White Gays Rotting in the Sun
Review of the “cocks and Ketamine” movie
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Spoiler-free review of Rotting in the Sun. Directed by Sebastián Silva, written by Sebastián Silva and Pedro Periano. Stars Jordan Firstman, Catalina Saavedra & Sebastián Silva. Now playing on Mubi.
I visited Zipolite in May of 2019. It’s a little hippie town in Oaxaca, with the only nude beaches in Mexico and lethal riptides which keep families away. The Gays™ come in winter to have orgies and post thirst traps, but my brother and I went off-season. Our reason was as corny as the thirst traps: it was the backdrop for the Gay kiss in 1999’s Y Tu Mamá También, one of our favorite movies. We were hoping for a shred of that quiet, humble beauty. Zipolite was sweltering and desolate but the water was warm, ripe mangos fell at our feet and businesses were thrilled to see two polite, good tippers who spoke Spanish. It was like the border town we’re from, except with a beach. We were enamored.
We befriended a Trans woman named Zara, who had a shack of a bar on the water. She had spent all year building it herself, whatever she could afford. She put in the thatched roof, built a stage for drag shows, installed hammocks and a volleyball net. “It will pay off when the gringos come.” At night, her bar was the living room for the bored kids from town who came to swim, blast music and play cards. It became our living room too.
Our last afternoon, we helped repair the straw roof from stray volleyball and in return, she got us drunk on mezcal. “This is what I’m proudest of!” She pointed at little colorful tables by each hammock, wooden milk crates she hand-painted. She could carry beers then flip them into a table. “I’m a fucking genius,” she slurred.
As the sun set, four white Gays showed up in matching abs and speedos. Expecting a bacchanalia but finding only kids playing cards, they growled at one another. “I thought this town was supposed to get crazy.” They glanced at my brother and I and probably assuming we were “just” Mexican townies, didn’t say hi. They ordered mojitos but Zara politely told them there was only beer and mezcal. They huffed, pounded shots and got on Grindr, looking for other Gays who never showed. They finally started a drunken, half-hearted orgy with each other while the rest of us tried to ignore them. The queen on the hammock was sucking his friend's flaccid penis when he put his leg through the milk crate. He checked to see if Zara had seen (she pretended not to) then he pushed the broken pieces out of the way. “That’s ghetto,” he hissed. He paid without tipping and they all headed back to their hotel.
I thought of those Gays when Jordan Firstman popped on screen in Rotting in The Sun. The entire movie is his milk crate. Filmmaker and co-star Sebastián Silva makes sure there’s plenty for both of them to stick a foot through. They play damaged and insufferable versions of themselves and I hope it was therapeutic because they’re clearly working out some shit. It’s very meta and you may not get as much from it unless you’re familiar with their other work and the marketing of the film. It’s been sold as “the movie with all the cocks and ketamine,” a feature-length Troye Sivan music video with unsimulated sex. I won’t spoil how you find out it’s not that.
There is a way certain white Gays act in Mexico, as if the entitlements they’re denied in the US bloom south of the border. Silva, who is from Chile and lives in Mexico City is very aware of this phenomenon. The same Gays who rally against gentrification and racism at home, have no issue casually fetishizing Mexican bodies and dicks, renting AirBnBs in hyper-gentrified neighborhoods, only eating at restaurants that Netflix tells them to, always talking about how “cheap” it all is. It’s the kind of disregard that was on full display when so many Gays flocked to vacation in Mexico at the peak of Covid lockdowns. I suspect in the movie’s universe, Jordan would be the first one on a plane to Puerto Vallarta in 2020 and featured on #GaysOverCovid.
Firstman’s character stomps around every space like he owns it, wielding his whiteness and social media like a passport and weapon, criminally unself-aware and a little predatory. Even as he leverages his fame for sex, drugs and validation, he suspects the serotonin pool is drying up. The real Firstman had a dazzling social media ascent during the pandemic for his impressions of banana bread’s publicist or the fly on Mike Pence’s head. His backlash over old tweets (of course) was just as swift. Firstman has been candid about his disillusionment with social media. In an interview with Gayletter, he lamented that the more famous he got, the less he felt supported by the Gays. There’s a rage behind how he’s sold the film to his nearly one million followers, setting a honey trap of drugs and hot sex and instead giving us a very different film. Silva plays a suicidal, lost artist with privileged ennui who mopes at the beach, zonked out on Ketamine while his maid cleans his big apartment in Roma. Their “meet cute” is nearly drowning in Zipolite’s rip-tide. These characters are infuriating but they’re not stupid. In Spanish we say “Tonta, tonta, pero no tanto.” Dumb, dumb but not that dumb. Smart enough to know they’re trapped but not aware enough to snap out of it.
Catalina Saavedra is phenomenal as the house cleaner Vero. Watching her curiosity and repulsion at the Gays feels like the equivalent of telling our moms what we do on the weekends. She carries the film on her back. In this inverted take on Roma, her scenes seethe with classism and her instinct to protect her job propels her to grotesque things. I wish it had shown us a little of what she was fighting for but Silva is not interested in silver linings. He doesn’t try to explain his suicidal depression or drug addiction but he doesn’t need to. Any Gay man has too many reasons to go into a K-hole on a random afternoon. It doesn’t glorify the sex but presents it like a chore or just because it’s “there,” like the poppers in the fridge that the characters take absentminded whiffs from. It’s not judgmental but it spells out the alarming link between Gays and Ketamine. How telling that such a powerful dissociative is now the drug of our Queer generation.
It’s because of “those Gays” that you’re even reading this review. Like Jordan and so many other creators, I found social media success during Covid. In January of 2021, a boat carrying American circuit queens capsized in Puerto Vallarta, creating a shit-storm on social media. I wrote them a vicious open letter on my Instagram. It was a virtue-signal but also things I’d wanted to say since the broken milk crate (I can hold a grudge). The post went mega-viral. Within a week, it was retweeted to millions, read on podcasts and I was interviewed about it by The New York Times. Thousands of new followers and the coveted blue check-mark followed. It’s embarrassing how happy it all made me.
Nothing prepares you for internet fame or how unsettling it is. Social media was sold to us as connection, but it’s really a dissociative, especially if your livelihood depends on it. The question of “is this content?” wedges itself into every moment. Going viral creates opportunities but also diminishes something intangible. Maybe you find later you offended a good friend (so many Gays I knew had secretly gone to PV that winter) or you lose anonymity in places where it was important. This fame is addicting by design and eventually you have to learn there will never be enough likes or follows. If you keep chasing that high, if you don’t build a moat between your “real” life and your social media avatar, it will suck you in too far. Who am I now without my “platform” and what would I do without my dopamine slot machine? Rotting in the Sun was made in that social media hangover. In an argument, Silva tells Firstman, “I don’t know you,” to which he replies “Don’t be mean.”
Regardless of whether you feel the film “works,” it’s showing a side of Gay-specific privilege, addiction and internet fame that we’re rarely shown with this kind of distance. These characters are deeply lost but they don’t “find themselves,” like in so much of our media. The filmmakers were smart to focus on the people we tend to ignore for abs and speedos. The brutal truth is many Gays don’t know who would search for us if we got lost but all of us know which folks would have to clean up our mess when we’re gone.
Dick Gallery: The film has a record number of penises, here’s some of my faves!
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