A Small Gay Story for Your Tuesday
A Small Gay Story for Your Tuesday
oh you haven't seen titanic? that's fine
Good morning!
I’d like to tell you a little story. If you haven’t got time, I completely understand, but if you do, this story involves deception, social climbing, early gender and sexuality questioning, a CINEMATIC MEGAHIT, and the careless, youthful burning-through of thousands and thousands of dollars on a tightly budgeted Mormon family’s high-deductible insurance plan in the mid-1990s.
You in?
Fantastic.
The story begins in the present day.
It was Davin’s birthday this past Saturday, and we were out for celebratory drinks in Minneapolis.
I was sitting across from our friend Claire, and she was wearing the coolest oversized 90s short-sleeve button-down shirt. Very colorful, so silky, clearly vintage. Perfect. Eyeing it jealously (while being aware it would look like that on literally no one else), I said, “I LOVE your shirt.”
Claire smiled smugly, knowing she was about to be obnoxious. “I got it in Spain.”
I narrowed my eyes at her, and she laughed. Don’t you hate when you compliment someone on something they’re wearing and they go, “Oh, this? Thanks, I got it in Morocco” or “Thank you! My sister sent it to me from Portugal” ??? This is 100% illegal behavior, I don’t care who you are and I don’t make the rules!!
Anyway, the reason the shirt was working so especially well on Claire was that she’d just gotten a short haircut, and it was good. With the haircut, the billowy 90s shirt made her look exactly like Leonardo DiCaprio in Romeo + Juliet – the 1996 version of the movie with Claire Danes in angel wings that I first watched when I was 13 and then rewatched so many times it rewired my brain in irreparable ways.
I told Claire this – that she looked just like 1996 Leo – and our table began discussing Leonardo. Gross now, obviously, because he only dates 21-year-olds, but when we were all growing up? What a chokehold Leo had on us all.
Especially the up-and-coming baby gays of the late 90s/early 2000s. I mean, remember Titanic? Leo was a lesbian before we were all lesbians!
Claire, Davin, and I were ranking the saddest scenes in Titanic – the mom reading to her children in steerage as the ship sank, the old people holding hands in bed – when Shay coolly interrupted the discussion.
“I’ve never seen Titanic,” she said.
My jaw dropped. I turned to fully face her.
“I mean, I actually saw the beginning – like the first 15 minutes? where they were on the future-boat with the old lady? – but it was boring, so I stopped watching,” she clarified.
A momentary hush fell over the table.
And then, a torrent of shock and outrage.
“You haven’t–”
“You’ve never–”
“BORING?”
Boring? BORING? EXCUSE ME?
Now, Shay is young – she is about to turn 31 – but boring?
The movie.
Titanic.
We couldn’t let it go.
“Shay, you missed the entire movie,” Davin said. “You turned it off before they even got on the ship.”
“There are sex scenes,” Claire said.
“Kate Winslet and Leonardo? They have sex,” I said.
Our explanations were patient. Our reasoning: airtight.
Shay didn’t care. She couldn’t be swayed. The table discussion turned elsewhere, and that was that.
By Sunday, I’d forgotten about the incident, but then Claire texted our group chat.
I needed Shay to understand why Titanic was important. She, as a YOUTH, clearly had no idea what this major motion picture had meant to the world, and to all of us, and to me, personally!!!
So let me preface this by saying that the last thing you ever want to do is give me your phone number, because I don’t give a fuck about double-texting, and I’m one of those people who hits send after every sentence, even when all information could be easily conveyed in a single text.
I went for it.
Reader, this is your last chance to stop reading the world’s dumbest gay story about the movie Titanic and get back to your job, i am warning you!
OK, here you go.
It was the 90s, we got the paper, my mom read the Health section religiously.
In this story, I am 14, and cell phones do not exist, and I have not brought a book with me to the doctor’s office, and I am deeply, deeply Mormon, and I don’t know why, having seen Titanic once, I cannot stop thinking about it. All I know is that I’ve mentally replayed the car sex scene between Kate Winslet and Leonardo about 45,000 times since I saw the movie.
I’ve also recently hit upon an Entirely New Thought: in my mind, thinking about the sex scene, I’m suddenly realizing that I’m able to imagine it from Kate or Leo’s point of view.
And this is very curious, and something I’m thinking about a lot, because I am now not sure if I’m interested in doing stuff with Leo or… being Leo as he is doing stuff to Kate.
I am pretty sure, as a 14 yo with no access to the internet, that I am the first person to ever have had this thought.
I am also sure there is no right answer, because both Leo and Kate have the best possible point of view during the scene.
Right. So I’m in a doctor’s office, getting an EKG, thinking about sweaty Titanic Model T Ford sex.
After the EKG printout is examined, a grave conversation happens between the doctor and my mom. The readout from my heart is not good. My heart is speeding randomly – maybe even skipping beats – and they don’t know why.
My mom and the doctor both look at me, their foreheads creased with concern.
And this is the moment when I put it all together. What happened during the EKG.
My heart was speeding randomly?
Inexplicably?
Oh no.
I was thinking about the Titanic sex scene. I was thinking about Kate Winslet’s boobs. That’s why my heart was going ohnonononnono.
My face turns red. There is no way I can tell them this.
A nurse attaches the portable heart monitor to me. It looks like a Walkman – it clips on your jeans, and comes with suction cups so sticky that you can shower with them and they won’t come off. They suction cups look like little metal nipples, all over my chest, and I am embarrassed.
We go home, and I decide to wear baggy shirts all week.
At school the next day, after I tell two friends in choir what’s going on, everyone wants to see the heart monitor. Very quickly, I become a medical celebrity at school.
Suddenly, everyone is extremely concerned about me.
Things begin to spiral out of control. By Day 2 of wearing the heart monitor at school, thinking about the car sex scene isn’t working the way it used to – it doesn’t make my heart race anymore. But this is not good; I have to get weird heart monitor results. I have to, or Julia and Anne, the most popular girls in school, are going to stop talking to me.
There’s nothing for it. I have to see the movie again.
I begin to lie. I lie to my mom about hanging out with my friends after school. I lie to my sister – who works evening shifts at Chuck E. Cheese, which is conveniently located next to the movie theater – about why I need to ride with her to her job at night.
I have about $25 to my name, saved up from babysitting, and I spend it all. Every cent I have. I have to watch Titanic every evening after school, because I have to watch the sex scene to get my heart racing while hooked up to the monitor because I have to remain a medical celebrity.
My future depends on it.
A full week goes by, and I am brought back to the doctor and unhooked from the suction cups.
The doctor comes in smiling, holding the readouts. “Perfectly normal,” he says. “Not a thing to worry about.”
My mom heaves a dramatic sigh of relief. “Thank heavens for that,” she says, and we walk out to the car, where I sit silent, staring out the window, for the ride home.
Fame. Popularity. Julia and Anne speaking to me at least once a day. Everybody having to be nice to me because I was going to die.
I could have had it all.
A tear slides down my cheek. My mom looks over and says, “Hard week, huh kiddo?”
We go into the house. No one asks me what I want for dinner, now that I’m not dying anymore. Julia and Anne stop talking to me at school. I spend the rest of my life having memorized every line of dialogue from a three-hour-and-fifteen-minute movie, thus leaving no more room in my brain for double-digit addition, the commitment of my own zip code to memory, or the ability to understand directions that are more than a block away from any apartment I will ever live in.
Oh, you haven’t seen Titanic?
That’s fine.
That’s totally fine.
Being 31 is no excuse!! I’m 31, and even I was shown Titanic at a frankly concerning age! Do I remember all of it? No, but I SAW it! I think they even had a cleaned up version that we watched in school one time??
Still haven’t seen it despite the intense peer pressure for DECADES. I get super stubborn to the point of being obstinate as hell anytime someone tells me I “have to…” I have, however, hungrily devoured absolutely every single documentary about finding and exploring the wreck of the Titanic, every weird story about someone not dying on it, etc., having been obsessed with undersea life since I was tiny. But that’s me, digging my stubborn toes in.