Posted: 03/08/2007

Boy Culture

(2007)

by Sawyer J. Lahr

Taking nearly ten years to prepare for production, the long wait was worth the final product. Boy Culture is a film of the queer genre that is uniquely about male homosexuality and male characters who deal with typically masculine difficulties.

X (Derek Magyar), an escort, is, at first, defined by his “career,” as he would prefer it to be called, rather than truly being himself. That person is uncovered gradually throughout this film, directed by Q. Allen Brocka (Eating Out).

We gain an understanding of the real X mostly through his friendship with one of his clients, Gregory (Patrick Bauchau). This elderly, charming, and handsome aristocrat lives a reclusive life on a university campus.

Meeting many times before getting involved sexually, X and Gregory reminisce about their adolescent loves. This helps us understand why X is afraid of rejection and why he enjoys being a top rather than being “taken,” which he says to have experienced as few times as once with his cousin.

While X bears more of himself to a client, he barely budges to tell his two roommates much about his past or his feelings at all.

Regardless of being emotionally closeted, X is more transparent than he would like to seem. Joey (Johnathon Trent), an 18 years-old promiscuous youth trails behind X, adoring him lustfully, though, he senses how in love X is with the other roommate, Andrew (Darryl Stephens). Joey does not cease his pursuit in light of this fact until he realizes his own youthful naïveté and begins to mature when he sees a need in his life and his roommates’ lives for radical change.

Joey is another example of a gay young man trying to grow up too fast for his own good, and his example is most likely personal to a lot of gay men.

As for the importance of Andrew as a representation of gay male development, he seems to be the wiser of the three, a once engaged and closeted gay man is now out and just exploring a gay lifestyle for the first time. He is more interested in pursuing a monogamous emotionally vulnerable relationship. Whereas X is non-committal, private, and cynically stubborn.

Every roommate’s life intersects with the others’ at different points in the film. Joey makes a pass at X while Joey is tranquilized, and X admires Andrew showering from afar, fulfilling his unrequited love for Andrew through an act of voyeurism. Disappointing to X are the tricks Andrew brings home and when Andrew has a three-some on a whim including Joey.

But Andrew surprises X by inviting him as a date to his ex-fiancé’s wedding and to give a possible relationship between the two a trial run. They share sexually and emotionally tense moments, often beginning as romantic and ending as argumentative.

This plays out through the film, unresolved until an intervention by Gregory and a quirky stroke of coincidence and fate. But after all, how frequent is this quaintness seen in heterosexual romantic comedies? Apparently with Boy Culture, it was time again to turn the tables and let some gay men have a not always frequently seen happy ending.

For more information, visit the offical film site here.

Sawyer J. Lahr is a film reviewer living in Chicago.

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