Hernandez says to his adversaries what Taia's protagonist struggles to articulate: 'Leaving you would be like leaving myself.' Can't get more humanist than that.An autobiographical novel by turn naive and cunning, funny and moving, this most recent work by Moroccan expatriate Abdellah Taia is a major addition to the new French literature emerging from the North African Arabic diaspora. It brilliantly recognizes that both gay and straight men (homophile and homophobe) are brothers of the same fear.

It also recalls Fassbinder's 1976 Fear Is Fear. Fear attracts his violence.' This confession connects Hernandez to Taia. 'Fear is my body letting him know I'm helpless. Hernandez's swimming pool film has finds a perfect visual metaphor for gay life, which had escaped him in last year's remarkable feature I Am Happiness on Earth. This isn't an idealized answer to homophobia. Our bodies talk, greeting our harasser from afar.' To his sympathetic audience of gay viewers-and to his antagonist-Hernandez's hero says, 'Cure your wounds in me. This poetic, swimmer's metaphor says, 'Freedom is an aerialist on the verge of being attacked.' Each lithe body is like other creatures-dolphin perhaps-peace-loving, phallic, graceful, desirous. This is the most remarkable film about a gay child since Terence Davies' The Long Day Closes. Abdellah (young Said Mrini, then adult Karim Ait M'Hand) endures the tacit homophobia of fundamentalist culture-as an innocently yearning youth, a desirous teen, and then as a young adult college student who emigrates to Switzerland where his emotions and longing for home combine complexly. It is the story of a Moroccan boy who can't help defying his Islamic culture, simply by recognizing his own same-sex attraction. In Salvation Army, Taia explores the emotional complexity that comes with achieving gay awareness. Neither movie has received critical praise equal to the rote white heterosexual celebration Boyhood, yet each movie is a rich expression of gay boyhood. These questions arise after enjoying two superb yet unheralded films that explore gay experience: Abdellah Taia's Salvation Army and Julian Hernandez's Nubes Flotantes.

How many gay film critics are there in America who defend their turf? An even better question: How many film critics are sympathetic to gay experience when it is not sanctioned by the Hollywood mainstream power structure (a la Brokeback Mountain )?

Salvation army abdellah taia