Nowadays there’s not much stopping me from consuming any and all media with LGBT characters except taste and preference. Queer characters have begun to pop up in many different shows, some geared toward children and age appropriate. Today, we’re far removed from the nights I would quietly stay up, way past my bedtime and try and sneak an episode of The L Word or Queer as Folk. By some miracle of packaged channel subscriptions, my parents had bought LOGO TV without being aware of it. I couldn’t openly watch it, but if I stayed up late and made sure to cover all the open spaces in my door frame through which light and noise could filter out, I could sneak an episode or two, the volume barely above a whisper.

I couldn’t have been much older than twelve, the apartment in my memory was not where we lived during my later high school years. So much of what I saw flew over my head though, probably a consequence of the low volume and of being more preoccupied listening for movements from my parents’ room. When I went back to rewatch as a young adult, I realized just how much I hadn’t picked up on the sex, drugs, and problematic behaviors of the casts of both shows.

At the time, these two shows were more or less all I had as far as explicitly same sex behavior. Occasionally Will and Grace would enter the rotation, but it was on too early for me too hide from my parents. So, I was left with content aimed exclusively at adults. Movies were no different either and through the magic of the Internet, I found a way to view those too without my parents finding out. I was thirteen when Brokeback Mountain (2005) came out, I remembered streaming it many times over the winter break, quietly sobbing into my pillow over the drama of those bisexual cowboys. Around the same time, my parents had gotten a copy of Y Tu Mama Tambien (2001). Brokeback Mountain was all over American news and hungry as I was for queer media, it was easy to learn about it. Y Tu Mama Tambien I only heard about because of my parents. I recall reading the back cover of it and Amores Perros (2000) and thinking nothing of either film, except that Gael Garcia Bernal was very handsome. My mom saw me reading the covers though and reacted, “Deja eso!” She warned me not to watch either of the two. I tell you, the only reason I remembered to watch that movie was because of her.

Those years I spent much time trying to find queer media without alerting my parents. I’d known for years that I liked boys, I recalled registering a desire to hug a boy in my fifth-grade class and knowing I could neither act on that nor tell anyone about it. The confusion at the time wasn’t why I was drawn to him, but if I was that way, why was I still crushing on the girls in my class? I didn’t want to be them or hang out with them, but I still liked them. Without realizing it at the time, I was most drawn to films that showed characters whose sexuality was not so fixed. There are many examples of gay films where the formerly straight character ends the film fully in love with a man, or a boy if it was a younger, coming of age film. That’s not what I’m referring to though. The films I came to enjoy, that still stand out in memory now, are those that acknowledged sex, gender and desire as something between two people, irrespective of gender and stated preferences, although they weren’t all necessarily positive.

Honorable mention goes to Plata Quemada (2001) and A Home at the End of the World (2004). Plata Quemada, as problematic as its representation of bisexuality remains, was one of my favorite films. Of the three main criminals, one was gay, the other bisexual, both together and stereotypically men, macho, killers and thugs. There was something about seeing queer characters being not just problematic and messy, but violent and angry that appealed to the troubled young man I was. Unsurprisingly, the bisexual character at one point cheats on his partner, but if it hasn’t been maid clear, these protagonists were not meant to be role models. A Home at the End of the World was a film I could only watch once, maybe I rewatched it to understand what had just happened. From reading a plot summary these many years later, I hadn’t understood the plot at all, but I saw what I understood then as some sort of polygamous arrangement, a love triangle consummated. From the plot summary, it’s not clear that that ever happened, but I was a very young teenager and far too naïve to understand anything.

The movies I want to wrap this discussion up with are Different for Girls (1996), Chasing Amy (1997). and Bedrooms and Hallways (1998). Although these are not queer films of the aughts, there is no conceivable way I watched these the years they came out, rather, I would have viewed these in the aughts, through the magic of the internet and hidden from my parents. Bedrooms and Hallways remains a treat, I found it recently on YouTube and rewatched. In my youth, it painted a picture of these cool late 20, early 30 somethings who were still figuring themselves out. It has the typical storyline of straight men discovering their sexuality later in life, funnily enough through a men’s emotional support group. There’s an effeminate gay best friend, Darren, who, despite his rather slutty vibe, is focused throughout the film on going steady with his somewhat boyfriend. What I treasured at the time was that the very handsome lead, Leo, and spoilers obviously, Leo spends the film stumbling around figuring himself out as a gay man but ends the film wrapped in the arms of a prior girlfriend. Darren finds the two, asleep post coitus on the couch and says, “God, just a phase” before wandering off to his room. As the film ends there, it’s not clear what becomes of the friendship or relationship, but, surrounded by the messiness and fluidity of all their friends, it’s hard to imagine this as a friendship ending event.

By contrast, in Chasing Amy, it seemed that a character’s bisexuality was more threatening to their lesbian friends. I don’t mean to draw this distinction as a stone’s throw at lesbians, implying that they are less accepting of bisexuality. I am not a woman, so I don’t have any experiences with women’s acceptance of bisexuality now, but I have been on many dates with gay men that ended after admitting I do find women attractive or having the wonderful experience of reminding a boyfriend that I did indeed tell them I identify as bisexual exactly because I am worried about rejection further along in the relationship. It seems, even as far back as the 90s, that the Europeans were more accepting than the Americans. In Chasing Amy, the three leads are a straight man, Holden, his very jealous best friend, and a woman they had gone to high school with, Alyssa Jones, played by the beautiful Joey Lauren Adams. Alyssa is seemingly a lesbian, and a quite promiscuous one at that, until she meets Holden. They kick it off and at a certain point she informs Holden that she’s essentially lost her friend group, previously shown helping her put together material for a comic convention, because they feel she’s been lost to the straights. Although at the end of the film they are no longer together, so, presumably, Alyssa can go back to identifying as a lesbian and indeed she is shown with one of her prior friends at a comic convention, it is easy to imagine that they don’t all take her back. After all, bisexuals still face scrutiny from the monosexuals, gay or straight. Somehow, despite the strong implications that Alyssa gets around, the threatening relationship/sexual encounter is the seemingly stable one with an opposite sex partner. It’s easy to imagine that they felt Alyssa would disappear into her seemingly straight relationship, her rather lengthy past erased. Fluidity seemed reserved for the Europeans, the lesson was well learned from the films I watched at the time and relearned as a young man in the dating world.

The final film is special in my heart, as it cemented my love of a whole genre of music, one that most queer men seem scared to approach.  Different for Girls focuses on two close friends, Kim and Prentice, who grew up together, Karl and Prentice, but then lost contact. It is the earliest film I watched that had a positive portrayal of a transsexual character, although truthfully, I can’t recall caring too much about her transness. It wasn’t that the film didn’t discuss it, details abound, intimate discussions about the experience and even harassment that she experiences because of her sexual reassignment. It is just that I loved how she explained her masculine preferences as a youth. There’s a scene where Prentice is accusing Kim, questioning Kim’s femininity given that as youths they would often go to rock shows together. If memory serves, it was punk shows specifically, the implication that this was too macho for a transperson. With one gleeful laugh, Kim brushes the accusation aside as, “It wasn’t about that for me. It was about the energy and the movement of the music.” As she says this, I recall the lithe movements of her wrists and hands, raising her arms above her body as she mimicked a dance from before. Whether or not the movie’s language would hold up to our scrutiny now, 25 years later, the intent behind the film was beautiful. That moment highlighted the transformative and liberating power of punk and rock, decades before Laura Jane Grace of Against Me! would come out, and was always what I recalled when asked why as a queer man I liked rock, punk, metal the most.