In 1985 young gay Bert (Tom Wagner) in San Francisco receives a call from a complete stranger in the middle of the night who engages in explicit sex talk. The men have phone sex over the next few months with Bert never knowing who the caller is. He calls himself J. R. (Joseph Stachura) and is a partially paralyzed Vietnam veteran who saw Bert at a party and was attracted to him, then found his phone number. “Jerker” unfolds in a series of 20 phone calls. At first the men only engage in sex game playing, but after several months Bert becomes serious when he discovers that a lover and frequent sexual partner is dying of AIDS. The phone relationship suddenly becomes deeper and more intense, developing into a profound if isolated intimacy. It soon becomes apparent that Bert also has the disease. Before going on a business trip to New York, J. R. talks with Bert and becomes concerned with how he sounds. After returning from the trip J. R. calls for several weeks, then he realizes that Bert has died.
This hard to find film of a play by Robert Chesley uses strong graphic sexual language at first, then shifts to intensely emotional dialogue when the specter of AIDS suddenly comes into their lives. Tom Wagner as the attractive, sexually promiscuous Bert, and Joseph Stachura as the calm, assured J. R. give very fine performances in this filmed play. It is intelligently staged and produced, but it's very low budget and home videoish. Mark Thompson, senior editor of the Advocate wrote, "Robert Chesley was one of the most significant gay playwrights of his time. ‘Jerker’ remains to this day one of the most important pieces of gay theater ever created." Film critic Dan Sullivan wrote: "I’ve never seen a play that went from the near-pornographic to the tragic, but ‘Jerker’ achieves it." What does "Jerker" mean? It has the sexual connotation of masturbation, but it is also quite deliberately a tear-jerker. Music was composed by Michael Angelo. The screenplay was written by Hugh Harrison, and he also directed
