To be controlled (October 12, 2026)

Growing up, I read the Variety section of the Minneapolis Star Tribune religiously. I went for the page where they listed movies and showtimes, and I would stare at this section for hours. What’s playing here? What’s playing there? How many screens? I imagined other people took to this page in a more practical sense—to find out when and where they could see Jerry Maguire or, in that same year, Twister. We’re in the 90s here.

On a practical level, I did need to figure out the when and where. My dad took me to the movies most Fridays, and he needed to know where to go. But I got hooked on details like a movie’s runtime. The longer the better. For some reason, I trusted longer movies. When another friend once recommended a movie to me, I remember asking, “But how long is it?”

Runtime and location mattered. Like in Burnsville, a suburb just south of the Twin Cities, there existed for many years a small, four-screen cave in the mall. Dark and muted. I can still smell the popcorn and envision the one-seat ticket office—a free-standing glass box that had, to the left and right of it, encased posters of the four movies currently playing. Something about that place still calms me: the dim lighting, the rust orange carpet, the glossy red brick bathrooms. I loved this tiny four-screen movie theater so much I imagined I had control over what movies it would show and when. At my parents’ kitchen table, late into the night, I would create my own list of showtimes and choose what films got the biggest screens. Like a kid “playing house,” I drew diagrams to figure out how much time we needed between showings.

Around this time, I also remember doing things like checking doorknobs four times, turning light switches on and off, and making sure I stepped on the right stairs when I went to bed.

But I can’t help but view my obsession with movies—and with these minute details—as a defense mechanism: a distraction from more distressing thoughts.

As a writer, I think a lot about the consequences of repression, like addiction. For many years, alcohol functioned as a coping mechanism, which is not to say it wasn’t fun. Tipping back shots of Captain Morgan at the end of high school, and then in college—I enjoyed it. I also realized how useful alcohol could be: how it allowed me to cope and hide this or that.  

Today, I’m an “out” queer professor and mentor. A pride flag waves in the wind year-round at my house. I told my current therapist, during our initial phone screen, that I didn’t need him to tell me it’s okay to be gay.

Though that’s all true, sex still scares me.

Even though I take medication daily, I worry what might happen—what I’ll contract. I grew up in a time when there were still rumors that you could catch HIV from a water fountain or a candy machine dispenser. Though my logical brain knows better, a knee-jerk reaction to intimacy stays with me. “It’s not you,” I tell partners when I explain I can’t go any further. “It’s my Catholic guilt or repression or something.”

As I moved from eleven to twelve years old—the age when, as I read somewhere, boys are taught the value of a punch—I held back and started to watch myself for fear of being made fun of for “having the personality of a gay man,” as one of the nicest kids in middle school once reminded me I had.

There’s also this: what bothers me today has less to do with same sex attraction. It has to do with things that stirred something in me from a very young age: like the eyes of my friend’s fathers at the gym, or how their belts revealed themselves when they took off their sweatshirts.

When I first started to see myself as a sexual being, these thoughts, while enticing, felt wrong—shameful. And so, I worked to offset them through compulsive behaviors I continue to repeat. But did it all start earlier than I thought? As a kid, did my attempt to control when and where movies were showing bring me peace? Did longer movies mean I had more time to check out—to not think about harsher cravings?

As a writer, I’m trying to understand how sexual repression works on and through our bones. To understand repression not as some abstract idea beyond our control, but rather as the result of coping mechanisms and patterns we perpetuate until we hit a breaking point. Until we can no longer block out distressing thoughts.

In a few days, I’ll head to Dublin, Ireland. Coincidentally, I’ll be in town the same day as Oscar Wilde’s birthday, which I think is fitting given the kind of writing task ahead of me: one that will demand I look inward to create something different, and Wilde’s caustic wit will energize me. So, too, will his raw and inward searching capacity. As I pack, I’m going back to notes and underlined passages in Wilde’s De Profundis—a letter he wrote, while imprisoned, to a lover. Last fall, it took me nearly an entire semester to read the whole thing. I’d take it a couple pages at a time in the morning, with coffee, before driving to work—mostly because it’s just that hard to read. Lines like, “Pain, unlike Pleasure, wears no mask” don’t easily leave you (Wilde 114). Or another line on that same page: “Truth in art,” Wilde goes on, “is the unity of a thing with itself: the outward rendered expressive of the inward: the soul made incarnate: the body instinct with spirit” (114). What a task.  

What a task it will be not only to illuminate the consequences of repression, but what, more specifically, I’m trying to repress—like how I crave men who know how to control me as an act of love.

Toxic masculinity has damaged us beyond repair. I know that. As a gay boy, I knew it all too well.

I also know that, in the face of that truth—that damage beyond repair—I’m drawn to pain and power and control because it’s intoxicating. It just is.

From as far back as I can remember, I’ve been drawn to these things. In middle school, I’d watch as other guys undressed without a care. I’d watch them wrestle and use their bodies in ways I couldn’t. I think of the kinds of physicality I witnessed, while growing up, between other sons and fathers. I didn’t have the language then to understand what was right or wrong. I could only see and feel something that scared me as much as it turned me on.

But that something runs deeper than the “erotic.” Or so I want to believe. For me, it’s wrapped up with an incessant need to put myself in situations in which, for once, I don’t need to watch my every move. Situations in which someone else can do that for me. Situations in which I can learn why boundaries matter and how not having them can feel extremely uncomfortable.

Works Cited:

Wilde, Oscar. De Profundis. Arcturus Publishing Limited, 2024.