Boy

A boy enters a gay nightclub one lazy Sunday night. The nightclub is basically empty. The boy is a newbie to these affairs, unaware of the codes of the trade inside the dimly lit halls of the club. Another love song sets the mood as eighteen-year-old Aries enters the stage.  „Macho dancer films“ named after Lino Brocka's Macho Dancer (1988), constitute a specific genre within the LGBTQIA+ cinema of the Philippines. Solito's Boy is an ideal representative of the genre, as it maintains the unhindered erotic possibilities of gazing at naked bodies in the safety and privacy of a darkened cinema, without implicating any guilt. The film had to be withdrawn from the Singapore Intl. Film Festival 2009, because the Singapore Censor Board concluded that it “normalize[s] homosexuality and that the movie romanticizes sex between men." (Filmový festival inakosti)