Boys Briefs

Award Winning Short Films About Gay First Love

The boys from Picture This! have compiled a collection about Gay First Love. These six films incorporate the motif of gay first love and lust into six concise stories that reflect the coming out experiences of all six filmmakers.

Stanley Beloved
James and Kevin are friends and live in Hong-Kong. When Kevin finds out that his Chinese father wants to send him away to England to study, he decides to spend a summer day with his friend James. Then something unexpected happens.

The Absolution of Anthony
A 16-year-old gay boy lives with his Catholic grandfather in the Bronx. The only way he can truly be himself is when he calls people in the phone book enticing them to participate in phone sex or when he is stocking the local jock with an interest in talking dirty.

Smear
A gay teenager is in love with a straight friend. The only way he knows how to deny his feelings is to beat up a random person to avoid being called queer.

Front Room
Close-ups of parts of the body, in a homoerotic statement.

Piglets
Two young men are on the verge of making love, but an old neighbor does everything she can to ruin their adventure.

I've always said that shorts can be classified into three categories. The first are films that fall short of using the film short medium to express their feelings. The second are films that overwhelm the film short medium with too much action or feeling. The third are films that have the right balance of plot, story and syuzhet. The lastly takes all three aspects of a film and molds them into a short concise narrative that fulfills the true purpose of films: to incite and entertain.

The one film in this lot that truly had me laughing, coming in at barely two minutes, is Piglets. The filmmaker takes the the act of sex to a comedic level by incorporating an old neighbor content on ruining a man's sex life. In making a film purely for the purpose of entertaining, the filmmaker utilizes the medium to the fullest extent. He sets up the plot of the film: Two men are about to have sex but keep getting interrupted by their neighbors attempt to thwart their hot and steamy evening. It has the story. A man lives with a crazy old neighbor that has a sense of humor or an evil streak (it seems uncertain). The man has definitely met the end of his rope. And it has syuzhet: the filmmaker unravels the relationship between the man and the neighbor one that lacks any affection but full of companionship. While his intent was probably not to create this playful relationship between the two protagonists, he does create something that seems intimate yet distant all at the same time.