SFBG Blogs

By Justin Juul

Dr. Rix, preaching the word

In every great film about post-college urbanites in America, there is a scene in which the hip gay character’s erratic behavior is explained through a montage that looks something like this:

The character — we’ll call him Rickie — is seen as a young child singing in a church choir with another boy. Fast forward two years and Rickie and the other boy – let’s call him Jordan — have become very good friends. They are shown eating lunch together at school, playing football, watching “The Birdcage,” and eventually listening to rock-n-roll music on a record player. This is when “Walk on The Wild Side,” by Lou Reed starts to play. Soon we see Rickie and Jordan –older teenagers now– running out of a school building as hundreds of other students are walking in. The camera follows the boys as they walk to Rickie’s house and then fades out when Rickie opens the door to his room and then slams it behind him. At this point, the POV suddenly switches to Rickie’s mother, a wholesome, but meddling schoolteacher who is inexplicably not at work. She responds to the noise by picking up the phone to call her husband who works at the local church. This is when the song gains momentum and when the images in the montage grow more rapid.

First we see the boys sitting side by side on the bed. Then we see the father grabbing his keys and rushing out the door. Back in Rickie’s room, a cigarette is lit. Mischievous glances are exchanged as the smoke billows and then, just as Lou Reed’s colored girls start to go “do duh do duh do duh do,” we see Rickie’s father kicking down the bedroom door. By the time the next verse of the song starts, it’s two months later and we see Rickie sitting in a classroom. He’s holding a picture of Jordan, and as he twirls it around, we see the words “Jordan RIP” scrawled on the back. Jordan has committed suicide and Rickie has been sentenced to two years at gay camp where he learns to hate himself. The final scene of the montage shows Rickie purchasing a greyhound ticket. He’s finished hiding from himself and from others. He is leaving his family, his church, and his town behind. Cut to Rickie as a young adult. He has just told this story to his best friend, Angela, and they are both crying silently and smoking their fifteenth cigarette of the day.

Very sad stuff, and a little on the dramatic side, but there’s a reason this type of scene occurs so frequently in movies and that’s because it really does happen. Gay kids from small-town religious families really do get sent to ex-gay camps or assigned to ex-gay ministries. And then afterward, when they realize the whole deal is complete bullshit, they really do move to big cities to avoid getting beat up every time they leave the house. The problem with the portrayal of the ex-gay experience in movies is that it’s always either given a comic slant (dorm rooms full of young gays who not-so-secretly enjoy each other’s company immensely) or heavily dramatized (see above). But haven’t you always wondered what it’s really like? Well, we have too.