Left-Handed (1972)

It has been my experience that most left-handed people are wacked-out in some striking way or another. In fact, my most criminally-inclined and psychopathic friend growing up was left-handed and when not breaking said left hand/wrist doing a number of idiotically dangerous things, he was certainly used it to thieve or to smoke a joint laced with coke or whatever drug of choice he was using at that time. Naturally, I would expect a gay hardcore porn flick entitled Left-Handed (1972) to be riddled with unsavory left-handed degenerates doing unsavory things and avant-garde pornographer Jack Deveau’s film certainly does not disappoint in that regard as a work of completely callous cocksucking cynicism that does not celebrate gay liberation and related counter-culture crap, but is instead a wonderfully wicked work that portrays the left-handed sodomite lead as predatory and pernicious psychopath who gets off to destroying normal heterosexual relationships, as well as loses interest and drops ‘lovers’ once they fall in love with him and he has fully debased to a most irreparable degree. The feature-length debut of architectural and graphic designer turned fag filmmaker/producer Jack Deveau (Drive, A Night at the Adonis), Left-Handed is far from the positive poof ‘crossover’ pictures of Wakefield Poole (Boys in the Sand, Bijou) and the sodomite S&M-celebrating of Fred Halsted (LA Plays Itself, Sextool), as a work about a long-haired trio of moral and sexual degenerates, including a hustler, antique dealer, and pot dealer, who live for sex, drugs, and rock n roll and ultimately pay the price for such hedonistic idiocy. Essentially the story of a gay hustler who conspires to turn an ostensibly heterosexual drug dealer with a girlfriend into a passive fag bottom, only to leave him in heartbreak in the end, Left-Handed is lecherous hardcore homo porn at its most misanthropically melodramatic and nastily nihilistic as the sort of work that, not unlike William Friedkin's Cruising (1980), would have been labeled ‘homophobic’ by hysterical homo do-gooders had it been directed by a heterosexual man. A dark and bitter tale of aberrant mis-romance with hardcore homo action thrown in between, Left-Hand is the film that announced Jack Deveau arrived and that Halsted was not American's only artsy fartsy S&M auteur pornographer. 

 Heterosexual country boy dope-peddler Bob (Robert Rikas) and super swarthy would-be-hunk hustler Ray (Ray Frank) have never met, but through their mutual ‘friend’ Larry (Larry Burns)—a dirty hippie antique dealer with an exceedingly annoying voice—the two will meet through happenstance and almost immediately begin a steamy sodomite love affair of the initially bi-curious but ultimately tragic sort. On his way to Larry’s shabby knick-knack shack, Ray makes a stop at a public restroom and having some time and semen to waste, he proves his oral versatility to a total stranger. When Ray finally arrives at Larry’s store, the antique dealer has already bought a couple kilos of grass from Bob, but the two strangers spend enough time with one another for the Hustler took get hooked on the Adonis-like Nordic-American dope peddler.  Like the stereotypical high school whore, Ray vows to Larry that he will initiate Bob into male buggery sooner or later.  Rather impressed with Bob’s outdoor hetero hunkness and crude country boy charm, Ray goes home and masturbates while fantasizing in what is an elaborate pornographic black-and-white dream-sequence between the scheming sodomite streetwalker and half-braindead pot dealer. In his innate vulgarity and deep-seated desire to defile country boy Bob, Ray perfectly personifies what Teutonic prophet philosopher of Occidental decline Oswald Spengler meant when he wrote regarding urban anti-folk, “In place of a type-true people, born of and grown on the soil, there is a new sort of nomad, cohering unstably in fluid masses, the parasitical city dweller, traditionless, utterly matter-of-fact, religionless, clever, unfruitful, deeply contemptuous of the countryman and especially that highest form of countryman, the country gentleman.” One afternoon while walking down the street, Ray bumps into Bob and the two virtual strangers decide to smoke dope at the latter’s pathetic apartment, thus resulting in rather raunchy consequences. Bob, who is featured in Left-Handed passionately performing cunnilingus on and penetrating his girlfriend (Teri Reardon), gets so pathetically stoned and inhibited that he decides to get naked with Ray and even screws the assumedly STD-stricken hustler’s rather ripped rectum.

 After converting Bob to play on the pink team, Ray decides to stalk the dope dealer, who lives with his girlfriend, at his quaint farmhouse. With his girlfriend viewing voyeuristically from a window, Bob allows Ray to blow him in a barn and the two continue to fuck furiously around the rural homestead. When big gay Ray leaves, Bob comes to the startling realization that he loves the homo hustler more than his girlfriend, so he drops her and his heterosexuality like a bad habit to begin his new life as a rare masculine rural queer. Naturally, Ray moves into Bob’s country home and the two engage in incessant aberrosexual activity that becomes more and more depraved as the days pass. Eventually, born bottom Ray deflowers Bob’s bi-curious bunghole, thus leading to the beginning of the end of their raunchy ‘romantic’ relationship, as the streetwalking sod is mainly attracted to the redneck dope dealer's innocence, which he has enthusiastically destroyed like the immune system of AIDS-addled crackbaby. Meanwhile, prissy antique pusher Larry becomes jealous like a frigid queen upon learning of Bob and Ray’s relationship, so he creates a sadistic plan to setup a five-man fag orgy at his apartment where he hopes the dope dealer will walk in on his hustler boy toy getting gangbanged by a brigade of rough and tough buggering boys. Of course, Ray goes to the party and in gives into his hyper hedonistic hustler tendencies, and just as lecherous lunatic Larry planned, Bob walks in on his beloved butt-boy being carnally manhandled by a number of anonymous unclad men. In fact, Ray becomes so erotically enamored with the five-cock orgy that he proudly takes some random dude’s fist and half of his arm up his ass like a true bitch with a sinister itch for morbid masochism. Of course, Bob finally comes to his senses and realizes that Ray was only capable of offering him a ‘left-handed’ romance, thus concluding Left-Handed on a rather depressingly note that is bound to spoil any poof pervert's masturbatory climax. 

 On top of being the first feature directed by Jack Deveau and the first Hand-in-Hand (the film studio Deveau cofounded) production, Left-Handed also has the dubious distinction of being the first fully scripted gay porn flick, as well as the first gay porn flick to feature an original musical score, which is not exactly a grand achievement artistically, but considering that in context with the fact that is a terribly dark fuck flick with a less than flattering depiction of fagdom and its seems rather funny. Described by Mallory Callan in the March 16, 1973 issue of The Reader: Chicago’s Free Weekly as follows, “As pornography goes, the film is remarkable because of its aesthetic sophistication and intellectual curiosity…While taut, the plot is not merely a flimsy premise to introduce one more sexual possibility. The essence of economy, all action advances the obsessional sexual pursuits of the central character, Ray, and all gratuitous ‘emotionality’ which does not bear directly on the erotic situation has been pruned away,” Left-Handed, as well as most of Deveau’s films, ultimately proved that porn, even gay porn featuring fisting, could rise above the level of a pathetic masturbation aid and reach a sort of visceral ‘truth’ that most non-pornographic films lack. Made at the end of the hippie era when even the most masculine of men looked like dirty pussy Jesus impersonators, Left-Handed, most importantly, demystified the appeal of ‘free love’, drug addiction, and idiotic haircuts and wardrobes, ultimately depicting these innately inane irrational ingredients as the recipe for a sad self-serving life of soulless sex and destructive relationships that no one, no matter high, would be proud of. Personally, I think Deveau’s second cinematic effort, Drive (1974), is superior to Left-Handed, but undoubtedly, if the two films have anything in common aside from the obvious homoerotic attractions, it is that they are unwaveringly aesthetically repugnant works from a decidedly deplorable zeitgeist, thus both works should be deemed culturally and historically significant in that they epitomize everything that was damningly degenerate about its excrement-flavored era of excess and eroticism for eroticism's sake.  Indeed, if there ever was a ‘left-handed’ film about a left-handed era, it is most certainly Deveau's Left-Handed.

-Ty E