Mysterious Skin

In the summer of 1981 in Hutchinson, Kansas, two eight-year-old Little League teammates — Neil McCormick and Brian Lackey — experience the same traumatic event, which each processes in radically different ways. Neil, raised by a careless, party-going mother and already awakening to his homosexuality, is sexually abused by the boys' Little League coach. Because Neil lacks parental stability and affection, he reinterprets the abuse as love and develops a lasting attraction to older men. Brian, equally neglected by his parents, retains almost no conscious memory of what happened — he recalls only rain during a game and waking in his house's crawl space with a bloody nose and five hours of missing time. His mind replaces the trauma with a fantasy of alien abduction, which he comes to believe more strongly as he grows up. By 1987, fifteen-year-old Neil is working as a male prostitute in Hutchinson, hustling older men in parks and private homes. He eventually moves to New York City, where his childhood friend Wendy Peterson lives, and continues sex work there. A turning point comes when he encounters a client dying of AIDS who asks only to be held and touched; the encounter shakes Neil enough that he quits prostitution and takes a mundane job at a sandwich shop. Brian, meanwhile, suffers chronic nosebleeds, blackouts, and episodes of incontinence dating from that night in 1981. He becomes obsessed with the alien-abduction explanation, connects with a local woman named Avalyn Friesen who claims her own alien encounter, and attempts to research what happened to him. When Brian discovers an old Little League team photograph, he recognizes young Neil as the mysterious figure from his fragmented dreams and seeks him out, believing Neil holds the key to unlocking the missing hours. Neil returns to Hutchinson at Christmas after suffering a brutal rape and beating by a violent client in New York. The two meet face to face for the first time in over a decade. Neil tells Brian the truth: their coach had offered both boys a ride home, brought them to his house, and sexually abused them, forcing them to perform acts on each other. During the abuse Brian passed out face-first, giving him the bloody nose he remembers waking with. The eerie blue cast he associates with alien visitors was simply the light from a porch lamp. Confronted with the reality that shattered his long-held delusion, Brian breaks down and weeps. Neil holds him through the night — two survivors, each finally understanding what the other has carried for fifteen years.

Sources: Wikipedia