Gregory J. Markopoulos | Ming Green / 1966

portrait of a film director

by Douglas Messerli

 

Gregory J. Markopoulos (director) Ming Green / 1966

 

There is nothing specifically “gay” about the great queer director Gregory J. Markopoulos’ 7-minute film Ming Green, and yet as a visually stunning tour of his Greenwich Village apartment with the knowledge that he would eventually have to leave it, it is perhaps one of his most personal movies. And anyone who is interested in his innovative queer works will want to watch this beautiful film over several times both for insights about his cinematographic art and for further information about the director himself.

    In a lecture delivered at Kent State University in June of 1968, Markopoulos himself has nicely explained both the title and the occasion of his filming:

 

“…The reason the film is called Ming Green is because it’s about a very beautiful apartment, a very simple apartment, that I had in New York for about six or seven years, where most of these films were edited. The apartment was painted Ming green, which is sort of a Chinese-y color, and that’s why the film is called Ming Green. Stan Brakhage gave me the idea. He said mine was the only apartment in New York City that he could stand to come and visit, because it was very, very quiet. The apartment itself is the subject of the film, which took about two days to do. And the important thing to understand about it is that it wasn’t preplanned in any way. Not even notes. It was simply that I wanted to make a document of this particular apartment, because I was giving it up to go and live in Europe.”

 

     He continues, explaining how it was filmed:

 

“The important thing about this film is that all the editing was done in the camera itself. As you already probably know, I have a system in which I edit using single frames and it gets very, very complicated, as in Twice a Man, or Himself As Herself. In Ming Green all these single frames, all these superimpositions were done in the camera itself. This was not only important because it meant that the filmmaker had to work in a very concentrated fashion to get whatever it was that he wanted onto film. It also meant, economically, that this film, which otherwise might have cost about $200, cost fifty dollars, because once all the footage was sent to the lab, you had a completed film. All you had to do was to add the soundtrack.

     I think this is a wonderful way of making films and I think that someday I will make a whole feature-length film, a film over sixty minutes, using this particular method. It’s a very personal film, as you’ll see, and because you won’t have an opportunity to see it a second time or even a third time, which would be the proper way of seeing a film, I should tell you that there are some very personal things in it—some photographs of my family, for instance. The film oddly enough ends with a photograph of my mother, who after I made it died of cancer. It was an uncanny thing, because I had no prior idea about using the photograph, and at the end the image sort of blurs.”

 

    The film actually begins just outside of the apartment with a picture of the neighboring tree underneath of which are lawn chairs that are overlapped and superimposed upon each other, continuing for while even when we enter into the apartment itself. Interfused with these images is a vague, almost haunting-like view of the now almost reverse negative view of the outside from within set against the bright orange curtains and, soon after, the red-lacquered chair, bright oppositional colors that set off the calm darkness of the room even more notably that any light from the garden below. The color is minimal but stunningly bright, like the extremely red rose that appears throughout many of the later sequences.

      Even more notably are what I would describe as the pulses of this film, a pause in image to a momentary darkened screen on occasion before returning to the room itself, as if the apartment were itself were a being, breathing in and out, closing and opening its eyes.

      Soon a record seems to fall into place playing “Träumen” (“Dreams”) from Richard Wagner's Five Songs for Mathilde Wesendonck as sung by Kirsten Flagstad. It is almost as if the music now invites us on the tour of the room. Kristin Jones, writing in Millennium Film Journal in 1998, fully catalogues many of the images of personal significance we now experience:

 

“One is a photographic nude hanging between the windows which are now shown with the curtains drawn—by Edmund Teske, an acquaintance of the filmmaker. A large, pink, artificial rose seen standing by a fireplace in another composition was a gift from three students who had attended a lecture by Markopoulos at their college. Three record albums are also seen propped up on a table like works of art. Ming Green is dedicated to Stan Brakhage…and the luminous vertical streak to the right of the frame in another shot of the green interior is a strip from Brakhage’s Mothlight.”

 

    To me this arrangement of objects looks very much like a small shrine that one might find in the home of an Asian dedicated to the memory of a dead one; in this case the objects standing as emblems of significant events in the past.

    Moreover, as the music grows increasingly intense the focus of the film more and more becomes the artificial rose Jones describes as being pink, but alternates as bright red, growing larger, with other objects being superimposed and seemingly projecting their forces upon it.

   The director briefly flashes us with a view of his library shelf, containing a volume, obviously hand-bound, of Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood, Thomas Mann, and Nikos Kazantzakis.

    Jones nicely provides a tour of the rest of the images, some of them, such as the photographs, difficult for the inexperienced eye to even glimpse let alone to recognize the significance of:

 

“[The bookshelf episode is] followed by a slowly blinking close-up of a drum-shaped, scarlet-and-gold Christmas ornament hanging above. This trinket echoes a drumming wind-up toy in Christmas U.S.A. (1949) one of Markopoulos' early black-and-white psychodramas; here, however, it is the image itself that beats, in a beautiful visual pun that underlines the musicality of Markopoulos' editing technique. An array of framed photographs on the walls of the apartment glimpsed in the remaining minutes of the film includes an image of Paul Kilb, the protagonist of Twice a Man; a snapshot of Markopoulos as a child held by his father; and a portrait of Clara Hoover, who represented Io in The Illiac Passion (1964-67), and who was also a valuable patron, providing Markopoulos with the funds to complete Twice a Man.”

    A slightly disheveled but nonetheless folded white shirt hovering upon the drum midair before the photographs. The director finally returns us to the orange drapes against which he imposes a houndstooth pattern of a nearby blanket, before panning to the image of his mother Maria who had died of cancer in January 1966, shortly before this film was made.

   And so we come to a close of a truly personal tour of the artist’s apartment, a room which we now feel, very much as Brakhage has proclaimed, is one we might feel comfortable in visiting. Here, as in Bliss (1966) and Gammelion (1968), Markopoulos, through color and composition, makes rooms themselves seem to come alive, revealing the breathing, thinking, dreaming, sexual being who lived within.

 

Los Angeles, November 14, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (November 2025).

     

 

Yasujirō Ozu | 小早川家の秋 (The End of Summer) / 1961

the end of the family

by Douglas Messerli

 

Kōgo Nada and Yasujirō Ozu (screenplay), Yasujirō Ozu (director) 小早川家の秋 (The End of Summer) / 1961

 

As are so many of Ozu’s great films, The End of Summer is a drama grounded in the family, in this case the Kohayagawa family, headed by the elderly Manbei Kohayagawa (Ganjirō Nakamura), who established the sake company now run by his son-in-law, Hisao (Keiju Kobayashi). Manbei lives with his eldest daughter Fumiko (Michiyo Aratama) and Hisao, who have noticed that recently the widowed Manbei has been disappearing for long parts of each day. When Hisao sends his clerk to tail his father-in-law, he discovers that Manbei has been returning to his former mistress, Saski Tsune (Chieko Naniwa).

     Fumiko is furious over her father’s behavior and tells him so, angry particularly since she had long witnessed her mother’s tears when she was young; but the old man denies his actions. Ozu, it is clear, rather approves of his elderly character’s pleasures, particularly in the manner he shoots the joyful Manbei rushing off to Sasaki, and through the gentle ministrations of Sasaki herself. The only slightly sour aspect to their relationship might be seen in the behavior of Sasaki’s selfish daughter, Yuriko, who may or may not be Manbei’s offspring. Yuriko, who dates mostly American men, insists that the old man should buy her a fur stole.

    Manbei’s other daughter, Noriko (Yoko Tsukasa) lives in Osaka with Aikiko (Setsuko Hara), Manbei’s daughter-in-law—whose husband, a professor, has died—and her young son, Minoru. Noriko works as an office clerk, while Aikiko helps out in an art gallery. Manbei has asked his brother-in-law, Kitagawa Yanosuke (Daisuke Katō) to help in finding husbands for both, but despite his attempts, neither finds the men to whom he introduces them suitable. Aikiko would prefer to remain unmarried, and Noriko is more interested in a friend, Teramoto (Akira Takarada), who, as the film begins, moves to Sapporo to begin a career as a professor.

  Accordingly, for the first third of this film, we encounter these various figures without much truly happening. They meet, go about their daily activities, and, most importantly—as in any Ozu film—talk with one another, sometimes quite obliquely, but, on occasion, straightforwardly, expressing their worries and fears over teak, sake, and food. One might describe the dining table, bar stools, and restaurant books, in fact, as the major props of this and other Ozu films; the characters mostly sitting throughout. Even Noriko and Aikiko speak to one another in a position of what we might describe as hunkering.

     Yet for all the uneventfulness of The End of Summer, we learn a great deal about family members through their gestures and acts; and we come to realize that despite their fairly conservative upbringings, they appear to be coming to terms with the modern world.

     It is no accident surely that the eldest of Manbei’s daughters is the most traditional, and the most angered by her father’s sexual activities; yet even she, after she has vented her feelings, can only laugh at his insistence that he is leaving the house to make a business deal.

    Aikiko, although dressing traditionally, encourages Noriko to make up her own mind about love, and refuses to even attend the dinner appointments with Yanosuke’s businessman friend. Yuriko, as I have suggested, is already almost entirely Westernized.

     At the same time, although this family unknowingly is in the process of breaking up, they come together over Manbei’s first heart attack and, soon after, his sudden death. And when they do gather we recognize their great love for Manbei and for one another, while the viewer, in turn, comes to feel emotionally involved with them.

     By summer’s end, the Kohayagawa clan must merge their company with a rival, while Noriko leaves to join her young man in Sapporo, forcing her close confidant, Aikiko, to find for herself. Even as we see the family, for the last time, in traditional procession to the crematorium where the patriarch’s body has been burned, we perceive—as Noriko and Aikiko, in conversation, trail for behind the others—that there may never again be such a full gathering of this family, that with the death of the father their deep familial ties have come undone.

 

Los Angeles, May 12, 2016 | Reprinted from World Cinema Review (May 2016).

Sidney Lumet | A View from the Bridge / 1962

london bridge is falling down

by Douglas Messerli

 

Norman Rosten (screenplay, based on the play by Arthur Miller), Sidney Lumet (director) A View from the Bridge / 1962

 

Obviously, it is not London Bridge in this American film based on the play by Arthur Miller, that is falling down, nor even Brooklyn Bridge near the shipping yards where the Carbone family lives and works. The bridge is a symbolic one, common to Miller’s dry literary conceits, representing Eddie Carbone’s (Raf Vallone) role as the bridge to his sister’s past through his caring for her daughter, Catherine (Carol Lawrence), and to his wife’s Sicilian roots given his invitation into their home of the immigrant relatives, Rodolfo (Jean Sorel) and Marco (Raymond Pellegrini).    

     Carbone also begins the drama as a human link at least, if not a bridge, between the dock workers, administrative brutes, and the workers’ lawyer, Alfieri (a role excellently acted by Morris Carnovsky). And we quickly perceive Eddie as a solid edifice who supports and loves his family, alternately teasing and attempting to please his adoring but increasingly troubled wife, Beatrice (Maureen Stapleton, in a strangely muted performance that more closely resembles the acting style of Jean Stapleton in the TV series All in the Family than Maureen’s usually endearing outsiders).

    The trouble is that this human bridge is gradually falling apart, his emotional rivets slowly being loosened by deep psychological yearnings of which the simple Italian workman is unaware. His role as protector to Catherine has, over the years—due to both his wife’s and the girl’s maternal sympathy and loving placation to his sometimes violent temperament—has grown into unspoken love for the niece, his “Madonna,” that is quietly smoldering into lust. 

     The arrival of his wife’s relatives, the ox-like, married Marco and the handsome blonde Southern-Italian Rodolfo, who quickly falls in love with the beautiful girl who is close to his own age, changes everything, and shifts the family dynamics so completely that Eddie is suddenly forced to perceive not just the impossibility of his unconsciously burning fantasies but that he is no longer a man in his prime. As nearly all of our major American dramatists, from O’Neill, Williams, Miller to Albee have made evident: sexual desire and aging are nearly always an incendiary mix.

      Director Sidney Lumet has done nearly everything he could to take Miller’s self-consciously claustrophobic, hot-house drama into the real world, spilling out crucial events into early 60’s derelict New York streets that reminds one a bit of Elia Kazan and Martin Scorsese. The scene in which Eddie literally trails after the couple, Rodolfo and Catherine, following them into a automat, insistently watching them as they enter a movie and, later, a dance club, adds texture and deeper dimensions to Miller’s stagey work, as we begin to wonder which one of the two is he really stalking, and imagine his emotional responses to the apparently innocent acts he witnesses. 

     And the final street battle between Marco and Eddie and Eddie’s suicide, with a curved metal lifting-hook, could not have been better dramatized. But the problem with Miller’s drama is that his simple-minded and brutish lead, Eddie, needs to be told, time and again, apparently, what his problem is—without him ever catching on—which puts nearly every character in the work in the position of verbally accosting him with the “facts,” as if each were required to take turns at playing a hack psychologist. Accordingly, although the audience catches on quite quickly to the heart of the matter, the drama requires that the “hidden reality” be restated over and over in sometimes yawn-inspired declarations.

   What is suggested in Miller’s script, without being fully developed by either the author or his commentators, is that Eddie is not just jealous of Rodolfo and desirous for his niece, but—in his macho conceptions of the handsome tenor, since he can dance and design dresses evidently with equal ease he views as a homosexual—that he, himself may have other latent desires as well. In the intense scene played-out as a demonstration to reveal to Catherine what Rodolfo “really is,” wherein Eddie plants a full kiss upon the kid’s lips, Eddie literally displays the sexual tensions from which he is suffering, as in the very next instant he attempts to embrace Catherine as well.* 

    But it is all too much to imagine that this brute of a man could possibly be so conflicted; and, besides, by this time we no longer care. He’ll never be able to figure it out and resolve any such psychologically complex concepts. The only thing he can imagine to ease his passions is to turn into a “rat,” turning in his wife’s illegal immigrant family members over to the authorities, much like a family member calling up ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) today. And even then, he cannot comprehend that in that act he himself has forever dirtied his name, not Marco or his neighbors, who he blames.                    

    Since the view from this collapsing Brooklyn bum reveals that he is ready to dump all those who he once supported into the dirty waters of the East River; and since the internal scenes were inexplicably shot in France, this film, about Italo-Americans, dubbed into both French and American-English, might as well have represented it’s view as emanating from a falling London Bridge. As The New York Times critic Bosley Crowther pointed out, “Mr. Miller’s longshoreman, unlike his salesman, is better off dead.” Yet that sounds dangerously close, for me, to a suggestion that as a closeted gay man Eddie might be better off dead.

     Still we can’t quite help ourselves wishing that in this south-borough version of West Side Story, Tony and Maria (Carol Lawrence’s most memorable film role) might escape as Rodolfo and Catherine to Manhattan, along with Beatrice and Marco, to start a new life: the singing duo might have easily discovered brain, heart, courage enough to carry on in Lumet’s The Wiz! Besides Rodolfo always wanted to see Broadway! Maybe he was more than a little bit gay after all.

 

*I suddenly remembered a related event wherein an acquaintance I’d made as a Freshman in 1965 at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee told me that he was reading Miller’s play, and was struck by the major character’s homosexuality. For years after, reading reviews and commentaries about the play, I found absolutely no mention about Eddie Carbone’s possible homosexuality. In hindsight, I can comprehend why. Perhaps the young friend was simply being a particularly astute reader— or perhaps he was trying to bring up another discussion, of which, in that year, I was yet quite innocent.

 

Los Angeles, May 14, 2015

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (May 2015).

 

 

Dave Fleischer | Any Rags? / 1932 [animated cartoon]

a big bag full of love

by Douglas Messerli

William Bowsky and Thomas Goodson (animation), Dave Fleischer (director) Any Rags? / 1932 [animated cartoon]

 

This cartoon, featuring a 1902 ragtime song for line dancers, was made when Bimbo and Betty were still a couple, whose best friend was Koko the Clown.

    Bimbo is a rag collector in this work, a long lost figure who used to wander the streets begging for old clothes, bit and pieces of fabrics, or anything else the tenant-dwellers might wish to dispose of. As usual Margie Hines provides Betty Boop’s memorable voice.

     Bimbo as rag picker clearly isn’t very picky, grabbing up anything he can, including stripping the clothes off of many of the people he passes, including a vagrant male, who is distraught for having had Bimbo take off his pants. At another point, a housewife sending unwanted possessions his way through the tenant-dwellers clothesline finds herself riding caught up in the line whereupon Bimbo strips her as well, something that in pre-code films was still comically possible.

     In one case, a wife tries to rid her husband of his old clothes, which as fast as she puts out for the ragpicker, he pulls back to wear for a few more years.

     Finally, an entire barrage of bowls, bottles, and buckets fall from the heavens, clonking out Bimbo so that he imagines he’s dead and gone to a better world, led on by a jazz playing angel where nearly all the neighbors now put things out on their ledges, including Betty, a cow who delivers presents him with can of milk, and even a fish presenting up a can of sardines, all for the garbage man.

     Betty, however, has nothing to give him, as her dress keeps dropping to expose her frilly bra. Finally, she does toss down a full bag which Bimbo tosses into his cart, which now attracts an entire chase of feral cats.

     Bimbo now moves on, himself playing a jazz trumpet rendition of the “any rags” song, one of the hep cats joining in.

     Several animal figures are now gathered into a group waiting for Bimbo to arrive and auction off his daily haul. Koko the Clown here plays a sissy man who, shouts out “75 dearie,” purchasing a statuette of Atlas holding up the world.

     Finally, Betty herself pops up out of one of the bags that goes for 99 cents, Bimbo awarding her a kiss as all the bits of furniture and junk join in a dance, the two B’s rolling off in the cart, which overturns to create a house replete with all the goods left over, including a dog returning home to Betty, now the happy housewife.

 

Los Angeles, November 13, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (November 2025).

Joseph L. Mankiewicz | The Quiet American / 1958

a fable of faith

by Douglas Messerli

 

Joseph L. Mankiewicz (screenwriter, after the novel by Graham Greene, and director) The Quiet American / 1958

 

Mankiewicz’s The Quiet American begins well enough, with Michael Redgrave as the British reporter Fowler endowed with an even drier and more intense wit than Michael Caine in the same role in the later film. Although not a subtle actor, the heavily decorated World War II hero, Audie Murphy seems like a near perfect Pyle. And, if she is not quite as beautiful as Do Thi Hai Yen’s Phuong, Giorgia Moll has a quiet elegance that makes her quite believable as the woman torn between the two radically different lovers.

      Although the version’s presentation of General Thè and Pyle’s relationship too him is so vague that it is hard, at times, to know what is to made of Pyle’s “third force,” and, indeed, throughout this film it seems more like a crackpot idea that having any possible meaning within the 1950s French Indochine world. In fact, Pyle seems throughout this work more like a bumbling Candide than a possibly dangerous force, and as such seems, at moments, acts like he should be rewarded “the girl.”

       But that is just the problem with Mankiewicz’s infuriating vision; he has taken Greene’s ambiguous political tale and turned it into a simplistic love story, where Fowler, out of his jealousy for losing Phuong, coupled with his Old World cynicism, is manipulated by the Communists into believing the worst of Pyle. And ultimately the director manipulates the audience into believing that Pyle was just that: a bumbling American Candide who is truly innocent. In short, this version takes all Greene’s outrage and turns in on its head, suggesting that the Americans of the period not only seemed guileless but actually were innocent.

       What we are left with, accordingly, is a kind of moral fable, wherein we perceive that the believer without values ends up with nothing, with no moral ground and no girl. Indeed, awarded a divorce by his wife and permitted by his London paper to remain in Viet Nam, this Thomas Fowler will surely die in Viet Nam in complete isolation, instead of staying on to report the truth as Greene’s figure does in the cinematic remake.

       Not only is this work dishonest but it is made from what might have been a powerful political statement into a little moral fable about faith. There has always been something openly crass about Mankiewicz’s films—the hang-them from the rafters nastiness of All About Eve, the stagey Southern gothic-ness of Suddenly, Last Summer, and the just awful travesty of Cleopatra—but why he bothered to convert Greene’s anti-American investigation into a pro-American diatribe, argued, moreover, by the local loyalist French police detective, is simply beyond reason. This work simply demanded a new and better adaptation—and fortunately got it.

 

Los Angeles, March 15, 2017

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2017). 

 

Jeffrey D. Brown | What If I’m Gay? / 1987

 

how do you know if you’re gay?

by Douglas Messerli

 

Paul Cooper (screenplay), Jeffrey D. Brown (director) 

 

Yesterday, January 6th—one of the most frightening days in American democracy when Trump supporters dared to attempt to take over the US Capitol Building to reassert their fantasy that this sick being had actually won an election he had massively lost—I still took time out to watch another queer movie, realizing that at this fraught time it was more necessary than ever before to record the history of the LGBTQ community as expressed through cinematic representations. Although the rights of lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, transsexuals, and those questioning of unsure of their identities were not specifically being attacked on this day, we all know that if the people who support Trump and other such rightists might have their way, all of our hard-won rights would be stripped, and we would return to the days in which we had to hide and cower rather than speak out freely about our existence.

     It was appropriate, I’d argue—although like much of what I do, it was simply a matter of coincidence—that I chose to view the 1987 45-minute film, What If I’m Gay? directed by Jeffrey D. Brown. As I began to view this work, in between tracking the horrors of what I was witnessing on television, I felt that I’d seen this story—about a young high school student suddenly coming to the realization that he might be gay and having to face his suddenly hostile former friends daily in the hallways of his school—many times before. Indeed, in its slightly histrionic, almost melodramatic telling, the tale of the young soccer team captain, Todd Bowers (Richard Joseph Paul)—who is suddenly suspected of being gay by his teammates and long-time friends Kirk (Manfred Melcher) and Allen (Evan Handler) when they discover a nude muscleman magazine in his desk drawer—seemed almost derivative until, looking back on my essays, I perceived that in the 1980s when this film first appeared as a “CBS Schoolbreak Special” there were very few examples of what we can now recognize as a “coming out” movie featuring 17-year-olds. The significant models of those films such as Get Real and Edge of Seventeen were still a decade away.

     Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, LGBTQ films dealt mostly with adults who had long ago accepted their sexualities, and even in the few “coming out” movies such as the 1982 film Making Love the central figure was an adult coming to terms with being gay after several years of heterosexual marriage. In the one exception among the films I have already written about (albeit I have yet about 160 films from just 1980 yet to screen) which involve a young boy, The Flavor of Corn (1986), it was the younger who taught his older teacher about the potentiality of gay love rather than the other way around.

       In short, this film presents us with one of the few examples of the decade that would later become a genre of its own. Moreover, even the later young high school coming out movies usually involve the love of another teenager or slightly older youth. In Todd’s instance, not only is there not a potential or actual lover to lead him through his sexual searches, but he knows no one, as he laments later in his confession to a school counselor, who is gay, and has had no gay sexual experiences—which reminds me of my own situation at that time of my life.

      Only his unconventional friend, Allen (Evan Handler) has an uncle who went through a similar experience. In fact, given the title of this work we might suspect Allen as being gay before we—and his friends—discover that Todd may have gay desires. After all, Allen is the one who, contrary to the “normal” student behaviors, likes anchovies on his pizza, prefers jazz to rock ‘n roll, participates in no sports, and seems to be constantly skirting any date with the girl who likes him, Nancy (Gabrielle Carteris). Not only does he have the gay uncle, but he is the only male who remains friends with Todd despite the possibility that he will be now also defined as gay, attempting to help guide his friend with all too savvy advice, occasioned by the necessity of the script meant to help guide young viewers out of just such a cul de sac in which Todd seems to be trapped. Worried about their friend’s state of health, it is Allen and Nancy who are willing to break into his house to make sure that the depressed Todd has not attempted to commit suicide. It is Allen who offers the most profound advice of this not terribly profound movie, “You will never be happy until you come to terms with who you are.”

      But that, of course, is the nearly impossible choice, particularly when you have had no previous encounters with queer life. The most poignant question this work evokes is “How do you know if you are gay?” A question for which there is no answer. Todd, with rather remarkable equanimity given his previous rather violent attempts to prove to himself and others that his is a “normal” male—attempting to beat up his childhood friend, Kirk, with whom he grew up considering almost as brother and almost raping his girlfriend Debra (Viginia Rae Robinson).

       Todd begins to perceive that his obsession with a national football hero whose every move he followed, clipping out and saving newspaper articles about him was not just a young sports-loving boy’s interest in a hero’s achievements, but represented a kind of “crush” he had on the player, a feeling he still holds inside. His interest in muscle-building magazines like the one in which some of the figures are shown in the nude, the magazine his friends discover in his desk drawer, was akin, we perceive, to the numerous male beefcake magazines of the 1950s and early 1960s—publications which assert an interest in the health of the male body, but actually serve another purpose of satisfying the masturbatory desires of necessarily closeted homosexuals.

      He even comes to terms with his differences, realizing that his dating was an attempt to prove himself as a heterosexual. And the advice of his rather incompetent, I’d argue, school advisor who suggests Todd see a psychiatrist and have a conversation with his former best friend who he argues is perhaps now fearful that given their friendship he might also be harboring gay feelings, seems almost doomed to failure given the toxic masculinity of Kirk and the others like him. In this short film it appears that the solution to Todd’s difficulties is to reassure his friend of his heterosexuality as much as to demand acceptance for his own differences. 

       Unfortunately, in this well-meaning lesson to students on how to deal with their LGBTQ feelings (and obviously this work is focused almost entirely on gays, whose problems and solutions are not entirely the same as all the others of the community) represent rather simplistic answers which result in unbelievably favorable results. If nothing else, looking back on this work from five decades later, the work belies the dishonesty of the truism that “it gets better.” Certainly, if the 2019 French film PD (Fag) is to be believed, the same almost total and sudden ostracization of young men perceived by their classmates to be gay still today faces youth whose queerness is perceived or even falsely questioned in their teenage years. Easy answers which this film makes such as sit down and discuss it with your parents, are not always helpful; my loving father proclaimed he would send me (or any son, presumably meaning my totally straight, sports-loving brother) packing if he ever discovered us to be gay*; and even the gay country singer, Will Lexington, a regular character on the TV series Nashville (which ran from 2011-2018) was left on the side of the road when his father discovered his homosexuality. When Todd earlier dares to even take up the subject with his father, the elder admits that as a young man he too bullied a young gay boy he knew in school. When he asks Todd if it’s “anyone I know,” his son answers what all those who are secretly gay come to realize: “Naw, you don’t know him.” That’s the problem for all young LGBTQ people, they feel so isolated in the conventional worlds in which they often live, that they cannot even imagine anyone might know what they’re feeling.

     Todd remarks that he sat outside the gay and lesbian center for a long while before he decided to speak with this school counselor, another well-meaning figure who declares he’s glad the boy decided instead to seek him out. I’d suggest he might have fared better if Todd had entered the center, sat down, and had a long chat with perhaps the first gay person he had ever met.

     But you can’t help but like director Jeffrey D. Brown and writer Paul Cooper’s little movie for daring to take on this subject in a popular medium in 1987, the year which in October over 800,000 (some estimate closer to a million) men and women marched in Washington, D.C. for lesbian, gay, and bisexual rights, while earlier that same month the Minnesota Supreme Court, by refusing to hear a case, upheld that state’s anti-sodomy laws, which made any gay sexual act punishable by imprisonment.

 

*When I finally told my parents I was gay at the dinner table in Howard’s and my Washington, D.C. apartment, my father stood up and signaled my mother, who together got into their car and drove straight back to their home in Iowa. I was then 23; had it happened six years earlier, I do not think I could have handled it as well as I did in 1970, with the man who I have now lived with for 51 years.

 

Los Angeles, January 7, 2021

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (January 2021).