“Remember those games we used to play?” I rented Chuck and Buck the other day, but couldn’t get past the first 10 or 15 minutes of the film. It’s been characterized as a “gay stalker” movie — Buck has never grown up or shaken his fixation on his former next-door-neighbor and friend Chuck, now engaged and a record producer in L.A. From what I’ve seen in the trailer, Buck moves to L.A. and tries to rekindle their old friendship and break up Chuck’s impending marriage.

Just seeing the first little bit of the film touched off some powerful memories that I’m not entirely comfortable in revisiting. All my life, I’ve had irrational obsessions over straight male friends, a pattern that continued all the way through to grad school. None of them were as severe as Buck’s fixation on Chuck, but in their own way they all still impeed my emotional development. I still continue to deliberately place myself in self-defeating contexts and environments (like living in rural Missouri) that block any chance of my forming an adult romantic realtionship with another man, but at least I recognize that fact now.