Having to repeat a grade placed him in the high school class of 2000. This was a great benefit, Trecartin says, because the impending new millennium motivated his teachers to talk repeatedly about what was coming. That formative experience may help account for his sweetly cockeyed approach to the universe: one eye focused on the future and the other on the present. (Forget about the past.) Discussing sex and sexual identity, for instance, he says he is looking forward to a time when humans leave their genitals behind. “I see people as being what their personality is at the moment of expression. I feel genitals hold us back a lot. They keep us connected to our older ideals of humanity.” Without a fixed gender, one would be freer to adapt to changing situations. “I think it’s really interesting that there are a lot of trannies now who are in transition and want to be in transition—they don’t want to be a man or a woman,” he says approvingly. “The more nuanced we get, the more things people want to be.”
Underlying these gender-bending theoretical notions is the biographical fact that Trecartin was once a gay boy growing up in the Midwest. Ever since the locked bathroom of his first movie, closets have featured prominently in his videos. (“I was in the closet, but I wasn’t as far as my ideas went,” he tells me.) But he is more eager to think about the role that closets might play in the future—allowing people to don different masks, as they now do online. “The idea of being something that’s hidden and not letting other people know isn’t only about sexual identity, and it isn’t only negative. It can be fun to be hidden. It can be like wanting to work for an Internet company and pretending to be a 50-year-old freelancer when actually you’re a 16-year-old kid getting these big checks. I feel being in a closet will become a choice rather than something you have to do.”
Trecartin, who came of age during the onslaught of AIDS, watched television coverage of the epidemic. “For me it was really frightening,” he recalls. “It turned me off from the whole idea of sex—‘So sex means you die?’ All those talk shows, and people are saying, ‘My son has AIDS, and he deserves it because he’s gay.’ That was really scary.” Cyberspace seemed safer, although that was risky too. “Junior and senior year, I wasn’t connecting to the Internet, because I was afraid of viruses,” he says. When I asked Fitch if that was true, she laughed and said, “For more than two years.”
While assuring me that he has become less phobic and more open to physical contact, Trecartin is no less wary of foreclosing alternatives. The much noticed reluctance of twentysomethings to grow up and settle down may be linked to the freedom they indulge in online, where they can be all things to all people. In one of his movies, the word all-ways flashes with almost subliminal speed across the screen. For Trecartin and many of his peers, “all ways” is a much more appealing prospect than “always.” It’s about fluidity. Indeed, he reacts with mild exasperation when people relate the cross-dressing or role-playing in his movies to the ironic, campy impersonations of drag. “I want a feminine moment, but it has nothing to do with performing a role that is the opposite of my being a man,” he says.
