The Image Left Behind: The Films of Kalil Haddad
As it continues to tour across North America, Sarah Fensom examines Kalil Haddad's provocative, self-curated program of short films, titled "He Never Dies".
A few weeks ago, I received a pitch from Sarah Fensom, about the films of Kalil Haddad. I’ve been fascinated by his work ever since I saw The Taking of Jordan (All American Boy) a few years ago, though I’m sad to say I haven’t had the chance to see the rest of his films in the time since. That unfortunate reality is rectified, in part, by Sarah’s sensitive, insightful essay, which identifies the provocative and the tender inside Haddad’s archival-oriented films. They repurpose and re-contextualize images of male youth — be they boys and teenagers on school picture day, or young men performing performing sex acts for the camera — which an invisible audience, hungry for innocence and desperation, devours. Full of the promise, these images comprise an underutilized archive of queer imagination. In her essay, Sarah homes in on this inherent tension, unlocking something fresh in Haddad’s cinema I personally hadn’t quite considered. It was a pleasure commission this piece, and it’s a perfect way to (belatedly) kick off Pride month.
— Chris Cassingham, Substack editor
Several of Kalil Haddad’s films begin with a school picture. An adolescent boy poses for the camera, his hair neatly brushed, his shirt clean, a wide smile revealing stubby new teeth. At face value, the school picture establishes normalcy—it’s a rite of passage and shared experience every American boy can recall. School pictures are also evidence, a paper trail of youth and innocence. The viewer has seen this before and knows what’s coming next, at least to some degree, because the school picture is the eternal image of lost or murdered or molested children. It’s the face on the milk carton, the image that anchors the primetime news magazine segment on network TV, where the journalist or talking head says so-and-so was always such a happy child, or had such a normal childhood. It’s the image that lives even when its subject doesn’t.
One of the most powerful aspects of “He Never Dies,” the self-curated program of Haddad’s short experimental films, is the way the works use sensationalism to reveal truth. He harnesses the devices of Hard Copy (syndicated from 1989-99), true crime docs, and their ilk; intermingling archival photos, newspaper clippings, and imagery of both crime scenes and quiet suburban streets; manipulating them with a myriad of experimental techniques, such as image distortion, strobing, and immersive sound design. In the lion’s share of Haddad’s films, excerpts and images from vintage gay porn films and magazines are evidence of the existence of queer life in the past. It’s a history he both commemorates and laments; for a time, what could be seen as the most blatant representation of gay culture was staged sex. What results from this mix are incisive, devastating works about the dangers and struggles of queer youth, and the commercialization of gay sexuality.
The first film in the program, 2022’s The Taking of Jordan (All American Boy) starts with a school photo of Jacob Wetterling, whose kidnapping case made the national news in the late 1980s; and cuts to pictures of young men tied up, their implied sexual violence ripped from a Dennis Cooper novel. These photos were purportedly sent to kidnapped paperboy Johnny Gosch’s mother decades after his 1982 disappearance. In the film, Haddad puts red bars over their eyes, but for anonymity rather than privacy. In label maker-like strips of text at the bottom of the screen, Haddad weaves a circuitous narrative about boys who are called by different names, used, and discarded, their lives traded for sex. “Jordan was killed for the fourth time on December 3rd, 1995,” the text reads. “Back when he was called Michael, before he was called Steve. Nobody knows what became of him because his body was never found.”
What comes next is a visual and sonic assault—the screen turns red and strobes violently over the image of a young man’s face during sex, accompanied by the sounds of harsh, fuzzed-out industrial noise. The sensory intensity of the sequence drops the viewer into violence, while opening a pathway to empathy, as if to say, “This is how it feels”. Then, the viewer is formally introduced to the titular Jordan, a fresh-faced, curly-haired college student who appeared in the Broke Straight Boys porn series for about a year, never to pop up in adult videos after that. Throughout the rest of the film, Haddad peppers clips of Jordan being interviewed by a man off-camera, masturbating, and performing other sexual acts. Jordan, who says he’s in need of cash, smiles in awe when he’s told he’s getting $200 just for coming in for his audition. The gay-for-pay storyline of the clips is titillating, in part, because Jordan seems desperate and susceptible; danger and coercion are implied in the sexual narrative. Shortly after, Haddad’s on-screen text does what the video clips don’t—it kills him again, saying he “died in his prime” in 2015, among shots of a bloodied crime scene.
Haddad grafts fictional narratives onto the images of real boys, creating fake “true crime,” that is all the more plausible given the historical violence against boys and gay men. As with school photos, pornographic images have permanence. Jordan’s youth is commodified, immortalized, and corrupted by the Broke Straight Boys clips, frozen in time forever. When the real “Jordan” leaves the industry, he fades from a form of existence, but the image lasts. Through its seemingly endless loop of real and symbolic deaths and disappearances, The Taking of Jordan links the ways in which true crime and a certain type of gonzo-style gay pornography both obsess over the fragility of youth and make its destruction the locus of their action.
The Boy Was Found Unharmed (2024), a short essay film (just over 2:30) and the second film in Haddad’s unofficial tetralogy, deals with similar themes but instead follows one true story. Also beginning with a school photo, it recounts the ordeal of Joseph Boyce “Jody” Plauché, a boy who was sexually abused and kidnapped by his karate instructor in 1984. Upon Jody’s recovery, his father shot the abuser dead in public—an event Haddad reconstructs with archival news footage and newspaper clippings. One newspaper excerpt claims that “the boy was found unharmed,” which lends both the film and its title a tragic irony. In narration, an adult Jody, his voice slowed and deepened in a manner equally reminiscent of news shows and Vaporwave remixes, reacts to details of his story, while footage of a young karate student besting his adult sensei plays on screen. The karate footage is a brutal reminder of Jody’s defenselessness, not just in the face of abuse but, more pointedly in Haddad’s film, to the persistent narrative it has created about his life. Haddad shows the comment section on Jody’s YouTube cooking videos where strangers mention his case and laud his father as a hero—artfully revealing the ongoing titillation, weaponized concern, and harm Jody’s very public story forces him to deal with.
Victim of Circumstance (2024) sets its sights on the Golden Age of Gay Porn that grew out of the sexual revolution. Responding to elements from a compendium of images reclaimed from smut magazines and porn films, Haddad’s short weaves a melodramatic narrative about two young men who meet in an orphanage, and their tumultuous, daring love affair that faces an agonizing separation, missed connections, and an escape to California. Elsewhere, we see a group of young men praise a motorbike, then exuberantly dive into a luxurious pool en masse to frolic and fuck. The film is an Edenic dream of sexual freedom, youth, and beauty that also reveals its precarious erasibility.
Haddad intercuts this tale of ill-fated romance and playful hedonism with a pageant of scanned images and text from personal ads published the back of gay porn mags, an article titled “The Trauma of Gay Teens”, and strobed-out, hardcore sex scenes set to throbbing industrial and metal. This extranarrative material unpacks the reality behind the fantasy, revealing a longing for connection that goes beyond the sunny but disposable depictions of endless studs.
Haddad also expresses the desire for connection and the bitter turns it can take in My Secret Boyfriend Died in a Mass Shooting (2025), which dramatizes a pictorial from a vintage porno mag as if it were a passionate love affair between two teens. In voice over, a narrator recalls inviting a boy over while his parents are out of town, while chopped and screwed R&B music accompanies scenes of hand jobs and kissing. The narration and the sudden sounds of gunshots reiterate the themes of the tragic fates of gay youth that unite Haddad’s works.
While pornographic materials affirmed the existence of gay life, they were also often thrown away, seen as potentially dangerous evidence of secret sexual desires. Haddad’s use of vintage porn films and magazines, then, is an act of salvation. His complex, process-heavy body of work exists on unstable ground; these materials and characters—both those he invents and those he discovers—are at risk of being forgotten or destroyed. But by taking still-extant images and pairing them with ideas and narratives about the fragility of gay youth, his films enact a unique synthesis in which permanence and ephemerality are allowed to mingle.
— Sarah Fensom
Haddad’s “He Never Dies” program continues its tour on June 17th at the Ada Gallery in Richmond, VA.