Guys and Balls (Manner wie wir), directed by
Sherry Horman and written by Benedikt Gollhardt, is based on the
perennial gay fantasy of the latent homosexuality of those involved
in such manly pursuits as soccer — or football as it is known to
the rest of the world. Ecki (Maximilian Bruckner) is the goalie for
Boldrup F.C., a local German semi-pro team, and he has ambitions to
play professionally. During a big game, in which victory would mean
promotion for Boldrup and more money for its players, Ecki blows
the save of a last-minute penalty kick and is mercilessly teased
and insulted by his disappointed teammates, particularly the
thuggish Udo (Carlo Ljubek). In dejection, Ecki finds himself
rough-housing with one of the more sympathetic members of the team
until, in a convenient entanglement of limbs, it seems natural for
him to kiss him. Just at this moment Udo happens along and loudly
announces: “Now I understand it! We’ve got a queer for a
keeper!”
“I don’t understand it myself,” Ecki tells his stunned and
disapproving father (Dietmar Bar). He has had a girlfriend, Cordula
(Judith Hoersch), whom we have seen on the point of offering
herself to him, but with Udo’s taunt he suddenly realizes that he
is gay. If so, it must be said that Ecki’s progress in gay
consciousness thereafter is rocket-like in its rapidity. When Udo
has him kicked off the team, he challenges him and Boldrup to a
match against a scratch side of gay footballers, to be assembled by
him in four weeks’ time. Considering that he is inexperienced in
sex of any kind and knows no one who is gay besides himself, this
challenge suggests the monumental self-confidence of a practiced
seducer. And, sure enough, when he goes off to stay with his
sister, Susanne (Lisa Potthoff), in Dortmund, he not only assembles
his team but also meets his first boyfriend, Sven (David Rott).
At the same time, the film has to hold on tight to Ecki’s
inexperience in order to milk it for comedy as he cruises the gay
bars of Dortmund. At one point, after he only escapes at the last
moment before losing his innocence to a terrifyingly large and
leather-clad person who has put him in a swing, he even tells
Susanne, “I’m not so sure I’m gay.” Of course, the doubt soon
passes. Uncertainty as to sexual orientation properly belongs only
to ostensibly heterosexual guys who haven’t yet realized that they
are “really” gay. Thus the Turkish lad, Ercin (Billey Demirtas),
whom with multicultural enthusiasm Ecki recruits from behind the
counter at his family’s restaurant, assures the others that his
hero, the English star David Beckham, is gay.
“But he has a wife and two kids,” objects one of them.
“Doesn’t matter. He’s gay as Tonto. He just doesn’t know it
yet.”
By the way, Ercin is not the first to have given expression to
this opinion, but in the context his remark hints at the hope if
not the conviction that all the world is gay and just doesn’t know
it yet. Thus when the two sides meet in the inevitable Big Game at
the climax of the film, the war-chant of the Boldrup lads — “Bang
‘em, bang ‘em, cream the queers!” — is meant to suggest that even
Udo & Co. are so hostile because they are in denial about their
own latent homosexuality. At the same time, and I think rather
self-contradictorily, the film insists on the bright and
uncrossable line between gay and straight that is necessary for the
claim to protected minority status. There can be any number of
those who think themselves straight but who are really gay, but
never anybody who thinks himself gay but who is really
straight.
When someone cites the dubious Kinseyite figure, to which some
in the gay movement continue to cling, of the ten percent rate of
homosexuality’s occurrence in the general population, we are
encouraged to see Ecki’s exclusion and banishment by the other ten
men on his original team as a synecdoche for the exclusion and
oppression of gays by the dominant straight culture. There are, of
course, various kinds of gayness, and the film’s running of the
gamut of gay stereotypes from leather-clad bikers to the mincing
and effeminate Ercin is meant to imply a kind of diversity. But
what all of them have in common is the ironclad certainty that they
are defined by their sexuality.
Thus Rudolf (Christian Berkel), one of the leather guys, says to
his eight-year-old son Jan (Marcel Nievelstein) whom apparently he
hasn’t seen in two years: “It took me a very long time to find out
who I am, and then I couldn’t stay with you anymore.” This seems to
be intended literally, since Rudolf’s ex-wife and Jan’s mother
(Sybille J. Schedwill) is a malevolent harpy who has somehow
managed to obtain a court-order preventing him from seeing his son.
How she could have done that in this day and age, and in
progressive Germany, we forbear to inquire, but the idea of who
I am as the excuse and license for every sort of
self-indulgence is not quite excluded. For like Brokeback
Mountain and other gay-themed movies of recent years, the real
point of Guys and Balls is to stress that the indulgence
of the sexual appetite without constraint is not so much a right as
a sacred duty — indeed, the sacred duty, since it
nullifies even the holy bond of marriage. The movie’s apparent
freedom and lack of inhibition give rise to a lot of fun, but
underneath it all there is an uncompromising agenda.
James Bowman is a resident scholar at the Ethics and
Public Policy Center, media essayist for the New
Criterion, and The American Spectator’s movie critic.
His new book, Honor: A History, has just been published by
Encounter Books.
