What makes My Own Private Idaho is a queer road trip film? In the simplest terms, it is a film about queer characters going on a road trip, but this does not explain what it is saying about queerness and how it uses the genre of the road trip movie to convey these ideas. When examining these questions, I immediately thought of the way that the film portrays family, both biological and found family, and the ways that the isolation of a road trip enhances these themes.
The theme of family is particularly strong in My Own Private Idaho. Mike and Scott both have fraught relationships with their biological families. Scott’s mother is barely mentioned, but his contentious relationship with his father is pivotal to his arc in the movie. Likewise, Mike has an argumentative, sometimes violent relationship with his father and spends much of the movie searching for the mother he has not seen in years. These contentious family relations are not always directly tied to the protagonists’ queerness (Scott is intentionally rebelling against his father because he is young and defiant, while Mike and his father seem to argue about a lot of things), but isolation from one’s biological family is a common aspect of the marginality that queer people face. Most members of marginalized communities share identities with their family members, so they will be able to lean on people who share their experiences. However, queer people can be born into any family, regardless of their views on queerness, so in many cases, being open about queerness drives a wedge between a queer person and their family.
This isolation from familial relationships leads many queer people to seek out acceptance elsewhere, finding it in groups of other queer people. As a result, queer people often form tight- knit communities, found families that defy heteronormative ideas about family structures. In My Own Private Idaho, Scott and Mike are part of their own queer found family on the fringes of society. With Bob as their ringleader, Mike and Scott spend some of their time with other queer sex workers (although many of them would be offended by the idea that they might have sex with men if they were not payed). Some of the happiest moments that Mike and Scott experience in the movie are with Bob and his gang. Scott even says, “I think I love Bob more than my father and my mother.” However, in the climax of the film, Scott turns his back on his queer found family, choosing to rejoin his father’s world and be “respectable” again, and the viewer is shown a scene where Mike attends Bob’s funeral and Scott attends his father’s funeral. Scott’s father’s funeral is a quiet, forlorn affair, while Bob’s funeral is raucous and chaotic, contrasting the respectable, heteronormative family that Scott has chosen to rejoin with the fringe, queer found family that Mike cannot afford to leave.
Until their split at the end of the film, it is easy to think of Mike and Scott as their own, small found family. They have a dynamic that Scott views as platonic and Mike would like to be romantic, but they clearly care for each other, protect each other and are devoted to each other. The genre of road trip film allows My Own Private Idaho to narratively explore their closeness to each other and isolation from everyone else. The viewer sees Mike and Scott travel through numerous locations with a rotating cast of characters. Mike and Scott are the only constants, the characters with the deepest exploration. They are outsiders to most of the locations they visit, so they have to rely on each other. My Own Private Idaho blurs the line between a homosexual and a homosocial relationship (Davis 105). Mike and Scott have a bond that goes deeper than either of them have with their families or the other sex workers that they spend their time with. Scott’s relationship with Carmella is never shown in any great depth. Mike and Scott are the most important people to each other. Mike is in love with Scott, but Scott expresses that he views the relationship as platonic, and that he does not believe two men can be in love. This is not the only asymmetry in their relationship. Mike is far more dependent on Scott for his safety than Scott is on Mike. For Mike, their relationship is based on a deep love and need to be with Scott. For Scott, it is a relationship full of care and devotion, but a relationship that he is able to walk away from if he so chooses. Directly interpreting the events of My Own Private Idaho, points to a homosocial relationship between Mike and Scott, but it is difficult to say whether Scott truly has no romantic feelings for Mike or is simply repressing his feelings. Particularly in older movies, queer-coded relationships often end with a straight love interest appearing in the final act of the movie. When Scott begins his relationship with Carmella, it is an assertion of his heterosexuality to Mike as much as it is to the viewer. He has decided to return to heteronormative society and marks this by entering into a relationship with a woman, as if to say, “Look, see, it was just a phase! I didn’t have any feelings for the men that I slept with.”
When discussing queerness in My Own Private Idaho, Keanu Reeves said, “…there’s not a lot in the film about sucking dick and getting fucked. I think it’s about family and the lives out there. I mean, it’s more.” (Mulvey, 251) In all likelihood, Reeves was attempting to dispel the notion that the film was “just a gay movie,” and asserting the idea that it has value as a film in spite of its queer content. Regardless of Reeves’ intent, his statement decentralizes sexuality as the core element of the queer experience and puts focus on the way that My Own Private Idaho portrays biological and found families as core elements of the queer experience.
Keanu Reeves’ quote about the film being more than the characters’ sexualities implies that My Own Private Idaho is a LGBTQ+ film and not a queer film (going by Amy Borden’s distinction between the two) (Borden 98-100). He is trying to make the film palatable for a straight audience who would be deterred by a movie that is too gay. However, the film does not support this. For one thing, portraying explicit queerness in 1991 was fairly taboo on its own, and unlike films like To Wong Foo: Thanks For Everything, My Own Private Idaho is not an attempt to make gay people family-friendly and nonthreatening. Both protagonists are sex workers, which was another taboo subject in the early 90’s. Portrayals of male sex workers were particularly uncommon at the time. However, My Own Private Idaho’s willingness to portray socially unacceptable behavior is only part of the reason that it is a queer film and not an LGBTQ+ film. Much larger than the unacceptability of gayness and sex work is the portrayal of queer assimilation into straight society as a tragedy. The film establishes a found family of male sex workers, all of them leaning on each other because they have no one else to lean on. Scott leaves them behind to rejoin his respectable father, bringing his new girlfriend with him, and the movie becomes a tragedy. Bob dies, Mike is heartbroken that the man he loves has abandoned him, and even Scott cannot find
happiness. The parallel funeral scenes, with Bob’s chaotic revelry and Scott’s father’s grim observance show us two different worlds. Far from portraying the heteronormative world as in any way preferable, or even equal to the queer found family, mourning their leader, the audience is made to feel that Scott has chosen wrong. Yes, he has money; yes, he has respect, but he has left the people that matter and he has left joy behind him. Keanu Reeves is correct when he says that the movie is about more than sexuality, but the focus on the family of the characters and the complicated blending of platonic and romantic feelings enhances its status as a queer film rather than detracting from it.
Sources
Borden, Amy. “QUEER OR LGBTQ+: On the question of inclusivity in queer cinema studies.” 98-107.
Davis, Nick. “I Love You, Hombre: Y tu mamá también as boarder crossing romance.” pp. 109– 138.
Mulvey. “My Own Private Idaho and the New Queer Road Movies.” pp. 245-262.
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