Drifter (1974)

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A bisexual hustler (Joed Adair) hitchhikes around the Pacific Southwest looking to trade sex for room and board — and maybe a deeper connection with someone? Drifter is an early offering in the history of gay cinema, a non-explicit 16mm film produced by a gay porn company (Jaguar) hoping for a mainstream crossover. Drifter never found that kind of success, of course. In fact, it pretty much disappeared from the Earth for fifty years until distributor Kino Lorber recently brought it to light on their Kino Cult label.

Crude and inelegant in its execution, Drifter feels a bit like an Ed Wood movie at times. The acting teeters between wooden and genuine, and the stock music teeters between overwrought and evocative. On the other hand, the film benefits from real-world location shooting (no cheap-looking sets here) and a script with some surprising depth.

Adair’s character has interactions with a wide variety of supporting players, with each interaction shedding light on his background and his desires. There’s a sympathetic younger man looking for a father figure, a horny man looking for a one-night stand, a lonely woman looking for company, a playful woman unsure of commitment, a sleazy pimp trying to exploit him, and a pre-op transsexual who hires Adair to help him celebrate his transition. This last character, played by Gerald Strickland, is the most compelling in the movie. At first, he’s a creepy threat to Adair, then the performance becomes so over-the-top that the character feels like a joke, but the character ends up spilling his heart in a way that is both shocking and moving.

Adair’s character develops an attachment to each of these people — he opens up to a few, and contains his disgust with a couple as well. The film led me to wonder what it is that makes human interaction compelling? What draws us to each other and keeps a relationship going? Essentially, how do we find love? The script gets especially compelling in the third act, when we learn Adair’s character struggles with his sense of self-respect. While he reluctantly submits to being used by paying customers, he has difficulty truly loving anyone without wielding power over them through sexual assault.

I went into Drifter with low expectations. I fully expected an exploitation movie or even an outright porno, but it surprised me by its efforts to tell a meaningful story with a cast of unknowns who give it their best shot. Director Pat Rocco (who also photographed, edited, and produced the film) succeeds in humanizing the film’s marginalized characters and presenting a compelling portrait of a world free from rigid sexual binary. It’s a cheap, rough and uneven film, but it’s also hard to dismiss.