Brokeback Mountain

The movie Brokeback Mountain opened here in Madison, Wisconsin yesterday. My partner, Jim, just left on a week-long business trip yesterday morning, so I went out to see it with a couple of our friends last night. Jim is planning to see it on the road somewhere. Maybe we'll see it again together when he gets back.

It is a sad movie about two men, Ennis and Jack, who fall in love, but never manage to build a relationship beyond getting together for occasional, romantic fishing trips over the course of twenty years. Jack shares with Ennis his dream of their building a ranch--a home--together, but Ennis rules that out because of his fear of society's deadly brutality towards those it marks as "queer." As a boy Ennis had been forced by his father to see the mutilated corpse of a man who had lived with his male partner on a neighboring ranch, and was taught that this is what happens to "queers." Indeed, events seem to demonstrate that though they are far from "flaunting their homosexuality," Ennis and Jack find it impossible to conceal "the love that dare not speak its name" despite their efforts to conform.

It took courage in the pre-Stonewall years (the story begins in 1963) for two men to build a life together--and some men had that courage. Frankly, it still takes courage. But for Ennis and Jack there was only decades of months and years of separation broken only by the occasional "fishing trip" where no fish are caught, and the fishing gear remains dry. After that first summer when they met camping out herding sheep together on the near isolation of Brokeback mountain, their first, painful separation lasts four years. Both men meet and marry beautiful and good women and father children. Then Jack makes contact again with Ennis and a lifetime of painful separations and brief, joyous, bittersweet reunions ensues.

The same issue of the local entertainment weekly that announced the opening here of Brokeback Mountain carried the story of two gay men being beaten outside a "cowboy" bar in a Madison suburb by "cowboys" who called them "fags." Unlike the Madison police, the suburban police did not seem to take seriously what is, by definition under Wisconsin law, a hate crime. We do have hate crime laws in Wisconsin, and I'm glad of it. I realize some people bizarrely think hate crime laws somehow come under the heading of "special rights" that gays and other minorities do not deserve, as though being singled out for assault because one is a member of a minority group is a privilege. Hate crimes are the means by which society has informally but effectively exercised tyranny over disfavored minorities. Ennis learned this lesson well, and so failed to accept the chance Jack offered him again and again to build a life with the one person he really loved.

Yelling "faggot" at some stranger and beating the crap out of him is the traditional way our culture seeks to keep all gay people in their place, living in fear, hiding in the closet. Just as painting a swastika on a synagogue is more than a simple act of vandalism but an act of intimidation aimed at oppressing a despised minority, "fag bashing" is more than a simple act of assault. Indeed, assaults on gays and other disfavored minorities are often far more brutal than other assaults. It is said that Brokeback mountain is actually located not far from the place where young Matthew Shepard had the life beaten out of him.

Personally, I could claim to have made a courageous choice in "coming out" as a gay man thirty-five years ago despite the fact that that decision slammed the door on my life-long aspiration to "preach the Gospel" as an ordained United Methodist preacher. From time to time I reflect on that choice. I have only to reflect on those I've known who've remained in the closet for the sake of a carreer in the Methodist ministry to reaffirm the choice I made to accept (as Ennis would not accept) the opportunity to build a home (and a family) with the man I love. But I do not claim to have extraordinary courage--it takes some courage in every life just to really live. Ennis and Jack were unable to really live, our homophobic culture tragically robbed them of the opportunity.