The Pleasure and Pain of Playing Straight in ‘Femme’ (2023)
There’s a single line in Femme that vibrates with enough livewire sexual energy to power a thousand pantiless Sharon Stone leg maneuvers.
After an impromptu night of bro-ing out, erstwhile drag performer Jules (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett) follows Preston (George MacKay), his attacker/secret lover, outside a nightclub for a smoke break. Feeling no pain and having successfully passed himself off as a straight man after the two had their date interrupted by Preston’s roommates, the typically submissive and feminine Jules is high on the power he suddenly finds himself wielding over the macho Preston. “You want a big man to treat you like a lil bitch?” smirks Jules, echoing a line disparagingly delivered by Preston earlier in the film. The hard-edged Preston is at once taken aback, his eyes softening to liquid pools as he lets out a choked and uncertain, “Maybe.”
With a frisson of white-hot tension spilling over, Femme shifts from a queer erotic thriller into something even trickier and more dangerous. It’s the hottest moment in a movie filled with highly GIF-able material, but it’s also a subversion that underscores the way trauma and power dynamics define the roles that gay men create to survive.
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Written and directed by Sam H. Freeman and Ng Choon Ping and based on their short of the same name, Femme opens with Jules backstage at a nightclub transforming into Aphrodite Banks, his drag alter ego. Stepping outside for a breather before the show starts, he catches Preston staring from across the way and gives him a slight wave. But the vaguely threatening admirer breaks away. Later, after a lip-synch performance of Shygirl’s “Cleo,” Jules, still in full drag, stops at a shop to buy cigarettes, when Preston comes in with his friends. The two exchange a furtive look, which Preston’s mate Oz (Aaron Heffernan), doesn’t let pass. “Is that a bloke?” he says, to which Preston responds “That’s fucked up, fuckin’ faggots man.”
Jules, unable to resist, lets out a half-voiced “Takes one to know one, innit,” a warning shot aimed directly at Preston. But Preston can’t let it go, and continues the harassment until Jules says, loud enough for everyone to hear: “How are you gonna call me a faggot in front of all your friends when I caught you checking me out earlier?” A trigger irrevocably pulled, Jules flees the store and is violently assaulted outside by Preston while his friends watch, jeer, and record the act with their phones.
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Left naked, beaten, and traumatized, Jules retreats into himself, spending the next three months on the couch playing Street Fighter while avoiding the club and his friends/chosen family that frequent it. One evening, after forcing himself out of the house to visit a gay sauna, Jules catches sight of Preston, towel-clad and making a scene. Unrecognizable to Preston when not in drag, Jules seizes the opportunity to set a revenge plan in motion. But, it’s almost immediately unclear to the viewer (and Jules himself) whether he’s merely going along with the power dynamic or getting off on it himself.
Freeman and Choon Ping are primarily interested in the identities gay men fashion for themselves in a world that’s often disapproving—if not outright hostile—towards them. Preston’s braggadocio and violent outbursts mask a deep well of pain and palpable fear of being seen for what he is. Styled as what’s pejoratively known as a “chav” or “scally” in U.K. parlance, his tough guy demeanor is quickly exposed for the sham it is as Jules spends time with him and sees how he’s treated by his flatmates, specifically Oz, with whom Preston is engaged in his own unique power struggle. As strong a front as Preston puts forward, Oz constantly undermines and belittles him, perhaps detecting the very softness that Preston is attempting to mask.
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Tellingly, though it’s implied that Preston is a drug dealer (he’s an ex-con with a social media profile that says “entrepreneur”) he’s most interested in clothing and street fashion—a feminine-coded pastime/career signposting that everything about him is as much a put-on as the makeup and wig Jules dons as a drag performer. But Femme is also very much about how the exaggerated gender performance of drag can just as much bring out what’s inside as hide what’s within.
Jules speaks to his friends midway through the film of Aphrodite, saying: “I fucking miss her. She was just so powerful. Sometimes it was confusing, it was like…like she was the real me and I was the performance.” In the same manner that Preston’s form of masculine drag allows him to access power as he moves through a heterosexual world, Jules’ drag empowers him through the defiance of normative gender expression. But critically, it’s an outward expression of a buried interior strength rather than, as he initially thinks, a shield to hide himself. Jules only comes to this realization after following Preston down his toxic, masc4masc rabbit hole: forced to wear more straight-coded clothes to keep up appearances for his closeted paramour. He even dons, in Freeman and Choon Ping’s most metaphorically fraught visual touch, the very yellow hoodie Preston wore while assaulting him.
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Gender performance and the way it’s explored in Femme also help viewers approach the film’s depiction of the intersection between trauma and eroticism. Following Jules’ assault, it’s clear that he is disinterested in healthy or even polite sexual encounters, turning down an initial and surprisingly respectful approach from an interested hookup at the sauna and driving a wedge between him and his best friend, Toby (John McCrea). When Jules sees Preston at the bathhouse, his fearful reaction is coupled with an initially disconcerting erotic curiosity. This uneasy co-mingling of trauma and pleasure is the thorny question at the heart of Femme.
“Straight boy” fetishism is a kink particular to gay men who often find themselves—sometimes willfully, sometimes subconsciously—indulging in an erotic fixation directed at their most archetypal oppressors. According to Pornhub’s annual year in review (which analyzes users smut consuming habits), for at least the past three years, the most viewed category amongst gay viewers was “Straight Guys” (with “straight” holding steady alongside “twink” and “hentai” among the top five most-searched terms). The drive to eroticize heterosexual men (or, as is often the case, gay men playing straight) is a fact of gay life without an easy explanation.
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The simplest, often knee-jerk response is often that this can be chalked up to good old-fashioned self-loathing and internalized homophobia. The facts don’t necessarily bear this out, however, as study after study has asserted that gay men tend, on average, to be less concerned with conforming to gender stereotypes or seeking out partners who do so. The opposite end of this thinking is to view this phenomenon through an “exotic becomes erotic” lens. It posits that, as Ms. Paula Abdul herself put it, opposites attract.
But the most compelling theory, and the one that Femme seems to embrace, is that it’s simply a reality of the dynamics of BDSM, the performance of dominance/submission, and how these roles shift, invert, or even merge within male/male sexual and pornographic spaces. BDSM is well-documented as a source of comfort and healing for those dealing with complex sexual trauma, and it’s natural for those engaged in this sort of play to bring their lived experiences with them. Of course, consent and communication are key, and it would be disingenuous to claim that the behaviors that Jules is engaged in are in any way healthy. But Femme makes the straight boy fixation harrowingly literal by allowing Jules to act out a pornographic fantasy with the very person who did him physical and emotional harm.
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The film is unambiguous in showing Jules getting a sexual thrill from re-engaging with the abuse he’s suffered at the hands of Preston. Though his ostensible mission is to expose his attacker in the manner of the pornographic “closeted guy outed” videos he searches online after their first encounter, his obsession goes beyond mere revenge to something deeper and more personally complex. He willingly portrays the submissive role that Preston demands, accepting his verbal cruelties and give with one hand, take with the other style of sexual engagement.
Through it, Jules finds his own strength and power within the constant flurry of debasement. In one of the film’s key scenes, Preston catches Jules attempting to record their fuck session while parked by an abandoned building. Preston’s reaction is characteristically terrifying, but there’s also genuine hurt in it, with Jules finally detecting a crack through which he sees an opportunity to slip a hook in. The two have make-up sex, almost like proper lovers, with Jules ordering Preston to go “slow”. Suddenly, there’s vulnerability where there once was just angry thrusting.
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When Preston does finally acquiesce to being filmed, it feels like a breakthrough moment for both characters on two distinct journeys headed for a brutal collision course. Jules seems to draw a strength that he believed was hitherto only available to him via his drag persona and rediscover himself in the process. On the other hand, Preston is able to relinquish control and, perhaps for the first time, truly trust someone else. But there’s an unbearable dramatic tension in this given that Jules has had to act like something he’s not, while Preston has slowly revealed more of the hurt little boy he truly is beneath the calloused outer layers of his cruel persona.
This brings us to the stickiest element of Femme: the filmmakers seem to fetishize this ill-advised sexual relationship while implying a romantic affection building between an abuser and his victim. The film’s sex scenes are intended to provoke and titillate, a queer power fantasy made hot, yearning flesh. But what makes Femme so hard to grapple with is how Freeman and Ng shift the perspective and empathies of the viewer. It’s easy to side with Jules immediately after his assault. But as Preston starts to soften little by little and Jules continues with his plan, it becomes harder to accept what he’s doing. You may, perversely, absurdly, find yourself wishing the two could make it work despite everything.
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When Preston is invited to Jules’ birthday and triumphant return to the stage at the club outside of which they first locked eyes, it’s hard not to share his devastation when the inevitable happens. Aphrodite Banks regales her audience with the story of the closeted guy she seduced and made a fool of. The second assault sequence that follows is a problematic misstep by Freeman and Ng (the fact that Jules, a POC character is beaten twice and given few chances to fight back leaves a bitter taste). But its emotional rawness and dramatic weight can’t be denied. Though again battered and bruised, Jules is the one able to walk out of the alleyway, leaving Preston a broken, sobbing mess.
Femme concludes with Jules returning home and unwrapping the gift Preston brought with him to the party: a designer version of the knock-off hoodie he’s wearing, the same Preston wore on the night of the original assault. “This one’s the real deal,” reads the note, the expensive yellow hoodie identical (save for the blood spatter) to the one Jules is wearing. Does it matter that Preston’s heterosexual persona is an outfit he wears if it causes others harm? Whether or not Jules simply, as he says, “felt sorry” for him, doesn’t Preston’s heartbreak hurt as if what was happening between them was real?
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The primary feature of most revenge thrillers is catharsis, and Femme queers this by denying it. Cinematic edging without relief, the film shows revenge not as a cathartic process but as a continued cycle of pain. It’s more penetrating and honest than your typical revenge thriller. It would be too rote to say that the film encapsulates the phrase “hurt people hurt people,” but what we witness in Femme is how the social problem of toxic masculinity makes victims of us all, even those doing the hurting.
Heteronormativity, the desire to pass, how easy it is to code switch and slip in and out of an identity that’s easier for everyone around us to stomach makes monsters of us all. Even eroticizing toxicity gives it power. Gay men can seek safety and strength by adopting more manly behaviors, but ultimately, Femme posits, our preoccupation with the appearance of straightness is like the illusory concept of revenge itself: a self-denying, soul-killing enterprise for anyone who falls for it.
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