Gerontophilia

Naturally, it is only a matter of time before every homo enfant terrible auteur filmmaker grows up a little bit and puts away the gratuitous shots of bulging cocks, senseless low-camp gross-out debauchery, and various other forms of hetero-terrorizing aberrosexual agitprop to assemble a more serious and sentimental piece of sod celluloid that is designed to be appreciated, or at least tolerated, by a heterosexual audience. While queer Jap-American auteur Gregg Araki (Nowhere, Mysterious Skin) pussied out long ago with his softcore screwball comedy Splendor (1999) starring Kathleen Robertson (who inspired the filmmaker to dabble in heterosexuality for a short-time), homocore queen Bruce LaBruce (No Skin Off My Ass, Hustler White) just recently decided he wanted to try and debase the mainstream with his most recent feature Gerontophilia (2013), which has been advertised as a sort of gay Harold and Maude (1971). And, indeed, like Hal Ashby’s obscenely overrated film, LaBruce’s latest work was specially tailored for ultra-hip hipsters and faint of heart leftist types as the superlatively sappy and subtly sick story of an 18-year-old Canadian frog twink that seems to suffer from a mild cause of autism who falls head-over-heels for an 81-year-old high yellow negro that climaxes with a dick-shrinking pseudo-existentialist road trip involving PG-rated gay inter-generational miscegenation and a young queen getting upset over the fact a bunch of other young queens are attempting to steal his old jigaboo queen. By far LaBruce’s biggest production to date as a work with a $2 million budget, Gerontophilia was apparently inspired by teenage old-fart-fucker Marcus Ewert, who made himself the cocksucking concubine of sexually introverted alpha-Beats Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs during the late-1980s when the men were already senior citizens. Ultimately, LaBruce's distinctly debasing rectal-reamer romantic comedy absurdly attempts to make the superlatively sleazy and uniquely unnatural into something ‘cute’ and ‘lighthearted,’ which is enough to make any sane person, to misquote the original pimp Hermann Göring, reach for their revolver. Easily LaBruce’s most lazy, contrived, and benign yet simultaneously repugnant work to date, this ‘gentle’ geezer-pleaser dramedy is the sort of film that will probably only appeal to those oh-so rare unlucky individuals that got molested by their grandfather and enjoyed it, as well as geriatric gay men who long to ‘break-in’ virginal teenage boys and turn them into grandfather-fucking freaks. Indeed, if LaBruce was attempting to tap into a larger audience with Gerontophilia, he probably failed, though there are probably enough unhinged middle-aged women and pre-twinks out there to get wet for lead Pier-Gabriel Lajoie, who radiates boyish innocence and naivety and thus makes for the perfect sex object for debauchees. 

Like many gay men, 18-year-old French-Canadian twink ‘Lake’ (played by heterosexual Pier-Gabriel Lajoie) spends a lot of time with wayward women, included his crypto-dyke girlfriend Desiree (Canadian child actress Katie Boland) and a whore mother named Marie (Marie-Hélène Thibault) who works at a strip club and forces her son to call her by her name instead of mom. Since all the women in his life make for worthless nurturers, Lake has been forced to become a sort of nurturer and caretaker himself, hence why he probably develops an erotic infatuation for elderly men, which he initially attempts to satisfy by doodling grotesque nude sketches of old farts with saggy skin. One day while working as a lifeguard at an indoor pool, Lake is forced to perform CPR on an old man he finds floating unconscious in the water, but he finds himself in an exceedingly awkward situation when he pops a boner in front of two younger girls after sucking face with the old timer, which ultimately causes him so much embarrassment that he decides to quit his job despite the fact that he needs money for college. Luckily, Lake’s mommy Marie gets beat up at the strip club she works at and starts a new job at an old folk’s home where she also manages to find her son employment. Of course, working in a retirement home is like being in a whorehouse for Lake, who finds himself stealing the patients’ pills and molesting horny old heterosexual geezers while high on said stolen patients’ pills. Eventually, Lake develops a pathological obsession with spoiled dark meat after giving a sensual sponge bath to a seemingly comatose 81-year-old high yellow elderly negro with faded blue eyes named Melvyn Peobody (played by gay Black Nova Scotian stage actor Walter Borden), whose jet black homo-hating son paid the tab for the old folk’s home but will not even let his poof padre see his grandkids. 

 The retirement home that Lake works at is run by conspicuously corrupt pill-peddling scumbags who intentionally keep the patients over-drugged to the point of perpetual unconsciousness so they do not have to deal with them.  On top of that, one of Lake's co-workers seOf course, Lake catches onto this early and begins trading Mr. Peobody’s pills for alcohol, as the two ‘lover’s get drunk and play cards together. Meanwhile, Lake’s closeted dyke girlfriend Desiree, who fetishes deranged cunts like Lizzie Borden and Aileen Wuornos, finds his scrapbook of old dirty men drawings and begins to realize her boyfriend bones old farts, thus eventually resulting in the dissolution of their phony relationship. After they break-up, Desiree gets drunk at a bar and makes out with a Sapphic metalhead while Lake swallows a bunch of pills with rum as a chaser and suffers a hallucinatory A Nightmare On Elm Street-esque dream featuring a nod to David Lynch's Eraserhead (1977) in which he enters a ruined hospital on his skateboard and begins ritualistically licking giant grotesque wounds on Mr. Peobody’s back. 

 When Lake’s mother gets raging drunk and accuses her son of sodomizing an 81-year-old negro, a struggle ensues between the two that results in the old whore breaking her leg. With his mother incapacitated, Lake decides to realize Mr. Peobody’s death wish of seeing the Pacific Ocean before he dies, so he gets his ex-girlfriend Desiree to help him kidnap the kindly old queer negro from the retirement home. While the two have tons of sleazy grandfather-grandson-like sex on the trip with Mr. Peobody absurdly posing as the boy’s granddad, Lake becomes quite jealous when various other considerably perverted poof’s begin hitting on his antiquated chocolate man. Indeed, Lake even gets into a heated girl fight with some Judaic-looking twink at a gay bar where neither girly man manages to land a single punch. Unfortunately, when Lake eventually gets the gall to proclaim his love to Mr. Peobody after they have sex in a motel room, the old high yellow homo is already dead. Only five people (including the organist!) attend Mr. Peobody’s funeral, which depresses Lake, but he at least becomes happy when he notices his belated senile sod lover’s homo-hating son making out with his mother. Indeed, Lake figures that if his mother marries his dead lover’s son, then Mr. Peobody would become his grandfather, thus adding a tinge of incest to their already tastelessly taboo romance. 

 Aside from Harold and Maude and Beat bitch boy Marcus Ewert, auteur Bruce LaBruce seems to have also had more personal reasons for directing Gerontophilia. Indeed, seemingly no longer intrigued by the martial phallus prowess of gay-bashing neo-Nazi skinheads and selling out to the oppressive heterosexual bourgeois institution of marriage, LaBruce married an older Cuban negro a couple years back, though one not nearly as hold as the one in the film. Aside from negrophilia, LaBruce revealed in an interview with www.vocativ.com regarding his personal interest in gerontophilia: “I am now middle-aged, and I hope I will run into gerontophiles in the near or distant future who will appreciate me as a sexy, stimulating and fascinating sexual object. It’s also a good metaphor for any sort of taboo or transgressive sexual peccadillo, a celebration of anyone who goes against the grain of society or nature. Young is fun, but old is bold.” As for his self-admitted (extra)gay agenda with the film, LaBruce stated in the same interview: “With my movie, I chose to represent an inter-generational love and sex relationship that is as extreme as possible and still within legal boundaries. But it still disturbs people in its extremity, if in a deceptively gentle and subtle way.” Of course, aside from men that partake in such behavior, I think it is most peoples’ gut reaction to be decidedly disgusted at the uniquely unnatural sight of an elderly negroid and a youthful Franco-Canadian fag fucking. To LaBruce’s credit, he makes no claim that he is a proponent of nature as demonstrated by Gerontophilia character Desiree's words of support to her ex-boyfriend Lake regarding his particularly perverse proclivity towards wrinkly old melanin-strong flesh, “I think that what you’re doing and what you are is really brave. And the fact that you’re acting on it, you know, like it’s revolutionary […] You’re fighting against nature.” If fucking old negroes is revolutionary, then I am proud to be a racist and homophobic counter-revolutionary.  Easily one of the most, if not the most, understatedly unhinged films to date, Gerontophilia is a quirky queer celluloid nightmare from the bowels of an old folk's home in homo Hades that demonstrates that the revolution is already over, as no so-called ‘heteronormative’ world could produce such a playfully pernicious poof piece. Indeed, LaBruce's cinematic STD is arguably the most corrupt thing to come out of cocksucking Canada since Gaëtan Dugas.

-Ty E