GLR September-October 2024

marriage, and the Mormon Church, to create a strong bond with another woman—Zach Meiners’ life doesn’t come to such a cer tain or cheerful resolution. Family photos show a sweet and sparely built youngster, while the adult Meiners, now stocky and soft-spoken, speaks of how in his teenage years he de scended into depression and suicidal ideation. He concludes that conversion “tears a person down.” Discovering that McRae Game, his counselor from years prior, has come out as gay, Meiners interviews him for the film. In the cadences of a South ern preacher, Game recounts his considerable success at con version, yet he was fired from his post for addiction to gay porn. Meiners’ making of Conversion is in part his own personal reckoning. He, like his companion subjects, tries to dig down

into the depths of confusion, hurt, and trauma that marked their psychological imprisonment in conversion therapy. Ultimately, Meiners knew that he “couldn’t change.” He is at least com forted by the apology his father offered in the fall of 2019. The documentary that he has fashioned will not, I suspect, comfort many viewers. Anti-conversion activist Wayne Besen assures us near the film’s end that, despite the success of some legal conversion bans that have been passed, these programs are “staging a comeback.” Religiously sanctioned programs are constitutionally protected, online therapeutic sessions are un regulated, and Christian media have intensified their outreach to their own populations. Given the current climate, Conversion serves as a dreadful warning.

Indies in P’town

A FTER A BRIEF HIATUS, here resumes my annual roundup of some of the films I saw at the Provincetown International Film Festival (PIFF) in June. While not an LGBT festival, there are always plenty of suitable entries for this magazine. Here are four. F ILMED IN P ROVINCETOWN , High Tide evoked cries of recognition from the PIFF audience, which was primed to love this boy-meets-boy, boy-loses-boy romance. Nor is this the first time a film set in P’town has been screened at the festival (a “meta” moment?). That Provincetown is location bait for filmmakers is not hard to explain. There are those lingering sunsets over the water and the quaintness of Commercial Street, but there’s also an intensity that makes for high drama, or comedy. Start with the high concentration of LGBT peo

his former boyfriend, who was also his U.S. sponsor, recently walked out, leaving him with a visa that’s set to expire. The taciturn Lourenço spends his free time alone on the beach, but the outgoing Maurice, who’s there with friends, calls out as he passes by and insists on talking. They make a date and it goes well; they spend the night together; they seem to be falling in love. But the clock is ticking—on the visa, on Maurice’s time in town (he works as a nurse in New York City). The film allows us, as it must, to hope that all the obstacles to their staying together can somehow be overcome. One thing the two men share is a sense of victimhood—Maurice as a Black gay man, Lourenço as an exploited immigrant. And yet, their connection remains a fragile one; a single incident could throw everything into jeopardy. When it comes, it involves a sim ple misunderstanding, and here is where an

R ICHARD S CHNEIDER J R .

HIGHTIDE Directed by Marco Calvani L. D. Entertainment SEBASTIAN Directed by Mikko Mäkelä Kino Lorber MAD ABOUT THE BOY The Noël Coward Story Directed by Barnaby Thompson Al ti tudeFilms MERCHANT IVORY Directed by Stephen Soucy Modernist Film

ple in a small area and add one crucial ingredient: the clock is ticking. Almost everyone you meet is there for a limited stay, whether a weekend or a week or even the season, which is all too short. A relationship can move through the entire arc from meeting to falling in love to saying goodbye in just the allotted time—or at least that’s how it works in the romcoms. Real life, of course, is never so simple. As their time winds down, deci sions will have to be made. Where do we go from here? In HighTide , the meeting of the two principals doesn’t occur until we’ve established that Lourenço, an undocumented Brazil ian immigrant, is a young man living on the razor’s edge, getting by on odd jobs at the whim of his erratic bosses. We learn that

ongoing source of frustration with this film rises to the fore. Lourenço is one of those brooding, silent types whose unwill ingness to explain himself is undoubtedly part of his “rizz.” But sometimes this reticence means leaving an awful lot to chance. S EBASTIAN ISAFILM of dualities. The title refers to the assumed identity of Max, a successful short story writer who’s trying to write a novel and works as a hustler (okay, sex worker) to get material for his fiction. After each encounter, he quickly writes down exactly what was said and done—Sebastian’s latest es capade for his thirsty readers. But Max also has a regular gig as a freelance writer for a magazine—the kind of job that comes

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September–October 2024

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