In
The Opposite of Sex, DeeDee Truitt (played
by Christina Ricci) narrates a film about love triangles involving
homosexuals, bisexuals, and heterosexuals. DeeDee is sixteen
years old, unhappy living with her stepmother, so she travels
from her home in Tennessee to Indiana, showing up on the doorstep
of her brother Bill (played by Martin Donovan), an openly
gay schoolteacher, after being orphaned. Bill's former affluent
lover has recently died of AIDS, but he is sleeping with Matt
(played by Ivan Sergei). When she arrives, she is greeted
by Matt. Soon she sleeps with Matt and another man, Jason
(played by Johnny Galecki), a former student of Bill. When
she announces that she is pregnant, Matt feels an obligation
to take care of her, so they move to Los Angeles on $10,000
purloined by Bill's inheritance. Soon, Jason comes over and
demands to know where Matt is, but Bill does not know, whereupon
Jason threatens to tell the police the lie that Bill molested
him while a student. The police then start an investigation,
Bill loses his job, but Lucia (played by Lisa Kudrow), the
sister of Bill's former lover, supports Bill because she is
secretly in love with him. Bill and Lucia then go to Los Angeles
to find DeeDee and Matt so that they can help pregnant DeeDee;
having located Matt, Jason promises to drop the charges, which
are not taken very seriously by Carl (played by Lyle Lovett),
the police officer assigned to the case. All four return to
Indiana, but DeeDee then pairs off with Jason, while Bill
tries to rekindle passions with Matt, and Lucia must accept
that she will not develop a romance with Bill. There are more
twists and turns as the triangles unravel, thanks to director/writer
Don Roos, consistent with the tagline "You'll laugh, you'll
cry, you'll be offended." Ultimately, DeeDee has twins, gives
them up for adoption, and at the end of the film confesses
that sex leads to three things-"kids or disease or relationships."
Since she wants none of these, she now tells us that she seeks
the opposite of sex. The film clearly shows the instability
of bisexuals, the persistent expectation of a female heterosexual
that gays will go straight if only pursued by the right woman,
the maturity of a responsible gay man in responding to a deceased
lover and failed relationships, and how punitively school
administrators will act on allegations of past sexual misconduct.
Indeed, Bill observes epigrammatically from a gay point of
view that sex is not for procreation or recreation but for
concentration -- that is, to develop an encounter into a commitment.
The tangle of relationships, however, often gets in the way
of the message, and the narrator DeeDee is the most mixed
up character in the film. She became pregnant in Tennessee,
we finally realize, and used her sexuality to entrap as many
men as possible so that her baby could have a father. Her
voice-overs demonstrate that she grew up as a result of the
experiences portrayed, and presumably filmviewers may also
have matured-in learning that gays want relationships infinitely
more than sex. MH
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