The title card hovers over an image of trolley tracks rushing toward the camera. A lulling piano serenades the words Passing Strangers, both heralded and undercut by painted letters on concrete spelling “KEEP OUT.” These dual sensations of momentum and trepidation are front and center in Arthur J. Bressan’s 1974 gay porno, which comments on the nature of its format while also doing it eerily erotic justice. The film’s cold open pulls back from hazy images of hetero organs in thrashing congress to reveal its director in a cheeky cameo role: the bored man projecting them for a theater full of silhouettes. He calls up his friend Tom (Robert Carnagey) upon reading his newly published and strikingly unconventional sex ad quoting Walt Whitman. “You must be he I was seeking, I have somewhere surely lived a life of joy with you… I do not doubt I am to be with you again,” it reads, followed by a P.O. box number. As we watch Tom sleepwalk through his daily rituals in montage, the projectionist wisecracks about the dingy sameness of the week’s offerings and bluntly informs his friend that he would not respond to his ad, saying “poetry’s not my style.” Cue the entrance of Robert (Robert Adams), a poetically inclined 18-year-old writing his dispatch from a closeted life in the suburbs. All of Passing Strangers’ adult film bonafides will ultimately build toward this young man’s sexual, political, romantic, and spiritual awakenings.
The black-and-white sequences that follow — which sharply contrast Tom’s torpefying existence drifting between bars, cruising spots, and an office job — begin to carefully situate us within Robert’s burgeoning sexual consciousness. We watch as he peruses San Francisco’s nudie mag shops with an unmistakable mixture of amusement, curiosity, and excitation — “Manly Devotion,” “Boys and Their Boyfriends,” “Long Loving Thrust,” along with all manner of presentational cock-posturing. He wanders into the peep show booths, where prolonged images of penetration are projected through the screen and scattered over Robert’s entranced eyes. A mise en abyme takes us inside the film reel, where we watch a four-way orgy play out in full quality and lengthy detail. As the writhing figures — whose distorted contours both clash and combine with those of Robert’s face — sequentially climax, we zoom out and away from this perspective of him framed by the viewing box. He is dwarfed by the surrounding darkness; hands, limbs, and genitals gently caress their viewer, trapped in his position on the other side of the screen.
What these shots achieve is not only an identification with the kind of sexual longing that is inextricable from inexperience, but also a visual reckoning with the proliferation of explicit imagery made readily available to people who are still discovering intimacy — something that time and technology have exponentially increased. Robert’s curiosity is most easily fulfilled within sites of hyperconcentration and overstimulation, places bearing implicit markers of secrecy and shame. Of course, this element of taboo only increases pornography’s grimy appeal, but in isolation — like Robert’s visual confinement in the shots described above — an avenue of release can easily become an enabler for unfettered obsession.
On the other hand, there are those, like Tom, for whom the instant gratification and routine release offered by social rituals surrounding casual sex have largely removed human connection from the picture, isolating them once again. As Tom recites a response to Robert, divulging the more intimate details of his day-to-day life, we watch him cruise the aptly named “Polk Street.” He brings a man home, and they engage in desperate, mechanical interplay, electric guitars setting the listless mood. When they climax, the camera zooms in on Tom’s face from below as he lets out a sigh of exhaustion and relief. He has a ten-year head start on Robert, and has built-in methods of satisfaction to fall back on whenever he feels the urge, but the two men’s purgatories are mirrored; where Robert can only watch as others act out his desires, Tom is totally detached from his participation in them.
In another conversation between Tom and his projectionist pal, the former describes the shine he’s taken to Robert over the course of their continued correspondence. “He seems sincere, I’d like to meet him soon,” Tom’s voice says in off-handed voiceover as Robert looks at himself in the mirror. He divulges the contents of his latest letter, in which he asked Robert to send him his photograph. “Do you think that was an okay thing to ask for?” Bressan responds as the boy scrutinizes his acne. “Is it that important how he looks?” “I guess so.” Thus begins a fractured sequence of imagined exhibitionist torment; Robert stares down the lens in clown paint, a sinister whirring sound complementing various distorting particles and fabrics that glide between the two. He turns away from the mirror to see lean, bearded phantoms disrobing throughout the living room. He responds in kind, and begins to jerk off as they all watch intently. Discordant hums, scratches, and chirps continue even as the group begins to frolic and blow bubbles, lending a sinister edge to the supposed innocence of their flaccid play. We cut back to a low angle of Robert as he comes. The noises recede, leaving only the faint sound of whistling wind as the group sits across from him applauding. We see money shots from various angles, and the sequence ends with one of them taking aim with his camera.
Bressan’s aesthetic not only arouses and unsettles in equal measure, but also achieves a synthesis between notions of willful, anxious display and the psychological consequences of opening oneself up to it. Robert’s delicate frame, boyish shag of hair, and abject vulnerability only endear the older man further to him, and the question of whether Tom’s attraction is predicated on that essential childishness or merely an extension of his desire to revert to a more innocent former self is left strategically opaque, underpinning the insecurity in Robert’s behaviors instead of eclipsing them. It’s emblematic of the film’s ability to provoke and interrogate from a sincere place while also delivering on the goods that its genre necessitates. Bressan is well aware that he’s working with one of the only mediums where you can tick these boxes and still retain some artistic integrity.
These anxieties are eased significantly when the terror and uncertainty of written communication gives way to tangible contact. It is also at this point, when the two men finally meet on a lush cliffside overlooking the bay, that the film switches from black-and-white to rich, brilliant color. “There’s a place here where no borders fix themselves upon your mind,” croons a guitarist on the soundtrack during a lengthy kite-flying session as the two men bound up and down the beach, stealing glances at each other. The music then morphs into Erik Satie, punctuated by lyrical synth notes, as the pair wander back up the cliff face arm-in-arm, picnic blanket in hand. Tom hangs back, taken by a moment of hesitation; Robert forges ahead, knowing what comes next. He turns and looks back, hair swept away from his face, which seems suspended somewhere between determination and awe. When they finally kiss, Robert’s eyes remain open.
They slowly undress, all the time petting, embracing, caressing; fragments of sunlight dance across their skin, the camera just as impassioned as the men below. Eager yet patient, ardent yet tender, the sex scene that follows not only articulates Robert’s ability to channel imagination into action, and obsession into satisfaction, but also unlocks a sensitivity an attentiveness in Tom that he seemed previously incapable of. Gently challenging assumed dynamics and simultaneously predicting the next few decades of amateur porn, twink tops hunk, place eclipses time, style merges with subject, and emotional histories are suffused into gestures. The pair continue to explore the surrounding areas (and later, each other’s bodies), engaging in various inner-child-appeasing modes of play. Bicycles, playgrounds, carousels — sites of regression and revelry — lead them finally toward Robert’s first Pride parade, which at last contextualizes the young man’s developments and discoveries within a framework of resilience and resistance.
Whether this all-encompassing ecstasy can ever be recaptured is a concern too small for Bressan’s expansive frames. Passing Strangers ends on a crane away from the two as they stand together on the peer, enshrined at a point of departure, increasingly dwarfed by the world around them. Now, Robert’s place within it is not one of enclosure, but of harmony and equilibrium. Whether Tom engaged him for the right reasons or not, he has given his junior a gift beyond either of their comprehension. Most of us have been a Robert at a certain point in our lives, and what Bressan seems to understand — and for better and for worse, accept — is that we often need a Tom in our lives in order to avoid becoming one ourselves, to ground us as we venture forward into the great big wide, and often terrifying, queer world. Passing Strangers embraces ambiguity, asking those questions that cannot be answered and observing how those gaps in clarity ripple into desire and behavior. Its fearless authenticity, and inimitable spirit of arousal and circumspection, moved this former Robert to tears.
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