I'm Not Afraid: A gay subtext romance between Miguel and the boy his parents have kidnapped. With cocks, the Nahuatl language, and a shirtless Short Guy.

 

In 2003 I saw Non ho pauro ("I'm Not Scared"), the film version of the novel by Niccolò Ammaniti: Nine-year old Michele (Giuseppe Cristiano) befriends a kidnapped boy, and discovers that everyone in his village is responsible.  

Left: Recent photo of Giuseppe.  He may not be the Non ho pauro one.

So I wasn't planning to watch the 2026 Spanish version, No tengo miedo, on Netflix.  How could they expand it into a tv series without a lot of padding?  Besides, I already know the twist ending.  So do you.

Then Yago Sandoval (who plays the kidnapped boy) posts that he and Aldo Navarro (the Michele character) have "Amistad como portal amoroso."  Portal amoroso is used to convey the transcendence, stability, and peace that comes from romantic love.  Is he referring to their own relationshp, or the characters?  There was no significant gay subtext in the 2003 movie, but just in case there is here, let's check out Episode 1.1, "Brujas" (Witches).  

Scene 1: Miguel lies amid dead leaves on the ground.  He has wet his pants.  He asks "Am I dead?"

No, his friends are calling for him.  As he walks through the ruins of an old convent, he stumbles upon a deep pit, and at the bottom a boy, chained up. 

Cut to four kids playing soccer, pretending that they're Mexico vs. Denmark in the 1986 World Cup.  A Bully hits Miguel in the crotch with the ball, then kicks it out into the jungle.  He orders  the Nerd Chuy to retrieve it, "Or I'll kill you."  

Left: The Bully is played by Mauro Guzman, who is quick to point out that he and Bruno Strauss (Chuy) are actually friends.

The Teenage Felix arrives and tells them not to go into the jungle, because a witch lives there who eats children.  Then he grabs his brother, the Bully, and drives him home.

The others ride their bicycles home, discussing why the Bully is so mean and if there really is a kid-eating witch.

Scene 2: Teenage Felix (Cosmo Elio Gonzalez) and the Bully arrive at their run-down, trash-strewn house to see Dad keeled over due to drunkenness and the debilitating disease that they can't afford medication for.  They discuss how horrible their lives are.  Dad would like to shoot himself, but he can't afford a gun, darn.  

As the Bully goes off to fetch some rotten platanos for dinner, Dad asks, "Why don't we have a mansion yet?  You said you have a deal going on that would make us the wealthiest family in the world?"

"I'm working on it!" Felix exclaims.  He must be the kidnapper!

Scene 3:  The kids arrive at Nerd Chuy's house to see his parents arguing with Pino (Luis Alberti, right).  "You can't back out now!" "But I'm scared." "Have faith!"  They're in on the kidnapping, too.

Nerd Chuy stays behind to have dinner, and the two remaining kids, Miguel and his Sister, go home with Pino, their Dad.  I thought he was a single father, but his wife is there, being depressed.  They do Sister's medical treatments, which she hates, and have rice and beans for dinner for the 3,000th time.   Dad Pino promises that soon they'll be able to afford real food, and 20 tv sets so they can watch the game from anywhere in their mansion. 

The kids retreat to their bedroom, where Sister calls him Luis.  Richster Chava appears at the window to invite Miguel/Luis to watch the game in his mansion.

"But you can't go in there without permission!" Sister exclaims.

"Richster Chava can, and his parents are asleep, so they won't know I'm there."  Can't he invite a friend over?  Or are the bourgeoisie not supposed to associate with the proletariat?

Cut to Richster Chava and Miguel/Luis watching the game and being affectionate.  I'd call it a gay-subtext buddy-bond.

Scene 4: In the morning Miguel/Luis is awakened to the poor people arguing with a rich guy.  "Something must have happened!" "We had nothing to with it!" The Nerd  Chuy and his parents have vanished, and his house has been ransacked!  

Richster Chava, Miguel/Luis, and his Sister decide to investigate.  At the house, they find that Nerd Chuy's bicycle is gone.  If he was kidnapped, it would still be there. They conclude that he went to the witch's house to fetch the soccer ball, and got eaten. Then his parents went looking for him, and the witch got them, too.

They run to the jungle to investigate.  Shouldn't you take your bikes?  It was miles away yesterday. 

More after the break

In the Hand of Dante: Film noir about an original Dante manuscript, set in a 1950s-era 2001. And it gets more confusing. And homophobic

I love the Divine Comedy, at least the Inferno, where Virgil guides Dante through the stages of hell.  He puts the sodomites in the Seventh Circle, where fire rains down on those who "do violence against nature," but at least it permitted me to
mention LGBT people in an Italian class in the 1980s, when otherwise the rule was "Don't mention them, they don't exist."  

So I'm going to watch the new movie In the Hands of Dante, about the discovery of an original Divine Comedy manuscript.  Maybe there will be gay characters, probably not, but I'll still get to hear that beginning phrase again: Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita, mi ritrovai per una selva oscura (at the midpoint of life's journey, I found myself lost in a dark forest).

We've all been there.

Scene 1: Dante climbs a rocky cliff.  Meanwhile, sometime in the 1940s or 1950s, an obnoxious novelist (Oscar Isaacs) complains to his friend that his books are too brilliant to be edited. "I'd rather the stableboy f*ck my wife than see my work edited." Heterosexual identity established immediately after his obnoxiousness.

Oscar Isaacs' backside

"So, what's your book about?"

"It's a translation of Dante's Divine Comedy. I've been working on it for ten years." 

Friend squeezes his shoulder.  "You're still hot after ten years."  Wait -- are you flirting with him?

" By the way, who is Dante?"  Say what?  Who doesn't know Dante?

"An old dead guy.  But he got trapped in the cage of rhyme and meter.  I'm breaking out, so my translation will be far superior to the original."  The greatest work in Italian literature?  You planning to improve on "Hamlet" next?

Scene 2:  Newark, 1969.  A young boy enters a middle-class house and tells his Uncle, "I just killed some kid."  He explains that the boy (Gavin Weingarten) had a big knife, and asked if he wanted to die.  He tried to defend himself, they struggled, and he managed to stab Knife Boy.  

Since he doesn't know who the boy was, and no one saw them, Uncle says that he should forget about it.  But don't make "malarkey" a habit in the future.  Are you going to grow up to be Our Hero? But you're way too young. That would make the "I'm a better writer than Dante" conversation sometime in the 2000s, and it was obviously in the 1950s.  Maybe Uncle is Our Hero?

Scene 3: Bora Bora, seaside, 2001. Our Hero on a hammock, writing in his notebook about "creamy white gardenia blossoms" and "faded petroglyphs."  So you must be the Boy who killed someone, now middle aged, but it's a parallel world with the look and feel of the 1950s: no computers or cell phones, men wear hats and smoke constantly, writers use pencils. 

Our Hero tells us that the Nine Heavens of the Paradiso is a bad translation; It's really Nine Skies.  The last and rarest of them is the Sky of Illimitibleness.  Or you could say "Endless," if you weren't a pretentious jerk.

Cut to the Young Dante sitting under a tree, looking at the Illimitible Sky.  

Scene 4:  New York, 2001, "That time when the daylight sky was an oppressive, low-lying glare of white, and the dark of night was..."  So, summer.  Is this one of your stories, or really happening in-universe?    A greasy-haired guy named Louie (Gerard Butler, but blond and greasy) saunters into a closed bar and orders a Dewars and water.  He criticizes the bartender's moustache: "You see a guy with a moustache, he's either a cop or a (homophobic slur)."

I expected L'amor che move il sole e l'altre stelle, the love that moves the sun and the stars, and I'm getting Charles Bukowski, homophobia, and a parallel world where the 1950s never ended. 

"By the way, you ever take it up the ass?" Louie asks.  "Might make a man out of you."  But then he calls him a c*cksucker.  Twice.  Are you homophobic or not, buddy?  

He criticizes the Bartender and his wife for being excessively ugly, and threatens his nine-year old daughter.

Next topic of conversation: the Bartender's Uncle, "a real fuckup," who opened the bar, but pissed his money away gambling.  Wait, is that the Uncle from 1969?  So the Bartender is Our Hero?  But he's supposed to be in Bora Bora, writing pretentious crap.  And the Uncle was elderly in 1969. No way he's alive in 2001.  

Unc owes the gang a lot of money, so his nephew the Bartender is going to provide it.  Louie takes tonight's proceeds, $1,200, then orders the Bartender to go down on him.  But he shoots him as soon as he gets on his knees.

What does this have to do with Dante?

More after the break.  Caution: It gets more confusing, but there are cocks.

"Caravaggio's Shadow": As time goes by, the gay Baroque painter becomes more and more straight. With nude Italian men

When my generation was growing up, teachers, reference books, and movies always presented historical figures as absolutely, undeniably straight.  My paperback copy of The Importance of Being Earnest said that Oscar Wilde was imprisoned "on scandalous charges."  I asked the teacher what those charges were. She said she didn't know.

In the 1980s, we started to uncover the "lies, secrets, and silence," reveal the gay men and lesbians of the past who had been denied us.  We collected them like beacons of hope in a homophobic world: Plato, Aristotle, Walt Whitman, Oscar Wilde, Emily Dickinson, Shakespeare, Gertrude Stein, Michelangelo...and Caravaggio (1571-1610), who introduced the Baroque style of bright, naturalistic color to Italy, who scandalized the art world by using thieves, beggars, and prostitutes as models for religious-themed paintings.  And who was gay.

Everybody in West Hollywood went to Caravaggio (1986), by filmmaker Derek Jarman (who announced that he was gay later that year). We were expecting a lot of cute Italian guys (there are some), and hoping that they would be nude (no). 

We were also hoping that Caravaggio would be presented as gay, but resigned to the likelihood that he would be straightwashed: turned heterosexual, or mostly heterosexual (a few men as trivial dalliances as he pursued the Woman of His Dreams).  

He was straightwashed.

As a child and teenager, the artist (Dexter Fletcher, left), is the victim of sexual abuse by Catholic clergy.  This "turns him" gay, or rather pansexual. 

As an adult (Nigel Terry), he is a decadent figure like something out of a Pasolini film, consorting with men and women, although he prefers women.   He seduces both Raduccio (Sean Bean) and his girlfriend Lena.  But Raduccio is just a dalliance; the heterosexual romance is True Love.  Then Raduccio kills Lena, and a distraught Caravaggio kills him.  Gay lives must always end in tragedy.

More after the break.  Caution: Explicit.

"Da Vinci's Demons": An absurdly heterosexual Da Vinci, a bi guy who only likes ladies, two monstrous gay predators, and a lot of penises

 

Last night Da Vinci's Demons, appeared on our Peacock recommendations.  We didn't realize that it was from 2013: Peacock keeps the date of tv series secret.

Of course it would turn gay artist and inventor Leonardo Da Vinci (1452-1519) straight: every historical figure from Shakespeare to Cole Porter gets straightened in contemporary media.  But when I was studying comparative literature, one of my fields was Renaissance Italy.  Plus there were hints of the paranormal, secret societies and such.  So why not?

Big mistake.  It was disgusting.  I can't even bring myself to do a scene-by-scene, but I'll post some of the nude photos.

1. They straightened Da Vinci (Tom Riley) in the most offensive, slap-in-the-face way possible.  He starts out painting a naked woman of "exceptional beauty," then discuss the incredible beauty of the Woman of His Dreams, Lucrezia Donati, over and over and over.  Finally he manages to have sex with her for ten minutes of her boobs.  .  

2. His apprentice Nico (Eros Vlastos), who grows up to be Niccolo Machiavelli, gazes longingly at the bare boobs, too.  It is absolutely imperative to demonstrate that every man on Earth is heterosexual.  

At least Machiavelli was straight in real life.

3. DaVinci's buddy Zoroaster (Greg Chillan) mentions that he's been with men in an offhand comment, then goes into detail about the exceptional beauty of the hundreds of women he's had sex with.  He likes ugly women, too, because they're better in bed.  

4. There are two gay guys.  I know, every man on Earth longs for women's boobs, but these people are not men, they are odious, slimy monsters who have nonconsensual sex with teenage boys.  The first, the Duke of Milan (Hugh Bonneville), is killed immediately after he kicks the boy (Matthew David) out of his bed.  Serves him right for being gay.

More homophobia and some penises after the break

Pasolini's "Arabian Nights": The less well-known tales told with penises and homophobia

Between 1971 and 1974, Italian filmmaker Piers Paolo Pasolini produced and directed three adaptions of famous Medieval stories.  The Arabian Nights (Il fiore delle Mille et una Notte) was the last, and the most ambitious, with filming locations in Yemen, Iran, and Nepal.  

If you've seen the other two (The Decameron and The Canterbury Tales), this one will be familiar; most of the same actors, especially Pasolini's lover Ninetto Davoli (left) and his protege Franco Merli, below, whom he discovered working at a gas station in Sicily.

Don't worry, he's 21 in this scene.

Some of the same annoying bits as in the previous movies: dozens of people sitting around singing for no reason; lengthy closeups of random people with bad teeth grinning idiotically at the camera; stories that merge into other stories, so you're never sure what you're watching.

Pasolini eschews the more familiar stories, like Aladdin and Ali Baba, to concentrate on Nur Ed Din (Franco Merli) who loses his favorite slave girl, and wanders around, crying and having erotic adventures while searching for her.

Inside that story is another, about Aziz (Ninetto Davoli), who depends on his girlfriend for advice on how to win The Girl of His Dreams.  It ends badly.

And a few others.  Prince Tagi (Francesco Paolo Governale) falls in love with a girl through hearing a story about her, but she doesn't like men. 

More after the break

Pasolini's Canterbury Tales: More gay characters and cocks than Chaucer imagined

 

The Canterbury Tales (I Racconti di Canterbury, 1972) is my favorite of Piers Paulo Pasolini's Trilogy of Life (others include The Decameron and The Arabian Nights), maybe because the set-up and many of the stories are familiar from my college claasses, so I don't get lost in the abrupt sedgeways.

And because I saw it last of the three, so some of the cast was familiar: Pasolini's lover Ninetto Davoli, left, as a comic-relief buffoon, Franco Citti as someone morose and frightening,  Although I'm still annoyed by the closeups of random people with bad teeth grinning at the camera for no apparent reason, and the groups of people sitting around singing for no reason.

There is less full-frontal nudity than in the others, but for some reason the penises on display are much more impressive. 

The biggest of the lot -- probably the biggest portrayed in any mainstream film -- belongs to John McLaren.

Pasolini includes adaptions of 8 stories:

More after the break