A mystery man brings together a group of dead, gay artists to investigate a police response to the dilema of wash-room sex in Toronto. The artists have seven days in which to report on the ethics of police tactics. The artists infiltrate the police only to discover that they themselves are under surveillance as a political subversive group. The artists explore and report on the evolution of toilets and wash-room behavior.
Canada
Canada
abbreviated notes from a public toilet lecture streamed alongside this movie, posting for posterity:
Toronto's bathhouse raids are a pretty well-publicized example of the legacy of harm the city's police force has inflicted on its queer community, and the history of tearooms more broadly is one of the more explicit case studies of how washrooms become sites of surveillance and policing
Robert Yang's video game The Tearoom (citing William E Jones’ work on the subject) is a historical public washroom simulator where the player attempts to cruise by some urinals - scope out a guy, determine if he's game, and suck his dick. present throughout the game is the danger you'll get caught, either by a straight homophobe or a…
i have yet to see the mishima movie from paul schrader but i doubt it features him taking a shower with sergei eisenstein does it.
Stop me if you've heard this one before: Yukio Mishima, Langston Hughes, Sergei Eisenstein, and Frida Kahlo all walk into a public bathroom.... and give talks on the history of tearoom sex and the increasing government surveillance and regulation of it??
Greyson's debut feature feels like a cross between a stage play and some public access kids show for the CBC, delivering a serious thesis through a series of stylistically different presentations by our cast of dead, queer historical figures. Maybe a little long, but totally compelling. Would pair nicely with William E. Jones' Massillon.
half-documentary, half-science fiction about Mishima, Eisenstein, Florence Wyle, Frida Kahlo and Langston Hughes forming a superteam to clash with Toronto Police Services over the criminalization of gay washroom hookups?? was this movie designed by a supercomputer to delight me specifically?????
really good entry point not just to the history of cottaging but to the different ways washrooms have been weaponized as sites of surveillance and control. lots to look at: crucifix fellatio, sets crudely illustrated on draped fabric, digital layering and graphics that look like the halfway point between Peter Greenaway and Corel Draw tutorials
Mishima letting a Canadian accent slip in was especially charming!
“Long live the stinking washrooms. Some already merit bronze plaques”
Tell everybody to piss off tonight
Well, they should piss off and leave you alone in your world tonight
John Waters and William Wegman's gay love child that was conceived in a public toilet. Informative made for TV documentary with faux elements meets late 80's Alternative/Indie music videos with a splash of Microsoft paint. Political, satirical, ahead of it's time and completely outside time where there is no forwards or backwards and everything just lives present in one moment. It's time to flush away outdated ideals and piss away the streaks of homophobia that remain. It's time to normalize fucking in a public toilet and living your best life, loving who you want to love.
My first queer Friday film for the year is this strange docudrama first film from Canadian writer/director/editor John Greyson who is best known for his 1993 musical, Zero Patience, that he made in response to Randy Shilts’ book, And the Band Played On (1987), which wrongly blamed Canadian airline attendant, Gaëtan Dugas, for introducing and spreading HIV in North America.
The drama part of Urinal is the action by an unnamed person to bring together a group of dead gay or lesbian literary and artistic figures, including Sergei Eisenstein (Paul Bettis), Langston Hughes (George Spelvin), Yukio Mishima (David Gonzales), Dorian Gray (Lance Eng), and Frida Kahlo (Olivia Rojas) for a week at the home of lesbian artists Frances Loring (Pauline…
absolutely wonderful. the film’s poetics feel every bit as necessary to the “documentarian” aspects as the “documentarian” aspects are to its poetics. it feels a bit strange to call this movie “poetic” when it’s about such serious stuff - namely the targeting of gay men in public restrooms by the toronto police - but i think that happens to be true here without trivializing or obscuring the subject matter. the effect is actually pretty profound, and i don’t say that lightly: it creates the space to actively imagine a sexual stigma-free, cop-free world (without entirely spelling it out or handing it to the viewer in a cathartic eruption, which imo would be a mistake). it therefore wouldn’t be quite right…
everything you come to love in indie queer films. temporal playfulness, inventive formal collage, cheesy winking cliches, literary referentiality, all in the service of a truly entertaining filmic essay about sex in public bathrooms. original yet classic and familiar. hits all the right social and political dimensions for a dynamic and energising discussion of policing and the neoliberal futility of "gay rights". loved it, LOVED it
This is The League of Extraordinary Gentleman for discourse attuned queers. Can be watched here.
perfect movie. should be a gay classic. i want a poster of the limp wrist couch meeting
cool to learn about the history of toilets, cottaging, and Canada's fucked police violence against queers in the 1980s. i really know very little about Canada so it was good to get a snapshot.
liked the concept, the vibe of all the characters, and seeing this sort of artist film from the 80s
The pinnacle of amateur art/art amateurism? Sergei Eisenstein's guided tour of Toronto's cruising sites? Sure. There's just some art out there where the measure of quality isn't "does x-y-z service the text" but "will I think way too much time thinking about this and talking about this to other people." Stream/download on the Internet Archive!
I've had a real bee in my bonnet lately over films that use onscreen words as a material collage (impossible to portmanteau with montage; we need a new language to steal art jargon from) so this really fits the bill: actual person Dorian Gray dying than reappearing, posing for his portrait once more, then copy/pasted infinitely across the frame; actual intertitles but also gif intertitles…
