Wildy acclaimed by gay activists at the time who lauded it as a post-modern gay film masterpiece*, My Own Private Idaho is really a bit of a false idol. Seduced by River Phoenix’s tragic Mike, many gay viewers failed to notice that in My Own Private Idaho, straight acting male hustlers - such as Mike - are mythologized as cowboys, while their tricks, or less macho gay characters are lampooned as grotesques. In this film, classically manly guys are everyone’s love object, while less masculine types are all destined to be drag queens or lonely, freaky old men. My Own Private Idaho is a creative and romantic, ostensibly gay-friendly film that contains the key career performance of charismatic but doomed River Phoenix, but the adoration paid to the film by gay activists and the bulk of the gay media is curious and misguided.

Mike is a rootless narcoleptic prostitute on the run from his childhood. Via arty imagery, we sense that he grew up in poverty in rural America, is estranged from his mother, and has probably never had a happy moment in his life. Mike shunts from highway to highway, collapses roadside here and there, but always seems to fall back into the Pacific Northwest orbit of Scott (Keanu Reeves) a handsome rich boy slumming it as a street hustler while he waits to collect his inheritance. After some high jinx in the hood, Mike and Scott set out to find Mike’s mother.

Predating Leonardo DiCaprio, Phoenix was a pretty and vulnerable leading man, a sort of boy-woman who lives on angst and gentle kisses. But unlike the frat-house DiCaprio, Phoenix has a seediness, a masochism, that makes him a very believable hooker. Knowing that Phoenix died of a drug overdose on the footpath outside the Viper Room adds to this self-destructive, in-the-gutter screen persona. In this role, he’s hard not to fall a little bit in love with.

This is a bit of a guilty pleasure, though, as Mike and Scott have been very deliberately designed as push button gay sex objects. They’re movie characters who function very much like prostitutes do, delivering preset ideas of sexiness and satisfaction to a willing and waiting audience. We swoon for Mike because he’s always in a state of epic turmoil, and shows us his furry stomach and gasps appealingly with orgasm when he gets blown from time to time by dirty old men. Scott appeals to those who like their men confident and aloof, sophisticated and a little hard-to-get. We identify with Mike because he’s a fantasy version of ourselves, a cool hustler with a sexy, naughty boyfriend. We aspire to be like Scott, challenging our disapproving fathers to their faces, and ruling over our subjects, who’ll suck our cocks whenever.

Both Mike and Scott are portrayed as iconic drifters, cowboys hot for each other, and united against the world. The cowboy motif is present from the opening of the film, which opens on an endless highway, a boot-and-denim clad young man making his way to nowhere. Then, the opening titles play over a country western song, and throughout the film, a lot of the action takes place on the open road, framed by neon-tinted clouds and dramatic sunsets. Only iconic male studs – cowboys, bad boys, unsung heroes – make the grade here, there’s no sexual creativity, or erotic surprises. It’s derivative, sub-standard Marlboro Man erotica.

The majority of the gay film going public don’t live lives like this – the film is part soft porn, part fairy tale, and hence, in my opinion, its popularity with city-dwelling, middle class guys who greedily and self-deceptively embraced the film as an escapist avatar for modern “gay”. What is there in gay culture that makes us think there’s a little bit of a cowboy in all of us, that after a hard days cattle-chasin’ he’s gonna want to saddle up to an armful of male-male lovin’? We buy into it in My Own Private Idaho, because it’s been lushly romanticised for us, with one scene featuring Scott cradling a stricken Mike at the base of a fountain, in classic Pietà pose. My Own Private Idaho is Gay Rebel Without A Cause – the sentimental all American boy-to-man story that shows how gays can do it too.

Also, the film appeals to our (latent) attraction to the idea of two straight working class men men getting it on with each other. It’s a hot idea that’s been the model for thousands of gay porn films. Here, it’s sexy and touching, and Scott’s wealthy background is the key for us to feel like we too are “slumming it”.

It is a generally worthwhile film, and unlike, say, The Living End, doesn’t collapse in on itself from the weight of its film-school affectations. Though it does disappoint with a plethora of self-conscious narrative devices such as talking magazine covers, freeze-frame sex scenes, and stale metaphors such as fish swimming upstream which are a little too obvious even the first time we see them, the film is generally strong. It has a real sweet heart, and it’s hard not to be sucked in by Mike’s tragic epic love story/hunt for truth and balance, but ultimately the film is too manipulative, and too all over the place ideologically and artistically, to engage for more than ten minutes at a time.