The Cinesexuals

It is always a pleasure when a film we mentioned in one of our Best of Fest round ups is submitted to Directors Notes. When I first saw Sean Lìonadh’s Too Rough at this year’s Glasgow Shorts Film Festival, I was taken aback by both its evocation of a tough, lived-in atmosphere of dread as well as its capacity for empathy, creating a nuanced portrait of coming-out in a difficult world. Telling the story of the young Nick (Ruaridh Mollica) hiding his boyfriend Charlie (Joshua Griffin) from his alcoholic parents, it is a deeply sensitive tale that is at once claustrophobic and touching, showing a fine command of tone from the poet/director. It’s a depiction that has clearly struck a chord with audiences and awards juries alike – from BAFTA Scotland (where it won Best Live Action Short) to the British Independent Film Awards as one of the five 2022 nominees for Best British Short Film – and so, of course, we jumped at the opportunity to talk to Lìonadh about basing his film on a true story, finding contrast through performance and being inspired by the hyper-realistic tone of Andrea Arnold.

Twenty-four-year-old Glaswegian Sean Lionadh has established himself as powerful storyteller as poet, writer, musician and filmmaker. A trailblazer, Sean uses the alchemy of film and poetry to share intimate work, making notable social impact. His short film Time for Love, made for BBC, catapulted him onto the global stage as an artist exploring themes of love, God, shame and psychological trial in today’s world. His newest short film Too Rough, inspired by events in Sean’s own life, poses the raw question of “Am I too rough for you?”

My movies are for the outsiders and the weirdos and the punks and the queers. They’re for the people that don’t really fit in. I think it’s why the films have resonated all these years. —⁠Gregg Araki

The real-life subject of a new Hugh Jackman film has criticised it for making his sexuality seem “somewhat sordid”.

The real-life subject of a new Hugh Jackman film has criticised it for making his sexuality seem “somewhat sordid”.Bad Education, which received rave reviews after debuting at Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) in 2019, tells the story of Frank Tassone, the superintendent behind the biggest school embezzlement in American history.

Bad Education, which received rave reviews after debuting at Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) in 2019, tells the story of Frank Tassone, the superintendent behind the biggest school embezzlement in American history.

Based on Sean’s own experiences, Too Rough tells the story of Nick (Ruriadh Mollica) who wakes up after a big night out next to his boyfriend Charlie (Joshua Griffin) and must conceal him from his dysfunctional, abusive family. Funded by Shortcircuit as part of Screen Scotland and the BFI Network, the film has appeared at 22 different festivals, winning the Audience Award at the Glasgow Short Film Festival and Best International Short at Ireland’s Galway Film Fleadh.

Which is where the LGBTQ angle of the movie begins. And ends. Lightfoot dons a dress and long blonde wig to distract the night manager of an alarm-monitoring service. Once this is accomplished, he dashes down an alley to catch up to the getaway car, which will soon rendez-vous with Eastwood and Kennedy, who’ve done the heavy lifting of the robbery itself.

Even the beleaguered gay emblems in As Good As It Gets (1997), The Object of My Affection (1998) and Threesome (1994) — to cite at random three Hollywood films of recent memory — are light-years more comfortable with themselves and the world around them. In those films, gay men are shown co-existing (for the most part) peacefully with heterosexuals: bottom-line, they can come out successfully. By contrast, Jack and Ennis have an eternally wounded dignity that refuses to be compromised. They were emotionally gutted, early in their lives, by the recognition that, to be themselves, they would have to fight to the death against the entire world — a world who would always fight back harder, and would always win.

Gay film work should be sexually candid and realistic and politically critical/ analytic of the forms of gay oppression. If a film is neither, its usefulness to gay liberation can be only accidental.

INTRODUCTION: WILL HOMOSEXUALS BE ADMITTED TO THE CLASSLESS SOCIETY? The prospect of writing on a few gay-oriented films for JUMP CUT has caused me a few tremors of hesitation. There are obvious dangers in blowing one's professional cover (i.e., coming out) in academia in 1977. But there are worse places to come out in than a Faculty of Fine Arts, like a Faculty of Engineering, for example (to indulge in a little of what is called interdisciplinary retaliatory stereotyping). And if a friend of mine in an English department was able, just last year, to seize tenure from the jaws of a board of Catholic priests, things are looking up indeed. There are other more important reasons for my hesitation, which I would like to outline briefly before I get started.

Nevertheless, gays still occasionally get expelled from left party formations. The Venceremos Brigade still won't let us go to Cuba with them. An enthusiastic gay contingent gets ignored and insulted at last summer's 4th of July Coalition, Anti-Bicentennial Rally in Philadelphia. And one still has to deal with such provocations as a position paper recently published by a California-based splinter group that states unequivocally that "homosexuals cannot be communists."

For filmmaker Kit Hung, coming out as a gay man to his family felt like a kind of confession. Hung hails from Hong Kong, where same-sex marriage is not legally recognized. For decades, he has been propelled by LGBTQ+ movements around the world to make his own queerness more visible, even though he wasn’t immediately accepted for his sexuality. That same desire to increase queer visibility is what drove his latest project, Forever 17, and what is driving his new work in New Haven this year.

For Dhont, “Close” began with the realization that images of men fighting have long flooded our screens, becoming the only accepted mode of engagement between them. Seeing men holding on to each other with platonic affection remains a much rarer sight.

“At the age of 13, these boys talk about each other in the most loving, tender, beautiful way,” said Dhont. “These are testimonies of love, and they dare to use that word openly.”

But as the young men went through puberty, their responses to Way’s questions drastically changed. With the codes and pressures of masculinity looming ever larger, they came to see emotion as weakness and to fear being perceived as feminine — often at the expense of authentic connections. It’s precisely around this age that the suicide rate for men becomes four times higher than that for women.