Welcome to Long Live the Sex Scene, a special project by Cosmopolitan that explores why these steamy television and movie moments truly matter, especially right now. Join us as we rewind, replay, and then rewind them all over again.
When I was 11 years old, generous young cinephiles with no regard for copyright laws would upload films to YouTube in 12-minute-long parts (the platform’s old time limit on videos). That’s how I watched all the movies I wasn’t supposed to see and how I came across a truly transformative 10-second sex scene in The Kids Are All Right.
The film follows the two teenage children of a lesbian couple, who go on a hunt to track down their moms’ sperm donor. I discovered it thanks to my full and total obsession with its young star, Josh Hutcherson. So imagine my surprise when, 11 minutes in, still on part 1 of 9, it was the man playing his biological father who caught my attention. That man was Mark Ruffalo, the incomparable Hulk himself.
He was confident. He was perfectly sun-kissed. He had facial hair that Josh could not compete with. And there he was having passionate sex in a supercut of positions with a dark-skinned Black model who looked exactly like me! (Our physical similarities started and ended with race. But that common ground was strong enough to sustain my Mark Ruffalo delusions for many years.)
I watched the blink-and-you-miss-it moment where Mark turns America’s Next Top Model alum Yaya DaCosta every which way on a couch, and then I watched it again...and again. Until then, I hadn’t seen someone with my skin positioned as such an unquestionable object of desire.
She wasn’t lusted after as comedic relief. She wasn’t given some tragic, traumatic backstory to justify her inclusion. She was there to have wild sex with Mark Ruffalo and look beautiful doing it. Unfortunately, her role in the film is not fleshed out at all. I’m pretty sure after this memorable sofa rendezvous, she had fewer than 25 lines. But as a sixth grader in the Deep South who’d been led to believe that my skin rendered me undesirable, those 10 seconds presented a clear case against that notion. It encouraged me to seek out more movies I also probably shouldn’t have been watching at that age, ones that centered Black women, like Foxy Brown and Set It Off. Ones in which a white guy’s attention wasn’t the greatest indicator of desirability.
But that journey started with 10 seconds of Yaya and Mark stumbling all around that living room and it changed me forever.
