Gay Men Everywhere are Seeing ‘Call Me By Your Name’ and Feeling Bad About their Shitty Love Lives
One night in October I hooked up with a gorgeous Moroccan-French professional dancer. He lured me back to his hotel room with the promise of a company T-shirt. A few hours later, we were nestled under the covers, lights off, our clothes in a pile on the floor. I stopped him as he dove in for another kiss, my heart pounding. Suddenly desperately anxious, I focused my eyes on the frosted window at the corner of the room, new worries barrelling through my mind. In a small voice, I asked: “Do you mind if I stay here tonight?” He looked around like an unwelcome being had come into the room. Then he guffawed and held me tighter. “Of course you can!”
Needless to say, I then accompanied him on a trip to northern Italy where he danced with a random girl and I threw up in a fountain and then we parted and I cried for the rest of my life while gazing into my fireplace. Kidding. We laughed and touched each other, slept, and then got up with the alarm and went on with our lives in emotionally intact pieces. This man, whom I barely knew and will never see again, demonstrated something to me that night, a thing that is not love, but may be even more wonderful. That thing is not being a dick.
I’m sort of hoping millenial gay men are starting to realize the possibilities of emotional connection and good, old-fashioned real life interaction by learning it from sweet pop star Troye Sivan or Call Me By Your Name. When I first saw Call Me By Your Name, it was in a Fort Lauderdale indie theatre packed with exclusively homosexual males over 50 (everyone who lives in Fort Lauderdale). I bought a box of candy (I was hungry, I skipped dinner) and when I touched the plastic wrap dozens of gray heads turned and glared at me murderously. At the end of the film, the character of Elio’s father, played by Michael Stuhlbarg, gives an impassioned speech to his son about the missed opportunities of downplaying his own latent bisexuality. He says something to the effect of, “When you’re my age, son, no one wants to look at your body, let alone touch it.” At this point, the older gay audience let out an audible, knowing sigh. Men turned to each other for reassurance.
I watched that movie unsure whether to feel sad or to laugh or to leave. I opted for screwing up my face, leaning on my arm, and trying to forget my extreme hunger and need to urinate. Even entranced by the stunning cinematography and Elio’s beauty and artistry, I wasn’t falling in love with the character of Oliver, acted by Armee Hammer. Oliver is a cocky bastard, apollonian but shallow, his flat voice ruining the romance of his interesting lines. In particular, the titular sequence, “‘Call me by your name’… ‘Elio Elio Elio’…’Oliver Oliver Oliver’”, was delivered by Hammer in a monotone drawl, only partially rescued by the virtuosic Chalamet. Maybe it’s just my flawed taste. In real life, no one would be able to resist the charms of a burly grad-student dude who is the 80s version of ‘masc for masc’. And yet, I think we deserve better, better even than the halcyon nicotine daydream of Call Me By Your Name.
This is the part where you expect me to lay into Call Me By Your Name. But I’m not going to, because in spite of my full bladder and jaded attitude, I haven’t thought of much else since that movie came out. It inspired me to delete grindr, re-invest in my imagination, and spend all hours of the day listening to Sufjan Stevens’ The Mystery of Love. This film did it for the gay community (like Moonlight maybe should have done if we weren’t all racist) as if none of us ever actually applied the billion love stories made about straight people to ourselves before. Love might have been nice, but it was not ours. Now love is trending in our community.
After a few years of clinical grindr interactions and drunk street hookups, the sober “you can stay here tonight” hookup was like the breath of fresh air that Sandra Bullock takes at the end of the film Gravity. That night with that man, he and I laughed about Americans, about foreigners and customs, about dance, about dancers, our careers, our desires, our past relationships. That night I didn’t gain a cool new dance company T shirt or a sitcom boyfriend. And I didn’t face a moral dilemma, cry, make someone else cry, or undergo a self-esteem implosion. Hookups can also be about two men (people) loving each other, being present with each other, even if just for one night.
