how do you know if you’re gay
by
Douglas Messerli
Paul Cooper (screenplay), Jeffrey D. Brown (director) What If I’m Gay? / 1987
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-wond 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.
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 a adult coming to terms with being gay after several
years of 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 their 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.
Even his unconventional friend, Allen (Evan Handler)
has a 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,
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.
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).
Ezra eases up and a sultry stillness cums over him, he lets his bottom know "I'm about to cum." He plunges his piece deep inside and unloads half his load.
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