Part "Dorian Gray", part Showgirls, The Everlasting Secret Family is all marvellous - and at least two surreal films in one.

It starts as a creepy masterpiece, a fruity and amoral tale of power and predatory homosexuality released, incongruously, at the height of AIDS hysteria (in 1988) but it doesn’t sustain this for long. The film’s peculiarities take over the ship around the twenty minute mark, and chart a direct course to cult-classic land. From then on, one hilarious moment follows another, as the film’s serious themes and earnest beginnings are ditched in favour of over-the-top melodrama chock-a-block with ritualistic all-boy sex-societies, face-slappings at expensive restaurants, and Supreme Court judges dying of heart attacks while in compromising positions.

Mark Lee plays the golden haired, full-lipped but unnamed Youth, who’s hand picked from his boarding school peers to be the personal sex-slave of an Australian Senator (played by Arthur Dignam). (Janet Maslin noted that Lee looks exactly like Katharine Hepburn circa Sylvia Scarlett. He's also a dead-ringer for David Bowie in The Hunger.) Youth is picked up during class time and chauffeured to ritzy hotels where he strips and entertains Senator (a character who is also unnamed). Youth's drink of choice is Crème de Menthe, and he likes having sex with the TV on. A born poseur,Youth likes what he finds in the high-life, and jumps into the role of top-shelf secret escort with gusto, bossing his chauffer/security guard around and starting a formidable collection of expensive silk underwear.

He's horrified, then, to find that Senator’s affections are thinner than his election promises, and that his arse is to be borrowed out among Senator’s acquaintances and visiting VIP’s like the company car. In one hilarious scene at a secret sex-society party, Youth is forced to entertain a Japanese businessman, an ogre who selects a claw-snapping lobster from an aquarium en route to the bedroom. From behind the closed door, Youth’s screams are heard, and his less-attractive rivals giggle at his pain. But Youth shows true ruthlessness by turning public humiliations like this into marks of honour, using them to craft a powerful image as the intimidating and unbreakable King of the Whores. Privately, though, he’s rattled by the inevitability of aging and losing his mantle, and so he seeks the help of a shady plastic surgeon, who speaks with a hard European accent and injects Youth with a range of experimental serums.

When Senator decides to take a convenience wife, Wife (Heather Mitchell), Youth plunges into pathological jealousy and suicidal despair, his psychosis fuelled by the side-effects of thoseskin-smoothing drugs. He starts to style his hair like Wife, and in another side-splitting scene, appears on his waterfront apartment balcony at dusk, gazing petulantly down at yachts and seagulls while wearing full eighties glamour make up, a wig, and a silver, sequined bat wing blouse. Drugs and alcohol begin to figure prominently in his daily life, and Wife starts to smell a rat, quizzing Eric the Chauffer (Dennis Miller) about her and Youth’s similar hairstyles, and later demanding Youth be kept away from her son, Son (Paul Goddard) who has himself grown into a golden-haired beauty with a taste for cock and compliments. Determined not to end up as a chauffer or personal secretary, Youth jockeys for position in the secret society, using his ample wits and malevolent charm to seduce Son and secure a permanent high place in the hierarchy.

Much of the action takes place after a title card announces “14 years later” after which all the actors appear with very fake grey hair, obvious make-up “wrinkles”, and ham about holding their hips or creaking into chairs to show how they’ve “aged”. Youth looks identical, if a little android-ish, with a plastic sheen to his preserved face. Throughout the film, Japanese culture, ritual boy prostitute ceremonies and a kind of inner-city witch/aunt/crazy cat lady who has an extensive cactus garden figure recurringly. Stagy dialogue only gets worse as the film goes along, but you’ll hear little of it over your howls of laughter.

But despite all the (often undeliberate) hilarity The Everlasting Secret Family a very interesting film, and one that comes highly recommended. What you get is what you get here, and what you get is really pretty good.

Homosexuality here is the Roman model, with beautiful working class boys apprenticed to those in a position to keep them well and teach them about etiquette and politics in return for very regular mouth and butt work. The only “gay” characters we meet are a drag queen and an aging club kid, who take up brief residence in Youth’s flat during his alcoholic collapse, and are symptomatic of his decline into the gutter.

The core group of homosexuals in this film seem to be homosexual because they are powerful, or because they are ambitious. Having a personal, secret live-in male sex slave who sucks you off in the back of your limo and keeps you company at night is like the ultimate proof of wealth and power, while being said slave guarantees lifelong patronage from those who need to keep their secrets well-protected.

Man-boy love, and sexually charged fraternal relationships are par for the course here, as is a respect for alchemy and the complex politics of the inner-city in-the-know. These thorny themes are hidden underneath the film’s dodgy production values and Z-grade plot, but they are very much there, astonishing given the time of the film’s release, when a hint of homosexuality meant disgrace and deadly infection, and when even gay culture itself was moving away at a pace from any association with vice, stealth and high culture.

Characters like Youth and Eric understand the inherent drama of their lives, the potential value of their anal and oral services, and are at all times respectful of the ever-creeping advance of nature. Admittedly, the film sinks increasingly out of its depth as it explores these very complex ideas, and though it doesn’t judge, doesn’t really crank up the controversy either. Also, the arty-farty touches like using character roles instead of names, and the archetypical approach to plot and character are cloying, and only draw attention to the insufficient breadth of vision applied to the potentially sensational and challenging material. But bravo for giving it a little bit of a go.

It is a misconceived and hugely enjoyable oddity.

Related Reading:
Reflections In A Golden Eye
The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert