I watched the latest “sensitive”, “coming of age” American gay film Yes, Simon but was disappointed, apart from a single episode – where Simon imagines his friends “coming out” to their parents as heterosexual. Nudity? Nah – a single, short scene where he steps out of the shower to check his phone, a towel wrapped tastefully around the crown jewels, but we get to see the manly chest. The nipples are worth a glance – which is all you get, half way through the film. It’s a long time to wait. No arse shots, though, clothed or otherwise. Such thoughts some here will doubtless suggest are tasteless, and should be focussed on poor brown boys in Pattaya rather than rich white boys in California

The film revolves in part around social media, but blink and you’d miss the single reference (no visual) to Grindr. Simon knows all about Grindr (or at least enough to correct his father, who offers to “follow” him on Grindr, that “Grindr isn’t Facebook”) but we never see him using it. In fact, while all the heterosexuals around him seem to have their tongues down each other’s throats in scene after scene (perhaps the contrast is intentional), Simon appears to be sexually intimate with nobody until the very end, when he meets his (previously virtual) friend and they snog. Spoiler alert – it’s a multi-racial happy ending. Very politically correct. (I was rooting for the white boy with the tints in his hair)

Subtracting from any sense that this is a realistic portrayal – despite the heavy use of online activity, there’s absolutely nothing about online pornography, and as for masturbation it’s never even hinted at …

I guess the studio is hoping for as wide a distribution as possible. A friend of mine says he’ll be haunting the men’s lavatory of the nearest cinema showing the film (remembrance of teenage Joe Orton in Prick Up Your Ears)

Contrast that to an episode of the English television series Bliss that I stumbled across. The series is mostly about the agonies of heterosexual bigamy , so I didn’t bother to watch the rest of the series. However, in this episode we find the anti-hero’s teenage son asking his mother if he can get out of the car and skateboard home through the park. It’s evening. Off to get his cock sucked I thought immediately. That was before he “came out” to his parents later in the episode. And teenage-boy-on-skateboard – the whole ensemble is known to one of my friends as “meals on wheels”. Far more authentic, although probably too subtle for your average breeder. For me, if it’s American moves, the Netflix film Alex Strangelove is way more realistic

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