I Am Michael (2015)
6/10
Really, Mary?
5 July 2017
Warning: Spoilers
I have to wonder what they were thinking? Another story of mental illness in post-scientific and religious America. But this isn't some cheesy little indie. James Franco, perhaps the king of the hipster closet cases, colludes with Zachary Quinto, an out gay icon, to further blur the lines between heterosexual and homosexual identities. Let's confuse the kids some more.

Gay marriage as the focal point of all gay activism in the past two decades was bad enough. Gays having the right to kill other human beings in uniform was even worse. But this?

Fifty years ago, as an adolescent under legal age, I was threatened with kidnapping by my religious Catholic father who was a cop. There was a mad Catholic priest, likely a pedophile, who would kidnap suspected homosexual boys and take them to a place unknown to convert them. I am not making this up.

In nursing school, I met a man in my psychiatric rotation who had been lobotomized for repeated escapes from a state hospital here in Liberal Massachusetts where he had been confined as a teen by crazy parents in the 1940's. Why was he locked up? He was homosexual and known to be promiscuous. His parents had died by the time I knew him. He was left to be a permanent ward of the state in that hospital. Probably ended up dying homeless on the streets when the hospitals were all closed to save taxpayers money.

So the producers of this joke of a film decided to rationalize the life of a mentally ill homosexual in the misguided name of being broad minded. It would have been fine if the man's mental illness hadn't been rationalized as religious quest. While the film was technically fine, I have to say, "Shame on all of you who should have known better."
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