You're Trying To Seduce Me, Aren't You? - Neil

"Where normal people have a heart, Neil McCormick has a bottomless black hole."

Neil stares into the camera right through the audience. He's previously seemed uncomfortable about this current venture into sex work, although once settled in with his client, he becomes more relaxed. It isn't just a low life situation in a hum drum town he finds himself in that is luring him into this profession, but a curiosity about his own sexual preference.

Mysterious Skin follows two male characters of the same age who were once acquinated, but have taken separate paths in their lives. One, Brian, spends his young adult life as a sheltered nerd, convinced of extra terrestrial life and spending his days chasing this belief, as he is certain it is the answer to a mystery in his own life that he has been unable to solve.

Neil however, knows what that mystery is, but whilst not in search of uncovering it, he is trying to chase the sense of human connection it entailed.

Sadly though, Neil's experience came out of abuse. What he will eventually reveal to a desparate Brian is that when the two were 5 years old and played in little league baseball together, their coach sexually abused them. Brian appears to have only been involved on one occasion, whilst Neil had been the target of the coach's predatory attention for some time. What snatched a brief period of Brian's life away that he would forever be trying to trace, having caused uncertainty and dysfunction in him, for Neil, it was the only true experience of love he had known. The coach adored him, spoilt him, treated him like he was number one. To Neil, it was less a matter of abuse, but instead a feeling of being worshipped. He would go on to have an attraction for older men in particular and being young and attractive gave him opportunity to be a kind of trophy lover. Sex work allowed him to be worshipped, spoilt and command attention.

Yet Neil's view of love is indicative of the harm abuse inflicts. It has skewed his belief that love is transactional. Where his coach would coax Neil with treats, money and adoration in exchange for sex acts, Neil sees this as the standard formula for receiving the love of another. Though his sex work does prove this for a while, his belief system is shaken when a client drugs and violently rapes him, his life becoming darker and murkier thereafter.

In revealing the mystery to a distraught Brian, Neil is facing some homes truthes of his own: that it was never love he experienced, only manipulation, lies and extreme abuse.

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