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boys (including Keanu Reeves and_River
Phoenix) on the covers start talking to
each other. Van Sant shot tlus a la_Holly-
wood Squares with the actors talking be-
hind glass. This for me is one of the
film’s most memorable, ‘among many,
amazing cinematographic images.

Mike and Scott soon are dumped by
Hans (“this guy’s a real pervert, I can
tell” says Mike as he falls into another
dreamstate) in Portland at the base of a
statue to “The Coming of the White
Man.” After Scott’s games with his real
Dad, the mayor, and with his street Dad,
Bob, Scott and Mike head off to Idaho in
search of Mike’s mom. They enter the
state on Mike’s undulating road “like no
other road, . . . like a face - like a fucked
up face,” riding the bike they had
“caught with much ease.” Unable to start
it, they retire under a ledge to escape the
rain and huddle by a small fire in what,
for me, is the pivotal scene of Mike’s
struggle to come out:

Mike: “If I had a good family, a nor-
mal family. . . I would like to talk with
you - I don’t feel I can be close to you. .
. . What do I mean to you?”

Scott: “I’m your friend.”

Mike: “Yes, it’s good to be a friend.
Two guys can love each other, Mike. I
could love someone even if I weren’t
paid for it  I love you.. I want to kiss
you.

The scene ends with Scott inviting Mike
to come lie beside him even as the
straight prisoner does for William Hurt
in the analogous moment in Kiss of the
Spiderwoman. In an interview in the Bay
Area Reporter (10/17/91), van Sant says
“it was River’s idea in the fireside se-
quence to declare his love for Scott and
we just decided to go with it.”

Scott and Mike’s adventures in Idaho, at
an inn called The Family Tree, include
hilarious entertainment with the lecher-
ous Hans who shows up again. The won-
derful three-way sex with Hans (Udo
Kier), Mike and Scott is shown in rapid-
ly sequenced still shots that pile up in
our minds, but if watched closely show
Scott enjoying deeply being fingerfucked
(oh play my own erotic idaho).

The sale of their bike to Hans enables
Mike and Scott to fly to Rome to con-
tinue the quest for Mike’s mother, Shar-
on. By now, Scott’s maturity clock has
run long enough for him to fall in love
with Carmella (Chiara Caselli) who lives
where Sharon had been a year before and
where Mike’s yearning for his mother is
shown most urgently. The rapid-pace
stills of Scott and Carmella making love
seal Scott’s return to the straight and nar-
row of heterosexuality. He sends Mike
on his way with a little cash and a return
airticket. Back in Portland, Scott, in a
three-piece suit, rides in a limousine past
Bob and Mike who are seen as lowlife.
In an expensive bistro surrounded by
Democratic Party manipulators as well
as the rich, closeted queer, Hans, Scott
makes his first crucial political speech:

Scott~Prince Hal to Bob-Falstaff: “I
don’t know you old man. Please leave
me alone, my former psychedelic teach-
er, street mentor. Don’t come near me.”

In response, Bob dies and Mike returns
to his narcoleptic road, accepting his fate
as a salmon swimming upstream. The
parallel with the final shot of Bob in the
Drugstore Cowboy is striking. Bob (Matt
Dillon) lies hooked to intravenous tubes
in an ambulance after having been shot
and is fantasizing his return “ride to the
fattest pharmacy in town,” drug heaven
for someone Drugstore Cowboy re-
inforced this inevitability, which all my
straight, good-thinking friends wanted to

March 1992

deny, by introducing the queer American
saint, William S. Burroughs, author of
Queer and Naked Lunch and father of
beatnik explorations beyond the main
stream. In Cowboy, Burroughs is old
Tom the priest who “shot a million
bucks in his arm” and who gives Bob
lessons on how to live on the edge of the
main flow. He takes Bob for a walk and
points out “works of art.” “Look at the
pole on that tree there” he says as the
only thing we can see is a handsome pair
of legs and ass in jeans walking by be-
hind Tom and Bob. Tom keeps up his
flow of drugs even while in a methadone
program. Bob, having paid what he saw
as his debt to a hex and having gotten
the cops off his back, will resume his
flow of drugs. Similarly, we know that
Mike will keep up his injections of erotic
narcolepsy as he floats against the
stream.

For me, Idaho suggests that modern day
queers would do well to beware mort-
gaging our dreams to assimilationist
Prince Hals, though like the salmon, we
may have little alternative as we are
driven by our own private moons and
our search for family. We resist calling
ourselves queer, yet find that our true
family is not biological. For us, Home
On The Range plays, perhaps even on a
1950’s Hammond organ, when we are
on the road to our private idaho.

 

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