A PAIR OF SHORTS (Gay short films)

I don’t usually watch short films. They would, however, be a better fit for my increasingly limited attention span when viewing anything onscreen. I just don’t ever think of them. It’s been many years since I’ve seen anything at a film festival and I don’t see any marketing for short films. But I paid attention to the Oscar speech for Best Live Action Short Film. Apparently Two People Exchanging Saliva was queer so I watched it for free on YouTube. I won’t say much about this black-and-white French film but it’s about a society where kissing anyone is taboo. And a lot of facial slapping is totally condoned. 

 

Okay…not wowed. 

 

When I finished watching, YouTube conveniently had several viewing suggestions, as always, in the right column of the screen. Sure, there were some songs I’d recently listened to by Janis Ian, Bruno Mars and, yes, Paul Anka. Let’s just say I have eclectic tastes. In addition, there were a few LGBTQ shorts. I clicked on the first one, a bit of a cliché about an out high school gay guy crushing on a jock. The voice-over was overwritten and the acting uneven. Again, not wowed.

 

I’ve been watching other gay shorts throughout the week—still no wows but a couple are worth mentioning here, one for better, one for worse.

 

Louder Than Words (2017) is a sixteen-minute movie about a male ballet student who is deaf crushing on an aspiring male musician who is hearing. While Niall is able to lip-read, Ansel understands very little when Niall communicates in sign language. It surprised me to learn two things about Marty Lauter who plays Niall. First he was a contestant on RuPaul’s Drag Race (Marcia Marcia Marcia) and, second, he’s not deaf. Although he plays his part perfectly against an equally matched Luke Farley, I wondered if the film caused a stir for casting a hearing actor in hearing-impaired role. No negative reaction came up when I did a quick Google; to the contrary, many praised Lauter for a convincing performance. Perhaps it's partly a case of short films not drawing much attention in the first place. Hearing and non-hearing issues aside, Louder Than Words is worth watching. It’s a sweet little film that is well acted.

 

In some ways, the fourteen-minute Read Between the Lines (2022) has a similar plot. It takes place at a Barnes & Noble near closing time. Another young gay guy has a crush. In both films, the protagonist doesn’t even know if his crush is gay. How do you then muster the courage to express an interest? Both films have a straight best friend—isn’t that a nice reversal of roles?—who nudges the protagonist to approach his crush.

 

Both films end on a positive note, though one not in the way that might be expected. 

 

If you’ve got a free half hour, it might be worth your while to check them both out. 

OSCAR CEREMONY FOLLOW-UP: ROB & MICHELE REINER'S ROLE IN SEEKING MARRIAGE EQUALITY

I tried watching the Oscars. As I don’t have a television, I streamed it on Crave, Canada’s version of HBO and the streaming service responsible for Heated Rivalry. Turns out Crave didn’t have the capacity for carrying the ceremony. I assume too many people tried to stream it, resulting in the broadcast crashing countless times. All I saw were a few little bits.

 

One of those bits was part of—but not all of—Billy Crystal’s speech honouring Rob Reiner. If the only thing Reiner ever did was direct When Harry Met Sally, he’d be an icon to me. It’s my favourite movie. I’ve watched it so many times and even read the screenplay (Thank you, Nora Ephron!). I didn’t realize how broad Reiner’s directing resume is (e.g., This Is Spinal Tap, The Sure Thing, A Few Good Men, Ghosts of Mississippi). I knew Reiner was an outspoken liberal on Twitter, but I didn’t know how deeply connected he was to gay rights. When Crystal said, “Rob and Michele Reiner became the driving force in the landmark decision for marriage equality in the United States,” I did some Googling. It’s not like I could watch any more of the ceremony. I gave up.

 

Turns out Rob Reiner served on the Board of Directors for the American Foundation for Equal Rights (AFER), established in 2009 to support the legal challenge to Proposition 8 which stated, "Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California." His wife, Michele Singer Reiner, served as the board’s treasurer. In an interview from February 2023, before the Supreme Court ruled in Hollingsworth v. Perry that, in effect, reinstated same-sex marriage in California (based on a technicality), Reiner talked about befriending Chad Griffin who was then a nineteen-year-old working in the White House Press Office during the Clinton years. Griffin had been assigned to be the liaison for the Michael Douglas-Annette Bening film The American President (1995), directed and produced by Reiner. Thereafter, Reiner said, “I asked [Griffin] to run my organization [for early childhood education] and after a while he came to me and said, ‘Rob, I have to tell you something: I’m gay.’ And I said, ‘What else is new?’ We knew.” Of Griffin, Reiner said, “I feel like a father to him and I’m very close to this guy.” Griffin co-founded AFER (with Kristina Schake). 

 

In speaking of the effort to strike down Proposition 8, Reiner added:

[T]here will be a time years from now when we’ll 

say, gay marriage? What was that fuss all about? 

It’s going to take time, and we’re moving in the right 

direction, but it is about a fundamental right. We 

cannot look at our fellow citizens – I could not look 

at Chad Griffin, who is someone that I love – and say, 

“You are lesser than me”; “you deserve less than me”; 

“you are a second-class citizen.” You can’t do that.

 

Hurrah, Rob and Michele.

 

Rob Reiner knew LGBTQ+ rights were part of the trajectory of civil rights in the U.S., citing the paths to women’s rights, interracial marriages and racial equality. He also knew that the 2015 case of Obergefell v. Hodges, recognizing marriage equality was an incredible step forward but not the end of the fight. Four days after the decision, he wrote an op-ed piece in Variety which the publication titled, “Rob Reiner on the ‘Long, Long Process’ to Widespread LGBT Acceptance.” He hinted at the next steps when he wrote, “It’s so heartening to think young people don’t think twice about gay marriage. And I think it’s going to be the same with the transgender community. It’s going to get closer and closer to the ideal that we are all one.”

 

Yes, Rob and Michele Reiner were committed, invaluable gay allies. They are missed.

 

 

SHOULD I HAVE STUCK TO THE FOOD AISLES?

Six rolls, double-ply. As I walked the two kilometres from the Denver grocery store with the package tucked under my arm, I wondered how Evan would react. I’ve bought him dinners, flowers, even a hotel stay at Waterton Lakes National Park, but this purchase seemed bigger. 

 

You don’t buy toilet paper for just anyone. 

 

There were moments when I felt I was overstepping. Would he feel insulted that I was buying such a personal household staple? Would he take it as a reactionary statement to the fact he’d accidentally bought single-ply toilet paper months ago and I really, really wasn’t fond of it. (Seriously, why do they even make single-play anymore? And why do so many hotels charge hundreds of dollars for a night’s stay and then go cheap on one of the basics?) 

 

When I got back to his place, he looked up from his desk and said what I knew he’d say. “You bought toilet paper?” It’s hard to be inconspicuous carrying six rolls. 

 

I had my answer ready. “I’m always blowing my nose.” (Evan is not one for accessorizing his digs with boxes of Kleenex.) “I figured I owed you.”

 

Fair enough. A logical explanation. But, still…toilet paper. No one has ever bought me Charmin and I’ve never bought it for anyone else. An acceptable, squeezably soft gift might be a teddy bear, not bathroom tissue. A pillow, even better. Evan loves pillows. Teddy bears, not so much.

 

Next big step:
Coming to an agreement 

Buying toilet paper felt so intimate, so meaningful. We’re a couple. We’re beyond movies and dinners out. Bathroom matters matter, too. I’d seen a need—down to the last damn single-ply roll (hurrah)—and I filled it. No big deal. 

 

But isn’t it?

 

 

 

  

WHERE THE BOYS WERE

Sad to hear that Neil Sedaka died last week. Eighty-six may be a ripe, old age but it happens to be my mother’s age so it once again gives me pause to wonder how long her good health will hold out. Fingers crossed.

 

I’ve been known to go down a Neil Sedaka rabbit hole a couple times a year. YouTube does me the courtesy of selecting “Laughter in the Rain” whenever it finds itself on a ’70s loop which seems custom-made for me.

 

When Sedaka’s death was announced, I did some Googling about his life and his music. Didn’t know he gets a shout-out—“Sedaka is back”—at the end of Captain & Tennille’s “Love Will Keep Us Together,” a song he co-wrote with his frequent writing partner, Howard Greenfield. That, of course, sent me down another rabbit hole: Who was Howard Greenfield?

 

The first thing that struck me was Greenfield lived a much shorter life, dying just shy of his fiftieth birthday in 1986. What had happened to him?

 

First, however, being the pop music geek I am, I read about the hits he wrote with Sedaka, including ones Sedaka recorded such as “Breaking Up Is Hard to Do,” “Calendar Girl” and “Oh! Carol” (in honour of Carole King) and those the pair wrote for others, including “Where the Boys Are” by Connie Francis and Captain & Tennille’s “You Never Done It Like That.” With other collaborators, Greenfield wrote “Crying in the Rain” by the Everly Brothers, “Venus in Blue Jeans” by Jimmy Clanton, “Foolish Little Girl” by the Shirelles and “Two Less Lonely People in the World” by Air Supply. He also co-wrote the theme music for TV’s Bewitched. (Try to get that out of your head now.) Greenfield was posthumously inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1991.

 

So what happened to Greenfield? Why did he die so young? According to Wikipedia, Greenfield was openly gay and partnered with cabaret singer Tory Damon who also died in 1986. 

 

Still, I did not put the pieces together.

 

Greenfield died of AIDS complications on March 4, 1986 and Damon died from AIDS three weeks later.

 

I bonked my forehead like they do in those “I could’ve had a V8” TV commercials. 1986. AIDS. Of course. 

 

Just last week, a friend and I were talking about how it almost seemed COVID and the worldwide lockdown from six years ago never happened. How quickly we get back to “regular” lives. How quickly we forget.

 

I swore I’d never forget the AIDS crisis which I lived through during my years coming out. This, however, feels like a lapse in memory. Only a decade ago, I would have first assumed a male dying young in the mid-’80s died from AIDS complications. Has AIDS fallen off the radar…my radar? This serves as a reminder that it is important to keep real and creative stories about AIDS alive.

 

Too depressing, I’ve heard too many people say. “I want happy gay stories,”a friend of mine has said many times. I’ve seen agents requesting works of queer joy. All good. Still, AIDS happened. We must not forget. Movies like Longtime Companion and Philadelphia were important at the time, humanizing AIDS when fear and hate were often associated with the virus. They now feel like historical blips.

 

It feels we’ve failed to keep narratives about AIDS alive. Contrast this to the Holocaust which always remains ripe for a book or film. If not stories of persons dying of AIDS, where are the works about people who survived this brutal period where, in North America and Europe, at least, it was treated as a gay disease, another reason to shun and actively discriminate against gays. 

 

Yes, there has been great progress this century regarding gay rights but there is much to learn and remember from the AIDS era. Both the hate and the responsive activism can provide insights for the trans community and other queer people. I feel there is a complacency among non-trans queers. Having crosswalks painted over and Netflix not renewing Boots for a second season are not enough to create a rallying cry.

 

Being belatedly introduced to the career of Howard Greenfield, I am reminded of all the creative men—and the ordinary men—we lost to AIDS. A generation of gay men, my age and older, was culled thirty to forty-five years ago. As far as I know, Neil Sedaka lived a full life; Howard Greenfield, by contrast, had so much more living to do. Greenfield at least leaves a legacy of catchy, upbeat pop songs worthy of remembrance.