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3. Every Queer Thing We Know
- NYU Press
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60 > 61 glossy pair of pink slippers sold to her by Richard Swersey (John Hawkes), a divorced dad and the new object of Christine’s affection. In her digital viewfinder , her “ME” and “YOU” feet approach, stop short, turn, withdraw, and finally they barely touch. Richard himself is unmoored by separation from his wife and the vicissitudes of custodial fatherhood. He needs his young sons, it appears, even more than they need him. “Do I seem okay?” he asks them. Six-year-old Robby (Brandon Ratcliff) is quizzical; fifteen-year-old Peter (Miles Thompson) responds, “Yeah, fine,” a little panicky, conscious of the role reversal and the thin line between fact and reassurance. The boys’ Pam’s nightshirt in mirror, Me and You and Everyone We Know © 2005 IFC and Film Four. Pam’s nightshirt from Richard’s perspective [44.213.66.116] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 09:02 GMT) 62 > 63 with the adults around her. Teenage friends and local mean girls Heather (Natasha Slayton) and Rebecca (Najarra Townsend) taunt their chubby neighbor Andrew (Brad William Henke), who is also Richard’s coworker in the shoe department, with challenges about what he might do with a couple of “lesbian sisters”—them—if he believed they were eighteen (they aren’t). He responds first with sensible disengagement, then with big Magic Marker notes pasted to the window of the apartment complex: “First, I would tell you both to take off your shirts so I could get a good look at your sweet little nipples.” Robby touches Herrington’s hair (#1). Robby touches Herrington’s hair (#2), Me and You and Everyone We Know © 2005 IFC and Film Four. [44.213.66.116] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 09:02 GMT) 64 > 65 her daughter. “Hi, baby girl,” Sylvie speaks into the air, “you are a precious treasure.” There are many such moments of exposure and generosity in the film: Herrington kisses Robby, avowing her affection and separating herself, as an attracted adult probably ought to do; Ellen loans a photograph of her daughter for Christine’s art project; Richard acknowledges, in response to Sylvie’s mother (Colette Kilroy), who has blithely claimed that “kids are so adaptable,” that “kids have absolutely no control over their lives.” Me and You and Everyone We Know is not a primer for queering children, but it shows us the delicacies and Christine and Richard embrace as Richard hangs picture. Bird photograph in tree, Me and You and Everyone We Know © 2005 IFC and Film Four. [44.213.66.116] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 09:02 GMT) 66 > 67 observation as light as lavender vapor, Me and You and Everyone We Know revives in me a curiosity, a wish, for a less self-righteous queer world. Amid the contemporary aggressions of Tea Partiers and generals, Judge Judy or Dr. Phil, self-righteousness is not a distinctly queer problem. But queerness has, historically, welcomed what others have shamed, inverted what others have damned or dismissed, deconstructed and reconstructed social possibility against the grain of misanthropy and accumulation. In a world high on greed and authority, how might queerness make things easier, not harder, and not only for queers? This is not an appeal to get along or abandon the multiple forms of social power that queer action has wrought. It is an aesthetic or dispositional appeal, a collective relaunch of the question “How to be?” This is a question in which July and her collaborators have kept the faith. As cultural polymath, July followed Me and You and Everyone We Know with a collection of stories published in the summer of 2007, whose title—No One Belongs Here More Than You—extends the plainspoken solidarities of the film and whose pieces extend the film’s reparative sense of observation and curiosity. They are empathic, unsentimental, sometimes “creepy” (to quote David Byrne from the jacket), and slow to judge. They invite their readers to go slow, too—a tonal beckoning more than a pedagogy, reached through spare expression and through characters who, themselves, have layered opinions about their experiences . In “Majesty,” for example, a young woman dreams night after night of a sexual romance with Prince William, then makes a list of ways to meet him: Go to his school to give a lecture on earthquake safety. Go to the bars near his school and wait for him. “They were not,” she continues, “mutually exclusive”: they were both reasonable ways to get to know someone...