Films that shepherded me from childlike wonder and straight into teenage curiosity (about, say, those ruggedly handsome male leads) still tug at me all these years later.īut The Fifth Element was different in that it put into stark contrast the different way I was reading the film in front of me. I enjoyed the childlike awe they inspired as we retreated into the comfort of our mom’s arms. Nevertheless, those hours we spent watching movies while laying in my mom’s bed remain some of my fondest memories of growing up. For a single mother of three, there was perhaps something rather soothing in these fantasies, where men like Bruce Willis (the obvious draw in The Fifth Element ) swooped in and saved the day. These films presented a vision of oppressive masculinity-one that my mom, despite her own liberal leanings, uncritically valued in the pop culture she (and we, in turn) consumed. Her predilection was for films that fulfilled two simple requests: They needed to have a ruggedly handsome male lead and were required to feature an improbable plot centered, if not outright dependent, on stuff blowing up. On occasion, when our household veered away from family fare, we were guided by my mother’s tastes. And sometimes it involved our most recent Blockbuster rental, which was always a mixed bag of compromises, except for that time we got Face/Off, which remains an all-time family favorite many years later. Oftentimes it amounted to watching whatever was playing on cable for a couple of months in 1998, a broken Pay-Per-View satellite channel meant we could catch Contact on loop as many times as we wanted. Sometimes this meant going to the malls in Bogotá to catch the latest Disney release (my mom snored her way through Hercules, having worked late the night before, while I blushed at Herc’s “pair of pretty pecs”).
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That meant our weekend movie gatherings were as close as we got to quality family time. And rarely were we able to enjoy weekend outings that didn’t eventually take us to my mom’s office (where my siblings and I fought over access to the one desktop with dial-up internet). We were never the kind of family unit to make a big deal out of dinners together (we usually took our plates to our respective TVs). My brother, my sister, and I nestled around our mother in her king-sized bed, as we always did when we all made time to watch a movie together at home. I was twelve-thirteen at most-when I watched The Fifth Element for the first time. They are, in my head at least, irrevocably intertwined. There’s no way of telling my coming out story without talking about Luc Besson’s The Fifth Element.
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My coming out story had all the regular trappings of the genre: a furtive sexual awakening, an overprotective and easily angered elder, a pair of lace-up boots that made me quake with lust, an operatic sequence punctuated with violence, an intergalactic tryst between a futuristic cab driver and a near-naked elemental deity… Oh, I should’ve warned you.
This is Movie-Made Gay, a column by Manuel Betancourt on thirst, reading queerly, and the films that have shaped his identity as a gay man.