Precog

I remember going to see Milk with my mom. ...Maybe "remember" isn't the right word, because it was only last spring, but stop quibbling. Anyway, I was mostly invested in enjoying it for showing me, again, that gay people exist and that they hadn't been a figment of my starved post-college imagination, but I also wondered what my mom was going to ask at the end. Did I find James Franco utterly, utterly sexy? Was I thinking about going to San Francisco? Where were all my gay friends, anyway? 'Course, now that I think about it, all of those things were on my mind, not hers, and her single question was considerably different.

There's a scene, at the very beginning of the movie, where Harvey Milk is coming up through a subway stairwell (I think) and he runs into James Franco's character, subtly hits on him, then flirts more audaciously, then invites him home. The only thing I really thought about that scene was how bold Mr. Milk had been, since ... well, James Franco can certainly look and act gay, but if I'd been in his place, I sure wouldn't have hit on some stranger on the subway. Then again, it was the city, and I've never even been on a subway; he was hitting on James Franco; he was nearly 40 and I was 21. Game, set, and match.

The scene stuck in my mom's head, though, and at the end she asked me, quite simply, how he could tell. This, in my mind, translated to "explain gaydar." Like I already said, the only way I'd known, in the context of the movie, that James Franco was gay was that I knew going in that he was supposed to play a gay character. Huxxah gaydar! I didn't know how to explain it, though - the majority experience I had with gay men were at my final university, and you didn't so much require gaydar to sense them as you, well, just had to kind of exist. Really, folks, Helen Keller could've told that these guys were gay from ten miles away. These were the types of guys who screamed for short-shorts, spent hours doing their makeup (and glitter) for a party attended only by their friends, and routinely dressed in drag when the conversation turned to anything boring. I'm not making this up: When my ex-friends and I would start talking about anything (mainly hip movies/music/whatnot, which bored me, too), they'd wend their way upstairs, snort some coke, and break out the heels.

This is only a slight exaggeration. A VERY slight exaggeration.

Maybe it makes for an amusing memory, but it didn't help me with identifying folks like James Franco. My mother wouldn't let it go, though - she wanted to know how Harvey had figured it out. I didn't have a good answer for her. What she might've been looking for, and what I've sort of embraced since, is that gay people should have some sort of precognitive ability that lets us recognize each other. Or maybe something similar; maybe we see the world in a slightly different way, and every other gay person has a cloudy little aura. It'd be neat, anyway, or at least a good conversation starter. "Your aura's looking a bit peppery today." "The tanning bed must have messed with it."

If one thing's for certain, this college life has seriously screwed my perceptions up. Take Eddie Izzard, who several of my friends and ex-friends were obsessed with; he's straight, or so I'm told, and he likes to cross-dress. Well, that's just not okay, is it? He should be gay, absolutely, according to my experience. Thank god I've learned to see past it, and through other things - books, memoirs, stories, movies, anecdotes - I've learned that the couple dozen queens I knew from university are not the be-all and end-all to being gay. It'd be worth finding out about James Franco, wouldn't it? I wouldn't mind running into him on a subway stairwell.

Now, to find a subway....