A Home at the End of the World

The film focuses on a trio of disparate individuals who struggle to create a family of their own. Bobby Morrow's life in suburban Cleveland has been tinged with tragedy since he was a young boy, losing first his older hippie brother (who gave him LSD, talked to him about sex, and taught him the beauties of his surroundings) to a freak accident, then his mother to illness, and finally his father. As a rebellious teenager, he meets the conservative and gawky Jonathan Glover in high school, and he becomes a regular visitor to the Glover home, where he introduces his friend - and his mother Alice - to marijuana and the music of Laura Nyro. Jonathan, who is slowly coming out as a homosexual, initiates Bobby into adolescent mutual masturbation during their frequent sleepovers. When Alice catches them both masturbating in a car, Jonathan, embarrassed by the incident, tells Bobby he is going to leave as soon as he finishes high school. Alice teaches Bobby how to bake, unintentionally setting him on a career path that eventually takes him to New York City, where Jonathan is sharing a colorful East Village apartment with the bohemian and somewhat older Clare. Bobby moves in, and the three create their own household.

Although Jonathan is openly gay and highly promiscuous, he is deeply committed to Clare and the two have tentatively planned to have a baby. Clare seduces and starts a relationship with Bobby, and she eventually becomes pregnant by him. Their romance occasionally is disrupted by sparks of jealousy between the two men until Jonathan, tired of being the third wheel, disappears without warning. He re-enters their lives when his father Ned dies and Bobby and Clare travel to Phoenix, Arizona for the services. The three take Ned's car back east with them, and they impulsively decide to buy a house near Woodstock, New York, where Bobby and Jonathan open and operate a cafe while Clare raises the baby daughter she and Bobby have had.

Jonathan discovers what appears to be a Kaposi's sarcoma lesion on his groin and, although Bobby tries to convince him it's simply a bruise, others soon appear. Although initially happy in her new home before the baby was born, Clare begins to feel left out, seeing the happy relationship Jonathan and Bobby share. One day, she takes the baby for what ostensibly is a brief visit to her mother in Philadelphia, but Bobby and Jonathan accurately suspect she has no intention of returning and Bobby decides to care for Jonathan during his last days. On a cold winter day some months later, they scatter Ned's ashes in the field behind their home, and Jonathan (who now visibly appears to be ill) lets Bobby know he would like his own ashes scattered in the same place, following his now inevitable early death from complications due to AIDS.