“Which would you rather die for: sex or love?”
Barely a year after the release of iconic road revenge fantasy Thelma and Louise had roused both accolades and scornful debate around feminism, and ten years after the word AIDS was introduced to describe the growing number of gay men diagnosed with a cluster of illnesses we now know are caused by human immunodeficiency virus, New Queer Cinema god Gregg Araki tossed perhaps his most potent and controversial molotov cocktail onto the culture wars of the early ‘90s: The Living End.
The Living End (1992) is a dark comedy about this: a sad film critic who has just found out he’s seroconverted nearly runs over a hustler who’s just shot dead three gay bashers in self-defence. Fleeing together, the two poz men realize they have nothing to lose - consigned to death by the “Neo-Nazi Republican final solution,” they kill a cop and go on a nihilistic spree. What’s not to love? Quentin Crisp called it, in a word, “dreadful.”
In the opening of The Living End, Luke spray paints FUCK THE WORLD onto a wall. And after 10 years of Reagan and Bush relegating everyone you know to almost certain death without so much as a fitful sleep, who wouldn’t? The plague was ending their world, and they were going to take America’s filthy heart with them.
The world is always already ending. My world ends all of the time, it’s very normal for me. My world ended in 2013, when my boyfriend died suddenly, horrifically, in front of me. My world ended in 2005 when I had my mother removed from life support after all hope of revival had been exhausted. My world ended in 2012 when my father died just as I stepped off the stage of my friend and co-worker Kyle’s memorial. My world ended most recently like this: sitting on a friend’s bed in Oakland this December. I picked up my phone and was told that my little brother was dead.
The weeks before that phone call had been brutal: I had, at one point almost literally, kicked down the door back into my brother’s life after he’d stopped responding to our texts, calls, and emails several months prior. What I found on the other side was the end of his world.
Last year, I took a young masc colleague to the ICA (remember when we could go places?) to watch Sauvage. Maybe you’ve seen it. It’s the latest entry in France’s own New Queer Wave, alongside films like 120 BPM (dir. Robin Campillo, 2017) and and the excellent Knife + Heart (dir. Yan Gonzalez, 2018). While I love to be escorted everywhere by my many mascs, with a colleague beside me I was not quite expecting Sauvage to be quite so explicit. We both pointedly stared straight ahead the entire time.
Sauvage picks up the gay nihilism of The Living End and reinvigorates it for the chemsex generation. A young street-based sex worker desperately seeks out meth and affection in what is perhaps the sweatiest movie I’ve ever seen.
It’s the type of film that throws a punch - either that punch misses you completely, or it hits you dead in the solar plexus and knocks the wind right out of you. Having spent my teen years trawling the street looking for more or less the same as Léo in Sauvage, obviously I put myself in the latter camp.
My little brother - 100 pounds on a good day, barely to my shoulder, younger than me in more ways than one, trans like I am - had been my first stop when I arrived in England two years ago. (Exactly how he was my brother is complicated to explain and, to be frank, I owe you nothing.) We’d been close before, practically inseparable in the humid garages and basements of California, but finally being in the same country together gave us so much more time. We went to dance classes, we got dinner together, he badgered me for a year to do a lecture at the bookshop he worked in.
Sweet, thoughtful, quiet, a little strange. My little brother was hard to pin down, you could ask him about himself directly and he would simply not answer or beg off, evade, refuse. You never felt like you were or could be close to him, and yet we were.
When he opened the door to his little house, everything was upside down. The floor was the ceiling. I eventually pieced together that my little brother had disappeared for six months after trying crystal for the first time with a Grindr hook up. Everything had changed. He couldn’t go more than a day without it. His language was clumped up, confused, words scrambled over each other trying to get out. Alone with him in his house, I was not the only voice he heard. I wasn’t even the only Morgan voice.
The weeks that followed were terrifying and exhausting. I barely left his side, sometimes sleeping beside him just to make sure he would still be alive the next day. I did all of the things that, as a former harm reduction worker, I know I should not have done: I begged, I pleaded, I reasoned. I also cooked, cleaned, tried to help him get his stuff back from the cops. I chased after my little brother because I knew he was about to fall off the edge of the world.
Of course it’s the responsible thing during the global pandemic to stay home and not have a meth-fuelled orgy with a bunch of guys from Scruff. But when I saw all of the funny, mean, and moralizing tweets about this story, I thought about how unrealistic that was. Certainly not everyone who does chemsex has a problematic substance use pattern, but for some, there is little other choice than to book a flat in Barcelona and compulsively invite over as many men and as much drugs as you can find. Doing otherwise brings only dope sickness, psychosis, and - worst of all - a loneliness so deep many might be lost to it entirely.
I knew, when I saw this story, that if my little brother had lived another few months, right now I would be pounding on the doors of flats in Soho in the middle of this pandemic, trying to drag him home, to find a way to get him to stay locked in, paying his tickets for breaking quarantine. Because he would not have been able to stop for 21 days. He could not stop for 2 days.
Chemsex is certainly nothing new. But over the past decade it has been the subject of hysterical media coverage, mainstream gay finger-wagging, and increased policing and surveillance. It’s no mistake that the panic over chemsex happened in the same decade both the UK and US finally legally recognized gay marriage - chemsex is gay marriage’s evil twin, onto which all the unacceptable parts of queerness have been dumped. As Léo walks away from a good life laid out for him by his stable, handsome sugar daddy, at the end of Sauvage, we have to reckon with the fact that some queers cannot, or do not want to be, sanitized.
This pandemic is the great revealer, casting off the white dust cloths those in power have thrown over society’s discontents. When 8 men get together in a flat in Barcelona to fuck and shoot tina at the end of the world, who can truly blame them? The writing is on the wall (FUCK THE WORLD). The world they came from will not be waiting for them on the other side of this plague, and let’s be honest, it didn’t have much to offer some of them beforehand.
When one of the characters in The Living End asks, “Which would you rather die for: sex or love?” it’s because dying isn’t in question.
Throw some money to Whose Corner Is it Anyway, a mutual aid, harm reduction group for street-based sex workers.
xo
M