Threesome (Motion Picture Corporation of America, TriStar Pictures, 1994)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Yesterday at about 7:35 p.m. I put on a DVD of the 1994 college sex comedy Threesome, a film I’d been curious about for years ever since I saw a video copy for rent at the late, sadly lamented Obelisk Bookstore in Hillcrest (which was a victim of the Interblob and has been replaced by yet another stupid, tacky “gift shop”) every time I went to an author’s event there. I hadn’t seen the film before but my husband Charles had; it came out in 1994, just a year before we started dating, and no doubt he saw it without me. Directed and written by Andrew Fleming, Threesome is essentially an updated Bisexual version of Noël Coward’s play Design for Living, premiered on London’s West End in 1932 with Alfred Lunt, his real-life wife Lynne Fontanne, and Coward himself in the two-man, ome-woman love triangle. It was filmed in 1933 by director Ernst Lubitsch for Paramount at the height of the so-called “pre-Code” Hollywood glasnost, and it’s electrifying to hear Miriam Hopkins in the female lead (with Gary Cooper and Fredric March as the two men) utter the phrase, “No sex!,” as the key for how the three principals can make their “design for living” work. Threesome writer-director Fleming copies the Design for Living speech almost verbatim and gives it to Alex Henderson (Lara Flynn Boyle), who as the school year opens at her college finds that because of a mixup – they saw the name “Alex” and decided soe was a man – she’s been matched with two male roommates, Eddy Howe (Josh Charles) and Stuart (Stephen Baldwin). Alex complains to the student housing office and is told that they can reassign her, but it will take 10 to 12 weeks, and in the meantime she’ll either have to find off-campus housing (which she can’t afford) or be homeless.

So she makes the best of her 1994 “design for living” with Stuart (Stephen Baldwin) and Eddy Howe (Josh Charles). Alex is immediately attracted to Eddy because he’s soft-spoken, intellectual and takes his studies seriously. Stuart (it’s significant, I think, that he’s the only one of the principals whom Andrew Fleming didn’t give a last name) is a sexually compulsive straight guy who’s a business major and resents having to learn about anything else. Stuart wants Alex – but then he’s the kind of straight guy who’ll have sex with anything as long as it’s alive, human and female – and Alex is attracted to Eddy for his soft-spokenness, his intellect and his charm. The problem is that Eddy is what in modern-day parlance would be called “questioning”; he’s not exactly turned off by women but he’s also attracted to men, and he’s got the hots for his straight roommate Stuart even while Stuart is after Alex and Alex is after Eddy. Early on in the movie Alex makes some incredibly sexual moves on Eddy, and Stuart can’t believe that Eddy isn’t responding to them. In one scene Alex is spread-eagled herself in front of Eddy at the school library as Eddy reads a book by Nathaniel Hawthorne to her, and she masturbates under her clothes and has an orgasm then and there. Stuart later tries the same trick, only the book he picks is Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov,and in order to pose as an intellectual he wears the ugliest pair of glasses he can find even though there’s no evidence during the rest of the movie that he needs glasses at all. Eventually Alex manages to have sex with both Eddy and Stuart – with Stuart it’s a good old-fashioned down ‘n’ dirty ashes-hauling, while with Eddy it’s a lotmore diffident. Naturally Alex swears both men to secrecy, and Eddy later tells Stuart that he had sex with a woman but lies that it’s someone Stuart doesn’t know and the sex was lousy. Naturally this gets back to Alex and she’s insulted. Threesome is a remarkable movie that avoids the “essentialist” trap that’s become the orthodoxy of the Queer rights movement; I’ve noted that a lot of Queer or Queer-frlendly artists have explored the multiplicities of desire and the arbtrariness of the “straight” and “Gay”

categories, even while Queer political and community leaders insist that they are hard-and-fast identities and you can’t switch back and forth from one to the other. The film builds to a “threesome” in which Alex, Eddy and Stuart make love to each other – though there’s no male-on-male action between Eddy and Stuart, just a lot of mutual fondling and caressing of Alex.In the end the three principals graduate and promise toi stay in touch – which they don’t, really, though in a voice-over Eddy tells us that he has a boyfriend and whenever Alex sees them she calls Eddy’s boyfriend “the other woman.” Threesome is a movie that I related to personally because during my one semester of dorm life at San Francisco State University (the first half of 1978) I was dating both my first boyfriend and my first (and only) serious girlfriend. She and I have remained good friends to this day, and as I watched this movie I found myself wondering if she thinks of my husband Charles as “the other woman.” (Since then she’s been married and divorced, though as a result of that relationship she had a quite remarkable daughter who’s now a teenager and is very mature for her age.) We even had a threesome once with a good (male) friend of ours whom we’d been seeing a lot of until then, and afterwards we drifted apart and eventually I decided to come out as Gay and break up with her. I remember being impressed with our friend’s huge cock and desperately wanting to go down on it, but I didn’t dare. Instead I just watched him fuck my girlfriend and felt some of the same frustration Eddy felt in this movie.