The Boys Life 7 DVD queer
shorts collection blows into stores with four edgy pieces that stimulate
without letting their well conceived messages spoil our fun. All were
featured at Sundance and several made it to our Frameline festival.
The Young and Evil: Julian Breece brilliantly
illustrates the problem of the elevated HIV infection rates among black gay men
with a harrowing tale of desire and fatalistic despair.
His young hero, Karel James --
Vaughn Lowery gives his impetuous teen seeker the body language and drop dead
gorgeous moxie of a Marshall Mathers suddenly turned gay – is on a mission to
receive unprotected anal intercourse with a different stranger every night
until he gets “the gift.” This evening takes him to the basement home of an
older black man who, ironically, he spied on a safe sex video. Breece’s
handling of his volatile young cast and total immersion in the downlow setting
removes any trace of preaching to the choir or any overt educational agenda. A
scary but memorably provocative bit of agit-prop filmmaking.
Spokane: Larry Kennar’s raw short kicks off at a wedding
party where the gay identified brother of the groom, David (Jason Waters) chats
up the straight identified James (Kyle
Bornheimer).
“So, James, do you go by James all
the time or are you more of a Jimmy or a Jim?”
“No, I like James.”
“I thought only guy men used their
full names, you know like Michael, Donovan, Steven, James…”
“No.”
“Just fucking with you…”
“I think James sounds pretty
fucking straight if you ask me! There’s James Brown from Good Times and
James Dean.”
“Oh, yeah James Dean sucked a dick
or two in his day.”
“Really?”
“Just fucking with you…”
The balance of the story takes the
“just fucking with you” premise to the end of the line where the guys fool
around in a motel room while kinky straight porn plays on the TV.
Kennar and his really cool leads
give the naked fumbling a loose, unscripted feel that leads us to believe it
could go anywhere at all, including someplace very nasty. A good bumpy ride
that plays like an answer to Branden Blinn’s Thirteen or so Minutes two
straight boys in bed romp from last year’s Frameline festival.
First Date: The engine of Gary Huggins’s high octane
romance is a sizzling, loose cannon performance by an amateur actor who
moonlights as a cop. Santiago Vasquez’s volatile mood swings – one moment he
can coo like a love advice columnist, and then he can turn on a dime and give
the impression of impending mayhem -- lends a dark, anarchistic spin to his
character’s lunatic resolve to do literally anything to keep an on-line
arranged date with an underage boy. A quirky surprise climax makes this short
feel like the first act of a feature we’d pay to see.
Raw Love: In Martin Deus’ frisky short a gaggle of
lovely lads from the Argentine give each other ceremonial hugs and kisses for
their graduation video scrapbooks. For the slender, sensitive Jeremias
(Valentino Arocena) the occasional prompts a bittersweet mixture of joy and
regret over his soon to be departed bunk mate, Ivan (curly-haired hottie Juan Felipe
Villanueva). Deus provides a rambunctious and exceedingly sensual exploration
of the ambiguities of adolescent passion along with flashbacks to the recent
past when Jeremias and Ivan spooned the nights away, a time when their sleeping
together involved risks and pleasures for both lads – there’s droll scene where
they fool Ivan’s mom into thinking her lad has been dating the school’s bad
girl. Raw Love offers the sense of youth’s fast fading ecstasy that
infused the Patagonia feature Glue. You may never see goofy boy wrestling
pictures quite the same way again.