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About Just out. (Portland, OR) 1983-2013 | View Entire Issue (Dec. 6, 2002)
Brian Cox and Paul Franklin D ano in L.l.E. nant (in a grueling scene he confesses his prob lem to his own young son) and pathetic, but cer tainly not gay. A nother complex portrait of a sexual preda tor can he found in L./.E. (U nited States, 2001 ) Some viewers might find “Big John” at least par tially ax led as a gay stereotype: unmarried, worldly, well-off, compulsive and bumped off in the end just as gay men in the movies so often were. But in making the character a real person rather than the scary shadow of the popular cliché, the film shifts the paradigm from gay/pedophile to human/monster. Like other such characters here, he regrets what he is. Told by one of his displaced boys, “You should he ashamed of your self," he replies, “1 a m ...l a m ...l always am.” T he economic motive in L.l.E. (Big John pays and sometimes hous es his victims) is also seen in some of the European films surveyed. The teen-age boys in O ur Lady o f the Assassins (Colombia, 2000) hook up with older men for money and a respite from the social chaos of Medellin. The film has a queer consciousness— the lead character, a 60- year-old writer, sarcastically tells one of the boys: “Someone who’s slept with over 1,000 boys isn’t a fag. H e’s a far-out guy, right?” But the relation ships here are more mutually exploitative than exploitatively queer, reactions to an impossible social situation. Social forces also drive the relationship in Ernesto (Italy, 1979) between the title charac ter, a 16-year-old bourgeois youth, and a 30-ish dock worker. Eventually their roles reverse, and Ernesto abuses his abuser in this class parable. There are still other variations. Cfoy Farmers (U nited States, 1988), a featurette at a mere 60 minutes, is so fearful of equating homosexuality with pedophilia that it refuses even to clarify the relationship between the two main characters, young men working together on a farm, much less their interest in a neighbor boy abused by his alcoholic father. Two of the most controversial films in this genre are For a Lost Sol dier (The Netherlands, 1982) and Eban and Charley (United States, 2000), which do the unthinkable in portraying the adult/youth relation ship as positive. Soldier treats what happens between a 12-year-old boy (the film is based on his World War II memoir) and a Canadian soldier liberating his village as a romance that became a joyous memory rather than a repressed one. Eban and Charley, about a 29- year-old soccer coach and a 15- Andrew Kelley and M aarten Smit in For a Lost Soldier year-old boy, makes society the villain, thwarting what to the principals is simply a love affair. Nei ther film apologizes for these relationships. Nor does Queer as Folk, though the “boy” is nearly of age. The highly successful gay soap opera features 30-ish sex hound Brian involved with 17-year-old Justin. (In the British version this character was 15, so Showtime is playing it safer.) Brian can be read as either sexually liber ated or amoral and predatory, or perhaps both, but his affair with Justin is just one of many kinds of relationships shown, not the focus. Now, of course, as Q AF heads into its third sea son, Justin is a consenting adult. T he question of w hat kinds of messages these works are sending to the mainstream is almost m oot, since most of them never reach the mainstream . T h ey ’re as marginalized in their way as their subject, staying safely under the cultural radar— playing at film festivals, in brief arthouse runs, o n obscure videos— in order to exist at all. 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