J. Edgar: The Film That Changed My Life

A biopic of a monster motivated me to come out as gay.

By MATT ERSPAMER

J. Edgar (2011), Clint Eastwood’s biopic of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, is uncomfortable to sit through.

It’s uncomfortable to see Leonardo DiCaprio portray a monster like Hoover as achingly, sympathetically human. It’s uncomfortable to watch DiCaprio, Armie Hammer, and Naomi Watts perform in subpar, old-age make-up. It’s uncomfortable to sit in a movie theater in central Michigan when a large portion of the audience boos and cries out in disgust when two men kiss onscreen.

That hissing at the screen and the movie itself were both catalysts for me:

J. Edgar pushed me to come out as gay to my friends and family.

In a more perfect version of this story, my college roommates and I would ride home from the cinema, and I would use the movie as a way of bringing it up just to them. But alas, I was (yet again) too nervous.

J. Edgar festered though. It stayed in the back of my mind for several weeks, until holiday break kept drawing closer and closer — and I pushed myself to start telling people.

During that in-between period, I kept thinking about how prominently the feeling of self-loathing factored into nearly every aspect of the movie, and how Dustin Lance Black’s screenplay showed the horrors of the closet writ large over twentieth-century America. In fact, the film’s climatic scene still haunts me: a violent kiss between Hoover and his sort-of lover, Clyde Tolson (Hammer), after an argument over a woman.

In an attempt to distance myself from identifying with J. Edgar Hoover as much as possible, I started unspooling the self-loathing around my gayness. The way DiCaprio conveyed Hoover’s exhaustion made me realize how tired I was of putting on my own act, pretending every time I wanted to have sex with another guy it would be another experiment.

I’m still unspooling. I haven’t re-watched J. Edgar in its entirety since I saw it in theaters. Unlike most movies, I’m more than content to leave it up there on the screen.

While I wouldn’t say I enjoyed J. Edgar, it has had more of a positive impact on my life than any other movie I can think of. I saw an awful, complex, twisted man onscreen, and I did not want to be like him at all — and yet I was.

I did not want to be the creepy old man listening to a wiretap of Martin Luther King, Jr. having sex. I wanted to kiss Armie Hammer and not feel bad about it. So I changed.

If you enjoyed this, please hit the green “Recommend” button below so others might also enjoy it.

Follow THE OUTTAKE: Medium | Twitter | Facebook