My malformative years.

In The Sound of Music, when Baron von Christopher Plummer was finally about to kiss Julie/Maria, it was me kissing her.

That detector you have to pass through as you enter a video store actually does two things, neither of which has anything to do with preventing purloined copies of Kevin Costner's The Postman from tripping the alarm. First, it destroys all memory of what you went into the video store to rent. Second, it destroys all memory of movies you have already rented. I can't tell you the number of times I have watched the opening scene of ducks waddling in a muddy rut and thought, Dang, I've already seen Cold Comfort Farm. OK, four.

In addition to the filmic amnesia caused by the L'Arche de Video, I can forget a movie I've just seen in my local cineplex faster than Al Gore can switch his position on litmus tests. The lights go up, and it starts. By the time I reach the exit, a friend could say, "When he found that horse's head in the bed ..." and I'm left stammering, "He did?!"

I can be cued back through patient prompting, but it takes me a while, and it might not last. Fortunately, a kind friend has turned me onto the online Internet Movie Database, and all my questions are more than answered. I only wish they'd post head shots with actors' names.

Despite obsessively micromanaging my mental health--ginseng and vitamin E, when I remember--these filmic lapses have never panicked me. In fact, they have seemed oddly familiar, albeit uncomfortable, for they are my youth.

While clearing boxes out of my Dad's attic, I came across a high school yearbook picture of me as queen of the Sweetheart Dance. The recently crowned king of the Sweetheart Dance, my date (?), was pinning a corsage to my not-at-all-heaving bosom.

What I remember of that night was my searing resentment of Tony Morgillo slow-dancing with Ruby Gill, a girl I mooned over most of my high school years. She was an unapologetic intellect, a stealth troublemaker, with jet-black hair and dreamy porcelain skin. She was a smart-ass cheerleader. Once, when the score of our pathetic boys' basketball game was 80-40, she started chanting, "Break that tie! Break that tie!" A wit like that, yet the team captain--Tony Morgillo, "the gorilla"--was the one who got to slow-dance with her. It should have been me.

My closeted youth was like a continuous lesbian film festival but with all the movies looped in some language I didn't speak. The hetero world outside sailed by, but it never really connected. Consequently I have little memory of many of its actual characters, conflicts, crises, resolutions.

Going to movies was a respite from my adolescence, but it too was often an altered experience. Julie Andrews was the Ruby Gill of film. In The Sound of Music, when Baron von Christopher Plummer was in the rainy-night gazebo finally about to kiss Julie/Maria, it was me. And I was not singing, "Perhaps I had a wicked childhood, perhaps I had a miserable youth ..." I was fixing to lay a big one on her.

Do I regret the lost memories? Yes. Do I regret how well I learned not to be in my own life? Yes, even today.

But regret gives way to new wonder. It is enormously cheering to me that there is a burgeoning gay and lesbian youth movement in high schools helping kids to find each other and, upon finding each other, to insist that they be active players in their own intricate, particular lives. Their sense of entitlement is bracing. Their memories are full.

And I remain flabbergasted that a movie like Boys Don't Cry ever got made and gains momentum, from Golden Globes to Oscar nods, even though it explores in minute detail the life of a young man, born a biological woman, who must become an actor in the movie of his life.

It is an excruciating, triumphant movie that collapses the boundaries between life and fantasy. Perhaps because it dares to deal in such an ordinary Midwestern way with an actual young life, I remember every scene, every detail, every character even at a month's distance from seeing it.

And I even remember the adenoidally challenged, openmouthed popcorn eater who sat behind me.