Sleepless in Seattle (1993)

directed by Nora Ephron

Hal Wright

The first time I encountered the word [redacted] was on a playground. One of the yellow poles near the slide bore a message in Sharpie: “Brad is [redacted].” L and I didn’t know the meaning of the word, but we knew anything inked onto playground equipment was the highest form of condemnation. We asked our mother: “What does [redacted] mean?”

She stewed on the park bench. She settled on: “It’s a boy who acts too much like a girl.”

“So, the opposite of a tomboy?” we asked. 

Our mother’s mouth tightened. “Sort of.”

“Well,” we decided, “there’s nothing wrong with that.”

“Actually—” Mother started, but we were already gone.

We raced through the playground, shouting, “There’s nothing wrong with being [redacted]!” My mother sat on the park bench, a too-wide smile pasted on her face.

*

There were a lot of rules in our house. There were a lot of things we could not say. The usual suspects, of course. But also the kinds of words that didn’t concern other families. Stupid, for example. Shut up. Fart. I think the idea was to keep us from saying anything unkind or improper, but we learned to call each other silly with real venom.

The line between God’s authority and my parents’ wasn’t always clear to me. Once, asked to name some of God’s commandments, I said, “Brush your teeth and eat your vegetables.” I didn’t understand why I was told, “Not quite.”

My brother, L, had different rules than the rest of us. I saw them taped above his bed. The rules were about when he could use the family computer, and for what purposes—or something like that; I don’t think I ever really read them. I was remarkably uncurious about anything that whiffed of trouble. I could fold an origami dragonfly and recite the periodic table, but I had no idea what “doggy style” was, and no intention of finding out. I didn’t even know who I would ask.

My brother asked the internet. One question led to another, and suddenly up sprang images of men kissing, of men naked and touching each other. I don’t know what went through his mind here, whether he immediately clicked out of the site, or continued to look. I know only that he came back to these images, that his thoughts circled around them like a dog who circles a bed before deciding to lie in it.

*

We got a DVD player after every single other person I knew had one—to my father, keeping up with the Joneses meant shuttling his family to church in time to claim the front pew—and when we finally did, it was not a standard DVD player. This one could edit crude language from the movie in real time. My father went in and adjusted the parental controls to “strict” and promptly forgot his passcode, so none of us were ever able to adjust them again.

Here is how it worked: If one character said that “shit was going to hit the fan,” the DVD player didn’t only edit the curse, it removed most of the phrase. There was no attempt to fill in the missing dialogue; we all simply endured 5 seconds of silence as whomever was on screen silently lipped the line. When I was feeling naughty, I tried to guess what the swear was.

The strict setting removed everything from the major curses to references to deity and beyond. (I remember watching the Mormon Christmas special; half of the hymns were muted out). One day we were watching Enchanted, the Disney movie about an animated princess who finds herself in New York City. When she sang a little ditty about cleaning up the apartment, one of the phrases was muted. We couldn’t for the life of us imagine what kind of curse Disney would allow Amy Adams to trill to New York sewer rats, so we looked up the lyrics online. The word was [redacted].

*

Every time I came home for the weekend from my freshman year of college, my brother and I stayed up and watched Sleepless in Seattle together. I don’t know how this became tradition, but it did. We loved Meg Ryan singing “horses, horses,” along with the radio. We loved Tom Hanks trying to remember how many girls he had slept with in college. We loved that some cosmic force moved these two strangers into each others’ paths, like God’s hand moving chess pieces. Though our DVD player mangled this movie too—it wasn’t until years later that I realized that one of the women who calls into the radio show was upset that her husband left the bed every time she was close to orgasm—we endured the tiny silences, listening for clues as to what was being said behind them.

There was something intentionally anti-masculine about the fact that we’d picked a chick flick to become “our” movie. We weren’t like other guys, who were too angry to actually feel things. It was a proclamation to the world, or a private confession to the other: we were somehow different in ways we didn’t yet have words for, and that knowledge accompanied us on the couch as real as the movie before us.

*

In the movie, Annie (Meg Ryan) is engaged to Walter (Bill Pullman), a good match on paper, but their relationship, as Annie says, runs “like clockwork,” a far cry from the fireworks and pizzazz L and I dreamed of for our future selves. Meg Ryan’s Annie is practical—when trying on her wedding dress she asserts that fate is fictional, but when the dress tears minutes later, Annie claims, “It’s a sign!” Eventually, Annie accepts the fact that she does not want the sensible plot and leaves her fiancé to pursue Sam (Tom Hanks), who she only knows as a disembodied voice from a radio program.

L and I believed in signs and wonders. We believed tsunamis and forest fires were heralding a triumphant Jesus comeback. The church had our whole lives planned out—full time missions followed by a BYU degree and temple marriage. But Sleepless in Seattle was about a woman who dodges all convention for the promise of “magic,” and L and I itched for magic in our own lives. 

*

At one point, my parents instituted a ticket system; each Monday we were awarded 10 TV Tickets, each of which could be exchanged for 30 minutes of television viewing. I didn’t say so, but knew this was all L’s fault—he would wake up early Saturday mornings and eat cereal in front of the box watching infomercials. I don’t know exactly what he got out of the TV except that it was a window to some place where people were driving fast cars or making perfectly braised salmon.

Though in some ways the television was a window to elsewhere, it also provided a look into ourselves. When we wanted “magic” for Meg Ryan, we really wanted our own personal fireworks, the kind of sparks we knew wouldn’t happen with a woman. If Annie could pick and choose her own signs, if she could upend her entire life for the chance at a little romance, maybe we could too. Tellingly, the movie does not give a conclusive ending. It ends with Sam and Annie suspended 1200 feet above New York, atop the Empire State Building, meeting in person for the very first time. After such an epic, cross-country meet-cute, will their relationship work out, or had Annie sabotaged her life for nothing? This question, among others, we didn’t dare ask each other.

*

Everything meant something else. When Rosie O’Donnell told Meg Ryan to do some research for her article about radio shows, what she really meant was that Meg should try to meet Tom Hanks. The silence just before our family prayer meant something different than the silence in which L and I watched Meg Ryan fall in love. Silences have different meanings; they can obscure or illuminate, they can become burdens or relieve them. But language, too, has power. One cannot deal with a thing until it has been named. For years, a silent fear clung to us like a haunting, each of us terrified of the word that would fill that silence if we let it.

In puberty, entire continents of my brain went dark; I didn’t have language to illuminate what was happening to my body. Father handed me a church-produced pamphlet called “For Young Men Only,” that talked about “self-abuse” and my “little factory.” “We’ll discuss this next week,” Father assured me. I hid the pamphlet under my mattress. Neither of us ever brought it up again.

When a Mormon said they were same-sex attracted, what they meant was that they wouldn’t act on it. When a Mormon said they were [redacted], that meant trouble. A high school friend once told me about her uncle who was the most kind, God-fearing man you could imagine until he went [redacted], shortly after which, his body was found in a jacuzzi, the result of overdose. These were the kinds of stories we were fed, that being [redacted] went hand in hand with drugs and disease and death.

Sleepless was like a language only we were fluent in. We said: “That statistic is not true, but it feels true.” We said: “You don’t believe in signs.” And what we meant was: “If no place exists where we can be ourselves, we will build that place.”

*

I started coming out about the same time as L. This was years later, after he’d graduated to join the ranks of college students. In fact, we came out to each other during the same long-distance phone call. It was a few hours to Independence Day, and I was driving around the hills of my conservative college town, whose movie theaters refused to show R-rated releases, and whose landscape was beautiful, save for the hilltop Mormon temple blighting the view. I was coming out as asexual, which allowed me to shrug off the patriarchal burden of heterosexual dating, marriage and childrearing, but didn’t require me to face the very real attraction I felt towards men. Asexuality felt like a revolutionary act. L was coming out as same-sex attracted.

There were rules for this kind of thing. People who identified as same sex attracted could still receive every church blessing so long as they didn’t act on it, which included just about everything from screwing to looking at scandalous pictures online.

L was looking at scandalous pictures online. Videos too. The Mormon phrase for occasional pornography usage was this: addiction. His impending marriage to a woman was called off, and my parents urged therapy.

When I came out to my best friend, who was also same sex attracted, he had this bit of advice for me: “Don’t be afraid of the word [redacted].” Up until then, I had been.

*

After college I moved back in with my parents. This was after I had told them I was asexual, and after they’d coaxed me into conversion therapy sessions that required me to listen to my therapist tell explicit stories meant to sexually arouse me. I had very little going for me at this time, but my father and I were training for a 5k, and this small, achievable goal was something to look forward to. Sometimes, after our three-mile jaunt, we sat outside in the dark and talked.

My father didn’t know what to do about my brother. He said: “I mean, you have this perfectly good fiancé, someone who loves you and is ready to marry you, knowing the risks. That’s not something that comes around every day. Do you understand what I’m saying?” He looked me in the eye. “Why would you throw that away? To let everyone know you’re different?” He was talking to my brother through me, like I was a surrogate.

I knew what my brother would do here—fight back. With either of my parents I felt like a limp noodle, something they could twist into any shape they wanted. L wanted to be seen and accepted exactly as he was. I wanted to fill whatever shape their particular sorrows took. I sat quiet, knowing silence was a blank canvas on which they could paint their emotions.

I wonder what word my father painted onto my silence that night, if it was a justification of his actions, or absolution for them. He knew, even then, that he could only reach my brother obliquely, that if you reached, L would scuttle back into his shell, but if you sat with an open hand, he might crawl up to it. Father reached through me, as if his intent might be somehow forwarded to L. My parents didn’t have the patience for sitting around with open hands, they had six other kids to worry about. Now the house echoes with silences and they sit and wait for their children to return, and nearly all of us do. Not L; he hasn’t talked to them in years.

*

Here is how you conjure magic: Scale Empire State, or some other heaven-adjacent height, and curse fate with every word the DVD player refused to teach you. You are not a pawn on the board, not a domino in an endless row of dominoes. Stumble, and allow yourself to stumble. Find yourself engaged to the wrong person. Stare into someone’s social media feed the way Meg Ryan stared at Tom Hanks from across the street, building possible futures in her mind. Fly across the country looking for magic, and understand it follows you, not the other way round. You carry magic within you. Once you know this, you can dip into its depths to feed others, like a well that never goes dry. Understand that each sleepless night precedes a dawning, the sun spangling the world in honey each morning, like clockwork. If you went on a radio talk show, I’m sure men across the country would lay themselves at your feet. The box you were born into only makes sense for so long, and then it is on to another story. When Tom and Meg walk off screen and slide down the elevator, we don’t get to know what they talk about. Your life and loves are not on display; let them shine anyway. Illuminate every part of you, every hurt, and in seeing them, let them be loved. There is no script for this kind of thing. Find your one and only, or fuck a lot of men. I don’t care; it’s your life. Know that words can be used for good or for ill. Stop hurling the words you were not allowed, like bricks, and use them to build something: a skyscraper, a fortress, a boundary, a family, a home. I’ll lay them out here for you here: Gay, Gay, Gay, Gay, Gay, Gay, Gay, Gay, Gay

Hal Wright (he/him) is a queer writer whose work has been published in Ninth Letter, The Molotov Cocktail, X-R-A-Y, and elsewhere. Hal's father recently cited their 5k training as one of his fondest memories.