Logan, soft spoken, lonely and 13 years old, is a boy with a crush.  Unlike his equally lonely friend Joey, who obsesses over the sexual exploits of the slightly older, postpubescent boys, Logan is fixated on the boys themselves, particularly Rodeo Walker.  Rodeo is the only one of the group of cool kids who shows any friendliness toward Logan, meaning he doesn’t go out of his way to make Logan’s life miserable.  As Logan and Rodeo strike up a mismatched friendship, the kind that only works on walks deep into the forest when no one else is around, Logan’s infatuation with Rodeo inspires him to create a new persona named Leah.  Leah and Rodeo grow close through whispered phone calls, and when Leah agrees to meet Rodeo face to face, it is Logan who must finally prove that he can ask for what he so achingly wants.

Painfully surreal and remarkably accurate, Wild Tigers I Have Known has all the makings of a controversial movie that will make some right-wingers down right angry.  Logan, brilliantly played by Malcolm Stumpf, is an effeminate acting boy who masturbates to visions of boys wrestling in singlets, and doesn’t seem to care what the other school kids say about him.  Publicly humiliated and continually called a "Fag" at school, Logan’s only sanctuary from all this ridiculing is his basement and Joey’s bizarre, space-age bedroom. Joey, an equally geeky, but non-gay friend, is a little too dense to see what Logan is all about (even after a penis measuring contest in the closet), but enjoys the sexually-based conversations they usually have about the other boys in the school.  When Logan and Rodeo become closer friends, Joey quickly fades from the scene until one day Logan invites Joey over to "show him something."

The moment at the dawn of adolescence when hormones and daydreams swirl into a heady fog of confusion is poetically evoked in Wild Tigers I Have Known. – Stephen Holden, New York Times

 

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