I Have To Tell You Something

Film Story by Griffy LaPlante

The Fellowship of the Ring

(Age 6)

Admittedly, you have not watched this movie. But it is Alex’s family’s favorite movie and you love Alex and her family, and sometimes when you’re at their house it’s playing and you catch scenes. Like when Bilbo Baggins sees the magic ring and for a second his face looks crazy. That part was too scary for you.

You are in kindergarten and Alex is in third grade, which makes her the coolest person in your world. She lives on the cul-de-sac down the street from where you live with your family and also where Rachel lives with hers. Rachel is your best friend. Alex is your friend, too, but it’s also sort of like she’s the lead singer of a band and you’re her backup singers. You’re not actually in a band together, but sometimes you make up choreography to the songs Alex loves and perform them for your parents and other neighbors. Well, Alex makes up the choreography, and you follow along.

Alex is the prettiest girl you’ve ever seen. When she gives you a copy of her school picture, you cut a heart around her face with safety scissors and put it in your treasure drawer. You’d probably do anything Alex asked you to do, but isn’t that what friendship is? Your dad once said that Alex is “bossy” and “not very nice sometimes,” but he doesn’t know her like you do.

What Alex loves most about the Lord of the Rings movies is Merry and Pippin, who are hobbits and, you’re pretty sure, brothers. When you play make-believe together, Alex is Pippin and you are Merry. Alex says that if there was a machine she could walk through to transform magically into a boy, she’d walk through it right away. Me too, you say, giggling.

Titanic

(Age 8)

You first watch this after school at Rachel’s house, on one of the many days it’s playing on TV. It’s about rich people and Irish people (Rachel is Irish, too) and a shipwreck that happened in real life. On the ship are two people (not Irish, you don’t think) who aren’t supposed to be together because Rose is rich and Jack is poor but they fall in love! They kiss a lot in an old car, and when they take off their clothes you see Rose’s boobs. You think that maybe you see Rose’s boobs a little too much, because you also see them when Jack draws her naked on the sofa with the necklace. Jack is an artist, and when he dies at the end it’s so sad that Rachel can’t stop crying, even though she’s seen the movie before. For weeks afterwards, whenever you and Rachel play together—Alex rarely plays with you anymore—you make-believe that one of you is Jack and one is Rose. You prefer being Jack, who you love with your whole heart. He’s so pretty he almost looks like a girl.

The Notebook

(Age 12)

After seeing this in your mother’s DVD collection for years, you finally watch it at a sleepover with your orchestra friends (you’ve been learning the cello). And guess what? YOU LOVE IT! You don’t like the old people scenes because you don’t think they act like the younger characters at all, and when they die at the end everyone at the sleepover cries except you. But you think young Allie is perfect in every way: she’s so smart, and so strong and sure of herself, and she wears the prettiest dresses. She’s played by an actress named Rachel McAdams, whose last name is very similar to your friend Rachel’s, and when she smiles she has the most amazing dimples. Noah is cute. Unlike in Titanic, you do not see any boobs, but you do see Noah touch Allie’s over her dress.

The Outsiders

(Age 13)

You don’t like this story’s violence, but you do like how nice the Greasers are to each other. You think, what if Johnny and Ponyboy kissed? Then you think: just kidding.

The Family Stone

(Age 16)

Rachel McAdams is in this, and once again her character is full of life and wit and beauty. This is the second role you’ve seen her in after The Notebook, which you and your friends still watch sometimes but ironically, having decided that neither of Allie’s love interests deserve her. In The Family Stone, Rachel McAdams has a gay sibling, like you do, and it’s the first movie you’ve seen where a gay character’s parents love and accept them without melodrama. Rachel McAdams wears pajamas in most scenes but still looks like an angel. Not much else to report about this.

Blue is the Warmest Color

(Age 18)

Pass.

Blue is the Warmest Color, Revisited

(Age 19)

After first watching this alone in your freshman dorm, you do a lot of research about it. You learn that the actresses (straight, female) who played the lesbians were actually treated very poorly on the set. Older feminists on the internet analyze the sex scenes, describing them as unrealistic and oversexualized, the male gaze embodied. The latter claim has to do with the amount of shots its director (straight, male) included of the actresses’ asses. This is patriarchal, the internet feminists say, because it gives men exactly what they want to see.

You prefer being Jack, who you love with your whole heart. He’s so pretty he almost looks like a girl.

You try not to think about what watching such scenes made you want to see. Instead, you nod along righteously to the criticism, relieved to have evidence that it’s not a good movie at all and definitely not worth dwelling on any longer. When a friend in your French class asks if you’ve seen it, you send her links to the feminists’ critiques.

Y tu mamá también

(Age 20)

You watch this on your own in a strange city. Throughout the movie, a thrum races the length of your body each time the adolescent protagonists—two boys—touch; you want so badly for them to make out that, when they do, you’re so excited you pause the movie to make yourself calm down. You tell yourself that this is a signifier of how much you love boys/men, of your desire for them to buck archaic codes of behavior and embrace tenderness however it finds them. In other words, your startling bodily reaction to this movie is because you are a worldly sort of girl/woman, straight and cisgender but keeping up with the times. After loving this movie so much, you work your way through a list of queer international films, through which you prove to yourself how very free-thinking you are. Such a passionate ally to the LGBTQ+ community.

Brokeback Mountain

(Age 21)

It just so happens that you see a clip from this movie one night and it stops you in your tracks. This occurs partway through your year studying in England, which is where you first meet self-described Marxists and also where two of your queer women classmates buy you drinks one night at a pub and ask you are you sure you’re not bisexual? America has just elected its very own fascist, and you tell yourself that the intensity of the Brokeback clip’s hold on you probably has to do with how melancholic and homesick you feel. These are cowboys, after all, and they can be so rough but also so, so sweet. Not at all unlike your childhood in the American Midwest, playing tackle football in backyards with neighbor boys and kissing Rachel, just once, on a trampoline.

After this night, there are many others that end with you looking up more of this movie’s clips using searches like “tent scene (full)” and “heath ledger spits in hand.” Thus far in your life you’ve been too chicken to seek out anything more pornographic than GIFs on Tumblr of people kissing, so these are the first depictions you’ve consumed of sex between men; in an attempt to understand the mechanics, you rewind the clips again and again.

It would be a lie to say that you don’t sometimes interpolate these with clips from Blue Is the Warmest Colour, but you do so only for research purposes.

Call Me By Your Name

(Age 22)

You see this in an old theater near the apartment you rent your senior year of college. Embarrassing as it is to admit later, it dissolves you. Devastates you. You see it in theaters again in full disregard of your financial situation, on the cusp of graduation with student loans coming due. It isn’t that sexually explicit of a movie, but when the Sufjan song hits, you think: I want to be like these characters. Then you think: I am like them, even though it’s a romance between two boys. After seeing it the second time, you say to your roommate something you’ve told her before—that you’re just really obsessed with queer coming-of-age films right now. “Imagine how much more you’d love them if you were queer,” your roommate says. This stirs something in you you have not planned for, something you’ve never admitted, not even to your diary. “I have to tell you something,” you tell her.

Teeth

(Age 25)

This is about a girl who has teeth in her vagina, teeth so powerful they can—and do—bite men’s appendages clean off. You don’t track anything else about the plot, though, because it’s shown to you by the first girl you ever have sex with, right before you have sex.

The girl—woman, really—is smaller than you, with tiny features and sharp clavicles, all of which she carries in an unmistakably sapphic fashion. While the movie plays she reclines Hellenically on her bed and wraps her arm around you. You nuzzle your head against her chest (!) and struggle to focus on anything besides the smell of her perfume/cologne. You never ask what it is, but it must be a common one, because afterwards you’ll frequently smell it on passersby. It’s sweet and heady and makes your knees go weak, even years later, even now.

In other words, your startling bodily reaction to this movie is because you are a worldly sort of girl/woman, straight and cisgender but keeping up with the times.

This woman has been practicing lesbianism for many years, and this is intimidating because she’s only a year older than you, and you already feel far too old to have no idea what you’re doing. But she is patient, a natural teacher. You take things slow then very fast. Unlike with the men—boys, really—you’ve been with, there is no expectation for either of you to orgasm, so when she does it feels like a revelation. Her back against your chest, your hand between her legs—oh, you think, it’s just like playing cello. You expected this all to be impossibly difficult, but you’ve been practicing for it for a long time.

She ghosts you a week later, teaching you what it feels like to have your heart broken by a femme.

Disobedience

(Age 23—26)

The one in which Rachel McAdams’s character asks another woman—played by another Rachel, no less—to spit into her mouth. You watch it while playing it very, very cool with a gay friend you have a crush on, who knows you’ve recently come out as bi but hasn’t made a move on you. You met her at a party with a boy you’d been on some dates with, who was her neighbor; halfway through the party, you confessed to her that you didn’t like the boy that much after all, and the two of you exchanged numbers so you could keep in touch after you broke things off with him. You keep in touch. You watch movies together, sleep over in each other’s beds; she joins your picket line when your union goes on strike, and you babysit her little dog when she goes out of town. Neither of you ever make a move. A year later, she moves to Dublin, where she soon finds herself an adorable (Irish) girlfriend, who looks and dresses like she time-traveled from the late Medieval peasantry. You’re happy for her.

As time keeps passing, the Rachel/Rachel spitting scene weaves itself irretrievably into your conception of your sexuality. The first person to act it out with you in real life is a trans person named—fittingly—Ray. They’re also among the first of your friends to call you by new pronouns, by a new name. A new type of life unfurls itself for you then, though it isn’t without its own set of insecurities, some of which are fairly idiosyncratic. You become hyperaware of power differentials, and for several years you tend to choose lovers who’d be your equal in the wildly unlikely event of a physical fight, who are more or less your height. You avoid close entanglements with cis boys, which feels like a necessary correction, at the time.

Miscellaneous

(Age 26—28)

Her back against your chest, your hand between her legs—oh, you think, it’s just like playing cello.

This is a period of your life in which watching movies doesn’t rank highly on your priorities list. When you do watch them, you watch for gender, for models. Diego Luna—then-teenaged star of Y tu mamá también, now comfortably in his forties and playing an intergalactic space communist—resurfaces powerfully in your psyche as a softly masculine archetype, slight of frame, a little facial hair but not much. A little anxiously, you begin to experiment with ways of cultivating a similar masculinity in yourself, like shaving your head, and taking a hormone that gently beckons changes. Gender seems to you at this time to be something foundational, bread and butter, but after a few years it strikes you more as a collection of grace notes. Your gender becomes impressionistic. You stop the hormone but keep the facial hair it gave you, not much but enough. You keep your tits, too, and start collecting the types of shirts they feel best swimming in. The gender anxiety is still there sometimes, but it’s no longer so loud that you can’t hear the other stories your body is trying to tell.

Conclave

(Age 29)

The pope dies, and this is as useful a pretext as any to reach out to the transfeminine person you recently started seeing, who is so gorgeous you sometimes have to look away. No pressure, you tell them, but if they happen to be free tonight, would they like to watch the movie about choosing a new pope with you? You just saw her two days ago, which makes the text somewhat risky, but she responds right away. Yes.

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You expected this movie to have scandals and betrayals, cardinals in coordinated outfits. You also expected it to be at least a little gay, but you did not accurately anticipate how. Hold up, you say at one point, you don’t think that priest is…? By the climax, you’re both giddy, screaming at the screen. Yes, yes. Within minutes, you are repeating these words to each other in your bed. Yes, yes, yes.

For the record, you’ve come by now to believe that it’s not Blue Is the Warmest Colour’s ass shots that make it unfeminist. Instead, its fatal flaw lies in how it represents queer life as inevitably frigid (contrary to its title) and full of secret shames. You understand that this is true to some people’s experiences but it’s not true to yours. Throughout all of Blue’s famously lengthy sex scenes, the characters only smile at each other once. That, you think as this beautiful queer beams radiance at you, is what’s truly unrealistic about it.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the Movie

(Age 29 ½)

Within minutes, you are repeating these words to each other in your bed. Yes, yes, yes.

Several pretty girls tell you to watch Buffy the TV series, and so you do—what are you to rocks and pretty girls? You watch several episodes with these women (your friends), but when you decide to watch the show’s precursor—the 1992 camp classic film—you ask a different friend to watch it with you, one with whom you’ve been flirting very, very carefully. This friend doesn’t describe themself as a pretty girl, though they are very pretty. You have similar haircuts, and you crop your shirts in similar ways, and they are much, much taller than you, though you’ve decided not to hold this against them. You’re nervous. You sit beside them on the sofa of the two-story house they share with many housemates; when Buffy slays her first vampire, they take your hand. By the movie’s credits, you are completely enfolded inside their long limbs.Your friend is a soft sort of nonconformist, who years ago described having “a non-binary twinge in the neck”; in the time since then, your respective gender arcs have brought you to meet in the middle of some borderless, anarchic land. You ask to kiss them, and the way they kiss you back feels familiar, feels dykey, but this is only peripheral to your attraction to them. Which is to say: unimpeachable dykeyness is no longer a standard by which you assess every cycle and turn of your intimate life. You’ve been friends for a long time and comrades for even longer—what else, you wonder now, matters? Perhaps this has to do with the fact that Saturn has recently returned to where it was in the skies when you were a newborn baby and knew nothing of gender. Or perhaps not. But some planet or other has brought you to a juncture in which your queerness is to you what Paris was to Hemingway: moveable, and evergreen. Queerness, you’re told, also occupies this role for the Buffy community, or maybe it’s the other way around. Maybe it even served that role for Hemingway, too, if he was half as lucky as you are now, kissing your genderbent friend on the sofa, climbing up their house’s creaking stairs.

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