(Originally published in: Body Politic Number 64, June/July 1980)

Colin Campbell makes video tapes. His characters are usually eccentric, exaggerated, and often played by people who sex doesn’t match that of the intended role.

Campbell himself often plays women: the blowzy Woman from Malibu; the naieve punkette Robin in Bad Girls and Modern Love. Campbell exposes and isolates the signals we rely on to read people’s roles, and uses them to build entirely new characters – not caricatures – of people he knows. He creates a vocabulary of superficial gesture, make-up and clothing, accentuating roles to eccentric proportions and thus questioning their validity.

In his most recent tape, He’s a Growing Boy/She’s Just Turning Fourty, Campbell deals with the breakdown of roles to reveal the humanity of the characters underneath. Growing boy Ricki) played by Tim Guest – there is no cross-dressing here, as in many of Campbell’s other works) is with his Uncle Harry (Colin Campbell) at the beginning of the tape, being fitted for his first suit, a metaphor for his initiation into his new role as a North American “man.” Ricki’s boss, Maxine Sludge (Martha Johnson) the quintessential ball-busting business matriarch, is introduced being given a massage by another of her employees, JJJ (Rodney Werden). Maxine’s birthday is tomorrow, she’ll be fourty.

As JJ massages away Maxine’s tensions, they examine together one of her private files, full of glossy photos of nude men. Provocative and enticing, they could appeal to both homosexual men (to whom they were actually marketed) and heterosexual women. The sexual signals the photos produce are confused and ambiguous – given the setting, do they invite or repel? Maxine and JJ are casual about it, but there is an intensity to the scene that mirrors a similar paradox between the two of them.

Later, in a restaurant, Uncle Harry, proudly displaying a broken arm he won in an argument, recounts an amazing scene of heterosexual love-making which he witnessed in a parking lot. The scene still makes him hard when he thinks about it. Ricki, at whom this arousing tale is directed, is busily engaged in an obvious game of eye contact with another man in the restaurant (John Greyson). The heterosexual signals we hear from Uncle Harry are mixed and confused with the homosexual signals we see as Ricki and the other man cruise each other.

In the tape’s final scene, Maxine offers Ricki a drink in her office. In this tableau, she transcends the role of slave-driving boss and reversals a few problems of her own: her husband of eighteen years has just dumped her and, of all things, her cat has diabetes. “What can you do?” they ask each other. But neither one knows. The simple fact of their ages leaves them inadequate to advise, able only to console.

All the characters relate to each other through a conducting agent of sexuality, a signifier of social roles. For any sincere communication to happen between them, the persons the are locked into must be stripped away.

Ricki realized the limits of this “modern world” at eighteen, when his hysterical mother wanted to commit him to a psychiatric clinic because he was gay. In one scene in the tape, he stands in front of a blowing fan in roller skates and a bandana, a simulation of the speed and dissassociation experienced at a roller-rink. The feeling of separation, of individuation in the midst of a crowd – the skater maintaining his anonymity, concentrating on keeping his balance, engaged in group activity but remaining essentially alone – parallels the elements in the tape that bring the characters together and keep them apart at the same time: the nude photographs, Uncle Harry’s story, the environment of Maxine’s office.

In the final scene we see Maxine cradle a weeping Ricki in her arms as he pines and wishes his own mother could be as understanding. They remain two lost people, free for the moment of their roles, but not of their problems.