"Poster Boy": A Movie About Outing with Some Unexpected Twists

The 2004 independent movie "Poster Boy," written by Lecia Rosenthal and Ryan Shiraki, directed by Zak Turner, is better than I expected it would be, though it took a long time to win me over. The time period is not stated, but seems to me to be late-1980s. The son of a US Senator based on the late and unlamented Jesse Helmes, the Republican Senate Majority leader, outed himself at a campaign appearance at the New York college (filmed at Wagner College on State Island) at which he had been forced to introduce Senator Jack Kray (Michael Lerner). The movie has Henry Kray (Matt Newton) giving a reporter (Steve Sheffler) who does not look all that different from his father the full story behind "the kiss."

That is, there are lots of flashbacks - flashbacks not only from his experience and perspective but of his parents together (Karen Allen plays the political wife Eunice who smiles until it hurts and then keeps on smiling-I love Karen Allen!) and of apartment mates Anthony (Jack Noseworthy) and Izzie (Valerie Geffner). Anthony has been in ACT-UP and Izzie is an HIV-positive woman (something of a fruit fly, despite having been infected by a bisexual man she didn't know swung both ways...)

Anthony and Izzie follow some college students to a party, where both of them score. Izzie does not know that his trick is the closeted gay son of Public Enemy Number One of ACT-UP - ACT-UP enclosed the real Senator Helmes' house in a giant condom at one point.

The extremely unsophisticated local opposition turn to Anthony for ideas of how to protest the local family values photo-op. Senator Kray is seeking to use his son as a prop and insists that Henry introduce him as a beloved father, though father has never been there for the son. Mrs. Kray attempts to dissuade the senator, but he is implacable, not paying enough attention to his son to realize how much resentment the son has for his father's politics - and claims to be fighting for family values in particular.

I don't want to spoil the plot, but there are some unexpected twists. Among other things, both Anthony and Izzie end up at the photo-op in clothes belonging to Krays. And although Anthony wanted to out Henry, he doesn't. Even Anthony's sort of stalking of Henry is motivated less by electoral politics than by frustration at his tricks always leaving in the morning. This last is especially well set up.

And the final part of the interview was not as pat as I'd expected. Even the senator's spinning the revelation he has a gay son took me by surprise - not that he's spin it, but the spin that instinctively came to him.

The real Jesse Helmes won close races with despicable character assassination of his opponents. Helmes wrote the Karl Rove playbook. I guess it is possible to consider that a Helmes could be in a tight race, though a tie is unbelievable. Not only closeted children of politicians but closeted politicians - even, rumor has it, the Senate Republican leader - are plausible. The conflicts wife and son feel about what the senator does to manufacture "issues" seems plausible to me, too. And the local college Republican leader, Skip (Ian Reed Kesler) might strike some as a parody, but does not strike me as inaccurate.

None of the Krays sound like they are from North Carolina, though. I do not know how to distinguish how these from North Carolina differ from those from South Carolina, but none of the Krays sounds like Jesse Helmes or Liddy Dole to me. And, as usual, the college student looks too old. Matt Newton was 27, but looked a couple of years older than that to me.

And I don't get the Palm Springs house, who lives in it, etc. (Henry flees his college dorm for a quite swank Palm Springs house early on.)

Except for some speech-making (not by the senator), I found the movie entertaining. If there's nudity, I missed it. Having gay characters got it an R rating, I think.