House of Boys (2009)

The title makes the film sound like a porno, and the cover of the movie doesn't help its case. To be perfectly honest there were points in the movie where I sort of wished I was indeed watching porn, for the relationships between characters in them would probably have been more developed, the story more inventive and the whole watching experience more enjoyable.

"House of Boys" begins as a fairly typical gay rom-com and winds up being an AIDS opus told in three acts. As I sat watching the story unfold I pondered the question of whether another gay rom-com or AIDS opus was needed in the world? This seemed an especially important question because the film is crippled with every gay movie cliche in the handbook. I answered my question very early on in the movie which left me a long while to find evidence for my argument.

Layke Anderson stars as Frank, a beautiful, shallow, slutty, young British fairy who travels to Amsterdam with his friends for a lark. After weeks of partying, he is left stranded there and decides to work and live at a gay strip club/brothel for funds. Our hero is a man who lives from hookup to hookup, who finds nothing better to do with his life than roll and dance and whose eyes are dazzled by the gay cabaret, the House of Boys. As a gay man, I immediately found this an offensive character and I found it extremely disrespectful that director/writer Jean-Claude Schlim glorifies the sexually depraved underworld where it seems every gay resides. Homosexual boys have very few role models and the public at large has a narrow view of what a gay man is, and this film does nothing to push against the stereotypes. But moving on...

The impossibly limber Frank is hired and asked to share a room with Jake (Benn Northover), the straight boy who we know will end up being with Frank once he learns to stop being afraid and love himself. Stories about homosexuals seem completely preoccupied with the act of coming out, as well as obsessed with the fantasy of obtaining the straight guy. As it happens, Benn Northover is not straight. I do not have any proof of this, other than the fact that my gaydar says he is a raging queen and does a piss poor job of disguising it. Schlim might have have thought that giving him ripped jeans, a bad haircut, and a gruff, ambiguous accent would cover up the actor's limp wrists, but Northover seems such an incompetent actor anyway that no number of parlor tricks could mask it.

Frank loves Jake at first sight. Rather he lusts him at first sight, though for the life of me I can't figure out why he would do either, considering Jake is very uninteresting and not very attractive, but that's just me. With no real reason at all Frank becomes enamored with Hot Straighty, and eventually Hot Straighty comes to his senses and realizes he liked Frank all along. It might have been sweet if there were any reason for them to love each other or if they hadn't found love in a brothel, but there you have it. In the end we decide it must be love because Jake gets AIDS--by the way I should have mentioned it takes place from 1984-86, when the disease is new and extremely frightening--and only a person who really loved him would take care of the dying Jake the way that Frank does.

It is strange how much I liked the third act about the disease, considering how much I hated the first two about the slutty boys being slutty. It is almost a completely different style of film, going from more of a campy glam to near melodrama, but the shift between the two styles is so jarring that I am surprised I was able to get passed it and focus on the death. Perhaps I subconsciously really wanted one or both of them to die. That's a grim thought.

What I think I disliked so intensely about the first two-thirds of this movie was that it seemed to present homosexuals as nothing more than giggling sex-machines. It is far too often that a gay man is shown in a club, and not near enough in a book store, or an art gallery, or Home Depot or any other place where there isn't one muscled, manicured man looking to get into the pants of another muscled, manicured man. This film is highly eroticized, with a gratuitous amount of sex and an almost uncomfortable amount of glorified male nudity. At times I wished that they would commit to giving a full-fledged sex scene, genitals flapping, so I could quit trying to take it seriously as a dramedy and simply watch some porn.

The answer to my question is that the year is now 2013. This film came out in 2009. After twenty some odd years AIDS is no longer frightening to the public or a prominent disease in the media, unlike breast cancer or bird flu. It has simply been played to death. And although that is an awful argument to make--the film tells us that some two million people die each year from it--another AIDS tragedy isn't necessary. We have had "Philadelphia", hell, we have had "Rent". It is time for filmmakers to stop dealing with gay men as stereotypes and understand that they are simply men who would prefer to sleep with other men. Clubs are unnecessary, sleazy sex is unnecessary, drag is unnecessary, just show us for who we are. Make a lead character homosexual incidentally.

I fully understand that we only barely have started casting black actors in ordinary roles simply because the fill the part the best, and judging from this it is going to be a considerable amount of time before this is the case with gay characters. But that does not negate that this film made me angry at its generic and ugly portrayal of gay men. You may have noticed I have barely talked about directing style or acting or anything about how well-made the film is, for that is how much I disliked the premise of the script. In the end, how good a movie it is is irrelevant simply because the film shouldn't have been made in the first place.

1/4