Of course, he’s from the UK, where speaking out on these issues aren’t as controversial as it once was, but I can still imagine his American agent being none too pleased. Yet here he is again, on the cover of British gay magazine Attitude‘s Youth Issue, not only looking smashing as always, but engaging on the gay issues even further than anyone could have asked.

Now that he has put the question of his own sexual preferences to rest – the hilarious “gay face” comment in the infamous 2010 MTV interview I wrote about at the time pretty much should have settled that – he has turned his attention to the issue of marriage. And true to form, he’s for it. It’s been an issue in the UK too, as it continues to be in the US, and DanRad instinctively understands that this is a rights issue, not a question of religion or other red herrings. As an atheist, it warms my heart to see that he calls himself a “militant atheist” as well, but he’s careful not to look down on religious people, even sharing a little bit about his (secular) Jewish upbringing and how it has, ahem, marked him.

When I put him forward as a future prime minister after a Daily Beast interview back in 2009, it was based on the political sentiments he shared. He criticized the Labour Party for being insufficently left, a view I heartily shared. However, with the antiquated voting system in Britain, he disappointed me when he later came out as a supporter of the Liberal Democrats in an Attitude interview. If this had been 2005 and the Brits had had the chance to elect their parliament on a proportional basis, I confess I might have entertained the throught myself – this was the Tony Blair Iraq-war supporting, civil liberties-gutting New Labour going to the polls, mind you – but in 2010? Nah. The Lib Dems could not explain before the election if they would back a Labour or a Conservative government. Luckily, both he and Labour are now owning up to past sins. For Radcliffe this doesn’t just mean talking openly about the alcoholism of his late teen years and early twenties, but also shifting his allegiance from the Lib Dems – which, it should be noted for American readers, is essentially a centrist party currently in a coalition with a much larger Conservative Party – to Labour. And again, his political analysis is to my liking: He calls Nick Clegg, the Lib Dem leader, Conservative prime minister David Cameron’s ‘whipping boy’, excoriates him over broken promises on taxes and education, and, sounding like a genuine Occu-Potter, calls for higher taxes on wealthy people like himself. Granted, I think it’s a stretch when he calls the new Labour leader Ed Miliband ‘genuinely left-wing’, but if that’s what’s he wants to hear from him, that makes two of us.

Politics aside, though, as always he also shows himself as a really nice, down-to-earth guy. He confesses to having a ‘darker side’, which only humanizes him to me, although it would have been so much easier for all of us if he just put on a happy face and declared himself invincible. Also, he’s perfectly fine with being a lust-object to gay men. I am often annoyed when gay mags try to make gay issues the be-all-end-all of their star interviews, but in this new Radcliffe piece, the approach really pays off. Speaking about whether it bothers him that guys might consider him wank fodder (my term, not his), he says:

It’s fine if people want to make me the subject of their sexual fantasies – good luck to them, fantastic. I’m honoured to be in their dreams. (…) [I]t’s very flattering and not something to object to at all. The other day, my girlfriend Rosie asked me, “Do you find it weird that some of your gay mates think about you sexually?” I’ve never really thought about it but I don’t care – if they want to it’s fine (…)

It’s close to being the perfect answer, really. Not only does he get in a reference to his girlfriend – he’s straight, you see – but, I mean, “I’m honoured to be in their dreams”? Never mind the kinky nature of those dreams; that’s damn near poetic.

The question of what constitutes sexiness has been a recurring one on this blog. How much should brain points count? The jury’s still out on that one, but with every bit of his public persona, Daniel Radcliffe is inching closer to the perfect blend between physical and intellectual attraction.

Now that his politics finally matches up with his values, he’d get my vote. For anything.

One of the things that have run as something of an unacknowledged undercurrent on the blog for years, is what kind of a guy I was before I realized I was gay. The Early Gay Crushes pieces have touched upon it briefly; when did I really understand that those crushes meant that I was gay? For the early ones, like Jonathan Taylor Thomas or Zac Hanson, the answer is simple: It didn’t. To the extent that I perceived them as gay crushes at all, I don’t think that made me think of myself as a potential homosexual. For one, I didn’t think of them as sexual at all. Later, I simply rationalized them into a heterosexual framework. For later crushes, like Jesse McCartney and Jesse Eisenberg, that became harder to do. By now I was old and mature enough to understand that the feelings I had toward them might mean that I was gay, but I wasn’t ready to admit it yet, either to myself or publicly.

Which brings me to the real topic of today’s post. In my near constant narcissistic quest to gain a deeper understand of my own recent past, I was lazingly reading through some old posts I made on the forums of the website tv.com. For a brief time, I was near obsessively interested in the machinations of the American television industry – to a far greater extent than I was interested in any particular TV show, with the possible exception of 7th Heaven, of course – and I posted regularly to the site. What surprised me, however, was that on January 23, 2006, I replied to the question of who I thought was the cuest guy in a television drama. My answer (“Adam Brody – The O.C., David Gallagher – 7th Heaven) didn’t surprise me – they have been staples on all SMAs of all time – but the important thing here is the date. I didn’t come out until August 2006, and from the way I usually tell the story of my coming out, I didn’t really admit it to myself until almost immediately before I came out.

Granted, this doesn’t have to mean much. One, the fine print on the timeline of my gay self-realization is not important, for anyone other than myself, if even to me. Second, the word “cute” leaves a certain room for heterosexual post-rationalization. There’s a qualitative difference between the words “cute” and “sexy”, for instance. While the first could arguably connote some sense of emotional attraction (like, say, that a person is “likable”, or “funny”, or “the kind of person I’d like to be”, or something like that), “sexy” is harder to misinterpret, it connotes sexual attraction (even though I have later tried to merge the two traits, per my Sexiest Males Alive, Twenty Over 30 edition), That said, I also know myself well enough to know that when I answered that question, I was actually interpreting it as meaning “attractive”. So maybe, by January 2006, I was sending out small signals that I would eventually ease out of the closet. It wasn’t that the thought of homosexual attractions hadn’t crossed my mind – like I’ve said numerous times, my first thought when my brother came out to me was that this complicated my sorting out of my own sexuality – but as far as I know, it was the first time I had put it in writing.

Also, I was a little surprised by the venue. My brother was a frequent tv.com poster as well, and there was a decent chance that he could in fact stumble upon my comment. Continuing down the psychoanalytical path, I can only speculate that I kind of wanted him to. If somebody had asked me directly at the time if I was gay, there is a slight chance I would actually have admitted it, depending on the questioner and the context of the question. But my brother never asked me, and even though the gradual realization that I was gay continued to burn inside me for several more months, I didn’t tell him until late summer. When I finally did, though, he said he had suspected for some time.

On a related note, I remember in the early summer of 2006, when I was slowly opening up to the idea that I might at least be bisexual – I quickly abandoned it after I realized that how deep my gay feeling really ran – I responded to a blog post (since deleted, I think) asking for the hottest players of the Euro 2006 soccer championships. Remember, this was before the concept of the bromance had really taken hold, and for a man to call another man “hot”, in my opinion it had ti mean there was some gayness involved. I don’t remember exactly which players I mentioned (maybe Cesc Fabregas? Fernando Torres? Lukas Podolski?), but by that time, I think it was starting to sink in that this pretty much had to mean I was gay. It was something of a breakthrough moment, I think, even though it came less than two months before I finally came out.

The important context of both of these internet postings, however, is that they were done semi-anonymously. For both I used a pseudonym, and if I was reluctant to reflect on their possible gay connotations, the guise of anonymity may have lowered the bar for answering the question. After all, in some sense, everything you do on the Internet is role-playing and edited self-presentation. Maybe I felt it was easier to admit to same-sex attractions because the anonymity somehow made it feel less real and by extention less definitive. Of course, all of this is partly contradicted by the aforementioned fact that there was some risk it might be read by someone I knew. If I wasn’t yet ready to own up to it, why didn’t I put in a diary instead, or at the very least behind the protection of a less recognizable pseudonym?

I don’t know. But I suspect this won’t be the last time I dig into my past for early clues of latent homosexuality, or of homosexuality self-awareness. You be the judge of whether this makes me a sad person in desperate need of a boyfriend.

I still don’t know. But as a co-writer on the Norwegian blog collective Skrivekollektivet, yet first and foremost as a great friend of Tore, I have found my own ways to express my sorrow. Almost more than anything, I have found strength in music. In the months after July 22, I found strenght in the words of the song Til Ungdommen (literally: To the Youth), and in particular the lines that read “ubygde kraftverker/ukjente stjerner” (literally: “unbuilt powerplants/unknown stars“). It’s not by far the most powerful lines of the poem, but it carries with them the optimism and unfilfilled promise that was so brutally ended on that day. Also, for those of us who knew and loved Tore Eikeland (1990-2011) (unfortunately his English Wikipedia page seems to have been deleted), it captures his political spirits in several ways. Unfortunately, I have not found an English version that captures the almost hymnal essence of the song in a satifying way, although the song has taken on an almost official status as the song to rally around in the aftermath of July 22.

But every time I really feel the need to remember the loss of July 22, the need to reconnect with my innermost feelings, the feelings of a time when Norway was still insperable in its determination to fight together against these forces of utfathomable evil, I turn to Jackson Browne’s For A Dancer. More than anything, this song gives me the opportunity to really express the sense of loss that’s still very much there, even though it has been a while. It reminds me of the shortcomings of the old saying that “time heals all wounds.” For one, it is not true, and in a sense it feels like a betrayal to even think that it could be true. But what it does remind me, is who Tore was, an unrelenting advocate for equality and justice everywhere. Other friends may have other favorites to remember him by, but this is mine:

I don’t remember losing track of you

You were always dancing in and out of view

I must have thought you’d always be around

Always keeping things real by playing the clown

Now you’re nowhere to be found

As usual, my lift follows the Norwegian release schedule, which means that any movie that was released to theaters, DVD or had a festival or first-run television screening between January 1 and December 31, 2011, was eligible for inclusion. While I have seen quite a lot of movies this year, availability issues, time concerns and mere personal preferences dictates that are of course a well of great movies I have not seen yet. In addition to the aforementioned Oscar contenders, I wouldn’t consider this working draft anywhere near finished until I have caught up with, among others:, A Separation, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Live, The Arbor, The Artist, The Future, We Need To Talk About Kevin, The Skin I Live In, 50/50, Le Havre, The Kid With A Bike, We Were Here, and Play. I’m sure there others. As always, I reserve the right to amend the ranking at any time, likely returning with a list of honorable mentions later this month.

The second, more complicated answer is that which may go some way toward deeming 2011 a less-than-stellar year for movies at the same time one of the reasons that I loved so many of the films that are included on my list. I love them because of their imperfections, not in spite of them. Having had to wrestle with not only with whether I loved them, but also how much, in what ways and why, I kept thinking about several of them for much of the year? Whether it was the possibly problematic mythification (if that’s a word) of the Ozarks in Winter’s Bone, the gusto vs. unevenness quotient in Easy A, the potential dark undertones of the perfect couple at the heart of Another Year or the wild overambition presentation in The Tree of Life, those qualities in and of themselves secured a place in my heart for each of those films. And there were many more like them. In that sense, 2011 was a truly fascinating year for movies.

Before we dive into my best cinematic experiences of 2011 for real, however, let me just reveal that the five most atrocious movies I saw last year were The Smurfs, Green Lantern, Transformers: Dark of the Moon, Larry Crowne and Hysteria. If you want to know more about my deeply felt hatred for these movies, fire away in the comments section. But be warned, I might not even be able to articulate my disdain. The mere thought of any of them usually reduces me to a fuming, rambling mess.

On a cheerier note, then, my top ten favorite movies of 2011:

1. Never Let Me Go (Directed by Mark Romanek)

I respect that there may be different views on the merits of this movie, but as a huge of it, it still stings that it didn’t even get a theatrical release in Norway. It was first scheduled for an April 2011 premiere, but it kept getting pushed back, until it disappeared entirely. By that time, it had already gone several months since I first saw it, and I physically ached to see it again, and to show it to my friends. That’s what this movie does to me, every time. An eerie fable of the dehumanizing potential of biotechnology coupled with a emotionally resonant love story, Never Let Me Go confirms Andrew Garfield, Carey Mulligan and even Keira Knightley as three of the absolute best actors of their generation. It was not the only movie I saw this year that tried to deal with human replacement of some kind (Benedek Fliegauf’s fascinating failure Womb explored the cloning, whereas Dogtooth director Giorgios Lanthimos tackled human substitutes in the chilly Alps), but Never Let Me Go had the warmth that both of those movies lacked. In my opinion, it’s the best movie of it’s kind since A.I. (2001).

 2. The Tree of Life (Dir: Terrence Malick)

Never really a fan of Malick’s previous movies (I respected but didn’t love Badlands and The Thin Red Line, was left unconvinced by Days of Heaven and actively detested The New World), and periodically annoyed by his grandiosity and aura of critical invincibility, I was nevertheless intrigued by the sheer ambition of his Palme d’Or winner. One of the least perfect movies I saw in 2011 (Darren Aronofsky’s mesmerizing yet messy Black Swan certainly gave it a run for its money), I eventually sucked in by the fact that this movie had even been made. For all their differences, I can’t find a better comparison than Paul Thomas Anderson’s monumental There Will Be Blood. Although either movie is just a little over two hours long, they crammed so much of history, so much of what ambition and being a good and successful person means into those two hours, that it feels like we’ve been watching the characters for a lifetime. The Tree of Life may be heavy-handed in it’s symbolism, Sean Penn’s character may be completely wasted, the metaphysical feel-good ending may tick you off, but again, to me it come down to a breathless “wow, this movie actually exists!“. At it’s best, The Tree of Life will leave you wanting to go back to 2001: A Space Oddysey (for the “history of the earth” sequence) or to Lars von Trier’s Antichrist (for a more cynical take on the man vs. nature thing), but even so, it is completely its own, a unique work of art. And having said all this, I have to underline that the movie is even better when it centers on the family dynamics at its core. Brad Pitt has never been better, and I prematurely lament that Hunter McCracken will not be up for an Oscar as the young Sean Penn. I’m rambling in a Tree of Life way, but the bottom line is this: You need to see this movie.

3. Another Year (Directed by Mike Leigh)

Another 2010 movie, Mike Leigh’s comedy/drama probably was the most humane piece of filmmaking I saw all year. Another Year took my by surprise from the first scene. What at first looked like a dreary social realist drama immediately turned itself around, into a warm and funny portrayal of a middle-aged married couple (Ruth Sheen and Jim Broadbent) who opened their home to a host of charmingly flawed characters (first among an exquisite Leslie Manville). The humor and wisdom will have to be seen to be properly experienced, but was fascinated me the most, was how Sheen and Broadbent’s characters were never reduced to be being simply good and well-meaning. There’s always a nerve there, a whiff of potential condescension, when well-adjusted people are exposed to other people’s problems and sorrows. This doesn’t mean that Leigh lacks compassion for his characters, only that he allows them to be more complex than what you’d expect at first. It may be what every filmmaker aspires to do, but it’s so hard that when anyone succeeds it sticks with you. In Another Year, Mike Leigh succeeds.

4. Beginners (Dir: Mike Mills)

Beginners is yet another movie that’s actually improved by the friction caused by its inherent imbalances. I invested much more in the relationship between the adult son (Ewan McGregor) and his deceased father (a magnificent Christopher Plummer), than I did in his attempt to strike a relationship with an insecure actress (Melanie Laurent). For large chunks of the movie I found the latter relationship, though meticulously etched in brief moments, to be a little too cute, but in the end I think their shared romantic passivity provided a nice contrast to the father-son relationship. That said, the core of the film has to be how McGregor’s character has to more or less reconceptualize his whole upbringing in the light of the revelation that his father came out to him five years before he died. It informs how we understand some wonderful scenes between him and his mother, and it brings emotional nuance to the father’s trajectory and his need to not let his deteriorating health get in the way of him finally living the life he had always wanted for him. The thought that someone so obviously liberated by the thought of coming would then get only five years to realize that dream, it just crushed me. I never cry at the movies, but Christopher Plummer’s performance and the poignance of his character’s plight had me tearing up, repeatedly. I love this film.

5. Blue Valentine (Dir: Derek Cianfrance)

The most admirable thing about this very accomplished directorial debut is that it doesn’t shy away from anything. The unraveling of Michele Williams and Ryan Gosling’s marriage is so portrayed with such naked honesty it’s positively painful. The genius lies in how the movie gives us the insecure courtship, only to then skip to six years later, when things are starting to come apart. In a way it reminded me of Francois Ozon’s 5×2 (2004). but this movie is even braver in how it doesn’t tell its story backwards. I also have to give a shout out to the shout out to the set design; the futuristic motel might just be the most unpleasant I saw at the movies this year. And please, please stay for the exquisitely beautiful end credit, coming at the end of an emotional riveting finale. Oh, and Michele Williams was way better in this movie than the overacting Natale Portman was in Black Swan. Just to put out out there.

6. Winter’s Bone (Dir: Debra Granik)

With Winter’s Bone, we return to the theme of imperfection. There was a moment late in this movie, when Ree (a fantastic Jennifer Lawrence) learns the true fate of her father, that it turn a turn for the grotesque so decisive I was starting to wonder if Debra Granik had completely lost sympathy with her characters. And wasn’t the portrayal of the Ozarks just a tad too broad and cliched? My answer is no on both. I learned from an interview about writing the movie were Granik was coming from when she wrote it, and it made me realize that it was just right. And more importantly, I felt like I was invited into a part of the American experience that I knew absolutely nothing about. Is it nuanced enough? Probably not. Does that lack of nuance make up for itself in emotional investment? Most definitely. And if you’re looking for a scene to sell you on this movie once and for all, just watch the scene where Ree tries to enlist in the military, in order to pay of her father’s debt. Yes, I cried.

7. Catfish (Dir: Ariel Schulman, Henry Joost)

In the end, does it matter is a documentary is one-hundred percent true? Catfish convinced the answer is no. The story of how to brattish college kids connected with this girl who turned out to somebody completely different may not have have happened exactly the way we seen in the movie, but its recreations are so convincing and suspense that I don’t really care about how genuine it is in the end. More than anything, Catfish made me think of last year’s The Social Network, and how in the end, I ended up not really caring whether the movie presented an accurate portrait of Mark Zuckerberg. The portrait that was there on screen was so compelling and so moving, that the question took second billing. Not only does Catfish have the suspense of a Hitchcockian thriller, it also has a twist so deftly handled so as to be downright moving.

8. Senna (Dir: Asif Kapadia)

The tragic story of racecar driver Ayrton Senna is a story so special you can’t make it up. Sure, one can hardly ask for more interesting rival than the socially conscious Senna and the arrogant but brilliant Frenchmen Alain Prost, or for that matter  the villain of the piece, Formula 1 director Jean-Marie Ballestre, but the movie doesn’t direct itself. Kapadia adept use of archival footage creates a truly suspenseful narrative, even if you already know Senna destiny beforehand. The movie is interesting for the way it provides a glimpse into the politics of Formula 1, in much the same way the the excellent ESPN The Two Escobars gave us a look into the cultural significance of soccer play Andres Escobar and drug lord Pablo Escobar.

9. Easy A (Dir: Will Gluck)

The only comedy on the list is carried very much on the strength of Emma Stone’s performance. A modern day Scarlet Letter reminiscent of 1999′s reworking of Twelfth Night into 10 Things I Hate About You, it stars and A-list cast of Stone, Stanley Tucci, Patricia Clarkson, Lisa Kudrow and Thomas Haden Church. First-time director Will Gluck (who later went on to make the much blander Friends With Benefits) shows a knack for rapid-fire dialog in the vein of Aaron Sorkin, although the movie does drag on a little in the middle section. If I were to recommend one segment in particular, be on the look out for the scene with Tucci and his son. I haven’t laughed this hard at the movies for a long time.

10. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part II (Dir: David Yates)

David Yates made it. That’s the most importamt achievement of the second Deathly Hallows segment. It’s not the better Potter by far (I’d rank both Deathly Hallows part I, The Half-Blood Prince, The Order of the Phoenix and The Prison of Azkaban ahead of this one), but it still is a satisfying end to one of the best movie franchise of recent years. Perhaps the most satisfying thing about the whole thing is how the three main leads have grown to leading person potential. Daniel Radcliffe used to drag the franchise down, but now he’s a draw by himself. If I have any frustrations, I must be that this is the last time I get to see Alan Rickman do Severus Snape. I’ll miss his threatening mix of coldnesss and good-natured self-parody.

The presence of Cooper on CNN doesn’t mean that I wouldn’t rather watch Rachel Maddow outshine and outsmart her liberal blowhard colleagues on MSNBC (is it me, or is Lawrence O’Donnell becoming more unbearable than Keith Olberman ever was?), but when CNN is what you’re stuck with, he’s still an oasis of reason and good humor. Case in point and the main reason for this whole post, a moment late in the Iowa election night coverage, pointed out by the site Mediaite. The Romney-Santorum race is as undecided as ever, and Erin Burnett is supposed to show us something on the electronic wall-thingy she’s operating. Something goes wrong, however, and the thing breaks down. So CNN’s completely redudant social media person breaks in and wants us all to focus on a graphic charting the Twitter buzz for the different candidates. It was uninteresting the first he showed it to us, and barely comprehensible at that, and now Anderson has had it with him: “Again with the social media screen? This is the third hit and I still don’t understand what the hell this thing shows!” As the whole show threatened to unravel, I was laughing heartily and ready to kiss him through my TV screen for finally injecting some humor into the self-important proceedings.

It’s seems that’s kind of his thing. Earlier in the evening, when Blitzer was showing off some other useless digital vehicle, meant to illustrate the difference between the “first and second wave” of caucusgoers (or something), Cooper seemed to sense the absurdity of it all – or maybe he just remembered how the network was savaged for the hologram debacle of 2008? – warning viewers that they could watch the no doubt impending Daily Show send-up instead. I was thinking the exact same thing. I hope Anderson appreciates his employer more than I do, but other than that, I honestly think we are soulmates.

Apart from being a good journalist with the ability to drive the national conversation (witness his anti-bullying coverage), he also is a good sport about his status as a silverfoxy lust-object of gay (he’s a surefire contender for my next ’20 over 30′ edition of the SMA). Of course, that won’t satisfy some people, who won’t rest until he gives a defintive statement on his sexual orientation – and something tells me anything less than a straight up ‘I’m gay’ just isn’t going to cut it – but as long as people are gay-friendly my impulse is to grant them some privacy on the question. And my man Anderson sure knows how to charm his audience. When AfterElton named him to their Hot 100 list in 2010, Cooper commented thusly:

I was very humbled and flattered to be number 11 on your list, until I was reminded I was number 9 on it two years ago. Is it my wattle, or the bags under my eyes? Despite my rapid decline, thank you very much. My trainer is also very thankful, because you have just guaranteed his employment for the coming year.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m super-psyched about this political season, but when you’re forced to have it curated for you by CNN, thank heavens Anderson Cooper is there to make it less intolerable. Also, I advise magazine writers to take their eyes off Brian Williams for long enough to pen a piece about the humor of Anderson Cooper. That one I’d read.

The marker itself is arbitrary, but this year more than ever, I need 2012 to symbolize a new beginning. A year in which we don’t forget, but accept and learn to live with the loss. Hopefully, 2012 will also provide a satisfying answer to one of the questions that have been haunting me ever since the tragedy occured: How am I supposed to respond? I don’t mean in the sense of what ways it’s appropriate to grieve, but what comes after that. When people you love and respect die fighting for a cause you had in common, how can you best honor their memory? My immediate reaction would be to double down on politics, to march, petition, speak up for the values that where attacked but not weakened, their values. And mine. It seems almost self-evident: Since our dead friends can no longer speak for themselves, we must take up the fight on their behalf.

Except, it’s not that simple. At least it hasn’t been for me. I threw everything I had into the campaign for the local elections in September, but even as I did that, I felt that what I did was somehow inadequate, or at least a very disproportionate answer to the scope of the tragedy. This may have been an irrational reaction (I’m sure Tore and the others would have wanted us to go on fighting for the cause of social democracy), but it has persisted. I still struggle to marry the relativel small-scale political work I’m doing day-to-day with a vision for an adequate way of paying tribute to my late friends. This is where politics suddenly is interwined with the Christmas spirit itself, understood as taking stock of how I’ve been as a person in the last year: Have I been a good person? Do I find my life to be meaningful?

A short blog post is not the right format to answer either question, but the mere question that they have to be asked indicates that my answers are not straightforward. I can hope that I’ve been a source of support for people around me in these hard months, but the grief process also entails an unavoidable sense that my grief is somehow self-centered, since there are always people who are worse off than me. On the question of leading a meaningful life, for the first several months I repeated a mantra to myself: Do whatever it takes to get through the day. And I succeeded. After that initial phase, the question of the appropriate response has become more pressing. My hope for 2012 is that I’ll able to channel the sorrow that is always there into something more constructive, something that feels meaningful, appropriate and which further the reach of the values of social democracy.

Yet no matter how much I may look forward to turning the page on 2011 in order to find a way to move on constructively, a significant part of me wants to stay in 2011. Not because I fetishize the misery of this year, but because I have an almost paralyzing fear of forgetting. It’s like even admitting that I want to move on from this year constitutes a possible betrayal: What happens when the sense of loss fades? Do I even want things to go back to normal? Wouldn’t it be safer, again, more appropriate, to stay within 2011, to ensure that I never forget? Yes, this too might seem like irrational questions, but I’ve been struggling mightily with them nonetheless.

Occasionally throughout the fall, I’ve been trying to blog about these thoughts, or even about something random and shallow, but I’ve published very little of it. It just didn’t seem appropriate, like it would somehow diminish or disgrace the memory of the tragic events and their aftermath. I struggled to find the words to express precisely how I felt – how do you rip your heart in a foreign language, anyway? – so in the end I stayed silent.

That said, you shouldn’t necessarily expect a deeply personal turn on the blog in 2012, but believe me, the events of this summer will be there, in everything I write. It informs how I watch movies now, how I read, what music I listen to, and what political issues I consider important, as I imagine it would impact anyone. It keeps me from forgetting.

There are some signs that this fact has become the source of something of a type-cast problem for Brody, forever associated with his signature role as Seth Cohen on the glossy mid-aughts teen angst dramedy The O.C. On paper the roles may have charted a slightly different path from the Cohen type, but both in temperament, function and delivery, there was lots of insecure, slightly geeky motor-mouth in his roles in Mr. & Mrs. Smith (2003) and Thank You For Smoking (2004), for instance. Not that I’m complaining. Brody is one of several young actors who are eminently watchable as long as they stay within their comfort zones (Logan Lerman and Ryan Phillippe are others).

Of course, Brody is watchable in more than one sense. Even if Seth Cohen worked on The O.C. in no small part because of Brody’s natural charm and sharp delivery – and because he, reportedly being a semiautobiographical version of showrunner Josh Schwartz as a young man, so obviously was the character written with most love and care – I never quite accepted him as a loner. A geek, yes, and one whose interests may have been slightly obscure to girls of lesser minds. But one who never had a serious girlfriend? Nah. Not when you look like that. At the very least, I’d assume that the acerbically funny but surprisingly tenderhearted type would have potential to become the (presumed gay) best friend of lots of girls? Then again, while I didn’t quite buy that about him, I felt closer to Seth Cohen for it. When I discovered The O.C. in 2005 at age 20, and still a year away from accepting that I was gay, I saw strands of myself in him; an arrogant pop culture snob without any luck with the ladies; a deeply felt bond with some of my male friends; and a sense of humor that I used to paper over personal insecurities. There was an ironi in all this, of course, in that my developing crush on Adam Brody, which I processed as a wish to be like him, contributed to that insecurity.

However, I think I was beginning the slow process of interpreting these feelings as gay. I remember watching the show and falling for Brody immediately, emotionally and physically. I couldn’t say so to my brother – who, I later learned, struggled with similar feelings of closeted homosexuality and Brody-crushing – but I when I tested my no-way-Seth-can’t-get-girls thesis on him, a part of me was aching for him to say something that indicated that he’d seen through me. If he had indeed said anything to suggest that I only said that because I found him hot, I would of course have denied it furiously. And there was really nothing in my question that could have set off any alarm bells about my latent gayness. It was just the kind of hyper-sensitivity I had toward the subject at the time. Because I wasn’t ready to admit it to myself yet, I thought just about anything I did would raise suspicions.

So, where does this leave Adam Brody? The O.C. is long gone, and his movie career seems to have stagnated somewhat, with appearances in In The Land of Women and Smiley Face in recent years, and a supporting role in the fourth installment in the Scream series earlier this year. But as with most of my other Early Gay Crushes, there will always be a place in my heart for Brody. He remains very pleasant to look at, and when it comes to earning my loyalty he has not one but two things going for him. Like all other ECGs, yes, he helped me to realize I was gay. But, in a way perhaps rivaled only by Jesse Eisenberg, his screen persona in my formative years as a searching homosexual helped me understand myself better in other ways as well. And as Seth Cohen, he gave me someone to aspire to. Now I only hope that Aaron Sorkin would extend a helping hand to Brody, by writing a movie or a TV series that made complete use of his knack for rapid-fire delivery and cocky wisdom beyond his years.

So, if only to get back in the game, let’s start with a true softball: The beauty of Logan Lerman. Regular readers of this blog should not be terribly surprised by the subject, seeing as Logan has previously been featured in the #1 spot at the Sexiest Males Alive list. But even though I don’t think I need a specific reason for serenading him, I have one nonetheless:  Last week saw the release of a new photoshoot he did with Hedi Slimane, for VMan‘s “Young Hollywood” feature. The strange thing is that it was what I didn’t like about the pictures that convinced me of what a true beauty Lerman is. Logan has a sleep-deprived, glassy look in these pictures, which was something of a turn-off. But no matter how hard you try to shed him of his mild-mannered charisma, you can’t take it away. It’s there in these pictures, as in all others. It reminds me somewhat of the “Dirty Zac” photoshoot with Zac Efron from Interview Magazine, that I wrote about a couple of years ago. You can run Zac through the mud as many times you want, but his natural beauty will still win the day. Just like Logan survived Hedi Slimane’s rough-up.

In a sense, you can see it in his acting career as well. In my estimation, his best performances to date has been as Bobby McCallister in the WB’s 2004 teen drama Jack & Bobby, and as the son of Renée Zellweger in Richard Loncraine’s 2009 comedy-drama My One and Only. They seem to play to his temperament as an actor, and at the same time they play to his nice-guy looks in a way that allows him to subtly tweak that image when necessary. His greatest asset as an actor is therefore also his greatest liability: He has a physique (open face, lanky build) that naturally exudes both insecurity and personal warmth, but when he is asked to counteract this by going for a bigger, louder and more self-assured performance – as seen in the awful fantasy spectacle Percy Jackson and the Olympians (2010), and, judging from the trailer, in the upcoming 3-D Musketeers movie – it’s like he tenses up to the point of being reduced to wide stares and heavy breathing.

That’s another reason why I’m truly excited to see what he can do with his upcoming lead role in Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower, set for release sometime next year. The source material, a well-written, tender and funny novel by Chbosky himself, should put Logan’s range as an actor to the test. The role of Charlie, an obviously smart but somewhat distant high school student who is slowly drawn into a world he has thus far only observed from afar, intuitively lies closer to the Lerman of the Hedia Slimane photos, than the one who last year put himself up for a young Peter Parker. If the movie version works, I imagine Logan’s Charlie as something like what Jesse Eisenberg’s Walt Berkman in The Squid and the Whale (2005) could have been like if he had actually read the books he was constantly going on about.

My main reason for hoping that Wallflower is a hit, however, apart from what it would do to the demand for more Logan, is that it would keep him at firmer footing in the business. Although he’s reportedly doing another Percy Jackson movie, his efforts at broad box-office hits have so far been pretty abysmal (The Three Musketeers is gonna tank, believe me). If he wants a chance to right his career afterward, it will serve him well to show that he can play moody dramas on the side. Plus, less CGI means more of the Logan I know and love. And he’s even a decent actor.

***

August 7 is the one day of the year when I allow myself to be absolutely, unabashedly, one-hundred percent gay. I don’t know much about personal courage, living in a liberal country with my liberal friends and liberal family, but I can’t help but feel a little bit of pride when I think back at the day when I finally took the leap, and told others about my true identity. That’s also why I so deeply admire all the young people growing up knowing, or simply fearing, that their being gay will cause them pain and exclusion, and then do go ahead and do it anyway – because they want to be true to themselves. These things take character.

But then again: Will you ever meet someone as critical as you are of yourself? For me, the hardest part of the whole coming out process was to convince myself that this was the real deal, that my attraction and emotional bond to guys was not going to go away. I  was never a self-hating gay, I simply had trouble coming around to the fact that I was not quite like anybody else I knew. I had my first serious crush on a guy (a classmate of mine) back when I was thirteen, and another one when I was fifteen, and I guess I had briefly asked myself the supposedly terrifying question ‘You’re not gay, are you?’ (notice the somewhat defensive phrasing), but as those crushes faded, I simply went back to being the presumed heterosexual. Strangely, I never considered the fact that I never had any female crushes as an indication of gayness.

Anyway, it was not until I moved away from home back in 2004 to go to university, that I started rethinking who I really was. Even though I love both my older sister and my twin brother, and they both had been very supportive of me at all times, I found it liberating to get a chance to redefine myself to other people, without having them comment on every minor change in my personality or appearance. When I think back on the period between fall 2004 and Christmas 2005, I’m always struck by how obvious it seems to me now that I was slowly adopting a gay identity, and how I still didn’t see it myself. Sure, I found a little bit of myself in such different pop-cultural works as Gregg Araki’s heartbreakingly earnest and beautiful gay-themed Mysterious Skin and encores of Dawson’s Creek, but still I couldn’t (or didn’t want to?) collect the dots emotionally, so to speak.

It might seem odd, then, but what eventually made me realize I was gay, was that my twin brother came out to me in late November 2005. We’ve always been close, and of course I was both happy for him, and proud of him for acting on his realization. We gave each other a big hug, and I told him how happy I was for him. This was not my full reaction, however. I’m a little ashamed to admit this, but when he had left that night, I also battled a strange sense of envy. It wasn’t that I wasn’t truly happy he had finally concluded he could be open about his orientation; I was. Instead, I battled the conflicted feeling that he had somehow beaten me to it. At the time, I wasn’t ready to admit, neither publicly nor to myself that I was gay, but I assumed (wrongly, as it turned out) that the fact that he was now openly gay, could make it harder for me to conclude with regard to my own sexuality.

In retrospect, this of course seems like a really silly concern, but it was real enough back then. Gays pondering their identity ask all kinds of questions, not all founded in reality. Thus, one of my prime concerns, as I became more and more convinced throughout the spring and early summer of 2006 that I was in fact gay, was whether people I loved and trusted would consider me a ‘copycat’ if I came out so soon after my brother. They didn’t, of course, and had I not been so self-absorbed at the time, I would have realized the entire assumption was just silly.

When I retell the events of my self-realization to other people, I tend to say that I realized I was gay almost overnight. From what I’ve written so far, that of course is an exaggeration. But even though I might comprise what happened for dramatic effect, it’s not entirely false. It is in fact true that I decided to come out the very same day I told myself in a ‘it’s-not-just-a-phase, there-is-no-way-I’m-gonna-change-the-way-I-feel, this-is-the-point-of-no-return’ kind of way that I was gay. You can believe me or not, but as I woke up on Saturday August 5, 2006, from a night of conflicting feelings, and days of going around weighing the pros and cons, rejecting the last lifeline (‘Might I at least be bisexual?’, ‘What about that nice girl back in kindergarten?’ etc), I decided I couldn’t take it any longer.

And then I chickened out. Just like my brother had done the year before, I decided I wanted my father to be the first to know. Picking up the phone to call him probably is one of the hardest things I’ve done in my life, and that excruciating insecurity lingers, even though eventually I couldn’t get myself to tell him. I wanted to tell him in person, but I didn’t have the guts to arrange for us to meet. When I dropped the idea, and instead started talking soccer with him (a common passion), I was truly ashamed of myself for being weak, but also for not ending my state of emotional limbo.

As I often do when I’m frustrated or insecure in any way, I turned to writing to try to gather my thoughts and feelings. For therapy, I sat down and wrote a long essay, much like this one, to get down on paper what I felt about being gay and what should happened next. I went to the subject from every angle; writing about gay role models, the public attitude toward gays, and how I thought I would fit with gay sterotypes; early clues in childhood memories, my high school crushes, feelings about gay porn, and finally, what you could call a ‘roll-out strategy’ for how to come out to friends and family, how to tell them, when and in what order. This might sound silly (and it probably is, too), but as I wrote I had this one lyric from the deliciously catchy Savage Garden song Affirmation constantly churning in my head: ‘I believe you can’t control or choose your sexuality’. It became sort of a mantra  for me in the coming days.

My plan to first tell my dad, then my brother, followed by my sister and my two male best friends, was very close to getting scrapped when my sister dropped by that same evening. My head felt like it was going to explode, but again I couldn’t find the right way to say it. I knew she would be perfectly fine with it, but I forced myself to stick to the plan, though not before I had tried for several hours to make smooth segway into the topic of gayness. Even though in my many ways it was a painful evening, I learned one thing: In coming out to people, I had to be straightforward. Looking for ways to let the conversation just naturally turn to my own feelings, would only offer me excuses to back out. When I finally told her, a week later, after I had come out to my dad and my brother, I just straightened up and told her. She had in fact said for years that she thought I was gay (which, come to think of it, might have weirdly contributed to my insecurity), so she wasn’t exactly surprised. When I said ‘I have to tell you something. I think you might have heard it once before’, referring to my brother’s coming out, she simply broke me off, asking: ‘Is this more of the same?’, and started laughing. The laughter made me feel a little small, but she soon hugged me and told me she was cool with it. I loved her for it.

Anyway, dear reader, if you’re still with me, I’d like to return to the chronological order of events. By Monday August 7, I was back where it had all started two days earlier. Phone in hand, I was ready to call my dad to set up a meeting. I actually went though with it this time, but in a way, to say ‘I need to see you. There’s something I need to tell you’ was just as hard as breaking the actual news to him. I guess it had something to do with the fact that once I’d set up the meeting, there would be no way back. I had already made him understand I had something important to tell him, and if I tried to talk myself out of it, he would ask questions until he’d uncovered what I wanted to tell him. When he finally showed up, at 3.45 p.m., I was so nervous I thought I was going to die.

When I wrote earlier that I had to go straight to what I wanted to say, that too was a slight exaggeration. I hadn’t done this before, and I tried to buy time by making small talk about sports or the weather, or whatever. But that works for only so long, so at about 4.05 (I remember the time fairly exactly because I was watching my cellphone nervously every other minute), I said something along the lines of ‘There is, however, a specific reason why I wanted you to come. Over the last couple of days I’ve been doing some thinking. I think you might have heard this before, but here goes. I’ve found out that I’m gay, too.’ Even though I fought it vigorously, I had a smile on my lips when I uttered the word ‘gay’. I guess it was a sense of pride.

Then my dad smiled and said ‘Would it be appropriate to say congratulations?’. I nodded, and immediately I knew that all my paranoid questions had been more of a way for me to get my life in order, than founded in reality. He went to say all the things you want your dad to say in situations like these: ‘I’m glad you told me’; ‘Do you need any help breaking the news to friends or relatives’, ‘You have to do this in the way that you’re most comfortable with’ etc. In fact, he even asked me the ‘When did you know’ question, correctly sensing that I needed to talk to someone about this. I think I was even prouder of him than he was of me.

Coming out of course is a continuing process, and I’ve gotten progressively better at it. But on this very day two days ago, I didn’t have the capacity to imagine it would ever get any easier. That, among other things, is why today I once again embrace that old Savage Garden mantra: ‘I believe you can’t control or choose your sexuality’. I chose to live with it.

“I haven’t been [to the summer camp at Utøya] in years, but now I feel a strong urge to go back. One of the most absurd things of all about this, is how starkly it contrasts with what I loved about going there every year: Meeting people who believed strongly in same things I did, making friends from all over the country and from our sister parties from around the world, and doing what 15-25 years old usually do when they meet like this; listen to music, play sports, debate, eat, fight, live.

My most fundamental feeling therefore is deep, deep sorrow. One of my closest friends was killed. and he literally died for the the ideals of a free, just and democratic society. I miss him so much. In total, five people from my county died in the attacks. I mourn the ones I never got to know better, and the ones I never got to know at all.

Next, I feel gratitude for those of my friends who came back alive. And yet. it doesn’t end here; this is where it starts. A whole generation of young social democrats have been scarred for life by the unfathomable evil they were forced to witness and the impossible choices they had to make as they hid, fought and swam to safety. We don’t yet know how it will change them, or us. We just know that it will. They’ll never be exactly the same people again, the ones we sent over there five days ago. But the ones we got back, we love them even more now. It feels absurd to have to call people who return home from summer camp survivors.

Third, I feel determined. Determined to keep fighting for the ideals those who didn’t return fought for, and to assist in the fight on behalf of those who did. We will not surrender to evil, but retaliate with a political order based on more democracy. more humanism, more love, more fairness. We owe it to those who share our political views, progressives everywhere, but not least do we owe it to those democratically-minded people who don’t share our political views. A continued, spirited yet respectful public debate must be the answer of believers in democracy, from the left, from the right, from the center. That is what the terrorist tried to silence. We will not be silenced.”