"THE ADULTS IN THE ROOM"
Director: Andy Blubaugh
Trevor's Rating: 5 / 5 Stars

*** EDITOR'S PICK: TREVOR'S 2010 FRAMELINE FAVORITE ***

My luck at Frameline just never seems to end this year. I've laughed. I've cried. And now with the addition of The Adults in the Room, I've had to think. Hard. This is hands down the most creative, challenging, and fascinating film I've seen this year at Frameline -- and perhaps ever. I know, I know -- that's a bit of a strong statement, but it reflects my love for this film. It is nothing short of incredible.

To say that this film deals with controversial subject matter is an understatement. Sex between people classified as minors and those classified as adults is perhaps one of the most heavily policed sexual boundaries. Maybe only incest is regarded with more disdain. Young people are not supposed to be sexual, and when they are with their peers it causes anxiety. When they have sex with people older than them, it causes outright panic.

This film cannot be easily classified. It is part documentary, part feature. Part fiction, part true story. It takes everything you expect about a film and throws it out the window. As such, telling you about it here is something of a challenge. But here goes.

When director Andy Blubaugh was 15, he had an intimate relationship with the father of his classmate. In The Adults in the Room, we get to see Andy grappling with the memory of this relationship. We see him meeting with friends to discuss making the film, his conflicted emotions about the relationship, and his angst over how to represent his lover without painting him as either totally innocent or guilty, so to speak. We see him auditioning actors to play both his younger self and his older lover, and the real discomfort that these actors experience when they realize they're expected to make out on screen. We see him discussing the "character" Andy's motivations with friends and teachers. We even get to see Andy in the classroom, teaching students about film-making (which reads as documentary, but is actually reenacted for the film by volunteers).

Alongside these self-reflexive and incredibly insightful vignettes into the filmmaking process and into Andy's brain, we get pieces of the finished narrative product. The actor cast as the younger Andy was in fact 16, and does in fact make out with his costar. He's pretty incredible and does a great job of conveying conflicted youth on screen. As the director noted during the Q&A, there is a difference between a 20 year-old playing a teenager and an actual 16 year-old on screen. Teenage angst is just about impossible to recreate without seeming farcical or overplayed.

What I especially love about these feature segments is that, because of the inclusion of the documentary-esque portions, the reconstructed artificiality of this story becomes apparent. Often times we take more seriously stories that are based on true stories, but of course what we remember is not actually what happened. It is our reconstructed, reformulated memory of those events. Because we get to see real-life Andy typing and editing the script for the scenes in the feature segments, it becomes impossible for the viewer to consume the story as if it were actually "reality." This of course should not be a way of discrediting the representation of that reality. Indeed, reconstructed memories are how we make sense of our lives and create our identities. They form the foundation of the decisions we make today -- of who we are as people.

I can't also applaud more loudly Andy's carefulness in dealing with this subject matter. He never claims to have the answer, to exculpate his lover or intergenerational relationships generally. He has his experience, and he sticks to it. This is a difficult decision when dealing with an experience that is caught up in such a web of sticky political issues. Representing that experience without making dramatic claims about its political rights and wrongs is no easy task. Put another way, he sticks to what he knows best. What that allows as a viewer is to leave the film asking the political questions, which is exactly what I did. Because he did not give us easy answers, my friends and I were still talking about that film two hours later.

I could keep writing about all the things I loved about the film, but I'd wind up taking away the pleasure that you will undoubtedly have in watching it yourself. I desperately hope this film gets distributed. You need to see it. And I can't wait to see it again! You can follow the film's progress on their website.

Here's a trailer:

AIDSmap has a story up about a study just published about gay men, with the title "Having older sexual partners increases HIV risk for younger gay men." If you didn't read closely, you might think that the researchers had actually done a study that might buy them the cache to make such a claim. I thought I would take a moment here to dissect what the study actually found, and what we can(not) safely conclude based on those findings.

First, the study wasn't just about "gay men." Though many of the men involved did identify as such (74%), they recruited "men who have sex with men" - which includes a variety of other kinds of guys. Second, and more importantly in my book, they study involved a small sample of 74 men in North Carolina. That's right, 74 people are the basis for that rather startling headline. The meat of their claim is this statement here:

Men with PHI had partners on average 6 years older than themselves, whereas uninfected men's partners were 4 months their junior (P , 0.001). After adjusting for race, sex while intoxicated, and having a serodiscordant/serostatus unknown partner, a participant had twice the odds of PHI if his sex partner was 5 years his senior (odds ratio 2.0, 95% confidence interval: 1.2 to 3.3)

Let me try to translate that into slightly more clear English:

On average, the men that recently HIV-positive participants reported having sex with before they seroconverted were 6 years older than them. By comparison, HIV-negative men's recent partners were 4 months younger than them. When we take into account these guys' race, whether they reported being intoxicated while having sex, and whether they had sex with poz guys or guys whose HIV-status they didn't know, a participant was twice as likely to be in the HIV-positive group if he reported having partners five years older than him.

I hope that was somewhat more readable. In any case, what they're trying to say here is that because there is an association between having sex with older guys and being HIV-positive yourself, there may be causal relationship between those two things. But of course their data doesn't actually show this. Indeed, what there data merely says is that - of the 74 guys they interviewed - the ones who were poz were more likely to report having sex with older men before they were infected. The data they are relying on here is a survey asking men about their three previous partners before infection if poz or their three previous partners before their enrollment if neg.

But of course we can infer other possible theories here, and not just the causal link that they're alleging here. Or at least it could be missing pieces of the story. Now, importantly they did control for race, substance use, and sex with poz and unknown status guys. These are all important factors that should indeed be taken into account, so we don't mistake the difference in age between partenrs for the causal factor when it's actually other factors.

However, in a strange move that they don't explain, they actually don't include in their associative model condom use with their previous serodiscordant or serounknown partners, which actually varies considerably between the two groups (click to embiggen):

Just to clarify: This data isn't about condom use with any last partner, but only the previous partner who was either HIV-positive or for whom you did not know their status. That's a pretty important piece of data, and the different shown above is striking. But there's a bit of a statistical trick going on in their write-up. While the difference above is stark, non-condom use with a previous poz or HIV-unknown partner is not actually what they include in their model. Rather, for their odds ratio calculation, they include whether or not the participant reported having sex with a serodiscordant or serounknown partner at all. But this of course is the less meaningful datapoint -- what actually matters for risk is whether you used a condom with that last positive or unknown partner!

I don't like being duped, and seems to me to be what's going on here. They are using statistical trickery to manipulate our interpretation of their findings. What other conclusion can we reach? They have more meaningful data, and yet they willfully leave it out of the model and never address that exclusion. There is just no way that this was an accident -- they obviously ran the model with the condom use data and it was likely weaker than the one they decided on. Thus, I'm suspicious.

But beyond the statistical manipulation, this is a study of 74 men in North Carolina. Let's not get ahead of ourselves and start making any big claims about "gay men" universally or even across the United States.

Moreover, what is most troubling for me about this data is what they clearly want us to do about it: Prevent younger men from having sex with older guys. This to me is the next logical step in Public Health logic, and it's the one that had a bunch of us gay men's health activist up in arms a year or two ago when Michael Scarce reported on the Ning that STOP AIDS was working on an intervention research project that would attempt to do just that. It's important to know the ways in which HIV gets transmitted, and to be able to implement culturally tailored prevention efforts that come out of that knowledge. But dissociative mixing is not the answer.

Citation:

Hurt CB et al. Sex with older partners is associated with primary HIV infection among men who have sex with men in North Carolina. J Acquir Immune Defic Syndr, online advance publication, 2010.

I've been spending the afternoon in bed, lazily catching up on my favorite TV shows. What a life! But color me surprised to find ABC's Ugly Betty seriously indulging what has now been a multi-episode storyline concerning little Justin's need for gay mentorship -- and finding that guidance in the form of the show's flamboyant Marc. On the most recent episode, Marc gives Justin some guidance about bullying: "Get ahead of the joke." Meaning, if the bullies think you're in on the joke and unaffected, they'll quit making fun of you (okay, we know it's not so easy -- but it can often work!). This is a classic storyline that you see time and time again, but I don't think I've ever seen it in the form of sissy-to-sissy mentorship like on Ugly Betty. I'm really loving this storyline, for obvious reasons -- gay / intergenerational mentorship like that featured here is precisely how I managed to survive and thrive in high school.

Unfortunately, I think this is precisely the kind of intergenerational support structure that is almost totally absent from gay youth organizations. The fear -- of course! -- is that older gay men will prey on youth / sexually abuse them / etc. It's the kind of gross assumption that shows how stereotypical remnants of gays-as-pedophiles still lurk in the shadows of discourse today. Alas, funders get freaked out at the possibility of older gay men sitting in the same room as teenagers, and rarely are willing to put their money to support that kind of thing.

Curiously, I think Ugly Betty circumvents these kinds of fears by not just making it gay mentorship, but sissy mentorship. Marc's character is just about as close to asexual as you can get, dissipating any potential for fears over intergenerational sexual tension. But this obviously is not to criticize the show. Rather, I think it's fabulous to see sissy-to-sissy mentorship. So, thanks, writers of UB!

Helen Goddard, a public school teacher in London, was sentenced yesterday to 15 months in jail for having a relationship with a 15-year-old female student. Goddard, once a prodigy trumpet player who performed at the opening ceremony of the Sydney Olympics in 2000, will be banned from teaching children and obligated to register as a sex offender upon her release.

The consequences for being placed on a sex offender registry can be unduly harsh. For example, in some localities in the United Kingdom, the lists of sex offenders are made available to the general public, marking the accused as deviant or hazardous. This is particularly troubling in cases of apparently consenual intergenerational relationships.

Read more about the Goddard case here.