Feedback on writing about the Tulsa trio, who celebrate not only the fifteen year anniversary of Middle of Nowhere today, but also their 20th anniversary as a band, I have come to realize that, barring the gay component, my story of secret Middle of Nowhere (1997) fandom, follow by a period of adoration from afar (This Time Around, 2000), until coming around completely in time for Underneath (2004-05), is not such an unusal one. Also, people, like the commenter Sue B., who commented on one of my earliest Hanson posts and the came back to comment on my personal favorites, are more welcoming to wavering fans and late-comers than I sensed when I viewed the 50f5 re-stream a couple of years ago.

My experience in many ways mirrors that of Melissa, who commented on the list of favorites, and also of Thea, who, like me, felt concerned about her reputation for wanting to embrace the band by the time This Time Around came out. And their personal ways, they allude to what I think is important for Fansons everywhere: First, you don’t have to love everything Hanson has ever put out to be a true fan, and second, that the magic of music in general, and of Hanson’s music in particular is something that is highly subjective to each individual fan. No matter how much we may love to share our stories of how our relationships with the band formed and has since evolved, we cannot escape that it was and continues to be shaped by our age, our environment, our tastes and everything else that mark us as individuals.

On August 23, 2010, Sue B. challenged me to flesh out a little more why I picked the songs I did for the top 25. She wrote: “(…) did the melodies rock your soul,the lyrics move you or what?” While I won’t go into all the twenty-five songs, I can, unsurprisingly, say that it was a bit of both, and a lot more, at different times. As a guiding principle, though, I’d stipulate that melody predates lyrics in my conception of whether a song is great and has staying power or not, particularly if it’s one of those upbeat pop-rock songs that Hanson are so good at. My two prime examples here, as I’m sure I’ve said before, are MMMBop and A Minute Without You, both prominently placed on my list – a list, I should add, that would not have changed all that much if I was to revise it today. If the melodies are this catchy, it’s almost like the lyrics don’t matter. It could have been mmmbop or another invented word; nothing could have ruined a song that addictive. That said, it didn’t hurt that mmmbop in a sense became separated from the song, allowing us to chew on such burning questions as what, precisely, an mmmbop is, and if we agree that it’s an amount of time (“In an mmmbop they’re gone”), how much time, etc. In the case of A Minute Without You, or Man From Milwaukee, for that matter, the silliness of the lyrics – the “one-thousand-four-hundred-forty hours in my day”, or the alien fantasy of Milwaukee – they serve a double purpose, both as metaphors for the obsessions of falling in love/the free-flowing fantasy or youngsters – and as charming lyrical expressions of the inherently sunny melodies that accompany them.

In other instances, the lyrics were the most important factor. Sure, Been There Before is a foot-stomping good time, but the clincher for me was the nostalgic bent of “does it move you?/does it soothe you?/does it fill your heart and soul/with the roots of rock & roll?” Or it could the fate of the apparently suicidal “pregnant flamenco dancer” in the unreleased In A Way. In this case, that character became so alive to me that I was drawn into the song from that angle. It was only in the next phase that I realized that I really liked its musical realization as well. A third example of this is the break-up ballad Me Myself and I. Nothing about it screams original, earth-shattering insights, but in a quietly defiant tone that is at the same time oddly discomforting, lines like “It must be the end of you and I/and forever, too” and “I don’t wanna get used to ‘it’s over’” take on some unexcpected emotional poignancy. There are countless other examples, and none of them can be completely separated from my personal experiences and temperament as an individual listener and Hanson fan.

Some songs on the list are included on the basis of a particular version, like the Underneath Acoustic Live DVD performance of River, which I much prefer compared to the 3 Car Garage version, or for reasons related to their place in the Hanson discography. Here, the whole Underneath album is something of a weird case. On the one hand, re-engaging with Hanson through this album, and Penny & Me, felt almost like a liberation, like I’ve tried to explain before. However, that doesn’t mean it’s an all-dominant force on the top 25. Lost Without Each Other is on there, yes, but when it comes to Strong Enough To Break, I in fact associate that song more with the similarly-titled documentary than with Underneath as an album. Which, I guess, only goes to show, once again, that there are a million different reasons why Hanson’s music continues to impact me so strongly at every level, and that any attempt to make a rigid formula to explain why a Hanson song from a particular era in their musical development (or mine) should appeal to me more than others, is likely to fall far short of being satisfactory. It’s the mystery of fandom, I guess.

For reference, here’s the list of  my 25 favorite Hanson songs, as initially published on June 11, 2010:

1. Penny & Me
2. A Minute Without You
3. Runaway Run
4. If Only
5. MMMBop
6. Thinking ‘Bout Somethin’
7. Sure About It
8. Madeline
9. Me Myself And I
10. I Will Come To You
11. Been There Before
12. River (Underneath Acoustic Live version, first released on 3 Car Garage, 1997)
13. Man From Milwaukee
14. In A Way (unreleased)
15. Musical Ride
16. Every Word I Say (b-side, Penny & Me, included on Live & Electric)
17. Strong Enough To Break
18. The Walk
19. Voice In The Chorus
20. A Song To Sing
21. I Almost Care (iTunes exclusive)
22. Lost Without Each Other
23. With You In Your Dreams
24. Wish I Was There
25. Waiting For This

I’m also talking about how the experiences we bring into a movie from the outset will change our perception of it over time. I tried to illustrate this by going back to the Swedish movie Show Me Love (Lukas Moodysson, 1998) a couple of years ago. When I rewatched it after more than ten years, with the mass hysteria long since past, and with my own experiences of what it means to be a questioning young gay person, I felt like I was finally able to understand some of the deeper meanings of the love story between its protagonists, Agnes and Elin. With what I now brought to the viewing, I could perceive it as a gay love story, whereas as a young teenager, I had been more or less oblivious to how both of them were actually questioning their sexuality.

To regular readers of this blog, both of these observations will seem like old news, and neither are exactly revolutionary new insights. But this month’s theatrical re-release of Titanic, James Cameron’s bombastic 1997 melodrama, made the value of rewatching clearer to me than perhaps ever before. What follows, therefore, is not a traditional review of the movie, so much as it an attempt to understand how and why my views on the movie have changed over time. (For a proper review we would have had to delve into Billy Zane’s amusing caricature of a British aristocrat; or the cinematographic gorgeousness of the sun deck strolls that anchor Rose’s and Jack’s relationship; or how Kate Winslet’s intense performance crosses paths with the strong female heroine conventions of a certain subset of sci-fi horror movies in a memorable scene involving an axe, vaguely reminiscent of another Cameron movie, Aliens; so yeah, that’ll have to wait for another day)

I have written about my long-held infatuation with the movie from a variety of angles already, be it my deeply-rooted Early Gay Crush on Leonardo DiCaprio, or how I completely bought into the marketing hype surrounding The Biggest and Most Expensive Movie Ever Made (for a sarcastic look at the marketing of the film, I recommend British movie critic Mark Kermode’s rant in his book The Good, the Bad and the Multiplex, 2011) to how its signature music number (Celine Dion’s My Heart Will Go On) illustrates why I often need music to release whatever emotional reaction a movie  has given me, and thus, I’ll try not to repeat all of it here. But all of these factors of course played a role when I went to see it in a movie theater for the first time in fourteen years (it didn’t premiere in Norway until February 1998). In a way, I felt like I was reconnecting with my twelve-and-a-half year old self, except this time it was through the dusty lens of nostalgia. The sensation rippling through my body as I took in the fact that I would get to marvel over Leo’s beauty for three hours was no longer that of a confused but secretly grateful pre-gay, and in contrast to the last time I waited for the lights to go down, I knew what to expect. I went in knowing about the strengths and weaknesses of the movie, and how its seminal moments and lines (“I’m the king of the world!”; “You have to promise me you’ll never let go”; Rose answering “Dawson” when asked about her last name) had made its historical reception almost immune to the categories of good or bad.

Or at least I thought I knew what awaited me. I knew that I would still be irked by the slow set-up, Cameron’s fetishistic hang-up on the architecture of the ship, and the (at least initially) somewhat clunky way the story is framed through the memories of the old Rose (played by Gloria Stuart) retelling her story. And, to some extent, I recognized all of that. I was initially satisfied that my mind hadn’t completely changed over the four years since I had last caught the movie on television. It was only later, towards the very end of a movie that I until this point and going forward will take for granted that every reader has seen and does remember, that I understood that my perception of the movie’s greater themes had changed. Changed  even to an extent that I had to revise my deep skepticism toward Titanic‘s narrative framework.

I had settled to the fact that I would always be somewhat annoyed that the movie didn’t do more to disguise how it was so obviously out to manipulate my feelings; that it felt no shame in spelling out not only exactly what I was supposed to feel at any given moment, but also what every line in the script, every frame, was supposed to mean. To understand how what I had always considered weaknesses of the movie was now suddenly turned into deeply emotional moments and cinematic strengths, I have to return to the previous point about how our changing life experiences will invariably affect how we conceive of a movie. Over the last nine months or so, I think I have developed a greater patience with and respect for movies that try to deal with the concepts of loss, remembrance and all-encompassing love, pretty much regardless of how elegantly it is executed. I haven’t abandoned my urge for movies to push the envelope, only supplemented it with a higher tolerance for humanist pretentions.

I think I noticed it for the first time with Mike Mills’ Beginners (2011) last fall, how that movie’s struggle with a life cut short at the exact moment when it felt most honest and truthful - Christopher Plummer’s dying gay father had recently made a life-altering realization that liberated him, in much the same way Rose’s admission that she loved Jack allowed her to act in accordance with that realization, tragic consequences be damned – spoke to me on an emotional level, no doubt influenced by a sense of loss I had myself experienced. Which brings me to the final few scenes of Titanic, the ones that are supposed to justify the use of old Rose as a framing device for the love story; the very aspect of the movie I had been most skeptical of just a few years earlier. I still didn’t care about the search for the diamond, but suddenly I was deeply moved by what the value of retelling her story had to Rose. At one point, the crew tells her that the official records show no signs of a Jack Dawson, which, she tells them, is only natural, since he wasn’t supposed to be on the ship in the first place. But then old Rose says, “He exists now only in my memory.” What I once wrote off as a banal and over-written line from the infamously banal over-writer extraordinaire James Cameron (Avatar!), now struck me as elevating Titanic to a new level of artistic merit.

By the utterance of that simple line, Titanic came alive to me as a sincere meditation on remembrance; about how Cameron, by telling the story of the sinking ship through the eyes of a fictional couple had managed to make us care about the victims and the survivors as individuals, not just as numbers in a statistic, or as historical artefacts in a spectacular setting. Rose’s words are ones I think we can all relate to; how we all feel, and in some sense have the responsibility to, keep the memory of people lost and loved alive. And if no one will do it, these people will either be forgotten entirely, or what remains of their memory will be so simplified as to be unrepresentative. If not us, who? Thus, when Brock Lovett (Bill Paxton), the leader of the expedition and an obvious stand-in for Cameron himself, says                                                                                                                         that, “[For] three years, I’ve thought of nothing except Titanic; but I never got it… I never let it in”, I’m right there with him. The way I “let Titanic in” had just changed, too.

Is there a moral to this story? I don’t know. Maybe that I’ve come to appreciate movies more on a gut level. Maybe that the old saying about how “the movie is created in the meeting with the audience” is true. But most of all, I would say this: Dear filmmakers, by all means, I encourage you to take chances, to push the envelope, to challenge the limits of the medium of cinema in order to push it forward. But at the same time, if you think you’ve got a piece of classic, melodramatic storytelling in your hands, don’t hold back; don’t be afraid to be banal or sentimental. If you thread carefully, it might come off as profound. You just might create something that not only resonates broadly, but which in the end transcends good and bad. If that’s what Michael Curtiz did with Casablanca, then I’d say that’s also what James Cameron did with Titanic.

Which brings me back to my conflicted feelings on the issue of outing celebrities, and whether or not they somehow owe it to themselves or to the wider world to come out. I have swung back and forth on this repeatedly, whether it be in discussing Harvey Milk’s political tactics, Susan Sontag’s bisexuality, Ramin Setoodeh’s queasiness with out actors playing straight, or Daniel Radcliffe and Taylor Lautner’s continued efforts to quell gay rumors. But the way the ‘glass closet’ argument is put makes it a little easier to come down on one side. Out‘s strategies have been debated for years (like their Gay Power 50 list, which regularly features people who have not come out), and the way the new article not only insists that Anderson Cooper is gay, but that there are others, like Queen Latifah and Ellen Paige, who are implicitly joining their ranks, rubs me the wrong way. The article doesn’t provide any evidence to support the latter claim, and the rumors about Cooper also strike me as based on observations that are hard to refute because they are presented in a way that makes it hard to locate and consider the trustworthiness of the source(s).

As a man who is very happy with being out, and who felt like a burden was immediately lifted off my shoulders when I told someone, I’m sympathetic to some parts of Musto’s argument. Like him, I believe that, if people are actually gay, many will feel a sense of liberation by not having to hide it anymore. But one of the central questions here concerns the operative word if: We don’t know if Anderson Cooper or some of the other people in Musto’s article are in fact gay, we just have to assume that they are, thanks in no small part to a) that they haven’t denied it and b) that writers like Musto continue to insist that they are. And, like Musto also touches on, if only in passing, in his 2007 piece, it might be because as gay men who find Anderson Cooper attractive, we want him to be. But the next question has to be: Does that gives us the right to demand of people that they come out, or even to advise them to?

In the context of the ‘glass closet’, my answer is a qualified no. Don’t get me wrong: I would love to see more openly gay people in all walks of life, and particularly in the most public professions, like politicians, musicians, actors, athletes, etc. I have, for instance, written about how I think the presence of a first-class gay soccer player would make a huge difference and do a world of good, not only to fellow players, but to fans and future players as well – and, if only to prove Ramin Setoodeh wrong, I am waiting for an actor who has played convincing straight roles his entire career to come out and then continue his successful career like nothing happened. And yet, however convinced I am that it would be immensely helpful to the broader acceptance of LGBT people to have more role models – these are professions that profoundly influence how we view the world around us – I cannot quite get myself to demand of celebrities that they put the constantly evolved common good that would result from their coming out ahead of their right to privacy and self-determination.

In my opinion, privacy is one of those complicated questions that Musto brushes aside much too easily. If, for the sake argument, we accept the premise that the people he has assigned to the ‘glass closet’ are in fact gay, that doesn’t mean we know all the reasons why they haven’t decided to come out (yet?). There could be career or commercial reasons behind the decision, of course, whose somewhat self-serving nature does not necessarily make them any less real. Or it could be that these celebrities are truly conflicted about either their sexuality or their willingness to, for some period of time, put it front and center in their public lives. For all we now, even celebrities could fear repercussions from family, friends or associates if they came out. The point is, only the individuals know a) if they are gay, and b) whether they it would be worth it to let the rest of the world know. As much as we want them to be available 24/7 for our entertainment as stars that are always on, in the end, these too are mere humans. And here I won’t even bring up the possible conflict between what people engage in and how they identify themselves sexually.

Even over the course of writing this post, however conflicting arguments have been racing through my head, so in addition to the previous point about my wish that there be more role models, I wanted to attempt to bring a little more nuance to my stated position. First, I realize that there are limits to my overall argument. Not the least of which being that without the courage of pioneers, whether celebrities or activists, who forfeited the right of privacy in favor of visibility and openness (think everyone from Harvey Milk to Ellen), which in turn is why homosexuality at least in some circles and professions is now considered such a non-issue that the ‘glass closet’ is a livable place to be in the first place (again, this assumes that the people we are talking about are actually gay, no minor assumption).

Seond, I respect that this issue might look a little different to people with other experiences than my own. I live in Norway, a country that while nowhere near a homonormative Utopia, is a place where the gay rights agenda has come a long way (that’s not to say it hasn’t been a long  struggle, or that these victories – from decriminilization, to the age of consent, to anti-discrimination and anti-bullying campaigns, awareness of hate crimes, civil partnerships and marriage rights – have been easily won, or won once and for all). From the perspective of the young farmboy in Montana, whom my friend Bryan Borland writes about in his poetry collection My Life as Adam, (2010, “In Defense of Existence”, p. 106) the need for a role model might carry more weight than a comfortable celebrity’s right to privacy.

Third, my opposition to outing is by no means absolute. I guess I just don’t share what I consider to be Musto’s implicit view that the ‘glass closet’ types are in some ways hypocrites or con artists (he writes of Anderson Cooper that his coyness about his sexuality helps heterosexual women and homosexual men see in him the fantasy that suits their preferences.) Instead, I want to go after the really harmful hypocrites, those politiicians, powerbrokers and opinion-movers who vote or speak out against gay rights while being privately gay themselves. That is why I was conflicted when Ken Mehlman, the former Chairman of the Republican National Committee, came out as gay and as an equal rights advocate last year. I was happy for him personally, but I just wished he’d had the courage to stand up to those in his party who decided to run the 2004 George W. Bush re-election campaign in large part on state-based anti-gay marriage initiatives. But back then, Mehlman sat quietly and said nothing.

What, then, is the constructive, if ever-negotiable middle way between skepticism toward outing and the wish to smoke out political hypocrites? The closest I get to a solution is this: Embrace people who are out, but also embrace those who may or may not be on their way out. And just as importantly, embrace people who raise issues of importance to the LGBT community, as Anderson Cooper has actually repeatedly done, with his focus on anti-gay bullying in schools. If you are straight celebrity, or if  you just want to guard your privacy, I simply want you to stay on a positive message about the whole gay thing, as both Cooper and Radcliffe have done. I might be repeating myself here, but whatever my personal views on the virtues of being out, neither I, nor anyone else for that matter, should feel like we are in a position to demand of non-hypocrites that they come out. A subsiding pressure may even help them crack the door open, should it be that they have a closet they want to come out of someday.

And I can’t describe the decision by the ratings board of the Motion Pictures Association of America (MPAA) to give an R rating for language to the documentary Bully (Lee Hirsch, 2011) by any other words than censorship and arbitrary. The film portrays a group of people who have strong stories to tell about bullying, and it is in that context that the offensive language is uttered. Deservedly, there has been a long-running campaign to get the ratings board to change its decision to PG-13, not least because that is the main target audience of the issue the movie deals with. I know I might now be playing up exactly the kind of societal factors that I otherwise think should be kept at a distance from the ratings business (see below), but it is enraging how this movie is kept from exactly audience that by all estimates would have the most to gain from getting to see it.

I should say that I haven’t seen the movie. I had the chance, at the Bergen International Film Festival last fall, but, I’m a little embarrassed to admit, the material seemed just too depressing for me to buy a ticket. However, my issue with the ratings controversy surrounding the movie is bigger than this one instance. In fact, I wrote about my displeasure with the MPAA in one of the very first posts on this blog (a brief post entitled Who’s Afraid of a Naked Torso?), about the imperfect but timely documentary This Film Is Not Yet Rated (Kirby Dick, 2006). While I had some problems with the Michael Moore-esque guerilla tactics of that film, it highlighted not only the convoluted way the ratings board itself operated, but how arbitrarily they judged films, based on criteria ranging from profanity to nudity to general suitability for a certain audience. Since then, the board has gone through some reforms, but the biggest problems remain. It’s rulings are still arbitrary, their stringent rules stil don’t seem to take context enough into account – if at all – when they hand down their judgment, and there still is not enough sunlight shone on the way they go about judging a movie.

If Bully is not enough of a clear-cut case for you of arbitrary rulings without sensitivity to context, consider the award-winning The King’s Speech (Tom Hooper, 2010). The movie was awarded an ‘R’ rating from the MPAA board (13:04) due to coarse language. So, what was the profanity that set off the alarm bells at the ratings board? A scene in which the severely stammering King George (Colin Firth) finally has a therapeutic breakthrough with his speech therapist Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush) by unleashing a series of curse words to get out of the speech pattern that triggers the stammering. It should be immediately clear to anyone who has seen the movie that not only is it not speculative in any way; it’s also absolutely essential to the plot structure of the movie. It’s one of the movie’s funniest scenes, and one that clearly advances the plot. Luckily for The King’s Speech, the influential and often abrasive producer Harvey Weinstein sensed that he was sitting on awards-season gold, so he put his considerable might behind challenging the ratings board. One shouldn’t discount the fact that the controversy raised the profile of the film in the process, but it was definitely a necessary fight to have. It was and is simply unacceptable that the MPAA overlords could come in and slap an absurd rating on a movie like that, and apparently with no sensitivity whatsoever to the artistic merit of the – giggle – offensive content.

I may be more liberal than most on these matters – what business does a board have  with such vague pre-censorship of movies intended for adult audiences, anyway? – but the MPAA still irritates the hell out of me. And it’s not just the context-free language-police part, though that is certainly an atrocity. It’s also their meticulous policing of sex and nudity on film. One would think an advanced culture like the American would have come further than keeping itself with an at the same time stringent and arbitrary self-policing body like the notoriously sex-averse MPAA, but no. Sex is judged as harshly as profanity and, as it was pointed out in This Film Is Not Yet Rated, gay sex is treated more harshly than straight sex. If that wasn’t enough, it seems like it’s easier to get violence past the censors than both sex and rough language. I’m don’t by any means subscribe to cultural behavioralism – I think the effect of violence on young viewers is overhyped, and anyway, I don’t think the possibility that some viewers might be mildly disturbed by violent or sexually charged or profane scenes that they may be a little young to see, is reason enough to enforce a strict ratings regime affecting everyone else – but violence nevertheless strikes me as a qualitatively different matter and one more worthy of the MPAA’s attention than the other two categories.

The retort from the ratings board often is two-fold: 1) It has taken note of the criticism and is improving its ways; and 2) it’s better that the movie industry itself takes care of the ratings issue, than running the risk of a ratings/censorship regime dictated from the legislative branch. Well, yes, if that’s how you size things up, I’m inclined to agree. But on the other hand, if this was regulated by law, then perhaps it would be easier to challenge in court, with the faint hope that the broad concept of free speech in the First Amendment of the Constitution could actually lessen the constraints of today’s MPAA? Or maybe I’m living in a fantasy land, and that the opposite outcome, with a judicial branch hellbent on policing public morality is a just as likely outcome.

But perhaps the most worrisome tendency of all this, is if the arbitrariness of the ratings board leads to a pervasive sense of self-censorship in the creative process. To some extent, it’s already happening. For tent-pole movies, a respectable box-office showing absolutely hinges on the difference between a PG-13 and an R or  NC-17 rating, and producers and screenwriters freely admit that they try to tailor their movies to what they expect to be acceptable to the MPAA. And what about the movie that haven’t been greenlit or even written yet? Where’s the incentive to take creative chances or push boundaries if you don’t even know where the previous boundaries were? The MPAA is in need of fundamental reform, and if the Bully controversy if good for anything, it could be that it might hurry along that much needed development.

***

Update, April 6: Since the time of writing, the movie has been downgraded to a PG-13 rating.

**

Initially, the plan was to write something on Rob Reiner’s Stand By Me on the occasion of its 25th anniversary last year. It’s nothing new that posts on this blog take a long time to materialize, but in the case of Stand By Me, it became increasingly hard to find the right words for it as the year progressed. I used the months between March and June to watch it something like six or seven times, and in the process I fell so unconditionally in love with it that I felt like I needed some time and distance from it in order to write about it. During that cooling off period, things happened that made me try to avoid any movie that might make me feel sad or nostalgic. As I shall explain later, Stand By Me does both. So, here we are, way into the movie’s 26th year, and maybe it is finally time to give the movie its due. (This essay contains major spoilers.)

In short, I struggled to formulate my initial thoughts on Stand By Me because I almost loved it too much. A character in Almost Famous – incidentally one of the very few movies that could rival Stand By Me on my all-time-high – talks of “loving a band or a song so much it hurts.” Well, for the last year, that’s pretty much been my experience with Stand By Me. I cannot pinpoint exactly what it is about it that makes it so moving, but maybe that’s the point. My relationship with it has grown from admiration to downright passion – as I’ve gotten to know it better, I have come to appreciate even its imperfections, the little details that meant that I didn’t recognize it as an immediate classic when I first saw it some seven or eight years ago.

Today, those very imperfections are what I love most about it. The story of best friends Gordie (Wil Wheaton) and Chris (River Phoenix), who together with Teddy (Corey Feldman) and Vern (Jerry O’Connell) take on a journey to find the body of a missing 12 year-old boy, can be both overly nostalgic and too broad-brushed at times. Richard Dreyfuss’ narration as the older Gordie adds a laconic humor («Finding new and preferably disgusting ways to degrade a friend’s mother was always held in high regard»), but the otherwise extremely well-written and poignant dialogue can get a little  too transparent on some occasions, like when Gordie warns the others that “We’re going to see a dead guy. Maybe this shouldn’t be a party.” I may shake my head a little, just to succumb, in the very next second, to the consistent earnestness that flows through this movie, and which is what gives it its punch, emotionally and as coming-of-age story that is both loyal to and able to transcend its geographically specific space and time.

As in all good movies about people who mature through experience, it’s not the journey itself that’s the point, but how all involved learn something about themselves and the others along the way. The intense loyalty between Gordie and Chris is perhaps best illustrated in a scene where they discuss what will happen when they start junior high in the fall:

Gordie: «Do you think I’m weird?»
Chris: «Definitely»
G: «No, man. Seriously. Am I weird?»
C: «Yeah, but so what? Everybody is weird.»
C: «You ready for school?
G: «Mhm.»
C: «Junior high. You know what that means. By next year we’ll be split up.»
G: «What are you talking about? Why would that happen?»
C: «’Cause it’s not gonna be like grammar school, that’s why. You’ll be takin’ your college courses, and me, Teddy and Vern, we’ll all be in the shop courses with the rest of the retards, making ashtrays and birdhouses.»
C: «You’re gonna meet a lot of new guys. Smart guys.
G: «Meet a lot of pussies is what you mean.»
C: «No, man. Don’t say that. Don’t even think that.»
G: «I’m not going in with a lot of pussies. Forget it.»
C: «Well, then you’re an asshole.»
G: «What’s asshole about wanting to be with your friends?»
C: «It’s asshole if your friends drag you down. You hang with us, you’ll be just be another wise guy with shit for brains.»

(…)

C: «I mean, you could be a real writer someday, Gordie.»
G: «Fuck writing. I don’t wanna be a writer. It’s stupid. It’s a stupid waste of time.»
C: «That’s your dad talking.»
G: «Bullshit!»
C: «Bull true. I know how your dad feels about you. He doesn’t give a shit about you. Denny was the one he cared about, and don’t try to tell me different.»
C: «You’re just a kid, Gordie.»
G: Oh, gee… thanks, Dad!»
C: «I wish the hell I was your dad. You wouldn’t be goin’ around talkin’ about takin’ these stupid shop courses if I was. (…) Kids lose everything unless there’s someone there to look out for them. If your parents are too fucked up to do it, then maybe I should.»

There’s something about how Chris, the son of an abusive father, takes it upon himself to act like a father figure to Gordie, that really breaks my heart every time. He’s convinced that social determinism will hold him down, but he would do anything to help Gordie reach his full potential, or at least to believe in himself enough to go for it. Look at that line again: “I wish the hell I was your dad.” I’ve never seen a bolder statement of friendship and loyalty captured on film. Ever. By  inviting insecurity and darkness into the conversation, the scene expertly shows how Gordie and Chris are ready to (and in fact have already had to) take responsibility for their lives and reveals a wisdom way beyond their years.

I find some of the same sentiment in a scene where Godie is buying food for the trip, and the man in the store tells him he looks like his brother Denny, who died in a jeep accident a couple months earlier. «People ever tell you that?» «Sometimes,» Gordie says, and we cut to a memory from the dinner table that lays out how Denny always encouraged Gordie and spoke up for him against their cold and distant father. But to me, that «sometimes» could also mean something a bit more conflicted. Maybe, although he loves his brother dearly, he is tired of always being compared to him? We know from a scene earlier in the movie that his father disapproves of his friends, and asks why he can’t have friends that are «more like Denny’s.» But I would imagine that if Gordie is in fact a little tired of always being measured against Denny, he is also stricken with guilt, asking himself if these feelings mean that he doesn’t love his brother as much as he should. Kids do that all the time, rationalizing guilt and demanding more of themselves than any reasonable person would.

What’s most striking about Stand By Me is that it’s an extraordinarily well-observed movie. The youngsters balance between exuberance and the thrill of an adventure on the hand, and a deep sense of determination and a vaguely defined purpose on the other. The movie captures it by allowing the serious and the silly to go together, like a cinematic nod to the freewheeling minds and short attention spans of young people. It never crosses the line where it has to define itself as either a comedy or a coming-of-age drama, but it gives all its central characters seminal scenes – or even just gestures or lines – that make us understand them as complex people. Take the scene early on, where Vern pitches the trip to the others. Within a span of maybe ten seconds his mood goes from enthusiasm to reluctance and back to enthusiasm, in a way that’s easily recognizable at every pivotal moment later on. Teddy, for his part, is defined first by the train-dodge dare and later by the showdown at the junkyard, while Chris and Gordie have great emotional scenes that deepen our understanding of their special bond, and as with Teddy, they help to situate them socially as well.

This willingness to engage with these kid characters as kids, makes even lines that otherwise might have sounded ham-handed and overly precocious (“This is my age! I’m in the prime of my youth, and I’ll only be young once!“) funny and touching, because the movie never looks down at its characters. I’m sure most of the eminently quotable one-liners originated in the Stephen King short story it’s adapted from, but Stand By Me might be one of the most quoteable movies I can remember having seen. The first lines sets up both the underlying mystery and the small-town romanticism beautifully: “I was 12 going on 13 the first time I saw a dead human being. It happened in the summer of 1959-a long time ago, but only if you measure in terms of years. I was living in a small town in Oregon called Castle Rock. There were only twelve hundred and eighty-one people. But to me, it was the whole world.” There are a dozen others (the infamous “Suck my fat one, you cheap dime-store hood“; “You guys look like my grandmother having a conniption fit“; “[It was] the kind of talk that seemed important until you discover girls“, “We were supposed to be heroes“; “I’m never gonna get out of this town, am I, Gordie?”, etc.), and if you’ve read this far, I encourage you to post your favorite quote in the comments section.

Returning to the theme of its loveable imperfections, however, I’ve always argued with myself over parts of the voice-over. For instance, there’s one line in the last scene where Chris and Gordie say goodbye that it took me me a long time to make peace with. We’ve known from the very first scene that Chris was recently killed in a knife fight, and  the narrator says «Chris, who’d always made the best peace, tried to break it [the knife fight] up.» It struck me as overwritten and a little too idealizing. But now that I think of it, it fits. Not only because this is at its core a film that thrives on nostalgia and the healing powers of old friendships, but also because that particular character trait had been so prominently on display in Chris throughout the movie, from getting Teddy to calm down after the train-dodging incident to the way he comforts Gordie when he breaks down at the sight of the dead body, and thus finally reveals his real motivation for going on the journey in the first place.

Also, there’s the very last scene in the movie, in which Dreyfuss as the older Geordie is finishing the story he has just told us.  His final lines: «I never had any friends later on, like the ones I had when I was 12. Jesus, does anyone?» While beautiful on a poetic level, it initially struck me as crossing the line into sentimentality, and I found its claim to universal truth a stretch. On repeated viewings, however, I’ve come around to the view that it actually encapsulates precisely what it is that I love about Stand By Me. Even at moments when its ever-present earnestness is in danger of going too far, it shows its mettle, in the sense that it doesn’t shy away from it. It’s almost like the movie itself is channeling the “game of chicken” scene with its main villain, Kiefer Sutherland’s terrifying Ace.

As a matter of storytelling, Stand By Me also has a keen eye and respect for how people change as they go through life. They may have been companions on the journey to find Ray Brower’s dead body at Back Harlow Road, but, as the older Gordie explains, Vern and Teddy eventually drifted out of his and Chris’ lives. They simply grew apart from them. This is another one of those points in the movie that I love to argue with myself about. I know that these are the facts of life, but a part of me wants to protest that this shows that Gordie’s thinks he’s somehow better than them. It corresponds with a sense from very early on in the movie, that Gordie considers himself the most serious of the four (see the “maybe this shouldn’t be a party” quote above) Like I’ve said before, it’s the movies that you have to struggle with that will stay with you the longest.

In the end, this awareness of how life changes people, coupled with its slightly nostalgic and romanticizing feel, is about respect. And the fundamental insight that handling grief often involves a deep-seated fear of forgetting. That, I think, is why Stand By Me, a now 26 year old movie, is the movie that has taught me the most about life in the last year. Amd maybe ever.

To take three examples from a TV show I know very well, and which I have written onto my coming out timeline before; the WB/CW family drama 7th Heaven. Over the years that show had at least three characters who sent my gaydar through the roof from the moment they appeared on the screen. Around mid-way through the show’s run, Lucy befriends this guy called Mike (played by Jeremy Lelliot), who is supposed to be straight, but let me put it this way: I wasn’t exactly shocked when he kissed Lucy and it turned out neither of them felt they had chemistry. It might sound prejudiced of me to say this, but in a show as hetero-centric as 7th Heaven, it’s all we have to go by. Mike was slightly effeminate, and he had the gay-bestfriend vibe about him. To me and my eagerly queer eye, that was enough to make him a closeted homo in that famously narrow-minded community called Glenoak. Second, I give you Harry, as played by Aaron Carter in the shows’s ninth season. Again, I don’t know how to say this without sounding like a gay guy perpetrating cliches about gay people, but wow, Harry must be one of the least convincing straight characters (4:20-5:02) I’ve seen on TV, like, ever. I’m not suggesting that Carter himself is gay, but in that particular role, he failed miserably at coming off as straight. And finally, there’s Thomas Dekker’s Vincent, a guy Ruthie falls for later in the same season. Dekker has an effeminate look about him – one I hasten to add that I find kinda attractive – and when Vincent told the reverend that his parents thought it would be good for him to start going to church because he had some kind of “problem”, I had a faint hope that the show would finally address the gay issue head on. But no. Throughout the show’s eleven seasons, the issue was never even hinted at, despite multiple intented or unintended opportunities.

Of course, I am thrilled whenever the hetero-centric barrier is broken down intentionally – like the scene in Love Actually  where Liam Neeson asks his son about the girl – or boy, he adds – he’s in love with. As a twentysomething gayer, I beamed with pride from how that light touch nibbled ever so teasingly at the genre conventions of heterosexual romance. But the second way I most often queer what I watch, is by reinterpreting dialogues or scenes through a queer lens. It doesn’t have to be anything big, and it can be completely uintentional, but if, like me, you’re a twelve year-old heart, it can be quite fun. Take a scene from John Hughes’ wondeful Sixteen Candles (1984), in which the geek (Anthony Michael Hall, definitively an Early Gay Crushes contender if I’d seen the Hughes movies before I came out. Now, let’s instead inaugurate him into the Geek Squad) banters with the jocky Jake (Michael Schoeffling) , who refuses to believe that the girl he’s interested in actually likes him back:

Jake: You better not be dicking me around.

Geek: (…) Would I dick you? Let me put it to you this way: What happens to me if I dick you?

Jake: I’d kick your ass.

Geek: Right. So why would I dick you? But if all you want off the girl is a piece of ass, I’ll either do it myself, or get someone bigger than me to kick your ass.

Jake: (…) I can get ass anytime I want.

I’ve condensed the scene slightly to make a point, but the effect stands. If you look at this through a queer lens, there’s enough “dick” and “ass” references in this scene to turn it entirely on its head. Yes, I know it’s childish (in an almost Beavis and Butt-head-like way: “Dick. Ass. (snicker)” But still. I can’t help it. And even queered, Hughes signatures dialogue – few writer/directors have been better at inventing a language for young people that simultaneously sounded like something they might actually say – loses nothing of its energy and punch. Quite the opposite, I think.

I’ll suspect I’ll keep queering for the rest of my life. Mostly because it’s fun, but also because it helps remind me of how unrepresentative (many) TV shows and (almost all) movies are of the audience they are wooing, and their real life experiences.

It’s also a movie that is fairly easy to summarize: Marco’s matador girlfriend Lydia is in a coma. While watching over her, Marco befriends Benigno, who is the personal nurse of the also comatose Alicia, which he confesses to being in love with. In order to not spoil anything, let’s just say that the two men have radically different ways of dealing with the impending loss of their loved ones, and the loneliness that comes with tending for someone who is unable to express anything in return. The relationship between the two men is to my mind never explored more exquisitely that in the scene that gives the movie its title: Marco confesses that he’s uncomfortable with touching Lydia, and even with watching anybody else, like the nurses, touch her. Then talk to her instead, Benigno suggests. In the very first scene of the movie, the two men meet at a ballet performance, and Benigno later tells Marco that after he learned from Alicia that she loved ballet and going to see silent movies at the cinemateque, he has made it his mission to see every ballet and every silent movie he can, and then tell Alicia about them. Regardless of what is later revealed about Benigno’s conception of his love story with Alicia, this immediately struck me as an incredibly beautiful way of expressing your love, in practice as well as metaphorically.

I think it’s a pretty universal impulse when someone you hold dear dies to want to honor him or her in a way that extends beyond the mere paying of respect and nurturing of memories. When this happened to me, I, perhaps in an act of desperation and deep respect promised that I would try to honor his ideals and values to the fullest possible extent. A part of me even wanted to be him, to take in the world on his behalf, in an irrational attempt to let him live on and experience all the things that was now suddenly denied him. To me, that’s the beauty of Benigno’s project in Talk to Her. The situations are not completely similar; death is final, whereas with a comatose person there is always the small chance that they will one day wake up – come back to life, if you will, in whatever state. The two men’s approaches to this remote possibility is addressed in the movie; Marco clings to the hope were realistically there is none, whereas Benigno remains stubbornly optimistic, partly out of (very complicated) love and perhaps partly because as a health worker he is trained to never give up on a patient. What happens if either of the women actually wakes up? Marco has learned something about Lydia that would complicate their relationship immensely, and the same is true with Benigno and Alicia. And yet; neither of the men are allowed to give up completely. I have always sympathized with the concept of premature grief – for the moment I can’t remember what the common medical term is – that people who are told that their loved ones are likely to die soon go through a period of grief more intense before it actually happens than immediately afterward. If by some surprise (I refuse to call it a “miracle”), the patient should happen to pull through, that will of course introduce a sense of guilt on those who had spent months mentally preparing themselves for a final outcome, but my sense is that guilt will be a part of the process no matter what.

But Benigno’s insistence to be Alicia’s eyes to the world in her absence, has haunted me from the moment I saw the movie. In fact, the beauty and sacrifice inherent in the fulfilment of that metaphor affected me so much it took me out of the movie for a moment. For the next couple of minutes, I was unable to focus on the plot and the dialogue; my mind was struggling with the consequences of such a strategy. It’s a beautiful thought, to be sure, but is it really as much of a self-sacrifice as I first thought? In the end, is he doing it for her, or to comfort himself, to make himself feel better? And, perhaps punishing myself for my cynical take on a romantic gesture, I asked myself if the motivations of it does even matter? I don’t think they do.

Most importantly, that means I can’t weigh on the merits of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, and by extension Max von Sydow’s performance (he has been mentioned as a possible, though unlikely, dark-horse for Best Supporting Actor). In general, my sense of that category is hampered by the fact that I haven’t seen Nick Nolte in Warrior, either. Granted, the movie doesn’t appeal to me in the slightest, but some trustworthy people have trumpeted Nolte’s performance. Below are some other observations in advance of Sunday’s event. I hope to have an official list of predictions and preferences up by Sunday afternoon.

1. What an incredibly weak Best Picture field this is!

Comparing to the staggering quality of the 2011 Best Picture nominees (The Social Network, Toy Story 3, Inception, The Kids Are All Right, etc), this fields strikes me as almost laughably bad. Apart from The Tree of Life and Hugo, I simply cannot muster anything more than middling enthusiasm (at best) for any of the contenders. Sure, both The Descendants and Moneyball are decent movies, but if Midnight in Paris wasn’t a Woody Allen feature, or if anyone other than Steven Spielberg had lent their signature to War Horse, I can’t imagine either would have been recognized. I’ll reserve my some kind words for my two favorites, some bland words for The Artist, and some very harsh words for The Help for a predictions post.

- Lifetime Achievement Award nominations abound

It might seem strange to say to this, but to me it feels like both Meryl Streep, Glenn Close, Michelle Williams and Jessica Chastain fit this description. For Streep and Close it’s pretty obvious, as they both have been nominated many, many times previously, and neither of them will probably win this time either. This isn’t to say that their nominations weren’t warranted – although I think Streep has been a little overpraised for her heroic attempts to save the irredeemable Iron Lady, but in the case of Streep it’s starting to feel like she could get nominated for just about anything at this point (The Devil Wears Prada nod spoke more to the dearth of good female roles, and she plainly didn’t deserve to be nominated for Doubt). In the cases of Williams and Chastain it’s a less clear-cut matter, but hear me out: Williams has been nominated (deservedly) twice before, for Brokeback Mountain and Blue Valentine, but in addition those movies she has continued to make performances that accumulate to more than most actresses do over the course of a whole career; think Meek’s Cutoff, Wendy & Lucy, and impressive supporting turns in Synecdoche, New York, Shutter Island, or Imaginary Heroes, for that matter. Although I don’t think she’ll win, and although I liked the movie quite a bit, it’s a little dismaying that her first Best Actress nomination was for the relatively inconsequential My Week with Marilyn. As for Chastain, I think she’s done more than enough in the last year – Take Shelter, The Tree of Life, The Help and others – to deserve a Lifetime Achievement Award already. The tendency is no less pronounced on the male side, with belated recognition in store for not only Plummer, but under-nominated von Sydow and Nolte as well.

- The Senna snub is scandalous

The documentary snub that has most people worked up is that The Interrupters didn’t even make it onto the shortlist, but I can’t comment on that. However, I think it’s an outrage that Senna wasn’t recognized. Maybe sports docs weren’t considered weighty enough for the Academy? Whatever the reason, they missed out on an opportunity to bestow honors on a universally loved future documentary classic. To me, this is like if they had passed over When We Were Kings (1996). The documentary category has been controversial for many years – Hoop Dreams and Roger & Me are just two of a long list of notable snubs – so I guess this was to be expected, but for those of us who care more about this ceremony that we often want to admit, it still stings.

- No notable “curtain call” nods for Harry Potter

Granted, the Academy has never even been kind to the Potter series in the technical categories, so maybe it was hopelessly naive to hope for something like a Return of the King-like expression of belated recognition. Still, it’s grating that this series, which has become progressively better over the years, will go basically unrecognized in Oscar history. If there was room for a comedic performance in the Best Supporting Actress category (Melissa McCarthy in Bridesmaids), why not exchange the pointless Kenneth Branagh nomination (My Week with Marilyn) for another Brit, a Lifetime Achievement Award of sorts, to Alan Rickman, for being a consistently funny and terrifying Severus Snape throughout the Potter franchise? I agree that Deathly Hallows, pt. 2 isn’t the best in the series, but Return of the King was the weakest of the Lord of the Rings movies, and it swept everything.

- The Oscars finally recognizes actors who tone it down

This is the first of my two positive notes: Having seeminly given last year’s awards out on the basis of who did the most acting (Natalie Portman over Anette Bening, Christian Bale over Geoffrey Rush, Melissa Leo over Amy Adams), this year’s field is a beacon of understated performances; from Viola Davis’ dignified turn in The Help to Gary Oldman’s minimalism in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and George Clooney’s relatively restrained turn in The Descendants. The awards could of course still go to the somewhat flashier (though generally good) performances of Streep or Jean Dujardin (The Artist), but it’s a welcome tendency nonetheless.

- Some love for The Three of Life and A Separation

I have to admit I was surprised to see The Tree of Life on the Best Picture list. It’s so ambitious and so deeply polarizing, I kind of expected it would fall through the cracks. I’m even more delighted that Terrence Malick got a Best Director nod. He won’t win, for reasons I’ll return to later this weekend, but at least it shows that the Academy is not immune to bold movies. Now if only they had nominated Brad Pitt in the Supporting Actor category and Jessica Chastain in Supporting Actress for The Tree of Life, instead of for Moneyball and The Help, respectively, I would have been bordering on ecstatic. I was also very pleased with the Best Original Screenplay nomination for Ashgar Farhadi’s magnificent A Separation. It was refreshing to see that this tightly-constructed script was recognized, instead of being sealed off in the Best Foreign Language Film ghetto, a category it should win with ease, but which has almost as many blemishes on its record as Best Documentary (they passed over The White Ribbon, A Prophet, Amelie, The Class and Waltz with Bashir, although all of them were at least nominated).

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.