Listen to me chat with Projection Booth host Mike White and Michelle Kisner about the astounding film The Wild Boys (2017)! This links to The Projection Booth website, (the ultimate film discussion podcast, in case you didn’t know that) but you can also get it wherever you normally get podcasts. I have a few comments below that I would have made on the show, but it’s new information that I didn’t have at the time of recording…

In our discussion of Bertrand Mandico’s The Wild Boys (2017), we touched briefly on some literary predecessors such as William Burroughs’ novel of the same title, which Mandico himself cites as being within the inspirations for his film. While I don’t think the film has enough in common with the novel to be considered in any way an adaptation of it, I have found something in actual history that reminds me of the raucous behavior of Mandico’s gender- transforming youths and Burroughs’ titular wild boys, and which links them more closely in my mind.

I wish I had found this very interesting article about “The Wild Boy Gangs of Weimar Berlin” by Peter Mann on CrimeReads before we’d recorded our conversation about the film so that I could have referred to it. From the article, this evocative quotation from the French gay anarchist writer Daniel Guérin who, on a walking trip across Germany in 1932, encountered one of these gangs:

“They had the depraved and troubled faces of hoodlums and the most bizarre coverings on their heads: black or gray Chaplinesque bowlers, old women’s hats with the brims turned up in ‘Amazon’ fashion adorned with ostrich plumes and medals, proletarian navigator caps decorated with enormous edelweiss above the visors, handkerchiefs or scarves in screaming colors tied any which way around the neck, bare chests bursting out of open skin vests with broad stripes, arms scored with fantastic or lewd tattoos, ears hung with pendants or enormous rings, leather shorts, surmounted by immense triangular belts—also of leather—both daubed with all the colors of the rainbow, esoteric numbers, human profiles, and inscriptions such as Wildfrei [wild-free] or Räuber [robbers]…. In short, they were a bizarre mixture of virility and effeminacy.” [emphasis mine]

It’s not a long distance imaginatively from this real-life gang to Burroughs’ wild boys, and this kind of anarchic repudiation of bourgeois society certainly resembles the cultural pose of Mandico’s boys. It also makes me imagine a combination of Peter Pan’s Lost Boys and the Clockwork Orange droogs. Like the droogs, some of these gangs were known to get quite violent, sometimes clashing with Hitler Youth gangs, which is fucking awesome. I love the thought of some wildly costumed gay boys appearing from the shadows and beating the shit out of Nazis. And it makes me wonder if Burroughs knew about these Weimar-era gangs and took them as an inspiration for the mob of queer marauders who sweep over civilization in his amazing novel.

The Wild-and-Free gang engaged in a test of strength in 1932. Image from Voluptuous Panic: The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin (2000), by Mel Gordon

Thinking about this topic made me wonder if I’d written in any of my own fiction anything about a mob of some kind of wild boys on the attack. It seems like I would have, right? But, weirdly, not so much. I did find, however, this passage from Episode #3 of my Commander Jace serial, The Spunk-Angels of Mars. It doesn’t make a ton of sense here, separated from its context like this, but it’s a chunk of a dream-narrative that the protagonist is experiencing…

You have arrived on the humid and smoky and glittery promenade of a vast space station, and it is boiling with activity from all the aetherships docking at it and spilling out their crews for a brief respite before what you know what will be an incredible offensive against the enemy that lies straight ahead in space and on the moons beyond. Later when you are awake you will remember this milieu and know that it came into your head from the premise of A-R Kanayda’s novel The Red Boys and the White which depicted this: a radical Awana sect has swept over whole worlds imposing their brutal religious ideology and, as their sphere of oppression draws nearer to Earth and all civil order collapses on the human homeworld, an unlikely tripartite alliance of militant Boy Scouts, violent Mormon missionary boys and the teenage acolytes of the Cult Cthulhu forms to block the scourge, save Earth and repel the Awana radicals. 

The supreme commander of the Boy Scouts, a twenty-something Eagle, has arrived at the space station to complete preparations for the final offensive against the Awana, an attack that he intends to lead personally even though he knows that he’s likely not come home again from the hellfire that he intends to release: dark and impossible Cthulhist technology, the weaponized cosmic horror that they called the “Nyarlathotep Cascade.”

In this dream version of the story, inside your head, partially under your control, he looks exactly like Trace Battle and now he is, in fact, Trace but he doesn’t know that he has already met you in the real world. He wears grey jodhpur-like pants, a thick metallic codpiece covering his crotch on the outside of those pants, metallic mesh shoes and no shirt. But the skin of his torso is lavishly inked with scores of little designs in purple and black and red and white, and you know somehow that these are “merit badges,” Scouting awards that he has accumulated for various achievements during his years in the organization. He seems not to notice you standing very near him, peering at the tattooed badges on his skin. You know somehow that some of them are for very mundane and kid-like things like knowing how to make a fire, how to tie various knots, how to catch and clean a fish. But some of the newer ones, running down his back along his spine from the nape of his neck down to his ass are for his queer fuck-skills…

And it goes on from there to detail very specifically all this dude’s gay sex skills and achievements. But I’ll cut it off there to keep things rated PG.

As of this posting, The Wild Boys is available to stream for free on Tubi. For some reason, that’s not showing as an option on Just Watch, but I double-checked Tubi a moment ago and it’s still there. It can also be rented on various platforms. I have the Blu-ray which is not exactly chockfull of special features (I was hoping for a commentary track), but it does have some deleted scenes and a short behind-the-scenes film which is interesting in that you can see what the island location of the film looked like in the “real” world before Mandico applied his intense artifice to it. It’s a great film. If you haven’t seen it yet, go do that ASAP.