OUR story begins in a bathroom, where a young man named Jerome takes his time in meticulously grooming himself. You couldn't help but notice that he does this very, very meticulously, as though he was an actor getting ready for the stage.
But it's a date, not a play, that he's preparing for. Leslie, the girl he meets downtown, has known him for some time now but she couldn't help wonder why he's taking such a strong interest in her all of a sudden.
What Jerome couldn't say, and what we the audience already know, is that he identifies as gay.
Director Cloyd Winstanley could have easily cast an “authentic” handsome but gay young man as Jerome in his award-winning short film Use Somebody, but instead he chose the straight Tristan Capulong to play that part – and this is very telling. Winstanley says that “Jerome is not the type of gay who would go for another guy.”
Could this mean that perhaps – just perhaps – Jerome isn't really gay at all?
In a flashback, we see Jerome getting berated for acting like a fairy by his macho father, who happens to be jockeying for a position in the upcoming local election. Having an effeminate son would only make him look bad, he explains, but at the same time he regrets not being able to raise Jerome right after the death of his wife. “Why don't you try being a man for a change and date that pretty girl I see you with sometimes,” Jerome's father urges him.
If Jerome was “authentically” gay, he'd have hurled this request back in his father's face before running off with his flamboyant best friend Andy for some escapades. But he didn't. He loves his father regardless, and so he gives dating a try even though he has serious doubts when it comes to romancing the opposite sex. But at least he can start by going through the motions. He can put on a mask.
“Everyone says that life is a stage... I was to play my part on the stage without once ever revealing my true self,” wrote the widely-acclaimed author Yukio Mishima, who was notorious, among many things, for his liaisons with other men and for a photo book depicting him half-naked in suggestive poses. One of Mishima's most memorable works is a novel titled Confessions of a Mask, wherein Mishima writes off as fiction the circumstances of his upbringing.
As the novel's protagonist Kochan (which is the diminutive of Mishima's real first name Kimitake), he explains that throughout his early childhood he was surrounded by females and only by females: his proud samurai grandmother maintained an iron grip on him, permitting only girls as playmates and forcing him since infancy to live in her sickroom with her until she died roughly a decade after he was born. While this uncanny and twisted upbringing left him physically weak, unsure of his place among boys his age, and confused regarding his own sexuality, his constant exposure to the female mode of communicating also gave him an uncommon facility with words.
Mishima would thus gain recognition even at an early age for his elegantly intricate writing, but sadly this would bring him more torment than joy. The other boys at school, whose rough horseplay he simply couldn't bring himself to join, would call him “the poet,” but out of derision and not praise. At home, his father saw his passion for writing as effeminate and disgraceful, and would conduct surprise raids on Mishima's room to seek out and destroy anything that smacked of his literary aspirations. Mishima would have to turn to his mother, who secretly supported and encouraged him as a writer.
On the other hand, Jerome in Use Somebody would have no such support, having lost his mother some years ago. Though a 15-minute film could only say so much, we could surmise that having no choice but to be close to the kind of father he has, Jerome must have been disgusted by his father's version of masculinity, which he rightly sees as a fake and ultimately meaningless attempt to put on a display of being tough and respectable. It takes an uncommonly great deal of introspection and sensitivity to see this at a young age, and boys capable of reflecting this much in past epochs would become great leaders, artists, scientists, and such. Those were simpler times, and men back then knew what they are all about.
But that was then, and this is now.
Unwilling to see his father and other older men as role models worthy of emulation, Jerome would have no other recourse but to fall in with the openly gay Andy and their gaggle of girlfriends. At first blush, softness and effeminacy does seem a lot easier and more honest than the farcical tough-guy machismo he sees all around him.
And yet, in spite of all this, Jerome went on his date anyway.
Notwithstanding what Lady Gaga once sang, perhaps – just perhaps – not all gay men were “born that way.”