three short films on aids: the second wave
Mark Christopher (screenwriter and director) The Dead Boys' Club / 1992
Mike Hoolboom (screenwriter and director) Frank’s Cock / 1993
Tom Donaghy (screenwriter, based on his play, and director) The Dadshuttle / 1994, 1996 general release
Quite by accident, yesterday I watched three short films from the early 1990s that dealt, in various, ways with the issue of AIDS. What is particularly interesting to find such a cluster of films from 1992 through 1994 is that this came several years after the intense commentaries of the 1980s, including, in the US, the groundbreaking works including Arthur J. Bressan’s Buddies and John Erman’s An Early Frost, and the Canadian documentary No Sad Songs directed by Nik Sheehan, all in 1985; Bill Sherwood’s Parting Glances (1986); and Norman René’s Longtime Companion and Marlon Riggs’ Tongues Untied, both of 1989. In musical theater William Finn and James Lupine’s March of the Falsettos of 1981 must be mentioned in this context, and their 1990 second episode Falsettoland might be seen as a link between the later works I describe below (a film version of Falsettos appeared in 2017).
Of course other, smaller films and
numerous documentaries continued to be produced in the intervening years. But
the next significant group of films concerned with AIDS, along with the 1991
theater premier of part 1 of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America represent
what has been described by some as the “second wave” of such films which began
appearing in the early 1990s with the release of Jonathan Demme’s Philadelphia
(1993) and the three short films I review below, along with the Broadway
premier of Kushner’s Angels (finally brought to the screen by Mike
Nichols in 2003).
dancing into the past
Iowa-born Mark Christopher is best known today for his 1998 film 54 about New York City’s renowned Studio 54, a movie starring Ryan Phillippe, Salma Hayek, Mike Myers, Neve Campbell, and numerous others which he later remade in a German-produced director’s cut in for the 2015 Berlin International Film Festival, restoring 45 minutes cut from the original. It was acclaimed as a modern classic as opposed the mostly negative reviews received for the earlier version.
Before and since 54, however,
Christopher directed three very well-received short films, most recently Heartland
(2007), and earlier Alkali, Iowa (1995) and his first film, The
Dead Boys' Club (1992) which have all been popular on the LGBTQ film
circuit.
In his first film a young man, Toby (Nat
DeWolf), recently graduated from a college in Wisconsin, is visiting his older cousin
Packard (Erik Van Der Wilden) in New York City.
Packard is a gay man who has just lost his
lover, John R., to AIDS, while his young cousin, although also gay, is shy and
taken aback by the open sexuality of the New York City streets. Although he is
clearly attracted to men he encounters, he cannot seem to carry through with
their invitations, tossing away, for example, a scrap of paper a cute man on
the street, Dick (Matt Decker) has just handed him with his telephone number,
hinting of a sexual tryst.
Packard and his campy friend are busy
packing up John’s possessions, a painful process for the older cousin as he is
forced to face the remnants of their evidently fabulous relationship. In the
pre-AIDS in which they lived, apparently John was a bar favorite, a sexually
popular man who attracted nearly everyone he encountered.
We know this, however, mostly through the
presence of a kind of ghost of the dead man located, queerly enough, in his
party shoes, which Packard presents as a gift to his young cousin. The minute
Toby puts on the shoes, reminding one a little of Dorothy’s ruby slippers or
the red shoes which refuse to leave Victoria Page’s feet in The Red Shoes,
he is suddenly transported to another time and place, a bar filled with
beautiful, half-naked men who dance and greet one another with sexual aplomb,
all of them definitely exuding a kind of animal magnetism.
Moreover, as Toby soon discovers, the
minute he wears John’s shoes into public spaces, he too is suddenly transformed
into a sexual being to whom nearly everyone he encounters is automatically
attracted. The slightly plain-looking country boy immediately becomes a sexual
object who others must possess and they, in turn, become themselves beautiful
beings.
Toby first discovers this phenomenon when
he visits a gym locker room where the man dressing next to him (Erik Estrada)
suddenly becomes a bronzed stud who is immediately entranced by the country boy
and is ready to rush him naked into the shower until Toby unlaces and pulls off
the shows, when his visions vanish, although the now lesser attractive gym-goer
is still willing to follow through the sexual encounter. Toby, however, stunned
by the transformations he has just witnessed feels almost “haunted” by the
magic shoes, leaving them purposely behind in the locker.
He quickly dresses, suddenly discovering
that in his pocket he still has his unopened packet containing a prophylactic.
Horrified by the fact, he puts on the other man’s shows and scurries off, his
lover of the previous night turning over to reveal a couple of opened packets, making
it clear to the audience that they had actually practiced safe sex, even while
Toby remains ignorant of the fact.
But Toby is now seriously troubled,
particularly when Dick shows up with the shoes and demanding his own be
returned. Scared by what the shoes do to him, he tosses them out the window
where they immediately are scooped up by a street vendor who places them among
the books and records for sale.
After the funeral ceremony for Packard’s
lover, Toby approaches his cousin to ask whether he believes that things can be
possessed, like people, houses—shoes. Packard only laughs at the strange
question, but admits that it is a difficult time for everyone.
What we realize, obviously, is that
John’s shoes reveal a past before AIDS when, as those who lived in the open
sexual world of the 1970s and early 80s have mythologized it, everyone was
young and dazzling, ready to tear off their clothes with a single glance. I was
there; and it’s true, I assure you!
Soon after, we see Toby purveying the
street vendor’s albums, while covertly eyeing the magic shoes sitting nearby for
sale. Although he has a record album in his hand, he quickly puts it back with
the intention of buying back the shoes. But as he reaches for them another boy grabs
them, another young man who soon may also be transported momentarily to a place
from which those who might confirm its existence have mostly disappeared.
the body believes only in the present
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.
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.
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).
a future of which no one dares speak
Playwright and director wrote several plays and produced two LGBT works, the feature film Story of a Bad Boy (1999), and the short Dadshuttle before turning to more commercial ventures such as Precious (2009), Lee Daniels’ The Butler (2013), The United States vs. Billie Holiday (2021), and the highly successful TV series Empire.
His LGBTQ short Dadshuttle, adapted from his own play, is a work of doublespeak, wherein a father (Peter Maloney) and his gay son (Matt McGrath) are driving from their home where to the train station where the son, after his visit to his family in Philadelphia, is on his way home to New York. From the very beginning we comprehend that nothing truly will be communicated between the two, yet a great deal is expressed nonetheless that lies behind their verbal dodges and linguistic twists. It begins with what might have been easily answered:
Son: And why did they
call him Yank?
Father: Oh you know,
there’s, when he was a kid
he used to...I don’t
know
Son: They just called
him that because he...
Father: It was a name
he got somewhere along the line...
but we worked for them for something like 25 years....
Even
in this brief interchange, we already perceive that nothing will be answered,
nor any possible completion of their sentences proffered. Both are evidently
afraid to say the obvious, that perhaps as a boy he masturbated regularly. But
we also recognize that for the most part, what they speak about is meaningless.
The son isn’t even quite sure of what his
father actually does for a living. Perhaps he builds skyscrapers, yet he no
longer works directly in construction but mostly meets with people. Is he a union
negotiator? Does he suggest variations in the buildings construction or their
codes? The son will never discover the answer.
The father talks endlessly about small
family matters, growing up with 15 related family members in one house, how is
wife drags him to various tourist destinations such as The Edgar Allan Poe
house, which isn’t actually Poe’s house but a replica, and isn’t a building in
which Poe lived...etc. Later on he begins a similar monologue about Clara
Barton’s house.
The son cannot comprehend why the family
reunion picnics are always held in famous gravesites such at Gettysburg
battlefield, as the father attempts to explain that his wife likes to make
candles, but later, after the son seems confused, clarifies that she likes to
watch the candlemakers at Gettysburg make candles.
There is an entire conversation about a relative
who gets “frequent flyer passes” that are good only on the train. The man
travels back and forth endlessly on the train, getting up and going without
saying anything his kids. The son cannot even find out why he, whoever he might
be, doesn’t talk to his kids other than the father’s proclamation that the
whole family is just crazy.
There
are incomplete sentences spun out about the son’s brother, Marty, who’s
disturbed evidently that no one told him that their mother is seeing,
apparently, a psychiatrist. No one around them, the father insists, ever go to
psychiatrists which the son understandably finds impossible to believe.
A later mention of the other younger
brother comes back into the conversation with the father’s statement that “He’s
getting better you know. All his friends come to the house.” He evidently has a
girlfriend, but he never calls her; she only calls him. Again the communication
breaks down without us discovering what in Marty getting better from, or what
might have previously been wrong with him. Our only clue is that is seems to be
very much like his mother.
And as issues about the boy’s mother
creep into the conversation, the father keeps moving away from them to further
describe visits, other family members, and pieces of furniture they have
recently purchased.
It gets even worse when the son begins
attempting to ask if when comes home at Christmas he can bring someone home
with him. It takes several tries to even get that question posed, which the
father immediately deflects by saying that he needs to ask his mother about
that. But the son finally breaks through to say that he would like to have Paul
over, who the son’s father keeps confusing with a waiter who has spilled something
over him at one time in the past. The son attempts to explain that Paul is not
that waiter, but is a waiter.
Slowly as the father rattles on about the
Edgar Allan Poe which is not a house, we begin to perceive that the son wants
to invite Paul to the family Christmas because he is all alone, and from there
we begin the realize, despite the barrage of miscellaneous interruptions what
the father seems to refuse to comprehend, that Paul is the son’s lover.
After a sudden interruption by the father
about “all this stuff”; “We’re still reading about all this stuff, for years
now....People magazine keep having these articles about these young guys
who work in New York City...girls now too....all these young people they get
sick and they don’t get better.” And suddenly while the son is now insistent
about correcting his father’s notion that he works in a bar, we realize that
the elder is talking about AIDS.
Finally, the son shouts out, that he
doesn’t need to worry. “I take care of myself....” And finally as his father
goes on and on about “all this sickness,” he cries out “I don’t have sex. I don’t
have sex.”
The significance of that outburst finally
begins to explain to us that Paul, his lover, indeed has AIDS, the reason for
the son no longer having sex. And slowly, in between endlessly meaningless harangues
on anything that crosses the father’s frightened mind, his son reveals that he
too has gotten tested.
We never quite find out if he is positive
or negative since the two have a ridiculous discussion about the ambiguity of
those words—the father is convinced that “positive” means good. But we can
glimpse the boy’s fear. And it slowly dawns on us that his father is equally
worried about the health of his wife, the son’s mother.
Neither ever express their feelings or
even convey the truth of their partners’ conditions to one another. But we now
recognize that this shuttle between son and father has been a voyage very much
like Charon rowing the dead to the underworld.
We can almost be certain that neither
father nor son will see one another again except perhaps at a funeral, and perhaps
not even then, since if the mother dies first, the son will surely be occupied
with his dying lover; and if Paul dies, the family will surely not wish to
attend a funeral in New York City.
For a few seconds, now and then, it
almost appears that they have communicated something below or above the torrent
of intentional miscommunications. Yet as they finally arrive at the door to the
underworld, they have nothing left to say but to awkwardly signify their love.
For me, this is the saddest story of the three, even though, unlike the other two films, no one in this work has yet died, and we truly know nothing about the mother or Paul—or Marty or the dozens other family members they superficially list. We just know that both father and son are scarred, terribly frightened beings, unable to even communicate their fears to themselves let alone to one another.
Los
Angeles, March 19, 2021
Reprinted
from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (March 2021).
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