Un-straight time

A kinky week of beauties and beasts

What with gay cinema being everywhere these days, straight film critics have been asked to expand their aesthetics and erotics. They're required to sit in judgment -- and calm judgment -- of movies championing sexual activity that they may not wish to experience or even watch. Of course that's what gay reviewers have had to do since the beginnings of cinema, to critique "bisexually."

For some heterosexual critics, rubbing against a gay sexual perspective can be a consciousness-liberating thing. (I like to think I'm one of these guys.) For other straights, the forced meeting in the dark with a gay way is an alien, shivery turnoff.

I've never read a homosexual critic write about being repelled when Cary Grant smooched with Katharine Hepburn or Ingrid Bergman. But John Harkness, the film critic of Toronto's alternative weekly, Now, e-mailed that Torontonians "were howling for my blood" after a recent column in which he confessed he had homophobic feelings while watching filmed gay sex. This "someone with a lifelong history of staunch heterosexuality" (that's how his column began) explained his queasiness:

"Coming from a relentlessly straight background -- raised Catholic and in small-town Ontario, where the absolute worst thing you could call someone was `queer,' I do not like to watch men kissing in movies, or in real life. I do not care what people do in the privacy of their homes. But I'd rather not watch. In public, of course, one can just look the other way. In a movie theatre, it's up there 15 or 20 feet high."

I'm not going to defend Harkness, who, it seems, enjoys an embracing murder on screen, or a lesbo grope, just, please, no male-on-male orality! But I've got to admit that, watching a preview screening of Pink Narcissus, an anonymously directed 1972-'73 soft-X gay fantasy (it shows August 8 and 9 at the Harvard Film Archive), I grew distracted (though not disgusted) -- probably for no reason other than my heterosexuality.

Sure, the film is a wry blending of bare bottoms, hard thighs, urinal floors, and kitsch: Fantasia's butterflies and flora imagery. Still, I became weary of the obsessive, solipsistic, homosexual dreams of the lead boy.

But what if he were Uma Thurman? Or Jennifer Connelly? Or Björk? Could I have watched Pink Narcissus all day?

I fared better with "Un chant d'amour" (1950), the 26-minute Jean Genet film that follows Pink Narcissus. A prior reading of Genet's Querelle, plus a love of Surrealist cinema, helped get me in the mood for Genet's prison-block-of-the-mind, a utopia of horny men prowling their jail cells, cocks in hand. A voyeuristic uniformed guard can't take it anymore, so he attacks his favorite jailbird with a whip. The jailbird adores it.

Genet's only film is excellent, transposing the male-female sexual pull at the crotch of Buñuel's Surrealist classics, Un chien andalou and L'âge d'or, into guy-guy sexual/magnetic games.

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Buñuel also inspired Walerian Borowczyk's 1975 effort The Beast (August 12 and 15 at the HFA). The Buñuelian elements are a musty mansion of sexually arrested male aristocracy, a sweet female thing who is a target for sexual corruption (think Viridiana and Tristana), and a dubious priest at the fringe of the tale.

Borowczyk's Catholic priest is a cheery old molester, kissing one teenage boy on the mouth while another tinkles Scarlatti on the piano. Buñuel would be amused. Borowczyk's virginal Lucy (Lisbeth Hummell) goes far beyond Buñuel's R-rated limits, racing about bosomy and bushy and, in one sexually explicit scene, masturbating with a thorny rose.

But The Beast's notoriety has to do with its bringing the barn into the arthouse. Horses buck, fuck, and come. There's a fantasy scene in which a damsel in the woods is attacked by a bearlike beast with a dong the size of a Louisville slugger. You've never seen a bestial sequence like this one, even at "anything goes" Harvard University.

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My kinky week ends at the Coolidge Corner with Nick Broomfield's fascinating Fetishes, in which the British documentarian films at New York's Pandora's Box, a very upscale S&M parlor ($175 and way beyond for a session). Broomfield, an amiable voyeur around brassy women acting wickedly (he's done documentaries about Heidi Fleiss and Margaret Thatcher), takes his camera into all kinds of client sessions, in which Wall Street men pay handsomely to crawl around like leashed dogs, wear suffocating rubber, have their butts whipped red, dress like little girls, swallow lit cigarettes, or have their faces flushed in a dirty toilet.

When they allow it, Broomfield interviews these masochists, including the bizarre potential serial killer whose head sits happily in the commode. There are also several female clients, a "slave" who hangs about to be spanked, and a professional Submissive who, on her day off from being caned by her male clients, pays to be brutally whipped by the gals of Pandora's Box.

Is it a healthy life being a dominatrix? Those here are between relationships. Several mistresses surf the Net for boyfriends. One shares a bed with a giant iguana. "He's my man," she says, just before the jealous creature leaps and bites Broomfield's cameraman.

Gerald Peary can be reached at gpeary[a]phx.com.