and so it began....

My sexuality deepened in young adulthood along with my cinematic coming-of-age. I took a lover (J) who, at first, was a colleague. He was a stage director, playwright, and screenwriter, with particular interest in multi-disciplinary collaboration. I was an architecture student with experience in photography, composition, and story boarding. I had been chosen by a close friend, film director (B), as cinematographer/storyboardist, location scout, and set designer.

J and I fell in love over a series of long distance letters we’d exchanged as we prepared for the summer film production. During the preceding spring, my post was graced by countless developments of the script, biographies of our characters, maps, ephemera, music collections, love letters, and, once, a flattened box of matches meant to evoke the final scene’s pyre.  I reciprocated with sketches, projective imagery, photographs, music, fabrics, geological artifacts, scents. It was a forest fire of desire wrapped around a creative endeavor.

The film was supported by a local grant and was about a schizophrenic photolab technician who held romantic obsession identifying as a vampire in the throes of seducing his photographer-client.

During the exhaustive dead-of-night production weeks, J also had responsibilities of an indie movie house manager. As unglamorous as it was, it paid for film school tuition and rent. Moreover, it afforded J’s network the lagniappe of the movie house.

The theater was a Deco structure and had been spare-no-cost meticulously restored, including light fixture re-gilding and  mohair mahogany seating.

One late late June night, I arrived at the theater for the first of our summer ritual. J would set up the current celluloid for a private screening. The first was ZENTROPA (EUROPA). I was lulled to sleep quickly because of the intensive, hot filming earlier that day, a cold refreshing shower, and the clack clack clack, flicker flicker flicker of the highly stylized European black and white film. J typically had at least an hour’s worth of work and he enjoyed our sharp banter of criticism the following day. In retrospect, he was quite methodically turning me in that darkness.

On this night, I struggled to keep awake in order to experience the photography of this film. It was sexy, slick, black, iconographic…no grey tones to speak of.

I was roused by J’s hand on the back of my neck, thumb on my jaw, mouth on my mouth, his other hand under my lower back, pulling down my sporty boi panties. I resisted awakening, preferring to remain in my somnambulant haze, and reciprocated with deepening kisses. The film sound had been quieted and, in this heightened stimulus, the imagery of the film pulsed with J’s advances. My hands tightened on the mahogany armrests, my hips lifted easily in his hands, feet on backs of chairs. Somehow, he always appeared quietly; sometimes, I anticipated him in light sleep.

The collapse of the image on the screen with the inebriation of sex and passion of new lovers consummated my future with cinema. Inextricable, my desire for celluloid can never be separated from my never-sated appetite for complete and total sexual adventure. This was the nascence of my film fetish.

And now, before every film commencement, as I wait for the ritual of velvet curtains to draw closed then open, I enjoy silent reflection…and complete arousal.