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Dorian Blues | 88 MINUTES | KENDALL SQUARE Funeral Parade of Roses | JAPANESE | 105 MINUTES | HFA: NOVEMBER 5 James Dean looms over Tennyson Bardwell’s Dorian Blues. In Rebel Without a Cause, Sal Mineo’s Plato, perhaps the first gay teenager in Hollywood movies, has a photo of heartthrob actor Alan Ladd taped in his locker. Dorian (Michael McMillian), who’s struggling to come out in the 1980s, sports a poster of handsome JFK above his bed. Dean’s East of Eden was about teen brothers, one beloved, one weird and off-the-wall, fighting for the love of their straitlaced father. In Dorian Blues, stuffy dad adores football-playing son Nicky (Lea Coco) but is turned off by mildly sissy Dorian. It’s that old story again, the sensitive gay son, the stern macho father, but perhaps it needs repeating, as there are always new gay kids suffering on the block. Dorian Blues is an audience-friendly movie to help such kids be comfortable with their sexuality, and a film that could be shown for school discussions. First-time filmmaker Bardwell is straight; he based his heartfelt story on a college buddy who died of AIDS. At the transgressive end of the gay spectrum is Toshio Matsumoto’s 1969 Funeral Procession of Roses, a boastfully abnormal, crazily shot tale of a boy-on-man geisha house. The main character is jealous, pouty, narcissist transvestite Eddie (played by " Peter " ), a murderer waiting to happen. The film is sometimes campy, often annoyingly indulgent, but stick around: all spills out at the end, a schlock Joan Crawford horror movie bleeding into a tranny Oedipus.
BY GERALD PEARY
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