White Muscle Daddy: horror and hormones collide
26 Mar 2024 - Photos by Jeremy Mimnagh

Being young and hot forever is what every queer person wants

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White Muscle Daddy begins with horror film titles projected on a large screen across the back of the stage. The blood red font is instantly, deliciously, recognizable as the one that introduced the Hammer Horror classics. Nostalgia, a frisson of fear, and a dose of camp. The film itself is a hilarious take off on any slasher film, but with a queer twist. And the final girl about to be stalked, the irrepressible Augusto Bitter (True Dating Stories, Chico, Iphigenia and the Furies, The Monument, Lear), is reading David Demchuk's queer horror classic Red X when that first ominous phone call comes through. As the horror and comedy build to a Hitchcockian climax, playwright Raf Antonio and co-directors Antonio and Tricia Hagoriles start to play with the fourth wall and reality. Film and theatre merge, contradict and blend with pre-filmed segments and live filmed segments often taking the place of onstage action. Stylistically and thematically ambitious, White Muscle Daddy is always visually inventive and once some of the technical and timing issues are ironed out, should become the thrill ride it aims to be.

Our central queer couple, Frankie Bayley as Gustavo and Jaime Lujan as Jeremy, are the norm, the Brad and Janet, that are about to be disrupted. Jeremy gets a job at a gym/spa that introduces him to the excessively buff and mysterious Eugene, Ray Jacildo (Kink Observed, Who's Afraid of Titus?). Lujan is immediately smitten and envious. Meanwhile the filmmaker responsible for the opening horror film footage, Chel Carmichael as Lucy, is about to premiere a documentary on Gustavo's trans journey. Jeremy works the night shift, taking over for Shaquille Pottinger (The Pansy Craze) whose career as a drag queen has taken off. They will all intersect on one fateful night. About halfway through, White Muscle Daddy takes a slight turn and becomes the horror narrative promised. It is fun and mildly suspenseful, with the subtext of capitalism and gender roles as the real monsters treated as ur-text. Unfortunately the combination of film and theatre, ties the proceedings to a specific pace and that pace is just too slow. Just as events get bloody and juicy, White Muscle Daddy threatens to grind to a halt.

Then, intentionally or not, White Muscle Daddy veers into camp. Jeremy becomes the diva he was meant to be and shouts "I'm not unfuckable" in full Naomi Malone gutter style. All of a sudden the stilted exposition dialogue makes sense and the actors dial up their performances past naturalism so that White Muscle Daddy becomes a lot more fun. However it doesn't become any less thematically confusing. In a world where genderqueer, multi-racial lives are taken as the norm, as they should be, the insistence on gym bodies and masculinity doesn't seem as oppressive as they are in life. And Jacildo, who is playing a villain, is so charming and so overtly sensual in his chilly Steve Reeves drag, that it throws the balance off. There are crucial segments where Jacildo, and then Lujan, talk about the hierarchy amongst the undead and how they don't belong, but as a plot point it begs to be explored. There are other examples of ideas that launch but never take flight, the projections include social media bursts that underline a subtext about the disconnection the characters feel and which leads to their downfalls. A bit with toys puppeted and filmed to create a car chase is striking, reminiscent of  Simon Phillip's North by Northwest, where form and function, theatre and film, reality and theatre, merge. If only there had been more of the same.

The queer/vampire connection has been made many times and will undoubtedly be made many more. Antonio's twist, adding the racial and non-binary elements, works well and doesn't get in the way of the thrill ride aspect of a horror narrative. And the queer elements allow for the camp to flourish, almost compensating for the minimal gore and glossed over sexuality. Bayley has a wonderful, excruciatingly painful, attempted seduction scene that will resonate with anyone, queer or not. To be blissfully, bravely yourself and rejected for a stereotype is a horror everyone has experienced, even those who succeed at mimicking or being stereotypes. And White Muscle Daddy does make one take stock of one's sensitivities or lack thereof. One understands completely why Jeremy is drawn to Eugene showering, the lingering shot of his backside makes that eloquently clear. We're all shallow darling. And one understands exactly how the shower curtain echoes the Batesian fate of Bitter. It might be too much to expect a thrill ride and a coherent thesis—genre, like gender, has always been messy—but White Muscle Daddy comes close. The technology and the structure are impressive, but in true queer style, it is the camp that gets us across the finish line.