It all started with a family meeting. Yes, we had a family meeting about this. “Your mother and I have discussed it, and we’ve decided you can see the movie, but we are going as a family.”

My father issued the decision in the tone of a president contemplating war. My mother nodded slightly as he spoke, her lips pursed, her hands resting dignified on her lap.

This was 1997. I was 12. My three sisters and I had responded with great trepidation to the call from my parents for everyone to gather in the living room.

The living room.

Not the family room, where casual nonsense took place.

Not the kitchen, where crumbs could have undermined the gravity of the conversation.

The living room. Where important meetings happened. Where people from church were sent to sit and wait when they visited unannounced. Where the results of parent-teacher conferences were discussed. Where the dusty piano, adorned with a stiff green hymnbook, stood propped against a wall below a large family portrait that worked as a resident roster for guests’ reference.

And, on this day, the one in 1997, when my father acted presidential, it was the place where my parents would tell us whether we were allowed to see the new box office blockbuster, “Titanic‚" starring Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio.

We had begged them, each of us in turn, like we had assigned ourselves shifts, to let us go to this movie.

“All of our friends have already seen it. Even the Winders have seen it,” we lied.

The Winders had not seen it. They didn’t even have a TV because their parents didn’t want them to learn swear words. It was a risk to make this implausible claim, but we figured our parents were unlikely to do any fact-checking because that would require them to talk to the Winders’ parents, who were weird.

Several of my Latter-day Saint friends were engaged in similar negotiations with their own moms and dads. It seemed every house in the neighborhood was engulfed in the dilemma over what to do about the titanic “Titanic” problem.

The R-rated vs. PG-13 quandary

General Conference sermons had told us not to see R-rated movies. That was a relatively hard-and-fast rule, easy to understand, and broken exclusively under the most special circumstances. Circumstances where, for example “it’s only rated R because of violence.”

But apart from violence, tolerance of “adult content” was low in our neighborhood. Overuse of the F-word or a flash of nudity were more taboo than two hours of graphic murder for my community, whose number one religious rule was to love one another.

In any event, what made the “Titanic” conversation so complicated was that it wasn’t rated R. It was PG-13, normally a green light for ’90s Latter-day Saint kids. But “Titanic” was a different sort of PG-13 film. Titanic contained nudity.

“A whole scene where a woman is topless and a man draws a picture of her!” I heard a woman at church say in exasperation and disbelief to a group of other women shaking their heads as they stood in front of a large painting of a loinclothed man whose limbs had been tacked to a cross by thick nails dripping with blood.

Latter-day Saint moms and dads were split on whether the historical value of the film outweighed the corrupting sexual influence.

My parents decided it did, but only if they were there to block my eyes at the right moment, not realizing I had little interest in artistically rendered breasts.

Leo and Kate

The next Saturday we arrived at Movies 9. “Six for Titanic, please.” My father said it, decidedly unapologetic. The teenager behind the glass counted out our tickets and slid them through a slit at the front of the counter.

My sisters and I could hardly contain our excitement.

No, none of us had any particular interest in the famous ship or in period films in general. All we really cared about was street cred. Other kids bragged when the dam of their parents’ resistance had broken. We didn’t want to be the last weirdos on this quest for access to adult content.

In nearly the first scene of the movie, Leo’s hair fell over his eye and something in my brain permanently broke.

“That is how a person should look.” I thought. “That is exactly the right way for a person to look.”

I spent most of the rest of the film stuck somewhere between hating Leo with a fiery hormonal rage I could have never possibly been able to explain and hating Kate (Rose) for touching Leo (Jack) who very much belonged to me.

And then she said it. It caught me off guard. I had been so enthralled in Leo’s eyes that I had forgotten we had a mountain to summit.

“I want you to draw me wearing this,” Kate declared. “Wearing only this.”

The scene

Suddenly my mother’s left hand was fully gripping my head, her thumb and middle finger digging into each of my temples. My upper face was mostly covered, besides a small gap between two of her fingers that left just enough space for a blurred peek through my left eye.

My father had directed my sisters to put their heads down. “I’ll tell you when you can look again,” he whispered.

We didn’t protest the censorship. This had all been carefully negotiated and choreographed beforehand.

My mother’s hand eventually came off my eyes. The deed was done. We were allowed to view the remainder of the film, unfiltered. (Spoiler: The boat sank.)

The next day at church, my best friend Sam confronted me the moment I walked into the building. “My mom covered my face, but I could kind of see through her fingers,” I reported to him. He gasped. His parents were still holding firm.

Out in the foyer I could hear my mother explaining to a friend, “we decided to let the kids see it, but I made sure to cover Eli’s eyes.”

“I’m sure he hated that,” the friend responded.

I stood, silently shaking my head.

Note to readers • Eli McCann is an attorney, writer and podcaster in Salt Lake City, where he lives with his husband, child and their two naughty (yet worshipped) dogs. His new book is “We’re Thankful for the Moisture: A Gay Guy’s Guide to Mormon Faith, Family, and Fruit Preservation." This column is available to Salt Lake Tribune subscribers only. Thank you for supporting local journalism.