Boy Culture FOLLOWING OUR FLING with the faraway world of gay cowboys, Boy Culture returns us to the more familiar turf of contemporary urban gay lives—and thus to a movie that’s likely to have none of the “crossover” appeal of Brokeback Mountain. But it’s a fine and fascinating movie that explores the complexities of gay life using a suitably complicated storytelling technique. Whether or not the four lives depicted in this film are “typical” of the Urban Gay Male, they do fill a lot of demographic squares. There’s Alix aka “X,” a white 25-year-old hustler; his African-American roommate Andrew, who’s about the same age; roommate number two, Joey, an eighteen-year-old good-time boy; The film is narrated by X, and Director Q. Allan Brocka has used the unusual device of breaking the fourth wall to have X speak directly to the audience, who informs us right away that this is a movie and it’s about his life—which in turn must be pretty interesting, because, hey, you’re watching a movie about it! So it is X’s version of the story that we’re watching unfold, and his narrative voice that we hear throughout, commenting on the action. This sets up an interesting dialogue between X the detached, disembodied storyteller and X the participant in the swirl of events. The voice-over is that of an intelligent, self-conscious, highly verbal guy that we come to trust and like; but the young man he’s describing is the distant, silent type who never lets on what he’s thinking, much less feeling, whose very nickname conveys his inscrutability, and who can be a major jerk at times. Which is the real X? One possibility is that the cool customer routine is totally contrived, an act whose script he’s writing even as he bangs away on his laptop. But no conspiracy, however diabolical, is perfectly executed: for all his efforts to remain above the fray of human emotion—just keep those $5,000 checks comin’!—X can’t help being a vulnerable, often clueless, all-too-human participant who’s capable of jealousy and childishness and even tears. This dialogue of self and soul (to borrow from Yeats) allows the author to play with some literary conventions and archetypes with a clever prankishness. Thus, for example, X is presented as a kind of Christ figure who has twelve “disciples”—his regular clients—and a statue of the Virgin that he thinks of as his mother. But he’s totally in on the gag and lets us in on it too. He even makes a point, after one “disciple” commits suicide, of quickly finding a replacement (Gregory) just to keep the total at twelve. For X is a reader of great books who can correctly identify a quote from Oscar Wilde and knows that Christ figures often show up in works of literature. And this is, after all, a novel that he’s working on. Which raises the question: is X doing all this stuff just so he’ll have an interesting story to tell? Given the intimate bond that X establishes early on with the viewer, a sympathetic audience is taken for granted. X is addressing gay men who know the scene firthand and don’t have to be brought up to speed about cruising, tricks, hustlers, or glory holes. This allows him to focus on the more unusual aspects of his big gay life: the fact that he’s a high-priced call-boy who’s incapable of having sex except for money; that he’s secretly in love with Andrew but can’t let on because—well, that’s just not in the script. Or is it a fear of rejection? Or the risk of losing a friend? The film is above all a meditation on the complexity of gay relationships when love, sex, and friendship—the Big Three—get mixed up in varying proportions. Straight men have it easy when you think about it. They have male friendships that don’t become muddled with feelings of love or lust, while love and sex are destined to converge (at least ideally) upon the woman of one’s dreams. Gay men know very well that love and sex are often detached, that sex can be just sex, that love—but what good is love? This is the question with which X must finally wrestle. Far from being complementary, love and sex seem to be at opposite poles. Sex is something X performs without feeling of any kind; it pays the bills. Love is only a feeling and can only get in the way. What’s more, love is exclusionary, foreclosing opportunities, while sex is opportunistic, cumulative—especially for young gay men with looks to spare. And so, we arrive at that central dilemma of gay life: whether to stay single and keep one’s sexual options open or to settle down and make a life with just one man.
Directed by Q. Allan Brocka
and Gregory, a dignified 79-year-old client of X. Based on Matthew Rettenmund’s 1996 novel, Boy Culture tells the story of the surrogate family formed by the three younger men as they negotiate the tangle of crushes, lusts, and jealousies that just three gay men living together can generate.
By genre, Boy Culture comes closest to romantic comedy, but it’s a peculiarly gay romantic comedy that focuses not on two but on three—actually, four—characters. The three younger men are variously in love with one another, or think they are—Joey with X, X and Andrew with each other, but secretly, unspeakably. The conceit of romantic comedy is that the two main characters are destined to end up together despite all the obstacles—family issues, ethnic disparities, random mishaps—that conspire to keep them apart. The obstacles in Boy Culture are prisons of the mind that still make it hard, even after all these years, for two gay men just to come out and say to each other, “I love you.”
