stop acting as if they were criminals,” but Tommy is beginning to think “this is a big mistake.” Tanner reminds him yet again that “he can vote, he can join the military, I can decide…,” “This isn’t just about your age, Tanner,” Tommy insists.

      What’s going on here we’re forced to ask?; are these two, man and boy, having a secret affair: We are even further titillated when Tanner unzips the duffel bag he’s been hauling around the entire day, with Tommy immediately warning: “Whoa, not here. What are you nuts? We’ll go to my place.”

      In the very next scene it is the audio that bothers us, as the camera pans over a wall of photographs, so me of them of Tanner with Tommy’s arm around the younger boy. We hear a groan of “Ow! Can’t you just slow down, please?” followed by Tommy’s voice, “I’m doing my best. Be patient. Okay?”

     We soon get a glimpse of what is behind those words when we now see Tanner festooned in a glimmering white reflective-beaded dress. “How do I look?” “As beautiful as the day you were born,” answers Tommy, Tanner echoing “I love you too, Dad.”

      What follows is a drag number in a gay club in which, apparently, Tommy, a drag queen by night, performs, this time with his son. Into the club angrily strides Beverly, having been clued in to Tanner’s whereabouts by Mike, who has stopped by to see how she was.

     Tanner attempts to silence her certain-to-be-furious response, but “Big Bev,” as Emily has called her, is not to be quieted. Tommy explains that Tanner came to one of his shows and asked his father to teach him how to perform in drag. “What was I supposed to say?” Beverly’s first response is predictable, “I don’t know, how about I’m not gonna let my child dress up like a freak to perform for a bunch of drunk old men?”

      “Look, I’m good at baseball, right. Well, I’m good at this too,” Tanner intercedes.

      Eventually Bev admits that she does want to support her son. She just doesn’t want to lose him as she lost his father.

      Tanner reassures his mother that she won’t lose him and he loves her—a lot.

      “Make ‘em gag, sweetie,” she wishes well.

      Tommy adds, “You know, Bev, you’re the only woman I would’ve married.”

      Bev pauses for a moment before responding: “Ditto.”

    So the show goes on as the new Father-son duo dance to “Can’t Keep a Secret” as performed by Jacinta.

      This is the kind of story where everyone is so sexually and gender fluid we no longer care to pin them down to being one thing or another.

 

Los Angeles, September 11, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2025).

 

Keerthivasan B | Love’s Green Patch / 2024

bodies and beds

by Douglas Messerli

 

Keerthivasan B (screenwriter and director) Love’s Green Patch / 2024 [15 minutes]

 

This Indian Tamil-language production is a truly amateur work, with basically one set, evidently a dorm house on an Indian college campus, although that is never established, and we can’t quite be sure why the two boys Raja (Dhilip Khana) and Deva (Devakirhnan) are sharing a room in a building where an unwelcome friend (Mohamed Nafeel) occasionally visits, and is not made to feel welcome, particularly when he smokes. If nothing else, the boys never seem to be studying.

    The two boys are very close friends, sharing a single bed even though another bed lies at an angle to it close by. They are also very hands on, seen often as they lounge upon the bed, with arm around the other’s neck or a hand left lying on the other’s shoulder, the phenomenon of which their friend quite clearly notices either negatively judging their behavior or feeling a twinge of jealousy—we can’t be sure.

   The conversations are few since they spend most of their time on their cellphones, talking occasionally to one another as if reciting lines instead of communicating in natural manner. Their comings and goings, moreover, are episodic, announced by a movement to the other bed or an invitation for lunch or tea. And there are three major events in their life together as presented in this short movie.

     The first seems of minor importance. Raja wants to paint their room green, an odd color Deva argues. Who paints a room in green?

     In the second of the events, Raja breaks up with his would-be girlfriend (Vandhana Varghese) by simply answering her request to go out together by saying that he’d like to remain best friends with the possibility of a relationship at some time in the future. She gets the message and immediately leaves him.

     The slower minded, but more handsome Deva, later wonders why Raja has stayed single, noting that if someone wanted a relationship with him he’d be there, steadfastly waiting. But perhaps he

doesn’t quite mean what he’s saying since when Raja finally reports that he’s gay, it somewhat troubles him, particularly when their friend reenters to spot them laying beside one another, with Raja’s hand upon Deva’s body.

      Deva finally perceives what their close relationship might mean. And even when he rides with Deva on the latter’s motor scooter, his hands change from holding on to his friend to balancing them on back of the scooter. And finally, he gets up in the midst of one of their afternoon naps, leaves, and doesn’t come back until the next morning.

      Raja clearly notes the change in their friendship, and even when Deva joins him on the bed, he moves aside to give him more room, moving away even when Deva puts up his foot as if to reestablish the closeness they once maintained.

      Yet we perceive that Deva’s absence has signified a time of thinking about the situation. Is he perhaps now comfortable with the news of his dear friend’s sexuality? Or just perhaps, is he himself in love with his friend, without even knowing it?

     No clear answer to that latter question is given. But what Deva does finally offer Raja is like a tiny signifier of his faithfulness, a small patch of green paint he slathers not on their bedroom wall, but on the outside of the building itself.

      I don’t know what green might signify in East Indian culture, or in the Tamil language. But surely it must have, as it does in English, a notion of the restorative, of the tranquility of nature. Perhaps it even suggests, as it does in English, the idea of proceeding, as in a green light, a kind of sign that they might “go ahead” in their friendship, relationship, love—whatever it is. Certainly the English-language titles suggests it’s love.

 

Los Angeles, September 11, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2025).

 

Kyle Krieger | Sports! / 2018

court confessions

by Douglas Messerli

 

Eduardo Sanchez-Ubanell (screenplay), Kyle Krieger (director) Sports! / 2018 [5 minutes]

 

Eduardo Sanchez-Ubanell and Kyle Krieger’s short comic film is about as simple-minded as a film can get without totally alienating is viewers.

    Zach (Zack Graves) and Eduardo (Sanchez-Ubanell) are unlikely roommates who are about as different—at least on the simple level that this work takes character—as possible, the muscle-rippled Zach being obviously a sportsman, while the scrawny, somewhat effeminate Eduardo is, well we don’t really know what he is since he’s presented simply as a physical stereotype.

    In this case as Zach goes off to play some hoops with his straight friend Cody (Cody Callahan), Eduardo insists that he tag along, something that Zach is not at all happy with.

    His reasons soon become apparent. Eduardo is a sissy when it comes to making his way down the basketball court. His first shot at the hoop is so far off that he might as well have closed his eyes, although with a little coaching from his roommate, he amazingly puts the second shot in the hoop (maybe because he uses the limp wrist method).

    Embarrassed to even be there with Eduardo, when Cody shows up, Zach suggests his friend stand in the corner without moving, the empty-headed roommate obeying him like a little-leaguer in baseball being sent out by the coach forever to right field.

     Finally, when Zach tosses him the ball, instead of shooting he instinctively throws it over to Cody. But Eduardo is not totally dumb, quickly realizing that Zach hasn’t told his straight friend he’s queer.

     Given Eduardo’s little pep talk about how important it is to speak out about one’s sexuality, Zach finally admits to his friend that he’s gay. Cody could care less; as the online reviewer Cyd Zeigler for OutSports puts it: “giving the Heisman to gay-sports stereotypes for a couple nice moments…Cody shows that, no, straight athletes don’t give a crap if you’re gay. But every once in a while, it’s not hard for them to figure it out.”

      When Eduardo explains that he’s gay too, Cody laughs, commenting that “Ahh, no I could tell.”

      Bit Eduardo goes back to being a dumb: “I could be straight right? People say I give off these really masculine vibes.”

      Cody, fortunately, has the last line: “Yeah, sure. You’ve also been checking out my ass all day.”

      I guess a chuckle is the highest rating I can give this short movie.

 

Los Angeles, September 10, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2025).

Jake Jonez and Emily Erdelyan | Touchdown / 2025

hike

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jake Jonez (composer and performer), Jake Jonez and Emily Erdelyan (directors) Touchdown / 2025 [3.47 minutes] [music video]

 

Actor and comedian Jake Jonez, famed for his video series with Jonez and Aaron Goldenberg, Mean Gays Invite You Over for Some Fun,” issues the music video Touchdown.

    If you just heard the lyrics you might imagine that it was the product of some hyperventilated high school sports star singing to all the girls of his school. But Jonez, as you may already know, is most definitely gay, and as the visual elements of this video make clear, the quarter back in this game is speaking to all the boys, in particular to one of his team mates when he sings lyrics such as these below

    Jonez comes strutting out with his backup chorus, hips swaying with homosexual lust; he kisses his locker mate, and lays him down right on the field. It’s pretty clear where this is going, and if his boyfriend ever tries to go back to girls, Jonez will come swinging for him with a baseball bat, knowing only too well,

“I'm sexy, I'm cute, I'm popular to boot

I'm wanted, I'm hot, I'm everything you're not

I'm bitchin', great hair, the boys all love to stare

Who am I? Just guess

Guys wanna touch my”

…

“Go tell your mom about me, you know I'm sticking around

I know you play the field, but I'm your touchdown

Baby, can't you see? You'll miss this, you're out of bounds

I know you play the field, but I'm your touchdown”

…

 

“(Night two) You fucked me in the back seat of your car

Flip this dime, I want your body on top of mine”

…

 

“I know ya told Amber that you loved her in May

But baby, it's October, and the leaves are all grey

If your dad found out, we know he'd be pissed

But nothing ever felt this good on your lips”

…

“Down, down, down, down, down, down, I'm your touchdown

(I'm your touchdown, yeah, I'm your touchdown, I'm your touchdown

Yeah, I'm your touchdown

I'm your touchdown)”

“I'm sexy, I'm cute, I'm popular to boot

I'm wanted, I'm hot, I'm everything you're not

I'm bitchin', great hair, the boys all love to stare

Who am I? Just guess

Guys wanna touch my (I'm your touchdown)”

Los Angeles, September 10, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2025).

 

Edwin Brienen | Cruising Ballet / 2022

dance of desire

by Douglas Messerli

 

Edwin Brienen (director) Cruising Ballet / 2022 [16 minutes]

 

It’s early evening when a boy in white pants begins to trudge up and down the sidewalks of a Berlin park. Another bearded man takes a view of the highly graffitied bathroom, and a man, having driven to the park, walks his pug. The performers of this dance of desire are named at the film’s end: Peto Coast, Lucky Joe, Gregor, and Casper the dog.

      The bearded man stands by a tree while the white pants wanders. Although no one speaks, the noises of the late evening are almost unbearable as the bells of a local cathedral ring out and an engine, perhaps of some park-grounds keeper, roars into action, soon falling into a kind of rising and falling rhythm. The bearded man notices the dog and pets him.

       When the pet owner moves in closer to the bearded man, the latter puts his hand momentarily on his crotch, but soon drops it, the dog lover smiling and moving off. It is far too early yet for serious business.

     As darkness begins to fall, the camera itself becomes a cruising figure moving stealthily through the park foliage to seek out, once more, the white pants of the walker. We now observe everything from ground level, the pants being passed by the sneakers of the bearded man. The feet stop and the white pants leans up against a tree to take in a drag from his cigarette. The ground his covered with trash, pamphlets, smashed paper cup and other pieces of plastic debris. A used condom hangs from a branch.

       Under the park lights we glimpse only the outlines of their faces as they each stand in wait. Once more the white pants slowly approaches the bearded man, pauses and smiles before he moves off. It has become a dance. No one dare approach the other directly, but circle, seemingly weighing their own desires against the imagined desire of the other. But there is also a sense of evaluation going on: are you the man I’m looking for this evening, can you succeed in providing me with pleasure, are you willing to complete what you begin?

       Now in a car, the bearded man drives off to a spot near the Brandenburg Gate. Meanwhile, the boy in white pants visits a public bathroom, noticing the same bearded man from the park coming out of another cubicle. Following one another like animals, they wander down some of the brick halls that seem to be interlinked with the toilet, moving deeper and deeper into the bowels of the construction before they briefly kiss, but still pull away and circle one another in a final check-out of one another.

 

      Finally, the boy in white pants kneels, pulls down the bearded man’s pants and begins sucking his cock. There is no wild expression of joy on either of their faces, no look of ecstasy upon ejaculation. The act is simply completed as the boy stands, puts his mouth briefly around the bearded man’s chin, pulls away, and walks off.

       This pas de deux is completed.

 

Los Angeles, September 26, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2023).

Michael Hyman | Billy's Blowjobs / 2017

the beginning or the end

by Douglas Messerli

 

Michael Hyman (screenwriter and director) Billy's Blowjobs / 2017 [17 minutes]

 

Imagine if the figure in Andy Warhol’s iconic figure of 1964, DeVeren Bookwalter in Blowjob, instead of facially expressing his ecstatic satisfaction from the sexual act being performed on his nether parts, spent the entire time instead on describing his prior experiences and the current voyeuristic movie being made of him at the very moment while insisting his sucking partner stop paying attention to his words and attend to his cock!

     After all, Billy (Wilson Cruz) has been coming to the same out-of-view spot against a fence behind which the LA subway now runs for many years, the cries of pleasure, the many fellow groan and moans having been lost in silence to time. He is the last man standing in the old fields of pleasure, checking his watch and even that of his fellationist. “We are the last people left on earth,” declares Billy, “except for that kid over there who’s had me under surveillance from so far away.   

      God knows, Billy has tried to stop, to give it all up and leave the degradation of his life. But he simply can’t despite the fact that his current sucker chews his cock just as often as he pleasurably sucks, and clearly isn’t giving him the satisfaction that he wants.   

     As Billy argues, “I hate to be a buzzkill for your happy experience down there, whoever you are down there, but I must speak. I must speak to feel less alone.”

     Of course, over the years, that’s been Billy’s major problem. He’s never bothered to know “whoever you are down there” was. Billy clearly isn’t satisfied because all of his life was about anonymous sex, the signifier of his nightly events. And now, talking up a storm, he isn’t even communicating to the last of his cocksuckers, the word fully expressing its many meanings.

     As Billy himself expresses it, “This is tough work,” followed soon after, by the sound of footsteps rushing off, the cum having been offered and the devotee having received its offerings, speeding into oblivion, Billy calling after, “Thanks for the company.”

     Alone, after Billy’s “brief encounter,” he invites the surveillance operator over. It takes some doing, the young boy, Paul (Jason Caceres) not being able to even comprehend that he might now be invited over to participate in what he has so long been witnessing. But Billy is, after all desperate.

     Finally, the boy with a camera, moves over to the idol, Billy, taking his place as all the others have, squatting before their master.

     Billy begins to head off, but the boy admits that it’s taken whatever nerve he has to come over to him. The boy argues he’s not like the others just looking for cheap thrills. He’s alone. And slowly, for a few moments, they play a Pinteresque game of why the boy is “here” instead of “there” where he has been. “You’re too young. You’re too cute. Why are you here?”

     Paul answers, “You’re too hot. Why are you here?”

   But when Billy asks the question over once again, and the boy answers in highly metaphorical language: “Because I don’t want to become just another shadow. Out past midnight running away from himself.”

      Even Billy, the rhetorician, can’t comprehend those words.

     When Billy asks, “Why have you had me under surveillance for two weeks?” Paul counters, “Why have you allowed yourself to be under surveillance for two weeks?”

    The two have established a kind of rapport about which Billy admits “This could be the end of something or the end of something. Or the exact reverse.”

      Eventually, Paul admits to Billy, “I get the feeling you’re not the kind of man who’s not going to hurt me as all the others have.”

      Paul continues, “I’m not just looking for cheap thrills,” Billy again repeating what you might almost describe as a desperate mantra: “This could be the beginning of something or the end of something. Or the exact reverse.”

       But when Paul goes down on him, Billy joking, “try not to chew,” we know it is the same old, same old. Paul is nothing but another of the endless sexual encounters that Billy has had over the years. And he has converted the boy into yet another reason to remain at the nowhere spot where he meets up with the endless parade of men who he never truly comes to know and soon after doesn’t want to know. This is but a continuation of Billy’s excuses for the uncomplicated, anonymous sex through which he has so long survived.

       The only hope this film provides is that after another subway passes and Billy cums, we observe the two walking off together. Maybe. Perhaps. But this seems to be both the beginning and the end.

        Forgive me if I continue to be a cynic. Billy is interested, it seems to me, only in satisfaction, not in love. 

 

Los Angeles, August 13, 2023

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2023).