Culture

When Boys Don’t Cry Was Your Only Teen Romance Movie


The years I spent in high school, from 2002-2006, were a popular time for high school theater departments to mount productions of The Laramie Project, a play about Matthew Shepard written by Moises Kaufman and members of the Tectonic Theater Company in 2000. Shepard, a gay University of Wyoming student, died in 1999 after two homophobic attackers beat him and left him tied to a fence. The play was based on interviews Laramie, Wyoming residents, and a decade after Shepard’s death, President Barack Obama signed the so-called “Matthew Shepard Act” into law. It moved to include hate crimes based on sexual orientation and gender identity into already existing federal hate crime legislation, and it was spearheaded by Shepard’s mother. The bill cemented Shepard, a white, cisgender, gay man who graduated from what Business Insider called one of the “most exclusive boarding schools for the super-rich,” as the face of the ’90s gay “tolerance” movement.

But Teena died, in equally brutal fashion, six years before Shepard. His name never went on any hate crime bills. Although trans people, including Kate Bornstein and the activist group Transexual Menace, mobilized to demonstrate at Teena’s attackers’ trials, the story was largely ignored by mainstream media. And unlike Shepard’s measure of parental support, Teena’s mother continued to misgender him after death; his headstone is still marked with his deadname. Along with the GLAAD Award-nominated documentary The Brandon Teena Story, Boys Don’t Cry remains one of the only tributes to Teena’s legacy.

The end of the film is such a difficult watch that I’d frequently deploy the Titanic trick of the era: only watching the first VHS tape in the two-tape set, thereby avoiding its tragic final act. Except Boys Don’t Cry was short enough for one VHS, so I’d just cut it after Brandon and Lana’s final sex scene in the barn. I still had to endure Brandon’s humiliating outing, sexual assault, and horrifically botched rape investigation by Falls City police. But I also got to watch Lana masterfully hold space for her wounded boyfriend — a skill I later found I’d need when I inevitably saw powerful butch facades crumble in my own relationships. I saw the now-ubiquitous binding-and-packing scene that made me feel like I was living in a queer Norman Rockwell painting when I watched butches do it in real life during my early relationships. And I got to see a sweet, handsome boy with a wallet full of girls’ pictures playfully chase crushes at the roller rink during a time when the only other masculine-of-center characters on TV were lecherous middle-aged butches (who are also my type, to be clear, but not in a way I felt ready to explore at 14).

Boys Don’t Cry was part of the patchwork of my initiation as a femme at a time when I had no femme role models in my real life. In fact, I was continually regarded as one by my peers, as someone who’d come out early and begun navigating sex and relationships right away. It was true that I had more experience, but all my discovery was self-led; I was never taken under any protective elder wings myself. I craved queer mentorship, and the film gave me a framework for how to cope with the inevitable violence against queer people I’d encounter in my own relationships, for which I’m grateful.

Chloe Sevigny and Hilary Swank in ‘Boys Don’t Cry’.Copyright © 20th Century Fox Licensing/Merchandising / Everett Collection



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