The Catharsis of "Love, Simon"

Nick Robinson as movie protagonist Simon Spier

After cleaning up following Easter dinner with one of my daughters and her family, the husband and I and a couple of friends went to see the movie "Love, Simon," a movie which some would describe as a coming of age movie.  The main difference is that the protagonist, Simon, is gay.  By coincidence, a friend who has a long history of national level LGBT activism also happened to go to the same showing of the movie.  Collectively, we loved the movie which is a combination of being hysterically funny in places and heavy on drama in others, especially for those of us who grew up as closeted LGBT youth always terrified that someone would discover our closely held secret - something that plagues Simon through much of the movie.  The good news is that the movie has a nice ending even though it left us wishing our teen years could have been different.  Indeed, my activist friend remarked that had we had a movie like Love, Simon during our own teen years, perhaps our lives would have been filled with less self-hate and anxiety.  My advice to both gays and straights is to see the movie, straights in particular who might get some much needed understanding of the trials of growing up gay in America.  A piece in The Advocate looks at the movie and touches on some of the reflections I experienced.   Here are highlights:

I walked out of Love, Simon a ball of emotions. I was happy, delighting in what was an unabashedly romantic story with a young gay protagonist. I was melancholy, mourning an adolescence I never had. I was both jealous and grateful, envying a generation of young queer people who had Simon’s story to celebrate, but at the same time relieved that they might not struggle as I had.

And I was proud and validated, because while Love, Simon was not my story, parts of my story were reflected in Simon’s journey.

It has been a couple of weeks since I watched the film and I have had time to process it. Seemingly, it is not a film that warrants processing. It adheres to the conventions of a well-worn genre. It is intended for the not-particularly discerning mainstream. But I nevertheless found it deeply affecting and have needed time to come to terms with why.

Growing up in the '90s in a conservative Catholic family in a conservative town in Australia’s most conservative state presented challenges for a young lad like me. You see, I wasn’t like the other boys; worryingly, it seemed I actually liked the other boys. And as time went on, I began to fear that this wasn’t a phase; that maybe I was stuck with this affliction, this "moral evil" and "objective disorder" that the Catholic Catechism on our bookshelf decried. Perhaps I was gay. A more terrifying prospect I could not have imagined. Unhelpfully, I had no one with whom I could talk about it. . . . . And I desperately needed to talk to a sinner.

The need for role models is a decidedly human trait and the search for them a decidedly human endeavor. As I was completely bereft of role models in my personal life, I did what many a young person does – I looked for them elsewhere, primarily in other people’s stories and usually in film.

However, the 1990s are not renowned for their sympathetic portrayal of queer characters or stories. And the few queer-themed movies that did make their way to Australia ranged from powerful but pretty grim dramas like Philadelphia and The Crying Game to farces like The Birdcage and comedies like The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. Germane to the majority of this mainstream queer fare was a sense of tragedy and doom. And the take-home message for this impressionable young guy? Gay equals either a long life of quiet desperation or a short life peppered with hostility and rejection and liberal doses of ABBA.  Teen-oriented films weren’t much better.

Which brings me back to Love, Simon. Here for the first time is a major studio film that features as its protagonist a young gay man coming to terms with his sexuality and finding his place in the world. And there is the promise of a happily ever after for him.

What would the 16-year-old me have made of this film? How would I have reacted to seeing a teenager trying to work his way out of the closet? And the coming-out scenes with his family – would they have inspired me to take those first tentative steps out of my dark, glitterless closet? Might they have nudged me closer to a conversation with my family that would not take place for years?

[T]here is no doubt that Simon is the kind of role model I would have embraced as a confused, scared teen. But I also realize that one film would not have significantly altered my timeline or journey. There was more at play in my life than Simon could singularly bear on his shoulders.

But a boy can dream. I can dream of taking the 16-year-old me to a movie about a boy called Simon, a boy who is trying to come out to the world in his own time and on his own terms. I can watch him relate to Simon’s struggles and empathise with his fears. I can laugh with him at Simon’s awkwardness. I can smuggle him a tissue when Simon comes out to his family and they embrace him. I can share with him the elation of the final scenes.

And as the credits roll, I can turn to him and say, "See. It’s going to be OK." 

The author of the piece bemoans growing up in the 1990's.  For me, as teen in the 1960's and first years of the 1970's, the 1990's were downright accepting and wonderful in comparison. No child or youth should undergo rejection, bullying or condemnation by modern day Pharisees simply for who they are - who god made them to be. 

The Right Freaks Out - and Lies - About Rise of LGBT Millennials

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The 2016 General Social Survey was publicly released back in April, 2017, and it reported on many things, including the growing number of people who admit to being LGBT.  In fact, the data that Gallup shared showed that the LGBT population increased dramatically between 2012 and 2016, from 3.5% to 4.1% of the U.S. population (or an estimated 8.3 to 10.052 million people).  That’s a big change for a short period of time.  And the majority of that change could be accounted for by large increases among young people, women, the college-educated, people of color, and those who are not religious.  The findings showed that a great deal of that increase can be accounted for by Millennials.  Perhaps not surprisingly, given marriage equality (at long last) younger generations have become progressively more likely to identify as LGBT.  But the gap between Millenials and other generations is large and growing much to the horror of the right wingers. Rather than admit to the fact that Millennials have left religion in rapidly accelerating numbers (nearly a third at this point) and correspondingly do not feel the shame and stigma of being LGBT that Christianity seeks to inflict, the right wingers blame the rise of LGBT Millennials on what might be called recruitment.  Anything rather than admit that sexual orientation is fixed at birth or accept modern medical and mental health knowledge.  A piece in American Conservative illustrates the longstanding lie that is being promoted. Here are highlights: 

[F]or those who want to grapple honestly with this issue, these data from Patrick Egan show pretty clearly that the nurturing that culture provides does make a big difference.

Therefore, for communities who wish for their children to remain heterosexual, to form heterosexual marital unions, traditional families, etc., neutrality on the matter of sexuality will result in five to eight times as many people claiming homosexuality or bisexuality as would have otherwise been the case. (There have also been skyrocketing numbers of people claiming to be transgender.)

Sexuality is a lot more fluid than we think. For post-pubescent adolescents, teenagers, and young adults in their twenties, re-setting the boundaries of what is permissible resets the boundaries of what is thinkable, and for a meaningful number of them will change the way they behave.

Here’s what I mean. It must be that there are young people who experience homosexual desires as teenagers, but who do not act on them for reasons of religious belief or social custom. Later in life — in their twenties, say — their sexual desire solidifies as heterosexual, allowing them to form a stable marital bond with someone of the opposite sex, and start a family. Had they had the opportunity to experiment with homosexuality as a teenager, they might have remained confused and unstable well into adulthood.

What we have now says there is virtually no sexual norm outside whatever one feels is right for them, right now. If one thinks that one would like to try out being gay, or bi, or the opposite gender, well, why not? One big problem with this, though, is: what about the kids? Social science has abundantly demonstrated that kids need stable homes in which to thrive. If issues of sexuality and gender identity remain fluid, it will be very difficult to create the kind of environment in which these young people can be formed in a healthy way.

It's pretty much the same lies promoted for decades by anti-hate groups and even the Catholic Church - even as the Vatican turned a blind eye to the rampant raping of children and youths by priests - and which is contrary to findings by legitimate associations of gay parenting.  Andrew Sullivan rightly goes ballistic.  Here are excerpts from his response:

 I’m usually pretty good at staying calm under assault from the religious right. . . . . But this latest post by my friend Rod Dreher deeply upset me. Titled “Born That Way? Really?” it accuses those of us who have long argued that homosexuality is involuntary or innate of being cynical liars: “The ‘truth’ in this matter [0f the origins of homosexuality] has always been ‘what works to advance the cause.’” He then argues that there is such a thing as “latent homosexuality” that can be “made active” by a more tolerant society. Hence the need to reinstate stigmatization of gay people as human beings who have chosen sin — to keep anyone else from experimenting and thereby becoming gay.

His sole evidence for this? A graph from a comprehensive study of the 2016 election that shows much higher identification as bisexual among today’s millennials than among older generations.

It is merely a measurement of who is prepared to identify as such in a survey. That’s a far more malleable and amorphous figure. And it finds, to Rod’s horror, that around 13 percent of 18-year-olds now identify as bi. That drops to around 6 percent for those who are 28; and around 4 percent for those now in their 30s. Another longitudinal survey — from Gallup — also shows a sizable increase among millennials who identify as “LGBT” in the last few years. The change is from 3.5 percent in 2012 to 4.1 percent in 2016.

If Rod’s interpretation is correct, it means that there were far, far fewer gay people as a proportion of the population a few decades ago than there are now. It means that, by the study Rod cites, there were almost no gays or lesbians born in America in 1930. It means that more progressive and secular countries, like the Netherlands, would have much higher numbers of gay people than in the past or elsewhere. There is no solid evidence for any of this.

But the obvious explanation for these numbers is a simple one: it is that millennials simply have much less shame about sexual orientation than older generations. Growing up in a world of legal marriage equality, that should not be surprising. Gallup suggests as much: “It’s likely that millennials are the first generation in the U.S. to grow up in an environment where social acceptance of the LGBT community markedly increased. This may be an important factor in explaining their greater willingness to identify as LGBT.” Maybe destigmatization will mean that more bi people will experiment with same-sex relationships, even though the study actually shows gay identification as stable for the past few decades. They might even — God forbid — have happier, healthier lives as a result. But what distresses me about Rod’s post is his belief that homosexuals should be restigmatized for the sake of others, that one part of the population should be shamed and targeted purely to send a message to otherwise confused kids that being gay is wrong. The only word for this is cruelty, the immiseration of gay kids for the sake of controlling those who may eventually be bi. I cannot see anything remotely Christian about that.