"A boy's best friend is his mother" said Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates in Psycho, the greatest probably-gay performance in Hollywood history. Touching on the primal relationship that figures in gay male self-esteem, Bates queered it for all time so that his famous ironic phrase even shadows this week's new films: Patrik-Ian Polk's Blackbird and Salome Breziner's Helicopter Mom.

Each movie is about a teenage boy coming to grips with his sexuality: In Blackbird, Randy Rousseau (Julian Walker) is a black church choirboy but ashamed of his nocturnal emissions. In Helicopter Mom, Lloyd Cooper (Jason Dolley) is a shy, white poet unsure about who to take to his high school prom. Both boys' mothers dominate the films and each one differently:

Claire Rousseau (Mo'Nique) is a disciplinarian, obsessed...