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. W h en they are actually
looked at, though, it’s clear th a t their mes
sages tend to be as com plex and varied, and
no t particularly queer, as th e taboo topic
they’re exploring. J H
G a r y M o r r is
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