Body Language

Body Language is a meta-documentary about the life and afterlife of Linus Herrell, a gay Clevelander who played an active role in awakening the city to the AIDS crisis. He died in 1990 at the age of 38, and his ashes were recently rediscovered at a clandestine BDSM retreat in rural Pennsylvania. Body Language—named after the adult bookstore that he founded and operated—is also the title of a play by Dale Peck, staged in November of 2025 with Jonah Wheeler and John Coons, and directed by Carson Parish, also about Linus’ life and afterlife. Both works attempt to honor Linus’ legacy by striving to imagine his abbreviated life, while documenting the void left by the AIDS crisis in small communities. Linus’s life was extraordinary, but he also stands in for the ordinary: hundreds of thousands of queer people whose lives are now defined in the negative space of their loss. The upcoming film will consist of five short acts: a fictional narrative about Linus’s life during his final years; a recreation of the real-life discovery of his ashes at the BDSM retreat; a loosely-structured documentary focusing on interviews with people who knew him; documentation from the staging of Peck’s play; and a ceremony for the spreading of Linus’ ashes, 35 years after his death.