About the Film

By Agustin Cruz | December 13, 2024

In this short film, I rēvisit the archive of Queer Cinema as a rētroactive intervention. At age 15, Billy’s Hollywood Screen Kiss (1998, Tommy O’Haver) was the first gay film I ever saw. One evening when I was home alone, seemingly out of nowhere, HBO programmed the film for an after-midnight block. The images of queerness on the television resonated deeply, but the feeling of being seen was coupled with dread, fearing my likeness—brownness—would be omitted. 41 minutes into the film, still no evidence of the existence of queer Chicanos in queer Los Angeles (where the film is set), I held out hope while simultaneously maintaining an oppositional gaze. Just then, Billy doses off and the film enters a dream sequence set to Petula Clark’s “This is My Song.” Within the first few bars, I thought a different song choice would have been more appropriate; I wondered why the filmmaker had not considered setting the scene to Selena’s “Dreaming of You.” This thought lingered and it rēverberated between my ears. The film ended and I never got to see the existence of queer Chicanidad in this film and nearly all the queer films that followed. I watched every queer film to see evidence of a queer Chicano bodymind that turned out to be so elusive to mainstream queer cinema, yet so ubiquitous outside of the picture plane, especially in Los Angeles where arguably there are more queer Chicanos than anywhere else in the world.

A quarter century later, while concurrently majoring in Film & Media Studies and Chicanx Latinx Studies at UC Berkeley, I found both a clip to that scene and the Selena song on YouTube and got to work rē-membering. In the original sequence, Gabriel (Billy’s possibly-straight crush) engages in an interpretive waltz with Billy before going off with a woman, leaving Billy sad and alone. B. Ruby Rich asserts that this sort of anticlimax tracks with New Queer Cinema’s proclivity to subvert heteronormative and mainstream happy endings, tropes, and cliches. In adulthood, I learned to appreciate and love the message conveyed by this scene, but the 15-year-old version of me was not yet experienced enough to appreciate this nuance. In order to soothe the 1998 quinceañerx, about halfway through my edit (3:17, “Dreaming of Billy Dreaming of Gabriel”), I reverse the footage so that Gabriel returns to Billy by the end of the Selena song. Adding the Selena song without anyone’s permission, whether in my teenaged memory or in my adult psyche, served as a remedy for healing a wound and a flawed archive.

Between 1998 and 2024, I managed to catch a glimpse of the ever-elusive cinematic queer Chicano whose image helped me realize Billy’s Hollywood screen kiss within “Dreaming of Billy Dreaming of Gabriel.” Once again, HBO served as the site of my first sighting with the network’s 2014 original series, Looking. The character Richie (Raúl Castillo) was the most fully realized manifestation of a Chicano queer on screen, with real dreams, thoughts, and character development, and he also dealt with the racism that Chicano queers experience outside of the picture plane. Looking flips tropes which were historically used to paint Mexicans as, what Charles Ramirez Berg termed in his book titled Latino Images in Film: Stereotypes, Subversion, and Resistance, “the male buffoon,” by making the white leads the male buffoon and humanizing Richie in ways that are typically reserved for white male leads.

The title of O’Haver’s film, Billy’s Hollywood Screen Kiss, is a bit of a misnomer. It is the title of the solo photography exhibition of the titular character. It does not represent the arch of the film per se. Billy does not get a Hollywood-style screen kiss similar to those of epic love stories from the golden age of Hollywood cinema. The quinceañero Agustín (me) needed to see the two men kiss, the present-time Agustín needed to time travel to make this happen for him(self).

For the purpose of rēappropriating the archive, I turned to Black female theorists and the notion of time travel through the lens of rēmediation. In particular, I was inspired by Julie Dash’s deployment of rēmediation in her 1991 film, Daughters of the Dust. Rizvana Bradley, Assistant Professor of Film & Media Studies at UC Berkeley writes, “At the most basic level, remediation is a concept in media theory which focuses on the integration of representation of one medium in another medium… J. David Bolter and Richard A. Grusin, in their book Remediation: Understanding New Media, argue that remediation is an essential characteristic of new digital media, which constantly borrows from and refashions older forms of media (such as painting, photography, television, and film).” Jacquie Jones, editor of Black Film Review writes, “To mediate the encounter between old and new, Dash introduces the character of the Unborn Child (Kai-Lynn Warren), sent by the ancestors[.]” O’Haver’s sequence included a countdown leader at the opening to transition from the previous sequence into the dream sequence, which is sort of a film within a film. A countdown leader is historically, a strip of film technology at the beginning and end of a film “tasked with fulfilling a surprisingly wide range of functions, chiefly, protection, identification, and synchronization, but also threading, alignment, framing, classification, and instruction” (Soar, 2016). The presence of this older film technology provided an open door for me to incorporate Richie and his lover who were born in 2014, 16 years after Billy’s. Doing so provided a framework for me to rē-member, in other words, to include a queer Chicano bodymind within queer cinema even after its attempted invizibilization of queer Chicanos. Additionally, the incorporation of a queer Chicano body together with the disembodied voice of a Chicana (Selena) work together to rēject erasure.

Furthermore, introducing glimpses of Richie and his lover at the opening of the sequence also functions to realize a kiss between Billy and Gabriel (4:31 in “Dreaming”), which did not exist in O’Haver’s version (43:01 in Billy’s). I lifted the antepenultimate scene (1:13:23 or -11:11) from Looking: The Movie (2016) where Richie and his lover (whose name is Patrick [Jonathan Groff]), kiss. While Richie and Patrick kissed on other occasions throughout the series, this kiss is important because it is the first time in their relationship where they are both fully present in their relationship. Previously, Patrick engaged with Richie with trepidation because he did not think Richie was ambitious enough, although viewers were given more insight to see that Richie was quite ambitious while maintaining a refreshing air of humility. The series Looking was cancelled after its second season and Looking: The Movie served as the series’ finale. It was not until the end of the series finale for Richie, who I argue is the first glimpse of a (three-dimensional) queer Chicano in mainstream queer cinema, to get his kiss, his true Hollywood screen kiss. I used an editing effect called cross-dissolve to blend the two clips together to complete Billy’s kiss. First, viewers see footage of Billy and Gabriel embracing and almost kiss. Right before Gabriel pulls away, I blend in the footage of Richie and Patrick having their first true kiss.

I conclude the rēvised sequence with a glimmer of hope which represents the hope of one day seeing queer Chicanidad within queer cinema. The new conclusion transitions out in the same manner as O’Haver’s original transition out, who used an iris out to transition to the next sequence (44:19 in Billy’s). An iris out connotes an old-timey feel rēminiscent of the silent era. It appears as if black starts to fill the screen, except for a clearly visible ellipse cut out of the footage. The ellipse shrinks into a spot within the picture plane until black fills the screen and either the film ends or transitions to the next sequence. That original iris out is maintained in “Dreaming” (4:31), but when I reverse the footage to change the outcome, the iris out changes course and suddenly becomes an iris in (which is the opposite of an iris out). I reprise the iris out to signal the rēvised sequence (5:00 in “Dreaming”). Rather than fully closing the iris at the end, it remains open at one pixel as the closing titles appear. Through the one pixel opening, the glimmering light that shines through is generated by the footage of Billy and Gabriel dancing in the background. The single pixel of glimmer also represents a kernel of teosinte, that, through hard work and determination, eventually evolved into corn, which sustained my ancestors and continues to sustain Chicanos today. This single pixel kernel falls like snowflake until it replaces the eye of the ‘i.’

This short film is an exercise in destabilizing linearity, which rēpresents hegemony. The title, “Dreaming of Billy Dreaming of Gabriel” intentionally omits a comma as move towards the nonlinear. As the title appears phrase-by-phrase at the end (5:01), the first phrase to appear is “Gabriel,” instead of “Billy,” followed by “Dreaming of Billy,” and then finally “Dreaming of.” This sequence is intended to make the viewer question whether the film is about Billy’s dream or if the film is centering Gabriel’s dream. By looking at “Dreaming” and Billy’s in this manner, the viewer is encouraged to question Looking similarly with an oppositional gaze. In conversations with many gay men, white gay men in particular, I discovered they mostly despise the Looking. It makes sense that they dislike the show because hegemonic films and other media have trained spectators to blindly identify with the white male leads. They see themselves in Patrick, the ostensible protagonist, and feel unseen or slighted by the series which makes them look like buffoons, not realizing that the real protagonist is Richie. Those viewers missed another important point, which is that historically images have been used to stereotype Latinos negatively. Those stereotypes shape the ways many viewers think about Chicanos on screen. Turning the male buffoon trope on its head is an invitation for viewers to engage with their own biases by tuning into their reactions that arise as they watch the series play out. Similarly, this short film (“Dreaming”) is an invitation for spectators to adopt an oppositional gaze, and to watch with a more critical eye.