Where the Boys Are: Cinemas of Masculinity and Youth

12. Out West: Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho and the Lost Mother

12 outwest Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho and the Lost Mother Matthew Tinkcom In “How to Bring Your Kids Up Gay,” in her book Tendencies, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick offers a thoroughgoing critique of the complicity of contemporary therapeutic and psychoanalytic practice in the pathologization and stigma attached to queer sexualities. In particular , in that essay Sedgwick argues that perhaps the greatest danger to queers comes not so much from the variety of religious and social commentators who earn their livelihoods from the demonization of queers, but more perniciously from those professionals (psychiatrists and therapists included) who claim as their mandate the improvement of the lot of queers as sex/gender has become more central to the public discussion of sexuality in the U.S. setting. She (rather devastatingly, to my mind) asserts that “revisionist analysts seem prepared to like some gay men, but the healthy homosexual is one who (a) is already grown up, and (b) acts masculine” (1993, 156), implying that the psychoanalytic explanation of the existence of queer adult men is preserved largely by the fiction that for the most part queer children do not exist—that the child or adolescent who announces queer desire or affiliation is an anomaly and can be treated, medically and psychologically, in order to avoid becoming a queer adult. Therefore, the “problem” of the queer child or adolescent is that he or she fails to inhabit one of the more powerful cultural teleologies of sex/gender, namely that queers simply appear fully formed as adults on the social landscape. In point of fact such chil233 Western fiction has traditionally been clean. Where the coyotes howl and the wind blows free was never a place for promiscuous sex, kinky sex or perversion. Since the early sixties, however, all this has changed. C. L. Sonnichsen matthew tinkcom 234 dren and teens grow and develop as queers throughout the early parts of their lives. Yet the psychological professions, according to Sedgwick, have afforded little possibility of such development. She writes: “[There] are huge blank spaces to be left in what purports to be a developmental account of proto-gay children,” and the absence of such accounts indicates a less than benign activity at work in the treatment of gay and lesbian youth, leading to what she describes as the net effect of such discourses and practices that although “the associated strategies and institutions are not about invasive violence ,” nevertheless, “what they are about is a train of squalid lies. The overarching lie is the lie that they are predicated on anything but the therapists’ disavowed desire for a nongay outcome” (Sedgwick 1993, 161). Sedgwick bases her interrogation of the “treatment” of queer youth on the rather startling fact that gay and lesbian teenagers are, by the admission of the United States Department of Health and Human Services, two to three times more likely to attempt suicide than their straight counterparts. Her accusations are not without their statistical merit. Elsewhere, though, Sedgwick suggests in passing that the techniques of psychoanalysis might be helpful in understanding the experiences of queer children and teenagers as they grow up in a homophobic culture, a culture that continually enjoys the harassment , insult, and sometimes murder of queers, young queers not excepted. What she calls “the possibly spacious affordances of the mother texts” of psychoanalysis might make room for us to see how the condemnation of queer desire and pleasure fuels a culture in need of outlets for its rage. Sedgwick’s playful turn to psychoanalysis as a discourse that mothers children, rather than fathering them by inserting them into the patriarchal arrangement of the socius, fosters this essay’s impulse to consider the function of the mother for the queer teenager. For the queer adolescent the movement from childhood to adulthood is a process fraught with various prohibitions against discussing the erotic dimensions of boys and male teenagers in relation to adult sexualities and genders. We should understand Sedgwick’s comments as an attempt to underscore how little commentary we have about the fact that children (male and female) are expected to arrive in the world of adult “choices” regarding pleasure and reproduction with astonishingly sparse acknowledgment of their own erotic capacities. I address Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho (1991) because that film almost singularly offers a Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho and the Lost Mother 235 vision of...