The world is erratic and chaotic for someone whose neurological disposition, like mine, depends on clear-cut routines. That’s how I get through daily life. Movies at cinemas begin on schedule, and barring any unforeseen technical issues (which rarely ever arise these days with automated digital projection booths), they also end on schedule. What unfolds in between those bookends both suspends the chaos outside and also lifts me out of it. I can just relax, something I can’t do when I walk back outside the cinema’s doors. Other people in the general public today are just too unpredictable, too unreliable, and as mean as it may sound, too disappointing in my five decades on this planet.
I prefer to interact with other people through the things that they create. Moviegoing as an experience is an immersion in that relationship. Going to a concert or to a live theatrical performance is also great but never quite the same. I prefer to plane out the element of spontaneity. I want the mechanical exposition of the narrative, a worthwhile narrative, one that can deepen with repeated viewings and lodge itself deeper into me, and in a way that can’t be rewound or fast-forwarded through. I simply want to see what I’m seeing, feel what I’m feeling, think what I’m thinking, and then contemplate it critically alone in my own head afterwards.
Now let me take a kind of inverted but intentional detour. For the past thirty years, I’ve lived in and around the city of Boston. I’m gay, and during those three decades, I’ve had various kinds of physical encounters with about 2,000 other gay men (plus a handful of straight and bisexual ones, obviously), which equates to an average of roughly one guy per week. (If that sounds like a lot to you, then perhaps you can find some reassurance in knowing that it’s less than half of the number of such encounters experienced by the gay Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas as he notes in his memoir Before Night Falls; furthermore, Arenas died of AIDS-related complications in New York City at the age of only 47, so his pace was way faster than mine.) Like the great gay Greek poet C.P. Cavafy, I now live with my vividly cinematic memories of those encounters since after age forty, it’s been mostly crickets for me in that regard, especially once those encounters ceased to be fulfilling for me because I felt like I was never being seen as a whole person by the guys with whom I met up.
Hence the unreliability and resulting disappointment in other people that I mentioned previously. I could go into the reasons why I think that’s the case (both for me and for the other gay men whom I’ve met), but I think I’ll just avoid psychologizing it and let it rest as a hard fact: the overwhelmingly vast majority of gay men don’t treat each other very well as a general rule (and why would we when society-at-large doesn’t treat us very well either?), and in many cases I’m certain that gay men don’t even care if other gay men whom they meet on the fly even survive or not. Hey, it’s a big world and a big ocean. One with lots of other fish swimming around in it.
So yeah, I’ll take my artful entertainment (at least when I get lucky by purchasing the right ticket at the box office) that begins on time, ends on time, keeps me company in between for about two hours in a comfortable air-conditioned space, and doesn’t make me feel the kinds of things about my own existence that I’d rather not feel. I’ll take a screen full of perfect male faces and bodies like those in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Outsiders, some cheap and finely positioned objects of beauty that I can admire and love, and not care that they won’t admire and love me back.
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