---

Before I knew David Moreton’s Edge of Seventeen (1998) was semi-autobiographical (it pulls from the life of co-screenwriter Todd Stephens right down to the town the protagonist lives in), a part of me wondered if one reason it took place in 1984 was to subtly dig at the several coming-of-age movies writer and director John Hughes had made during that particular sliver of the decade. All collectively have come to form a mass embodying what many people first associate with the coming-of-age movie. All are also uniformly focused on straight people — a demographic the mainstream Bildungsroman has consistently favored pre- and post-Hughes. 

A better movie than anything Hughes made during his imperial run, Edge of Seventeen marked a change of pace at a time when coming-of-age movies centering around anybody who wasn’t straight and cisgender were few and far between. That’s depressingly hasn’t changed much today, though you can see how Edge of Seventeen might have helped pave the way for latter-day coming-of-age-and-coming-out movies like, say, 2018’s Love, Simon.

It tracks about a year in the life of a Sandusky, Ohio, 17-year-old named Eric (Chris Stafford) who’s starting a slow process of coming out. It begins with a summer fling with a dreamy couple-years-older college boy named Rod (Andersen Gabrych) with heartthrobbish bleach-blonde hair. It’s further explored well into the school year with casual — and typically unsatisfying — hookups and increasing trips to the local queer bar, where he finds a chosen family via a maternal older lesbian (a scene-stealing Lea DeLaria) who will become something of a guardian-angel figure.

Chris Stafford in Edge of Seventeen.

Friends and family, whose level of prospective acceptance Eric isn’t confident about, are not an immediate priority. (Something I like about the movie is how much it tries to keep the straight gaze to the wayside, intimating that nothing should matter more than Eric’s acceptance of himself and finding a life where others do, too.) There’s a joy in the recognition one might reap from Edge of Seventeen’s frankness and first-person intimacy; Eric’s doing-the-best-he-can messiness is endearing, and for me and I’m sure for many other gay men watching, easy to identify with. I can’t think of a movie that has better captured the full-body tingle you feel when you’re finally crossing the threshold from being closeted to out — an exhilarating tango of anxiousness and excitement it’s nearly impossible to recapture the older and more experienced you get.

The inevitable scenes where he does come out to his straight loved ones are masterfully written, though. Eric’s best friend, Maggie (Tina Holmes), tries to be supportive. But she’s also understandably hurt by how he’s practically used her as a test subject for his final attempts at compulsory heterosexuality, indelicately sleeping with her near the film’s end, for instance, just to confirm things to himself. And when Eric finally tells his mom (Stephanie McVay) who he is, the warmth of her hug ices over when she wonders aloud what she did wrong — a subtle, not-dwelled-on line that heartbreakingly encapsulates how not-thinking-twice microaggressions from loved ones can accrue with time to make it feel near-impossible to safely come out. (She says earlier in the film that she doesn’t want people getting the “wrong idea” when Eric starts dressing more effeminately and dying the top half of his hair a shade of blonde clumsily resembling a freshly creamed cup of coffee.)

In Edge of Seventeen, there is no problem-solving romance, no climax triggering the kind of all-encompassing peace eluding Eric all film long. It manages to end happily by teasing the possibility of a relationship — with a cute guy who looks a lot like Rod (Jeff Fryer) with whom Eric had connected and then lost track of earlier in the movie — and by appreciating an image of Eric surrounded by the fellow gay people he’s gotten closer to in the course of the film at the queer bar. What comes next in his life will probably be better: it’s confirmed mid-movie that he’ll attend college in more progressive New York City to study music. Edge of Seventeen knows that coming of age, regardless of where your sexuality falls, is just a long process of fumbling your way to better self-understanding. I wish it had come into my life earlier.