Best Keanu: (no dialogue — embracing River Phoenix)

Being queer comes with a lot of pain.

There is no one model of queer pain. But it’s part of our makeup. Pain is part and parcel of our existence as queer people.

I know your pain. I feel it. I’ve felt it. It may ebb and flow, like your identity may ebb and flow, oscillating between two or more of the letters in the acronym. You will learn how to manage your pain, console it, treat it with love and kindness. Honor it for what it’s given you, by showing you how deeply and wonderfully you can feel.

It’s all right. I want to tell you that it’s all right, especially if you’re getting the message that you shouldn’t feel pain, because we’ve evolved so much that queerness is no big deal and you should just come out and live your life. That’s not true. Your queer pain is as real as the queerness itself. It’s all right.

Your queerness is yours. It’s beautiful and precious. But you decide the role it plays. Life is long, your queerness may hide for awhile, change shape, consume you, or liberate you. No one else can tell you what’s right. Hold your queerness dear and close, even if it comes with queer pain.

There’s no shame in pain. But it wears on us, attacks us from the inside. It hollows us out, exhausts us.

It comes back to haunt us, sometimes, in unexpected and unplanned ways. I am 47 years old. One week ago, I had a resurgence of queer pain that left me feeling so raw I wanted to ruin nearly three years of sobriety with as much alcohol as I could drink in one sitting.

(I didn’t. I am still sober.)

There’s queer pain, and there are also other kinds of pain.

My Own Private Idaho was on the long list of Keanu Reeves movies I’d long heard about but never seen. I was only moderately interested, was confused by the Shakespeare, and didn’t like the anti-nostalgia effect of going back to 1991, an era of my life I’d just as soon forget.

So the campfire scene took me completely off guard. In it, the River Phoenix character tells the Keanu character he could love him — does love him — without being paid. The characters are best friends and street hustlers, selling sex to get by. The Keanu character, wealthy and straight, says “two guys can’t love each other,” but at the end of the scene, invites River to sit next to him, and they embrace.

That would have been enough. It was enough, but the YouTube algorithm decided tonight, as I sat down to write this, to give me a heads up about a longer, extended version of the scene. At first, I questioned whether it was real. I discovered it was indeed — part of unused footage from the film that James Franco in 2012 compiled into a reimagining of Idaho that he called My Own Private River.

In December 2021, Keanu was on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. The host asked him why he was so meme-able; why are there so many Keanu memes. Colbert said, “you have such a distinct character of your own, and yet people lay on you meaning.” Which is insightful of Colbert, and something I never wanted to do in these expositories.

By which I mean, it is always tempting to lay meaning on Keanu that may not actually be there. Sometimes, you might want to say he experienced X in his life and maybe that experience led him to bring Y to a scene. But that kind of analysis is unfair, because it breaches a kind of privacy, and it’s inherently false because of the layers of filters between famous people and their audiences.

But. In this case, of the extended, unreleased footage, I’m breaking my own rule. I invite anyone watching this extended scene to, if it helps them, if it eases their queer pain, lay on whatever meaning they wish. The love between these men — barely men, River was 20, Keanu 26 when this was filmed — is beautiful. And really, this is Keanu’s scene. It’s only his face you see, and it’s soothing and comforting. An antidote to queer pain, still, more than 30 years later.

March 2022