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Possibly Maybe
Winter Kept Us Warm
By Matthew Eng

Over the years, David Cronenberg has spoken with gratitude about the film that catalyzed his career in movies. In 1964, David Secter, then a 21-year-old, fourth-year English major at Toronto’s University College, corralled a group of his classmates to make a fictional, feature-length film about their social, sexual, and interpersonal lives, shot in and around campus with administrative approval. The result was the black-and-white, proto-queer drama Winter Kept Us Warm (1965), which Cronenberg, himself a University of Toronto undergraduate at the time, has called “the most influential film of my life,” even if by Cronenberg’s estimation, its artistry had nothing to do with its influence on him. Instead, it was the shock of seeing friends on screen in familiar settings that first planted the seed that filmmaking was a feasible vocation for the future godhead of Canadian cinema, at a time when narrative features were only intermittently produced and no film schools yet existed in the country.

I admit that I had, until recently, never heard of Secter nor his debut, which focuses on the increasingly close relationship between introverted freshman Peter (Henry Tarvainen) and popular upperclassman Doug (John Labow) before an unceremonious dissolution. Made with scant funding but a surfeit of can-do enthusiasm, Winter Kept Us Warm was completed within hours of its opening night premiere at the 1965 Commonwealth Film Festival in Cardiff, Wales, mere months after Secter had graduated from U of T. The press was instantly drawn to the exploits of a would-be cinematic prodigy attempting something genuinely novel while still sitting for exams. Like Orson Welles, his oft-mentioned hero, Secter was round-faced, enterprising, and preternaturally assured. When speaking to journalists during the film’s heavily publicized production, this born self-promoter professed dismissive apathy to the lack of assistance and encouragement afforded his project by the National Film Board of Canada, whose elite members had coolly dismissed Secter following a futile screening of a rough cut that might have clocked in at three hours. Yet the film, eventually abbreviated to a brisk 81 minutes, was favorably received in Cardiff and during a subsequent, self-distributed run in select Canadian cinemas, where it managed to recoup its $8,000 budget, half of which was made up of personal loans.

An emboldened Secter once again contacted the NFB, whose distribution agent submitted the film to the 1966 Cannes Film Festival, where it played the International Critics’ Week section alongside Ousmane Sembène’s Black Girl and works by Jean Eustache, Dušan Makavejev, and Jean-Marie Straub. In the decades since its auspicious unveiling, Winter Kept Us Warm has been rendered an usual footnote in Canadian film history. It is perennially eclipsed by its louder, grittier, and more galvanizing contemporaries in overviews of international queer cinema before Stonewall, and it has seemed perpetually on the verge of vanishing. But that reputation has started to shift, due in part to a recent 4K restoration by Canadian International Pictures, as well as the 2024 publication of a monograph on the film by the writer Chris Dupuis, who connects the film back to a famed moment of man-on-man intimacy in William Wellman’s inaugural Best Picture winner Wings (1927), where a soldier’s kiss grazes the corner of his dying comrade’s lips.

Winter Kept Us Warm is unmistakably the work of nonprofessionals, full of gaffes that are conspicuous from the very first scene, in which the unmoving mouths of Tarvainen and an actor playing a cabbie fail to correspond with the sounds they are ostensibly issuing. In these early stretches, the film seesaws between levity and leadenness, the cringingly crude and the disarmingly casual, sometimes within the span of a single scene. Touched and molded by multiple collaborators, the film’s defining quality is tangible communality. Secter and his cast shot without a finished script. Actors dropped in and out of roles on a whim (including future Saturday Night Live sovereign Lorne Michaels), but they also contributed dialogue and story ideas throughout production, sometimes while the camera was rolling. An attitude of Sure, why not? permeates several scenes, like an impromptu striptease that a female character performs in a common area before a small male audience for no discernible reason. If the film avoids collapsing into haphazardness it is through Secter’s temperate avoidance of melodrama and the humbling sincerity of his intent. There’s a montage early in the film composed entirely of still photographs that captures the dream of sixties-era campus life in its teeming totality—from rambunctious varsity athletics to solemn lecture halls to anti-segregation demonstrations—more effectively than original footage possibly could have, culminating in a shot of Peter lying alone on his dorm room bed, isolated in the very environment that he romanticizes.

Peter, who hails from a traditional Finnish family and evidently lacks some social graces, is rescued from his isolation by Doug, a tall, striding, cleft-chinned presence who arrives for the semester having spent the summer toiling on a steel mill and takes pity on the freshman after playing a prank on him in the dining hall. But is it really pity that drives Doug to seek out Peter’s company? At first glance, Doug is little more than a standard-issue fuckboy, the kind of straight guy who publicly greets his girlfriend with a firm slap on the ass. And yet he divulges that something is missing in his current relationship and gravitates to Peter with an insistence that transcends the norms of homosocial camaraderie. Their bond is solidified in the wintertime with frolics in the snow and easy-breezy banter, but Secter finds sly ways to tease out the deeper significance of this connection. After attending a Harry Belafonte concert (the exteriors of which were shot on the sly), the pair spends the night roaming downtown Toronto’s arcades and clubs before ending up in a Turkish bathhouse; their visit, in which the nude bodies of Labow and Tarvainen are carefully framed and tactfully covered by towels, raises an eyebrow but quickly proves chaste, pivoting on Doug urging his underling to avoid the surging antiwar protests and stick to the status quo.

Making a film about queerness just five years before the decriminalization of homosexuality in Canada necessitated that Secter toe a line and avoid any overt displays of homoeroticism; even a montage of Doug and Peter sharing a bar of soap and scrubbing each other’s backs as they shower alongside other bare-assed men in a locker room feels more whimsical than titillating. In an article for The Globe and Mail published during preproduction, Secter identified the film’s primary theme as friendship, which, “like snow, is brilliant but ephemeral.” According to retrospective accounts by the cast and crew, the majority of them (including, bizarrely, Labow) had no clue that they were working on a film with both gay characters and a bisexual director, one whose own unrequited crush on a straight roommate had inspired the central narrative. The film’s title is lifted from the opening stanza of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, which Doug espies Peter reading in the library, but Secter was himself unaware of its queer interpretation, borne of the gay-mongering gossip about Eliot and his colleague Ezra Pound, who edited the epic poem and to whom it is dedicated. Likewise, queerness is left subterranean in Winter Kept Us Warm, but its potential is legible, if only in Doug’s lingering gazes, which bespeak his uneasy, involuntary curiosity about his younger companion. There seems to be an alternate film playing out entirely in Labow’s sultry eyes, which oscillate between a sybaritic glint and a piercing concentration in the first half before growing heavy, twitchy, and despondent as Doug slowly, brutally comes undone for reasons that surprise him and the viewer alike.

The complexity of Secter’s vision comes to fullest fruition in Doug’s unarticulated inner crisis, which stands in stark contrast to Peter’s spring awakening. As benignly animated by Tarvainen, who would become a committed theater artist before dying of complications from COVID-19 in 2021, Peter’s quiet, doe-eyed diffidence and artistic proclivities certainly mark him as different from the other boys at school. He makes a point of brushing off a welcoming floormate’s comment about the nubile coeds and later chastises Doug for talking about women as though they were merely “sex machines.” But the film refrains from overstating Peter’s difference, nor do its characters persecute him for it, aside from the initial dining-hall hazing and occasional, mostly lightweight quips about his acting ambitions. There is none of the “sister boy” hysteria that torments Tea and Sympathy’s Tom, the prep schooler degraded for his effeminacy in Vincente Minnelli’s 1956 melodrama and who bears a slight resemblance to Peter; the forsaken friendship between Tom and his roommate-protector Al in that earlier film could very well be a starting point for Winter Kept Us Warm. But atypically and intriguingly, it is Peter who discards his meekness and imposes a distance between him and Doug upon earning a lead role in a student production of Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts and taking up with Sandra (Janet Amos), the senior actress cast as his mother. And it is Doug who pines for Peter and resents the younger man’s absence the further he strays from his mentor’s hold. Secter sensibly abstains from swinging between binaries, refusing to correlate his characters’ superficially effeminate and virile behaviors with their sexual preferences. At one point, Tarvainen is captured swishing it up backstage after a performance of Ghosts in a series of vérité inserts. But a moment like this does not automatically prescribe who or what Peter desires, just as Doug’s gravitation to Peter does not invalidate the ruggedness of his surface demeanor, but rather exposes the emotional vulnerability secreted beneath.

Secter’s film is understandably coy about its queerness but conversely candid when discussing and depicting premarital sex between both of its straight couples. For Peter, the act is a rite of passage fulfilled by film’s end; for Doug, it reads more like a defense mechanism, a means of quieting the concerns of his increasingly sidelined girlfriend Bev (played by Joy Fielding, née Tepperman, soon to become a prolific, mass-market novelist), who is at once brash and pitiful in her devotion to a man with dwindling interest in her. “If I didn’t know you better, I’d swear you and Peter…,” Bev cracks at Doug, who brusquely cuts her off before she can utter the unspeakable. Indeed, it comes as a shock to see this strapping, waggish alpha male reduced to a brooding, bristling paranoiac, the hairy-armed big man on campus ensorcelled by the twinky naïf who regards their friendship as just that: a friendship.

In this way, Secter summons the same unclassifiable ambiguity that surrounds Tea and Sympathy’s Tom, whose sexual identity remains irresolute. The bromance between Doug and Peter is accordingly less a lovestruck meeting of polar opposites than a thwarted connection between two young men in diverging moments of transition, finally broken with a swift act of violence. The film halts to a close almost immediately after this, which may speak more to budgetary constraints than narrative purpose. But its final scene, in which Peter, in voiceover, again reads the title passage of The Waste Land, is pointedly desolate, even mournful, proffering no promise or suggestion of potential reconciliation. And so we are left with a film of foiled satisfaction, its dismaying incompleteness anticipating the stalled career of its maker.

Secter followed Winter Kept Us Warm with The Offering (1966), which is not the horror film that its title suggests but a heterosexual romance between a white stagehand and a visiting Chinese dancer. The director worked sporadically in the last half-century, making a few indifferently received indies and nearly directing Cher in 1969’s Chastity. Not long after walking away from that disastrous star vehicle, Secter arrived in New York and formed Total Impact, a promiscuous, drug-and-drink-fueled commune that doubled as a filmmaking cooperative dedicated to producing utopian portraits of their own rocky, ramshackle setup, entirely housed inside a Lower East Side tenement. (Philip Glass lived downstairs.) He dabbled in softcore pornography and helped run a multimedia performance space out of the historic theater that is now the Village East multiplex before relocating to Southern California. On numerous occasions, he has voiced his wish to make a follow-up to Winter Kept Us Warm that would catch up with its characters in the decades after the film’s events, but the project never materialized. In 2004, Secter’s nephew Joel made The Best of Secter and the Rest of Secter, a homespun but loving biographical documentary that runs through his uncle’s life and pays tribute to his landmark debut; in the film, Secter discloses his status as HIV-positive. He turned 82 this past March, living in Hawaii with his longtime partner.

Winter Kept Us Warm appears to occupy a celluloid closet all its own, one built with increasingly transparent walls. “It’s really up to the individual to decide whether this kind of male relationship is homosexual or not,” Secter maintained during a televised interview with the Canadian Broadcast Corporation in 1966. But critics of the era, from Sight & Sound to Variety to the Village Voice, apprehended and acknowledged the aberrance of Doug and Peter’s dynamic, no matter the discretion of its treatment or the prudence of its publicity. Secter’s film challenges the contemporary penchant—some might say demand—for characters to be unambiguously queer in both practice and pronouncement in order to qualify as queer. I wonder if this is how something as hollow-hearted as Rose Glass’s Kristen Stewart-starring noir pastiche Love Lies Bleeding (2024) gets automatically deemed a “new queer classic” by mainstream queer media, which has historically held no space for, say, the films of Kelly Reichardt, whose understated work has long blurred the line between workaday homosociality and latent queerness. Secter troubles that same line in his film, in which the most romantic gesture involves Doug learning one of Peter’s beloved Finnish folk songs and nonchalantly playing it for him on the guitar as his girlfriend sits beside him; it is the purest admission of adoration that the film can muster.

This adoration, however impractical and unvoiced within the context of the film, is memorialized in the end as a moment already gone, an opportunity suddenly vanished, a nameless something for its characters to remember and rue. There is no declaration or consummation of love, but the dawning knowledge that desire is mercurial, holding us captive to urges that we struggle to identify and absorb, sometimes without reprieve. What is most affecting about Winter Kept Us Warm is the permission that Secter tacitly allows this pair to wander and to wonder before its bleak conclusion. He was 21 in the hour just before Stonewall and the Gay Liberation Movement, soft-pedaling the queerness of his film around prying press, potential investors, and closest collaborators. Perhaps he assumed that Doug and Peter would soon be conveyed into a puritanical culture where such permission to explore would rapidly diminish, where the winter they once shared would become a retreating memory, a phantom pain, a reason to ponder what could have been, rather than what might still be. Secter could not foresee what was on the horizon as he sent his film out into the world, but I like to imagine that he held out an emancipatory hope for these boys, and for himself.