‘Call Me By Your Name’ Made Me Realize What the Closet Stole From Me
Inspired by an article of the same name by Manuel Betancourt, which made me cry actual tears at my workplace.
The first time I fell in love, I had no idea what was happening. I knew that what I was feeling was strong, and should probably be kept secret, but I guarded the secret loosely and convinced myself that there wasn’t anything to hide (and even if there was, admitting it would just (frighteningly) confirm what it was: a big ol’ crush.)
I was 15 and I had felt some version of this before, but now it was irresistible. Something was different, and I couldn’t stop myself from doing and saying insane, reckless things. I was acting weird, and I knew it — and that people would probably notice — but I was fascinated by the fact that a person could make me so delirious with just a glance of acknowledgement. When I got her number I lived for her texts. Phantom ringtones made me claw frantically at my pocket to see if it was her. When her name was on my flip-phone’s screen above “1 New Message” I teetered with a joy that made my ears ring. I had never felt anything like it.
I didn’t have a texting plan — like, at all — and my texts with her racked up a $200 bill that I would have to answer to my parents for. I didn’t have a texting plan, but I did have her number. I had known the whole time that the texts would be pricey, and I didn’t care. It was a no-brainer, it was worth it, and in my happy delirium I told, straight up told, one of our mutual friends what I had done — unsolicited! I couldn’t shut up. I was so happy. I even ended my confession by meaningfully and dramatically saying, in reference to the steep bill I’d now have to pay back to my parents, “I knew what I was doing.”
She was like, “Okay…cool.” Sorry for the melodrama, Mandy.
But the school year eventually ended and the girl and I went to different schools and when I learned how to drive I looked for her at every stop light. I was always looking for her. I kept thinking I saw her at school, and my heart would leap only for her to turn around and be some other person. I felt crazy — I was always wondering if she thought of me, and what she thought of me. It hurt, it burned, and I wondered if she missed me too. Then suddenly it hit me. It took that broken-hearted feeling to recognize the severity of what I had been dealing with so flippantly: that this wasn’t just a friendship for me, never had been. And the heartbreak coupled itself with a frantic knowledge that I was doomed for feeling it. I began to panic.
When I choked in my final playoff basketball game a few years later I cried on my bedroom floor for three days straight. I said it was about basketball —about the game, my career being over, letting my team down — the truth was that there was a girl on the other team that I couldn’t stop thinking about. I pined for her in that now-familiar and dreaded way, and it felt like a nightmare. I thought I’d die if the feeling didn’t go away.
It’s a truly horrific thing, hating yourself that much.
So I can’t believe I had never really considered it, but after seeing Call Me By Your Name I began to wonder: What would love have been like, back then, without that damning fear?
What if I had been able to call my mom crying after each crack in my heart and say, “Mom…can you come get me?”. To collapse into her arms and not have to lie about why. What if I had seen gay people be respected; what if I hadn’t had to start avoiding church, turning myself into a different kind of disappointment, for my own sanity? My cousin once bragged that he had punched two faggots kissing at school, and that the principal gave him a high five for it. We all told him that was awesome and laughed. When a high school classmate came out, my friends and I all grimaced and said “ew”, practically in unison. It was what we did. It was what everybody did.
But what if it hadn’t been? What if I had been allowed to learn the harsh lessons of heartbreak without it piggybacking the threat of losing everything else that I loved?
Call Me By Your Name shocked me — it kind of left an aching slap on my face — because it depics a story of queer romance that has nothing to do with danger. There is no confusion, no penitence, no self-flagellation or frantic tears of “please God, change me”. The lovers are a mere one step away from being blatantly, kind of shockingly open about their relationship, the bit of secrecy seeming more to revolve around Oliver being a student of Elio’s father than any kind of gender norms or religious expectations. There are no angry parents, no embarrassed friends, no tragedies besides heartbreak, and no threatening talk of God and his judgements. It’s just…a romance.
So I wonder, and I fantasize a little, about having had that. Elio is a curious and sincere 17 year-old, like I was once, and acts a bit like a puppy learning the difference between aggression and play — when it’s okay to bite, and how — things that 17 year-olds should be allowed to learn. His character is lovable, precocious, and deftly written as having a youthful eagerness, an eagerness I recognized quickly as something I had long learned to suppress. Expertly woven in is a small romance with a girl named Marzia which, refreshingly, isn’t presented as a product of guilt or societal expectations. It’s simply another interest; a connection that ultimately pales in comparison to another, fiercer one.
I had never seen a movie that treated queer characters as so fluid and human and something other than damaged. Have you?
The magic of it all, the part that was unrecognizable to me, is that Elio doesn’t care that his attraction is unconventional. He jumps into it with a zeal and beginner’s imperfect confidence that left me crying and and smiling and not knowing exactly why. I guess I’ve just never seen a movie about a queer teenager who isn’t ashamed of it, who isn’t tortured and tormented and tugging at his bedsheets praying for it to go away. I’ve never seen a movie about a gay teenager who isn’t bullied or beaten or disowned or dead. I’ve never known one, either.
I’ve seen movies that felt correct to me, that mirrored my experience of guilt, and heavenly pacts, and tucking myself away in the corner of a glass closet, with a few variations. But I’ve never seen one like this, guiltless and pure. It’s a story of gay love that I’m not sure I’ve ever even considered, in its fullness, as possible. “They aren’t ashamed,” I thought. “So that’s what it looks like.”
Maybe it’s something I could have had if the world and I had been different. If I had been born just a decade or two later (I barely missed it), or in a different place (it could have been worse). I long for that specific kind of heartbreak, still, but I know I’ll never have it. It’s too late now. I’ll never be a teenager again; I’ll never be privileged with that youthful, bursting feeling. I wonder what it would have felt like to be able to explore a love that is new, reckless, experimental, maddening, and…requited.
Can you imagine what that would feel like?
The first time I told someone how I felt, I was in my early 20s and couldn’t sleep from the happiness of it. I didn’t mind that I may have come on a bit strong; I didn’t even think I’d mind if she didn’t say it back. I just wanted her to know. I wanted her to know. And I realized that that had been all I’d ever wanted, all the other times I had held back, mortified as I’d notice myself leaning toward someone involuntarily for some kind of contact, frantically rushing away to my car saying “shit, shit, shit, shit”. It was simply the desire to tell. To express with words the pounding, fluttering, hot ice inside me.
But even by then, with her, it wasn’t the same. Something golden had passed, already, by then. I felt behind, like I was missing something everyone else already knew. I feel behind sometimes, still, and it’s something like loss and theft all at once.
But watching Elio fumble through expressing himself, through anger and confusion and betrayal and soul-throwing joy gave me some kind of freedom. It was something like finding an old photo I’d thought I’d burned, an old forgotten fantasy that I gave up on, or whose time had naturally passed.
I don’t know if I’ve brought this on myself, but I am sure that assigning blame won’t fix it. Regardless, I still worry about what the closet might have stolen from me. I worry that I’m learning things far too late for the stakes to be negligible (they’re higher and higher all the time). I worry that I missed the window where trial and error are acceptable.
I worry about who might get caught in the shrapnel of my likely explosions.
I’m trying to learn, but I can only reassemble myself.