Call Me By Your Name date night, GAY SHIT

Wax's main fandom for a couple of months, in the sense of reblogging, following, and even voluntarily wading into the Tumblr-wide tag and actually reading the extremely distressing people being Wrong on the Internet therein, has been Call Me By Your Name.

We've been waiting for this movie forever, which is always the case with a gay movie of course. This one having a well-regarded book made it a bit special though.

She read the book ages ago and has been checking the tag and reading the articles and things since then; I myself didn't read it until before Christmas, but I then made pages of notes on it and then we had a lot of discussions about it. She's also been following every step of the publicity tour and every gifset and every miniature wankstorm because some people on Tumblr were offended that Armie Hammer's wife Elizabeth smoothed a piece of Timothée Chalamet's hair back on the red carpet and she read multiple posts of well-intentioned citizens futilely arguing with said offended Tumblrites.

She watched it last weekend without me, but I couldn't go because I had to get up at 5 am to take the government Finnish exam the next morning. We finally saw it together today, though! I liked it a lot (though my experience was somewhat spoiled by a person nearby wearing enough perfume that I had to watch with my scarf over my face and every time I took it down I started to choke again). I did cry at the end, which I hate to do in public, but at least it was a small theater full of gay people, so not too bad. I was thinking I didn't cry when I read it although just now I remembered that I actually did, but only a little bit. The book didn't have as many sad closeups of eyes glistening with tears. Anyway, I was intrigued and impressed by many of the directing choices and it was all pretty great. I will enjoy watching it again and making even more notes (yes of course I made notes).

I'm waiting with impatience for more people to see the movie so that (I hope) the fandom gets bigger. With fertile ground like the early 1980s as a setting, there are all kinds of fun things that could be done besides the obvious, which as far as I can tell has still only been done a little tiny bit so far (probably because the movie hasn't been out long enough).

~

Continuing with the related subject of Gay Shit:

And then after the movie the person in front of us stood up and said "HEY!" And we both just stared blankly for a minute until eventually I recognized Wax's old coworker Aki, the baby gay. We haven't seen him in YEARS.

I said "Oh shit, I didn't recognize you! You went from a twink to - well, not exactly a bear, but maybe... almost a bear cub? A beardy guy!" The cute, still-twinky man of color he was there with (but didn't introduce us to, that was weird) snorted.

Aki's greatest hits include:

• He grew up in a rural area and until Wax told him, he nonetheless believed that sheep and goats were the same species. He thought goats were the male sheep.



• After she'd known him for a few years he introduced a super cute tiny baby gay boyfriend to us who was an American and they had long-distance dated I think and the boyfriend was some kind of weird language genius who had taught himself Finnish from books, for fun, as a high school student, and wanted to come to Finland to study it. They were together and then the bf got depressed and moved back, and then Aki moved there to be with him and went to college in America, and then they broke up but continued to cohabit and Aki continued to go to school there.



• And he came back for Christmas there and met up with us and was talking about how they were still living together and then somewhere in the anecdote they were sharing a bedroom or a bed or something and we were like, "You're broken up but you're still sharing like an actual ROOM? Isn't that awkward?" And he was like, "What? No! Of course we didn't stop SLEEPING together. We're still having SEX, we're just not TOGETHER." Oh. Of course. (The gay man forgot he was talking to lesbians and the lesbians forgot we were talking to a gay guy there I guess? Culture clash!)



• One time we met up with them in town and were talking about watching a movie together and Aki was like, "But it can't be like last time, right? There won't be any laundry? Because the other time I was in your apartment, there was laundry, and I SAW BRAS." And we were like "What...? You... are afraid of bras?" And he was like "It's GROSS. BOOBS go in there." And his boyfriend agreed. (I still can't believe this is normal, even for gay men. Like... BOOBS... what's not to like?)

So that was a nice, fun, and surprising blast from the past. We haven't had any contact with him since he moved away from Turku to live in his hometown like 4? years ago or something? But he said he's moved back to town ages ago.