I have been experimenting with collectivity this summer. Not in the ways that people going back to school do, not in the historic way, in the hippie ways or the lesbian separatist ways, or the religious groups that blossom like mushrooms in the middle of America—not like Brigham Young, or Joseph Noyes, or even Rajneesh. I have been using Us more often or the second person more often, I have thot more about what I have in common with Christians, or men who have sex with men, or with those who are on the autism spectrum. Because for the last decade I have been Christan, and Queer, Depressed and Autistic. There is language to describe the collective nature of the first two of these things, a history, a linguistic heritage, a tendency to know that it means when collective nouns are spoken. Maybe having Aspergers is too new, or too hip, or still too strange, or maybe the awkwardness of the social means that there is less spoken as a collective noun.

It used to be, until fairly recently, that to see a culture emerge we went to the movies. There are a million moves about rapturous, difficult, and aesthetic Christs. The movies made me Christian—the swoon of Falconetti, those two Ben Hurs, all of the sins of De Mille's Sodoms, the spectacle of Ray's King of Kings, the Kierkegaardean suffering in the knights of the Seventh Seal. Every movie ever made about Nuns, and most of the movies made about vampires. Not only did the movies make me Christian, it made me Catholic. Miracles made of light, commissioned in the dark, secrets about sex and death, of violence redeemed, even in the multiplexes there is a confessional aspect, there is a collective aspect. They work in conjunction.

It is not only the Christianity that works this dual mystery. My queerness as well. In The Celluloid Closet, Lily Tomlin told a secret—she told the straight people who went to that move to be educated, that queers went to the movies to have their stories heard. The stories were not always positive, they were often broken, but you would see yourself from the beginning when the lights went out. They told us how to talk, how to move, how to swing, how to fuck, how to love, and how to hate ourselves. We became queer in the dark. Some of the mystical transference, like the hand jobs in back rows or that feeling that Frank O'Hara talked about when he wrote about those “gratuitous bags of popcorn” or “the immediacy of a bad movie, or to be as alive as the vulgar. “ The catholicism and the queerness grew like moon-flowers in the cinema's dark gaze.

The darkness is also about depression, the cinema feeds the glamour of my depression. Sometimes it is the explicit suicides, the melodrama of self destruction in characters played b y Shirley McClain in the Apartment (for laughs) or that silly kid in Swing Kids (because Nazis are sexier when they are dead), or all of those vestal virgins in Sophia Coppola's first film, or the Elliot Smith orchestrated wrist slitting in the Royal Tennenbaums. But also, the whole list of addicts, closet cases, tragic wastrels, and starlets lost that provide a meta-narrative to the central role of celluloid.

Movies then made me a homosexual, a catholic, a melancholic. There wre 100 years of stories, and stories about stories, and stories about the people who made stories that gave me context and ammunition. There was a collective of responses that allowed for me to enter the slipstream. The last of the items on the above list was the most difficult. When I was diagnosed with Asperger's there was scant resources on the ground, and those resources were about training. But this summer I went back to school to do religious or at least theological work. I entered an evangelical anglican dorm, I went to classes, and I sought help so that my grad school experiment would end as less of an unmitigated disaster then the flunk out of my undergrad.

So I met with this guy who was in charge of all the autism guys, and I started going to meetings with other people who had the disorder. They were all guys. They were going to teach me how to be an Aspie, how to construct a collective identity around this piece that was so unmoored for so long. Mostly it was meeting in the 70s era basement of the big library in Toronto, and talking. It was sort of like an encounter group, or a baptist youth group, or one of these al-anon meetings I would go to, or a cocktail party where no one was networking, or one of those cruisey dances where everyone was a stranger—except the emphasis was on strange, and none of these people were adroit enough to cruise. There were no movies, no corpus of collective energy that has emerged about this kind of awkwardness,

Here is the thing about Aspergers. It is to live constantly without awareness, but the assumption is to always be in error. You are constantly awkward. I did not know how to be someone with Aspergers, people with Aspergers did not know how to teach me, and I could not just go to the movies. My experiences was not reflected in the medium that spent the most time teaching me lessons, both positive and negative. So about 6 weeks into the experience with the group, with the emerging into a new kind of self, Adam comes out. Adam was a movie that was sold as a rom-com where the male lead had the same condition we did. I was sure that it would be one of those gork of the week movies, because in the last few years the condition had been fashionable enough to have fiction written and television shows constructed around us. People were telling our stories because we did not have the skills or the resources to tell our own. I wanted to see Adam, not alone like I saw Milk, or with straight friends like I saw Brokeback. I wanted to see Adam in a jury of my newly discovered peers.

Not everyone goes to the movie. There is the facilitor, me, a guy named Dave who I have meet a few times and a new guy, Timothy—not new to Jason or David, but new to me. Conversation with Timothy was to be reminded of a tight knot of almost physical pain, an awkwardness that rests unutterable near the root of my being, somewhere below the belly. The tightness never unwinds, the asking questions and not quite knowing what to say. Timothy has the same instincts that I do;th e same stutter starts, the same geek infodumps, it was like being recorded. It was like finally knowing what the spectrum was. It was not belonging, but understanding. Pauline Kael lost it at the movies, I might have found it. (what ever it was)

What it was, was centered on the film. In Adam there are two men and a woman. this is not Jules et Jim.One of the man is a father who is going to prison for finical malfeasance. one of these men's father dies at the end of the movie. one of these men is successful but emotionally stunted. one of these men has a (disorder). one of these men has to be taught how to be loved. one of these men will never be a husband, but will be a lover. there is a mirroring, aside from all of the oddities of one of the characters, he progresses. He is a moral neutral, he can be taught.

To evade Aspergers is to be trained like Adam is in the film, like the father cannot be. The pedological instincts of this film are transparent. They show people reading, making notes, how to books are given as gifts, and interview practices are shadowed as erotic rituals...to be taught how to be normal (ie neurotypical) is to be taught how to love, how to fuck, how to be part of a family. To not be taught is to avoid order, and to be taught order is to be taught love. Adam is a naif but honest, he never lies, and is cruel to his lover (Beth), who does. Beth's father is venal, dishonest in love and business, his cruelty comes from another kind of absence.

The movie centers on autistic ordering rituals, rituals that are assumed to be secret--not only the aforementioned melt downs, but the info dumps, the checking in with friends connecting all of this to a desire to be taught and the desire to teach. In this film, social currency is traded for intellectual currency, but neither of those casues as much trouble or holds as much power (to destroy) as the hard currency that the father the trader deals in. That some of the social traded for the intellectual is done in bed, leads to a difficult question. There are other things that must be approached before asking it. Aspergers asks that we construct an ordered set of rituals around teaching--a clarity of narrative, an avoidance of lacunae, of narrative gaps. Adam cannot be taught, and because of this lack of teaching he lives a monastic life, a life that seems to learn nothing, to vary nothing.

He eats the same things, he sleeps at the same time, he wears the same things, he meets the same people, he is tight and small. He has his father, and his father's friend, but neither are able to do the kind of work that Beth is able to fulfill. Adam is a child (and is called a child) until he has contact with a woman. The training of a father figure, or father figures pales in comparability to the (erotic) contact of a woman. But that teaching cannot be transitioned into relationships, into actual human contact. Both Adam, and Beth's father maintain a kind of permanent adolescence.

That Adam is fascinated by cosmology--that the largeness of the universe can be contained in such a small space, but that this large/small dialectic can be disrupted by the emergence of the erotic, and the possibility of another life and family suggests that there is an erotic component to the training, to the pedagogical aspect of those with ASD--but all of that training, the with holding of sex, the insertion of Adam into the family, and Adam being unable to love, the separation because the training was a refusal to integrate eros into the context of other lives--but this might be that Beth chose to be with her father, who was paying for the apartment, who was going to jail, whose narrative was more important.

It is a taboo in this culture to talk about how the emergence of sexual skills leads from a childhood state to an adult state. That Adam learns how to fuck becomes the signifier that allows us to view him as an adult. But that he is unable to sustain the fucking with in a heterosexual context means that he is as much of a failure as the other men in his life. In this way, the film is not about how to have Aspergers, and it is not even a movie like I Am Sam or Rainman where the simplicity of neurological otherness can provide a prophetic holy fool role. The film wants to tell us how to be men. That Aspergers seems mostly about men, that there are more men then women, and that the woman is forced to make Adam a man, problematizes the narrative of erotic teaching and learning, the text becomes gendered, and this gendering adds to the tension of the collective.

The movie was in an afternoon screening, about 1:30 in the afternoon. There were the four of us, and three other people who could have had aspies ahead of us, and a room full of middle aged women, who I think wanted a happy ending, and never got one. Beth and Adam broke up, Adam went away to learn how to socialise, and Beth becomes a loose thread. It is not the romatic complition expected in most comedies, but it does allow for an autonomy, a new kind of travel towards adulthood. I wonder if what we expected to be taught was different then the middle aged women in the film. There are very few places that make me feel like I am a man, and this was one of them.

But what exactly am I one of—of my gender, of my sex, of my disorder, or of my compulsion to ordering. Going every Friday this summer to that meeting, there are no women, on the list of people who get the emails, there are one or two out of 15 or so. This seems typical, from my reading--it seems mostly straight men. That Adam did not conquer, that he was better trained but did not live with Beth, was it a disappointment for the rest of the audience that it was not a comedy, because comedies end in weddings? Was it a disappointment for us because the message we got was not about erotic satisfaction, but another message about being educable, trainable, was the message about passing. Did the gender, the sexualities in the story work through these issues--because it does seem gendered.?





I never felt trained by the movies. I never felt that it told me how to be queer, how to be christian, how to be depressed, but that there was a myriad of options were presented. Some of those options were tragic, and some of those were comic, but I could weave around a labryinth of choices, make ones that were interesting. The difficult inabilty to be a man, to know how to construct masculinity and masculinity within a context of disordered thinking, and on top of that, attempts to attach this construction to a romantic comedy, ultimately fails, because it knows that things must be taught, and that teaching is ordered, but little is made to the implications of that teaching, and that order.