In the wake of Jadin’s death, it’s left to Joe to do the standing up. Joe had advised his son to stand up for himself in the face of such people. These are the people akin to his bullies. But what about the random homophobes in biker gear that Joe overhears spouting casual hatred in a diner, or the people - there are many of them - who have nothing to offer Joe but confrontation? These are the people, Jadin’s ghostlike fellow traveler suggests, that need to be reached.
A gay son who sits in on his father’s talks to the public and gets to offer his own critiques, pointing out the ways that Joe has settled into a pattern of preaching to the choir: The people showing up at his talks, particularly once he’s gained notoriety, already know what he’s about, and are already at minimum prepared to hear what he has to say. A gay son and his father who can bond over Lady Gaga lyrics.
DAD GAY VIDEOS MOVIE
Before the movie gives us flashbacks to nine months prior, in the stretch leading up to Jadin’s death - with its scenes of bullying, fledgling romance, and familial disappointment - what we get is a snapshot of an ideal. What immediately stands out about the pair is their camaraderie. From the start of the movie there’s a young man at Joe’s side - and it isn’t long before we realize that this young man is Jadin (played here by Reid Miller). I know you’re with me on this walk.” Joe Bell takes this idea and, in a way, makes it literal. The real Joe Bell had written, on Facebook: “I miss my son Jadin with all my heart and soul. And queer people everywhere - which, for Joe, means that this journey is made all the more morally serious, not because of the lessons he imparts to others, but by the lessons he learns on his journey, the kindness the sprouts up in seemingly unexpected places, out of people cut from the same cloth as Joe. Throughout, we’ll see people stop and ask to take his picture, or offer him meals - people who, being that they’re from areas in the stretch between Oregon and Colorado, are testaments to the idea that though much of the country remains committed to bigotry, there are loving, understanding people everywhere.
By the time the film starts, Joe, played by a grizzled Mark Wahlberg, has already been on the road for some months. Reinaldo Marcus Green’s new film is titled Joe Bell, not Jadin Bell, which maybe tells you something about its scope and intentions - but not everything. It happened in eastern Colorado, on a rural two-lane highway.
DAD GAY VIDEOS DRIVER
Joe was struck and killed in October 2013 by a tractor trailer whose driver had fallen asleep at the wheel. It was, for him, a journey toward healing - not only over the loss of his son in itself, but over the regrets he had as a father whose son needed him in ways that only became apparent to the elder Bell after his boy’s suicide. Joe’s following, online and in the local press, grew as he traveled. And giving talks, campaigning against bullying in schools, at motorcycle rallies, wherever he could, as he traveled. Some months after Jadin’s death, Jadin’s father, Joe Bell, decided to walk the country in honor of his son, from his home in La Grande all the way to New York, landing where Jadin once dreamed of living out the rest of his life after high school. In Jadin’s case, the second leg of his story may have had something to do with it. Why some stories of this stripe loom so large over the public imagination, while others receive little to no attention, is itself complicated. Jadin’s death was a big story, but not a unique one.
Much of the coverage inevitably had to confront the ways that bullying, in itself, had also changed, as technology had changed, and social lives - anonymity, access to others, video cameras and messaging apps on every phone - have played into some of our worst instincts. The coverage was motivated, in part, by the pained irony that an ostensibly more progressive nation - nudged forward from above by changing (if contested) political policies and more visibly out-and-proud celebrities and from below by a more accepting generation of young people - was still home to tragedies such as these. Like many queer teens before him and, it’s painful to say, many since his death, Jadin was subject to intense bullying - mistreatment that became the primary point of order of the expansive news coverage following his death. He’d dreamed of becoming an artist, of going to New York City for college - of, at the very least, getting the hell out of La Grande. In January 2013, a gay 15-year-old named Jadin Bell, from La Grande, Oregon, hanged himself from a piece of playground equipment and, after being kept on life support for several weeks, died in early February that year.