Loaded title notwithstanding, it’s with upbeat intent we embark upon our Queer Ire journey, firmly convinced that, as Andrew Scott announced in last year’s Handsome Devil, “it gets better”. That regular refrain is a steadfast staple of LGBT literature and film, a post hoc platitude passed on from one embittered generation to the embattled next; the fundamental tension between trusting it will and wondering when is fuel to the optimistic urgency with which we go forth. It will get better for this Irish Queer Cinema we’re out to unearth; indeed, it’s beginning to before our eyes, with films like Handsome Devil (to which we’ll return in a future installment) increasingly bringing to our screens, however belatedly, readily recognisable representations of Irish queer experiences.
Such representation is less novel in, well, novels: the idea of an Irish Queer Literature is much better-founded than its cinematic counterpart, with the work of writers like Desmond Hogan, Jamie O’Neill, and Colm Tóibín among those establishing a heritage of gay narratives on the page that have, thus far, examined the intersection of Irish and queer identities in much more detail than on the screen. Where better to start, then, than with Michael Moody Culpepper’s 2016 short 3 Friends? Based on Tóibín’s 2006 story of the same name from the collection Mothers and Sons, this outwardly observant adaptation amounts to a beguiling bridge between literary and cinematic forms, a telling take on their respective strengths in conveying queer sexuality, and a quietly revelatory insight into the point at which each medium finds itself in portraying this in a specifically Irish context.
‘You were never a hurler,’ the man said quietly. His tone was friendly.
‘That’s right,’ Fergus said.
‘Conor was the hurler of the family,’ the man said.
‘He was good in his day all right.’ Fergus said.
‘Are you the brainy one?’
‘No,’ Fergus smiled. ‘That’s Fiach. He’s the youngest.’
It’s a characteristically spare evocation of an essentially Irish funeral scene with which Tóibín in his story introduces us to his young adult protagonist, and one Culpepper sees fit to film verbatim. In Tóibín, the rhythm of language in Ireland is often revealing as much in silence and the unsaid as in the actual utterances; neither the hurler nor the brainy one, which one are we to paint Fergus to distinguish him from his tribe? The implicit answer, as both versions’ low-key relations of a post-party seaside sexual experience suggest it, and as each in intriguingly uneven ways comes to frame it, is the gay one. Anchored by the ritual of the wake, amplified by the anecdotes of interpersonal history, the intrinsic effect of this stage-setting scene is to question the reductive identities by which communities large and small invariably define us. The thrust of “Three Friends”—the short story that is—is the tension between embracing that on an individual level and rejecting its restrictions as a social signifier, between claiming an identity and allowing it claim you.
"It gets better"
A look at 3 Friends
20 CinÉireann / May 2018