IGF CultureWatch

In a 1980 essay entitled "The Boys on the Beach," conservative writer Midge Decter described the gay men who summered at Fire Island in the 1960s:

No households of wives and children requiring security; no entailments of school bills, doctor and dentist bills; no lifetime of acquiring the goods needed for family welfare and the goods desired for family entertainment, with a margin left over for that greatest of all heterosexual entailments, the Future: no such households burdened the overwhelmingly vast majority of homosexuals.

Homosexuality, argued Decter, is a flight from adult responsibility. Heterosexual men who accept their share of the burden to raise the next generation feel "mocked," especially by gay men, because male "homosexuality paints them with the color of sheer entrapment." Being gay, she concluded, means "taking oneself out of the tides of ordinary mortal existence."

From early on in Brokeback Mountain, the Oscar-contending film by director Ang Lee, I found myself thinking about Decter's essay.

The basic story is by now familiar: two young men, Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal), meet and fall in love in 1963 while tending sheep in the mountains of Wyoming. Subsequently, they each get married and have kids but get together a couple of times a year to go "fishing," the euphemism they give their wives for the periodic renewal of their affair. The story ends in 1983.

There's much to admire in this film. Ennis and Jack bust stereotypes of gay men. They aren't effeminate. When they meet, they are modern "cowboys" who live on profanity, fighting, country music, beer, and hard work for low pay. Yet their masculinity is also not the posed hyper-masculinity of leather, Levi, and uniform fetish scenes.

There's no mention of Stonewall, Harvey Milk, or even San Francisco. It's a welcome corrective to the urban-centered study of gay life in America.

For the most part we do not see sensationalized homophobia. That would be too easy. Instead, we see the everyday contempt for gays that still suffuses life in much of the country. Disdain for homosexuals mostly comes to Ennis and Jack in the sneers of others and in their own shame.

Still, the film-or more precisely, the gay reaction to it-offers some support for the hoary notion that homosexuality is "taking oneself out of the tides of ordinary mortal existence." Critics have rushed to praise Brokeback Mountain as a universal love story. Perhaps that's true, but it's not the whole story.

It's almost never mentioned that their affair is juxtaposed to the consequences of neglecting life's obligations. The first time Ennis and Jack have sex they shirk their responsibility to watch the flock. That night, a sheep is killed by a wolf; the aftermath is graphically depicted. A large portion of the flock is ultimately lost while they frolic.

More importantly, in their occasional fishing retreats, Ennis and Jack leave behind families. They are adulterers. This doesn't seem so terrible in the case of Jack, whose cartoonish wife is obsessed with her career and her press-on nails. But in the case of Ennis the result is poignant. Rushing out of the house to meet Jack, Ennis bodily passes off his two daughters to his wife (Michelle Williams), who stoically bears the burden left by a homosexual fleeing his entrapment. Eventually they divorce.

The film speaks powerfully to the sense of lost love and opportunity every closeted gay person must feel. "Heartbreaking" is not too strong a word to describe the loss this film confronts us with. But it's difficult to buy the widespread idea that the love between Jack and Ennis is an unvarnished good thing made tragic only by a homophobic world.

Part of the reason is that the love story itself is a bit strained. Hollywood delights in acting of the stumbling-and-mumbling sort (think James Dean and Marlon Brando) because it is thought to convey authenticity. Ledger in particular nails this style. But the spare dialogue between Jack and Ennis puts a lot of interpretive pressure on the meaningful glances they exchange.

Their sexual intimacy seems contrived. The sex-full of wrestling and snorting-is the kind that a person who's neither gay nor a cowboy imagines gay cowboys must have.

But the deeper reason their love doesn't completely register is that every time they go off together one is left wondering, what about the kids? What Ennis and Jack experience as an exhilarating liberation from the mundane and the stifling is for their families an abandonment. Ennis at least talks about living up to his familial obligations, but in truth he's checked out of them almost from the start.

For these reasons, I couldn't quite join in the symphony of sniffles I heard in the theater at the undeniably sad end of the film.

Yes, the world around Ennis and Jack channeled them into unhappy heterosexual lives. All concerned-including their families-would have been better off if that hadn't happened. By itself, that's a powerful argument against homophobia.

I don't have good answers to the problems confronting Ennis and Jack in their time and circumstance. I only have more questions than are currently being asked. Once families have been formed, do the interests of those families count for anything at all? Do we think Ennis and Jack have no obligation except to fulfill their own deepest desires? Do we really believe that the only tragedy in the film is the thwarted love of these two men? Why is nobody in the gay community even considering the moral complexity Brokeback Mountain presents?

Which brings us back to Midge Decter. Much that's happened in the past quarter-century has thoroughly discredited her view of homosexuality as escapism. She was wrong about gays even then, and she's more wrong now. But you would not know that from the sentimental and myopic reaction to this film, which sees in a multi-layered calamity only a beautiful but doomed gay romance.

It was the kind of film that changes lives. And it changed mine-seeing a true gay love story, playing in major theaters, with a passionate performance by a talented young actor in a role quite different from anything he had tackled before.

I'm talking, of course, about Torch Song Trilogy, which remains my favorite gay film despite my having seen Brokeback Mountain this past weekend. Don't get me wrong: Brokeback was a fine film, well deserving of the accolades piling up around it. You should see it; you should tell your friends to see it; you should hope that most of America sees it. It's a great film in terms of both its artistic quality and its political value (although both can be overstated).

But I've grown tired of people talking about Brokeback as if it's the first film ever to broach the subject of men loving men, or as if such love is a recent discovery. The 1988 film Torch Song Trilogy may be less palatable to the masses (the lead character, played by Harvey Fierstein, is a drag queen), but the love between Arnold (Fierstein) and Alan (Matthew Broderick) is palpable and moving. And unlike Brokeback, Torch Song's lead character insists on being true to himself, despite the consequences. Rent it if you haven't seen it.

The buzz surrounding Brokeback has reminded me frequently of Torch Song, not because Torch Song generated a similar buzz (it didn't) but because it did for me what Brokeback is allegedly doing for audiences: send a powerful message that same-sex love is real and worthy of respect. The scenes in Torch Song where Arnold defends himself before his mother (Anne Bancroft) made my heart race.

I recall one of those scenes being replayed on a Donohue show (remember him?) in the late 80's. The topic of the show was "coming out," and the studio audience was largely negative. Then Donohue played the clip where Arnold forcefully tells his mother,

There's one more thing you better understand. I have taught myself to sew, cook, fix plumbing. I can even pat myself on the back when necessary. So I don't have to ask anyone for anything. There's nothing I need from anyone except for love and respect. Anyone who can't give me those two things has no place in my life.

The tone of the audience suddenly changed. It was difficult for them to remain hostile in the face of such sentiment. Art can move people: Torch Song did, and Brokeback will. Indeed, it already has. I was particularly struck by a review of the film by Harry Forbes in the Catholic News Service. While Forbes mentions the Catholic Church's condemnation of homosexual sex, the mention seems ambivalent, and it is overshadowed by Forbes's sympathetic reaction to the love story:

Looked at from the point of view of the need for love which everyone feels but few people can articulate, the plight of these guys is easy to understand while their way of dealing with it is likely to surprise and shock an audience.

While the actions taken by Ennis and Jack cannot be endorsed, the universal themes of love and loss ring true.

This is coming from the director of the Office for Film & Broadcasting of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops-the same church that recently banned gays from the seminary. A review in the protestant Christianity Today was similarly sympathetic.

There's no getting around it: romantic love is powerful, and beautiful, and some people experience it with persons of the same sex.

So can we expect a wave of pro-gay-marriage initiatives to sweep the country? Not a chance, for several reasons.

First, because the people who most need to watch this film won't. The ranch hands in Wyoming that it portrays are far different from the NPR listeners who are likely to go see it.

Second, because people can read different messages into this film. Some will think that the Jack and Ennis's love should be supported; others, that they should be pitied.

Third, and perhaps most important, because people are lazy, and they have short memories. I bet plenty of the people who voted for anti-gay initiatives in the last year saw Philadelphia in 1993 and wept when Antonio Banderas challenged the hospital officials who wanted him to leave Tom Hanks's bedside: "Are you telling me I am not family?" Where are these audience members now?

The lesson is that we must keep telling our stories, not just in the occasional movie but in our day-to-day lives.