I think, when I look back now and occasionally find myself tumbling through his Facebook page, that he wasn’t. I never learned whether the boy I lost my virginity to was struggling with his sexuality. I’m not sure whether I really fell for the guy or not, but I do know that at the end of it he was just using me to get off. And while at the beginning I felt like I had the upper hand in the situation-I was the one who was out and comfortable in my sexuality, right?-after each time we met became more secretive and more dirty, I began to feel secretive, dirty, and most of all shameful. We’d meet surreptitiously in dark and make out in the cold British weather on a park bench before venturing back to his place to have sex. I didn’t tell him that I’d never had sex with someone before instead, saturated with vodka and inflated by nerves, I was swept up in the motions.įor the next year, we’d hook-up on and off, usually at 3 a.m. All I know is that one moment we were talking and the next minute, well. The minutiae of exactly how things developed from us being together in that room to us having slightly unsuccessful sex in a bathroom in a different corridor have since escaped me. He was clearly intoxicated, but it was a party after all and who was I, quite drunk myself, to judge.
It was late (or early, depending on your outlook on the world) when I was joined by the boy who was living in the room next to mine, way back on the other side of the building. I can remember, although I'd had some drinks, sitting alone in my friend’s room on a single bed, the mattress overly springy and with a coarse plastic coating, attempting to stream a song over our dorm’s spotty Internet connection. The whole thing went down near the end of my freshman year at a party, at which people from the whole dorm floor were drunk and celebrating, carelessly streaming in and out of each other’s rooms, following the various different pop songs until one room took their fancy. I was at college, living in dorms, and the experience-aside from the usual horrifying awkwardness and somewhat spontaneity of the occasion-was completely and utterly unremarkable aside from one thing: the guy I slept with identified as straight.
I cried when I read the short story book a few years before the movie and I still cried and do so now of this writing, feeling the heartbreak and loneliness of Enis at the end.I was 19 when I first had full-on sex with another man. This movie, unto itself, is a celebration that there is hope for the empathy possible from our straight counterparts particularly in our current times of so much foment coming from the extreme right religiosity around the world. To this day, I celebrate the sensitivity straight people brought to a heart-wrenching love story between two men of a certain time and place. You had to know the life that was so closeted in those times, especially for those of us who were closer to the ‘rural’ scene. Ang Lee struck an incredible note of sensitivity to the times, for the story was one that transpired over years, not in the time of the movie’s release. That freshness translated into their believability and chemistry. These lamenters of “Brokeback Mountain” forget both Gyllenhaal and Ledger were only ‘actors-on-the-rise’ and still fresh faces to many of us in both the straight and gay realms.
The only other ‘wide release movie’ I can think touches upon this kind of energy between the two main characters is “God’s Own Country”. Some seem riled that two straight actors got these roles or somehow the intimacy was ‘tame’?! I’m not sure what movie they were watching, because I came away feeling the intensity of the two characters.