I Watched Terminator 2 (1991) For The First Time

So. Linda Hamilton could've made me gay back in the 90s.

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By the time I hit my tween growth spurt in the sixth grade, two things were obvious: 1) I was going to be a really good basketball player, and 2) I was going to be a weeeeiiiirdo.

Look, you know by now that I was both loved as a child — and also that I was basically raised by wolves. I spent all of my time growing up in a state of hyper-vigilance, constantly watching everyone around me, because I didn't know how to be a person, and no adults in my daily life were interested in consistently modeling to me how to be a person. Everything outside of playing sports and being with my sister felt like an impossible challenge.

I didn't know how to dress. I didn't like boys. I didn't like noise. I didn't understand sarcasm. I didn't know how to talk to people unless they, too, were extremely interested in the University of Tennessee Lady Vols basketball team or my favorite TV shows. At the age of eleven, those shows were: Golden Girls, 227, Designing Women, and A Different World. In fact, the most popular girl in my middle school uninvited me from her birthday because she said I'd talk about Whitley Gilbert until I put everyone to sleep. Which, frankly, was an indictment of them, but I didn't know it at the time. Who could fall asleep when someone was talking about WHITLEY GILBERT?

I realize that last paragraph looks like I've simply copied and pasted something out of The Autistic Lesbian Handbook, but we didn't have TikTok back then, okay? I didn't know WHY I wanted to be bossed around by Whitley Gilbert while watching her get dressed and do her makeup, only that I did. That I would have chewed off my own arm to be her MAN, her MUSE, her SWEET INSPIRATION.

I feel like I could have learned way more from observing my peers, but the problem, like I said, was that I was very good at basketball. I was always getting punched up into older leagues to play with people who were as big as me. Every sleepaway skills academy, every day after school, every team trip, every break at day camp, for years and years, I was surrounded by people who were way older than me, and in teenage years. Which is like puppy years, but for horniness. If I'd been playing ball with my friends, I could have spent my downtime learning the appropriate amount of time to rattle off uninterrupted Pokemon facts, but my friends were in a whole other gym than me, on a whole other schedule, and so I was stuck listening to endless stories about our point guard doing secret blowjobs in the her boyfriend's basement.

Here's how I knew I was in trouble: At group camp, in ninth grade, I walked into my shared hotel room and my teammates had Terminator 2 on the TV. I paused and watched Linda Hamilton do pull-up after pull-up, her hair tossed up into a messy ponytail, tanktop, every single muscle in her arm absolutely shredded, sweat beading on her face.

"Son of a motherless billy goat!" is what I said, which was about six entire words more than I usually spoke at a time to my varsity teammates.

"Are you blushing?!" one of the seniors asked, and not in a fun way.

I was. I could feel it. Heat everywhere I had skin. But I said no, that I'd just gotten done putting in some extra time in the weight room, and I was still hot and sweaty, so yeah, I should get going, get a shower, get some rest before the next game.

And then I never went near Terminator 2 ever again.

My wife, as I have mentioned, graduated magna cum laude from Northwestern film school and works as a film editor, so her tastes lean pretty artistic. It's all Aftersun and Moonlight and Before Sunrise. Moody, weepy, atmospheric, some kind of Earthshine as the title. But lately, she's been working hard to catch me up on all the movies I missed in the 90s and early 2000s due to being a sheltered, closeted lesbian during that era, and also being a big baby when it comes to blood splatter. When I went honk bonks for G20 and watched it three times in one weekend, she said I could definitely handle Terminator 2, and so we revisited it together. Turns out I was EXACTLY RIGHT to stay away from that movie! It would have unearthed my lesbianism ON THE SPOT.

The plot is basically every third video game and sci-fi movie I've ever played or watched: Humans, in their unquenchable arrogance, greed, and stupidity, create robots that end up destroying them. Linda Hamilton is the mother of the Chosen One, and she knows this all for a fact because robot Arnold Schwarzenegger proved it to her in the first movie, which Stacy said we didn't need to watch because Linda Hamilton was more of a damsel in that one. Linda Hamilton’s son, John Conner, is in foster care. And she's in a mental institution where all the doctors are having a grand old time torturing her and mocking her for knowing the truth about the robot apocalypse.

The line of dialogue* in the movie that does the most work is when John Connor tells Arnold Schwarzenegger that his mom has spent the last decade dating a bunch of survivalists / cultists / private militia guys, etc. 'Cause, baby, she knows how to do it all. Starting with breaking out of a high security hospital with a paperclip and a broomstick. (Like witches do.) For example, one of the technicians who strapped her down while licking her face, she stabs him in the belly with a broken broom handle and watches his gizzards leak out all over the floor. She cracks other people in the noggin with the broom. It's not, like, elite staff work. Not like POP POP! But she's only using the broom handle until she can get her hands on a gun, which she does almost immediately, and also immediately knows exactly how to shoot it.

* I know, I know. I'll be back and hasta la vista, baby, and all that, but, honestly, when Arnold Schwarzenegger was saying those iconic phrases, I was focusing on Linda Hamilton chain smoking and doing push-ups in the background.

I'm not exactly sure where Terminator 2 takes place. The desert? It's honestly only important in the sense that it's sweltering, so Linda Hamilton keeps switching between a white tank top and a black tank top. Every muscle in her arm is so defined that you can tell the tricep from the bicep from the deltoid in the complete and total darkness. She spends half her time bossing her son and his robot around and the other half of her time kicking everyone's motherfucking goddamn asses. She beats their asses with her bare hands. She beats their asses with a variety of guns. She beats their asses with knives. And in between beating their asses, she keeps adding lesbian accessories to her outfit. Side-shield sunglasses, monochromatic vests, thick leather belts with about a hundred carabiners, combat boots.

When she breaks a guy's arm, he goes, "You broke my arm!" And she goes, "There are 215 bones in the human body. That's one."

Near the end of the first act, when she's feeling too much, she tires to make a run for it and solve the whole world's problems all by herself. Rookie butch move. But she ends up back on the team, and in charge. Veteran butch move.

The main bad guy in Terminator 2 is a more advanced robot than Arnold Schwarzenegger. He's made of liquid metal and can't die. EXCEPT, very luckily, the final fight takes place inside a lava warehouse. Like an indoor volcano. Linda Hamilton beats the bad robot’s ass into the boiling magma. At the very end, Arnold Schwarzenegger also has to die for some reason. He slowly lowers himself into one of the lava pits and then gives a thumbs up as he completely liquifies. The music says I'm supposed to be sad about this, but, honestly, it didn't even come close to the trauma of watching a baby shoe get melted in a barrel of Cartoon Dip in Who Framed Roger Rabbit. No offense, but the apocalypse robots got nothing on Judge Doom.

Now, would this film alone have revealed the flaming homosexuality inside of me when I was a young teen? Yes, obviously. Linda Hamilton's arms and surly swagger certainly would have awakened a sleeping giant. But not just that! Linda Hamilton, in Terminator 2, is also a weeeeiiiirdo, with hyper-fixations, who has no idea how to talk to people. Everyone around her thinks she's way too intense and way too kooky, and maybe I'm projecting here, but she seems like the kind of person who would only eat room temperature ketchup and also cut the seeds out of her pickles. You know what I mean? You put onions on Linda Hamilton's cheeseburger and she's gonna rocket that thing into the sun. She would have been my very first: Do I want to kiss her on the mouth or do I want to be her? Her whole vibe happened five years before Helen Hunt's Twister tank top!

Also, I'm gonna keep it a button: Linda Hamilton's misandry made me gayer even at this age. That guy whose arm she broke, while he was writhing on the ground, she was stomping around in her boots talking about, "Fucking men like you built the hydrogen bomb! Men like you thought it up! You think you're so creative? You don't know what it's like to really create something; to create a life; to feel it growing inside you. All you know how to create is death and destruction!"

Like what Whitley Gilbert said that time: “Women cry because they live in a world where men run them ragged!”

It’s good I waited. Now I can watch Linda Hamilton do pull-ups and blush in peace. 👍

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