You Love to See It: The Last Unicorn (Patreon)

As a child I used to lie in bed at night and beg God to change my body, to remake me into anything but what I was. As I grew older and abandoned God, those pleas took on a formless, aching desperation which puberty sharpened to a killing point. As I grew body hair and my thoughts lost their magical inclination, drifting toward a hormonally addled species of “Scientific Rationality”, I started to contemplate another kind of transformation. If no power existed that could reach down and remake me, then I could at least transform through suicide, reject my body and the place alotted for me as a man in my community and float like John Everett Millais’ Ophelia in a state of permanent denial, plummeting through my own death toward the only escape I could see. Naturally, Rankin-Bass’s animated adaptation of Peter S. Beagle’s novel The Last Unicorn was my favorite movie.

Like Molly Grue I could feel my girlhood slipping away from me, wriggling year by year through my fingers. At ten, when I first read Beagle’s book by the dim illumination of a nightlight in the attic of my aunt’s apartment, I broke down sobbing when she rebuked the unicorn for coming to her too late. I had no words for those emotions, but I felt them. I knew something was being taken from me. The same line had always moved me in the film, but it was the unicorn’s distraught cry of “I can feel this body dying all around me!” after she is forced into a human form that wove itself into my nightly pleading. I would lie in bed with my eyes squeezed shut as tightly as I could, watching starbursts of dim color bloom and fade behind my eyelids, and think of Mia Farrow’s choked and desperate line reading, her trembling disgust at the knowledge of her own decay, her speechless depression in the halls of King Haggard’s castle.

In college and after, as I cauterized my own emotions and attempted to be straight, to be cis, to exist as I’d been told to exist, I revisited the film on several occasions. In groups I felt a kind of defensive embarrassment at America’s earnest soundtrack, at the idiosyncratic animation and distinctive voice acting, but alone I couldn’t seem to drink enough of its strange, heady mixture of fantasy and harsh reality. When I finally came out, the journal entry just before my confession to myself begins: I can feel this body dying all around me. An echo on the edge of understanding, as much mourning as celebration. I can feel this body dying, it’s true, and I will never have the girlhood that I lost, but at least what’s left is mine. At least it’s mine.