Well, maybe a three-bedroom. This wasn't a sex fantasy at all, but it was confusing. Any gay boy can tell you about the blurry line that separates platonic and sexual attraction when negotiating friendship with a group of boys in grade school, especially when those boys shun you either way. In the end, it's really about longing for inclusion and a chance to be one of the guys.
So I felt a bit Raphaelish, though without any of his tough-guy angst. And being the angsty one, I naturally fell for Donatello, the least threatening of the other three. (I might have gone for gregarious Michelangelo, but I assumed he was out of my league.) I figured that, as a nerd — and a far more convincing one than Anthony Michael Hall — Donatello must feel sort of marginalized too, and that he'd be a great boyfriend who could regale me with interesting facts about solar winds and deep-sea ecosystems. With time, I would come to see him not as a nerd, but as a passionate surveyor of the world's molecular magic, and he'd begin to see me not as a weird recluse, but as an old soul misunderstood by his myopic, suffocating little high school.
Today, bored suburban kids — girls, mostly, but also certain boys — have a similar gang of four to lead them toward a fantasy life in Sex and the City. I'd bet there are just as many friendless girls out there who aren't fantasizing about the velvet-ropes and twelve-dollar mojitos as much as they're simply dreaming about having their own group of four. Because in the end, all of the lip-biting questions stored on Carrie's iBook can basically be boiled down to one:
Do we need others to make us whole, or can we be happy alone?
She may have been talking about men, but Sex and the City inadvertently broadens the question with its strange group dynamic: four friends-to-the-end, none of whom seem to have — or care about having — any other friends at all. This sort of scenario was custom-made for me. I yearned for a small core of total stability — four people who were emotionally available to each other twenty-four hours a day. We'd insulate ourselves from the turbulence of the outside world by not letting anyone else in.
I'd bet there are just as many friendless girls out there dreaming of their own group of four.
TMNT was originally created as a parody of comics that over-utilize mutants and toxic waste as plot points, and that fetishize adolescent ostracism. X-Men played out these themes most blatantly, but X-Men wasn't what I needed. I wanted no part of a grand society of outcasts. What I wanted was a small, quiet circle. I haven't seen the TMNT movie in years, and I understand there's a new one in the works. But I have seen Sex and the City, probably every episode, and I still find it soothing to this day. Not because of the clubs or the drinks or the men that flit in and out of their lives, all of whom I find abhorrent, but because they're basically living in their own more glamorous sewer system, obsessed mainly with each other. n°
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Will Doig has written for New York magazine, Black Book, Out, The Advocate and Highlights for Children. He was raised in Massachusetts and New Hampshire. Today he lives in Park Slope, Brooklyn.
