14 - A Gay Boy Comes to Terms with his Sexuality: 50 Ways of Saying Fabulous (Stewart Main, 2005)

Summary

While all of the films discussed in this book express gender in one way or another, the first feature film made in New Zealand for theatrical release about gay adolescent masculine sexuality, 50 Ways of Saying Fabulous (Stewart Main, 2005), is also one of the first, along with Niki Caro's Whale Rider, to foreground gender issues explicitly as the main preoccupation of the movie. Based on a novel by the expatriate New Zealand gay writer Graeme Aitken published in 1995, the film was ‘really a very brave one to make,’ just as the novel had been a bold one to write. As the author himself states of the film that was based on his work:

50 Ways of Saying Fabulous is … very distinctively a New Zealand film … When I was growing up in rural New Zealand in the 1970s, there were no positive representations of gay men anywhere … I can't imagine such a film being made back in the Seventies when it is set, so it is also a testament to the fact that times have changed.

Both the book and the film are extremely courageous, not merely because the subject of gay sexuality and love between young men was a taboo subject in New Zealand until well into the twenty-first century, but also because the approach that Aitken took to the subject was unflinching in its realism – a quality that was appreciated by at least one reviewer when the film was released overseas:

Billy (Andrew Patterson), the hero of our story, is overweight, fey, fickle, treacherous to his friends, unfaithful to his lover, and cursed with an EQ low enough to assume he can seduce aforesaid farmhand [Jamie, the handsome young man hired by the hero's father] by jumping on him. In other words, he's the selfish, brainless brat most of us once were. He's a wonderful character because he's so realistically imperfect.

Predictably, the combination of taboo subject matter and a de-romanticized approach meant that neither the novel nor the film was well received by critics in New Zealand and Australia.