where is love?
by
Douglas Messerli
Christopher
Larkin and Joseph Coencas (screenplay), Christopher Larkin (director) A Very
Natural Thing / 1974
Frank
Ripploh (writer and director) Taxi zum Klo (Taxi to the Toilets)
/ 1981
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 5th 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.
As I am about to celebrate with my husband
our 51st anniversary early in 2021, it 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 in Madison,
Wisconsin where I was attending the university, the lure of almost daily sex
with other nubile male bodies was a lure 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 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.
Even from the beginning of A Very
Natural Thing we quickly perceive
that
the two gay men, David (Robert Joel) and Mark (Curt Gareth), who meet one night
at a gay bar, are basically incompatible, and we wince a bit as David soon
pushes their night of good sex into a more serious relationship.
In the first scene of the film we have
seen David being released from his vows as a monk from a Schenectady, New York,
monastery. The night he meets Mark he has driven down to New York City to visit
his long-time gay friend Alan (Jay Pierce). He is, in short, a man attracted to
if not still committed to spiritual beliefs, a man who has lived an ordered
life of commitment, if only to the church. And he soon becomes a public-school
teacher, which obviously requires a new dedication to some of the most
important of normative cultural values, the education of the product of those
heterosexual unions. As a teacher, just as we suspect of Mark, he has of
necessity closeted off his sexual life from his daily job.
Mark, a businessman, it is clear, picks
up tricks mainly as an exciting alternative from his overly regularized
schedule which, we suspect, he uses as a kind of relief valve from the highly
formalized world into which he is locked. To David he even admits that at times
he does also have sex with women, suggesting that his very societal role
demands some restrictions to his central gay attractions.
Clearly, however, the sex with David has
been highly enjoyable, and surprisingly, perhaps even to himself, he asks if he
can see him again after returning from a two-week trip to Cleveland to see his
parents.
David, it is apparent, is already quite
hooked, yelling out a greeting to a stranger on the street who just happens to
be wearing the same kind of suit coat Mark has worn.
They do get together upon Mark’s return
and before long are enjoying weekly outings together at Coney Island, the zoo,
museums and elsewhere, even rather openly sentimentally rolling down hills. And
David has begun asking the kinds of questions which Mark dismisses by dubbing
David as his “fucking romantic friend.” Playing with the popular culture of the
day, the writers call up the Erich Segal film Love Story from 1970, Mark
responding to his friend’s predictable question “Do you love me?” with the
comeback, “Love means never having to say you’re in love.”
Yet despite Mark’s obvious resistance,
David pushes the issue until we observe him moving in with his new lover short
before he begins cooking, house
cleaning, and gardening. Mark is neither a deep thinker nor a natural talker,
and the tensions within him build up, despite David’s attempts to bring the
problems into the open. It begins with him picking up a boy waiting outside the
subway stop, and soon after expands into late-night walks in Central Park and
other inexplicable absences, not so vastly different from the life of any
heterosexual married partner.
The
causes for his cheating, if you want to call it that, are something quite different,
however, from simply tiring of one’s wife. On the contrary Mark is still
sexually very attracted to the man waiting at home. For the reasons I’ve
outlined above and simply because of living outside of the constraints of
normative values, queer life almost demands alternatives, what Mark and others of
his kind describe as a “perfect relationship that still permits a couple to
live separate lives.”
Even David’s friend speaks of this in
similar terms, a slightly older man explaining that he has grown used to his lover
demanding outside sex and permits it, except if he were to see a beautiful
young face more than once in his lover’s bed, whereupon he would quickly join
him to break up any false romantic attachments. There is almost a kind of
cynicism in this kind of “give and take” concept which instead of entailing
compromises consists of a “commitment with limitations.”
Yet even David comprehends those pulls in
his companion, agreeing to explore new possibilities with him on Fire Island, where,
however, the moment David wanders off with another man, Mark becomes jealous,
and when Mark suggests group sex, David breaks away unable to continue with the
anonymous groping of strangers.
Their differences demand they reluctantly
break up, with Mark, at first, half-heartedly attempting to lure David back
through sex, David perceiving all along it is still a kind of test, a trap that
puts him at a distant embrace without the deeper emotional attachment he seeks.
Of course, heterosexuals also feel these
pushes and pulls. It is no accident that nowadays gay marriages sometimes last
longer than heterosexual ones, in part because we have been forced to be more
honest, as Larkin’s film makes clear, about these various issues. It is hard to
imagine that one night or even several in someone else’s arms would end in
immediate divorce as it appears almost always to end in the cinema romances of husbands
and wives, male and female.
And ultimately, in this very optimistic work,
David finds someone with whom he is sexually in love and to whom he can also
talk in Jason (Bo White), a photographer who was formerly in a heterosexual marriage
with a child, and who has had to struggle with these very issues in order to
come out. Accordingly, he remains close friends with his wife, is committed to participating
in the Gay Pride March, and puts the very words that one might imagine David
wanting to hear in his mouth “Do you love me? “Why not move in together?” etc. by
requesting them instead the standard smile alert: “cheese.”
Only it is now David who has become
skeptical, determined this time to not to force commitment upon himself or
someone else, but base their future not on their needs but their wants. The
wait-and-see attitude this time around, bodes well for what the audience which cannot
help but to perceive as a necessary coupling as the two skip naked through the
Cape Cod surf.
Not surprisingly, particularly given David’s
own discomfort about the true meaning of what an annual march might mean and
the film’s seeming argument for a marriage-like commitment in a time of new
liberations, A Very Natural Thing was not so “naturally” well-received.
Yet its positive message was something totally unavailable previously—when the
vast majority of LGBTQ films ended either in suicide or with the heroes (and
studios) hiding or transforming their sexuality into something else—or a few
years later with AIDS looming over the horizon.
In later films, moreover, these questions
were often simply shuffled under the table because of AIDS, with more
traditional marriages not only able to protect the LGBTQ figures from disease
but finally being embraced by the society at large. Only a handful of films
between the 1970s and early 1980s could substantially take up these issues.
Sadly, the director of this work committed
suicide in 1988. One only hopes the cause was not because he had not found a
life-time commitment or was suffering from AIDS, both of which seem possible
given the time and the issues his film raises.
Ripploh’s film is so similar in some
respects that it seems almost uncanny. The central figure of Taxi to the
Toilets, Frank (Ripploh) like David in Larkin’s film, is by day a
schoolteacher. But in this case he is the more promiscuous of the couple, even
taking his student’s homework to read with him into his toilet stops as he
waits for a cock to be shoved into a near-by glory hole. What’s more, as you
might expect in a German-made film, Frank is rather strongly into leather and light
S&M.
Given Bernd’s preference that they move
to the country to raise food and perhaps a few animals instead of remaining in
the city, Frank does briefly attempt to limit his sexual appetite—but without
success. Most nights his lover is left alone, like Larkin’s David, hugging the
pillow instead of Frank. One of the most outrageous lines of the film is Frank’s
campy statement—once he has laced up into his leather gear and found his prophylactics
and cocaine—“Don’t wait up. I’ll be late tonight.”
Another clever moment of this work
consists of Frank attempting to tutor at home one of his students not at doing
well in the class, while in the other room Bernd and their transgender friend
watch a German educational film warning young boys about pervert pedophiles. As
Frank attempts to help the boy in arithmetic, the child hands him some of his
metal toys before he suggests they play “horsey,” as Frank does everything
possible to return his student’s attention to the lesson at hand.
Despite the film’s jocularity, however,
Ripploh’s work points in the opposite direction of Larkin’s optimism. As Frank’s
adventures accelerate, for example, he meets up with a gas station attendant whose
number he had scribbled down in one of his student’s lesson books earlier in
the film. The attendant (Peter Fahrni, also listed as an assistant director,
perhaps a relative given that my Swiss great-grandfather shared the same name)
plays out the humiliating acts of beating Frank across his back before pissing
over his entire body.
More significantly, attending an annual
drag ball for which this year Frank dresses somewhat like Scheherazade and
Bernd as a sailor, the story-teller director misses his midnight departure only
to arrive the next morning at his school still in costume, Bernd having left
him in anger for all their missed opportunities to live a more regularized
life.
Obviously, Frank has committed a kind of
symbolic suicide by now having lost his mode of employment on top of his
increasing ill health. Giving up on all sense of order, he hands each of his students
a single die (the singular of dice), encouraging her or him to roll for the
chance of performing the worst acts she or he might imagine committing,
including beating up one another, destroying the classroom, and tearing off one
another’s clothing, which the camera catches them accomplishing before cutting,
for the film’s last scene, to show Bernd, evidently at a nearby petting zoo,
holding a lamb in his arms.
*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.
Los
Angeles, September 25, 2020
Reprinted
from World Cinema Review and My Queen Cinema blog (September
2020).
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