I Love My Dead Gay Cowboy

One more quotation from Chris Freeman's article on Brokeback Mountain. Tom Gregory, the collector who bought Jack and Ennis's shirts, told Freeman in an interview:

I think Brokeback was so cathartic for my friends because it allowed them to see themselves represented in some way that they hoped, when the movie had a wider release, would make us more acceptable in 2005. It was a hopeful movie for us. For the first time, I think a lot of gay people really thought that finally, now, when people see what we're really like, this persecution will cease [113].

Gregory also told Freeman,

When Ennis says, "Jack, I swear," it is a powerful line. What was he swearing to? I swear I love you? I swear I wish it could have been different? I think it's a great slogan for gay America [114].

It might be that in the first quotation, Gregory was not describing a sentiment he agreed with; it sounds that way to me. I'm sure that a lot of gay men did think that a melodramatic movie would make the persecution cease, though looking at the past six years I think that hope has been decisively dashed. Such a wish is magical thinking, to my mind, but it's typical of American attitudes in general to believe that a single intervention, whether a movie or a heroic African-American ascending to the presidency, would produce fundamental and lasting change without any need for anyone to do more.

Even more mind-boggling to me is the bit about "when people see what we're really like." Again, this is a movie, with the gay characters played by straight actors, far more attractive than the majority of American men straight or gay. (Gyllenhaal and Ledger are also more glamorous than the characters as they are described in the original story.) The characters are not at all representative of American gay men. I've written before about the film that "Middle-class gay men especially were excited about a love story involving trailer trash they’d have scorned in real life." As Brokeback Book's editor William R. Handley reports,

Noah Tsika told me that when he saw the film in New York, among the many gay men who had dressed up as cowboys for the occasion, one was heard to complain on the way out of the theater, "I didn't realize they [Jack and Ennis] were going to be white trash!" [11]

I've long thought that a major weakness of the assimilationist gay movement is its fundamental dishonesty. It tries to sell to straight America a false image of gay men, not "what we're really like," not even what we wish we were like, but what the movement thinks will sell. "What we're really like" may include a few men like Jack and Ennis, but it also includes drag queens and leathermen, collectors of movie memorabilia and hairdressers. The scary thing is that so many gay men could look at Brokeback Mountain and think, in all seriousness, That's what we're really like!

The other factor involved is pity. Feel sorry for us! the assimilationist gay movement cries. We can't get married! We get queer-bashed! And if you don't kill us, we'll kill ourselves! Just so, it's too easy to focus on Ennis swearing something inchoate to a dead man's shirt. If Jack were to come back to life, with his inconvenient, unrealistic and scary demands that the two of them build a life together, it's a safe bet that Ennis would forget his fine sentiments and oaths. A dead gay son is so much easier to love than a living one.

Slogans are all very well. They're probably useful in building a movement for social justice. But they're no substitute for getting out there and doing the hard work. I saw Brokeback Mountain in the theater twice, and bought the DVD but never watched it all the way through. I wonder now if one thing that put me off watching it again was the absurd things that so many other gay men said about it. Not that that's any excuse.

Incidentally, the next article after Freeman's is about the installation of the two shirts at the Autry International Center, and it mentions the International Gay Rodeo Association, another relevant part of American and GLBT history. (I first heard about it in Armistead Maupin's Further Tales of the City, published in 1982.) Annie Proulx preferred to see gay men in the West as pitiful, helpless isolates; the reality is often different, and the IGRA is one useful corrective.

I Love My Dead Gay Cowboy

One more quotation from Chris Freeman's article on Brokeback Mountain. Tom Gregory, the collector who bought Jack and Ennis's shirts, told Freeman in an interview:

I think Brokeback was so cathartic for my friends because it allowed them to see themselves represented in some way that they hoped, when the movie had a wider release, would make us more acceptable in 2005. It was a hopeful movie for us. For the first time, I think a lot of gay people really thought that finally, now, when people see what we're really like, this persecution will cease [113].

Gregory also told Freeman,

When Ennis says, "Jack, I swear," it is a powerful line. What was he swearing to? I swear I love you? I swear I wish it could have been different? I think it's a great slogan for gay America [114].

It might be that in the first quotation, Gregory was not describing a sentiment he agreed with; it sounds that way to me. I'm sure that a lot of gay men did think that a melodramatic movie would make the persecution cease, though looking at the past six years I think that hope has been decisively dashed. Such a wish is magical thinking, to my mind, but it's typical of American attitudes in general to believe that a single intervention, whether a movie or a heroic African-American ascending to the presidency, would produce fundamental and lasting change without any need for anyone to do more.

Even more mind-boggling to me is the bit about "when people see what we're really like." Again, this is a movie, with the gay characters played by straight actors, far more attractive than the majority of American men straight or gay. (Gyllenhaal and Ledger are also more glamorous than the characters as they are described in the original story.) The characters are not at all representative of American gay men. I've written before about the film that "Middle-class gay men especially were excited about a love story involving trailer trash they’d have scorned in real life." As Brokeback Book's editor William R. Handley reports,

Noah Tsika told me that when he saw the film in New York, among the many gay men who had dressed up as cowboys for the occasion, one was heard to complain on the way out of the theater, "I didn't realize they [Jack and Ennis] were going to be white trash!" [11]

I've long thought that a major weakness of the assimilationist gay movement is its fundamental dishonesty. It tries to sell to straight America a false image of gay men, not "what we're really like," not even what we wish we were like, but what the movement thinks will sell. "What we're really like" may include a few men like Jack and Ennis, but it also includes drag queens and leathermen, collectors of movie memorabilia and hairdressers. The scary thing is that so many gay men could look at Brokeback Mountain and think, in all seriousness, That's what we're really like!

The other factor involved is pity. Feel sorry for us! the assimilationist gay movement cries. We can't get married! We get queer-bashed! And if you don't kill us, we'll kill ourselves! Just so, it's too easy to focus on Ennis swearing something inchoate to a dead man's shirt. If Jack were to come back to life, with his inconvenient, unrealistic and scary demands that the two of them build a life together, it's a safe bet that Ennis would forget his fine sentiments and oaths. A dead gay son is so much easier to love than a living one.

Slogans are all very well. They're probably useful in building a movement for social justice. But they're no substitute for getting out there and doing the hard work. I saw Brokeback Mountain in the theater twice, and bought the DVD but never watched it all the way through. I wonder now if one thing that put me off watching it again was the absurd things that so many other gay men said about it. Not that that's any excuse.

Incidentally, the next article after Freeman's is about the installation of the two shirts at the Autry International Center, and it mentions the International Gay Rodeo Association, another relevant part of American and GLBT history. (I first heard about it in Armistead Maupin's Further Tales of the City, published in 1982.) Annie Proulx preferred to see gay men in the West as pitiful, helpless isolates; the reality is often different, and the IGRA is one useful corrective.

The Exceptions That Prove the Rule

I'm glad to report that succeeding articles in The Brokeback Book have been much better than David Leavitt's opening clunker. Even Daniel Mendelssohn, whose The Elusive Embrace: Desire and the Riddle of Identity (Knopf, 1999) annoyed me so much a decade ago, wrote a very smart review of the film for the New York Review of Books that is reprinted here. After that, Mun-hou Lo's "Backs Unbroken: Ang Lee, Forbearance, and the Closet" is a very interesting look at the concepts of repression and forbearance in Chinese culture, comparing Brokeback Mountain to Lee's earlier films The Wedding Banquet and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon in their treatment of this theme. James Morrison's "Back to the Ranch Ag'in: Brokeback Mountain and Gay Civil Rights" covers a lot of ground, including male romances in American literature as analyzed by the critic Leslie Fiedler, and the role of nature in the story and the film.

But now I'm in the middle of Chris Freeman's "'Jack, I Swear': Some Promises to Gay Culture from Mainstream Hollywood," which centers on the talismanic shirts from the film, bought by a gay collector in 2008. Freeman writes at one point:

What we know, as viewers with some historical and critical distance from this imaginary but all too real scenario, is that a life together for lovers like Jack and Ennis was almost unimaginable, particularly in the West of legend [111].

I guess it depends partly on what you mean by "lovers like Jack and Ennis" and "unimaginable." We know of quite a few male couples who lived together in US history, though we can rarely be sure that they were lovers, for very good reasons. To me that means that a life together for two men is quite imaginable, even if they didn't bugger each other on the front porch of the old homestead every Saturday night. In James Fenimore Cooper's novel The Pioneers, set in the 1780s, the aged Deerslayer and Chingachook (called Mohegan) live together in a cabin. In Cooper's Red Rover, two male friends, partners since they survived a shipwreck together, have raised a foundling to adulthood. In The Pilot, two seamen "wind up living together in a remote cabin deep in the North American wilderness" (Chris Packard, Queer Cowboys [Palgrave Macmillan, 2006], 34). Abraham Lincoln shared not just a room but a bed with Joshua Speed for four years after his arrival in Springfield, Illinois. The fantasy of two male friends running a ranch together recurs in movie Westerns of the 1940s and 1950s, and is referred to in John Steinbeck's short novel Of Mice and Men. I'm not claiming that any of these couples were sodomitical, but that's not the point: the point is that two loving friends could and did live together, not just in the wilderness but in town, without exciting suspicion. (Incidentally, Patricial Nell Warren gives a much more nuanced and informed account of this phenomenon in her essay "Real Gay Cowboys and Brokeback Mountain", included in The Brokeback Book.)

(I haven't mentioned female couples here because of the male-to-male focus of Brokeback Mountain, but of course there's a long tradition of women living together too.)

Freeman goes on:

Domestic gay life in big cities wasn't a great deal different: an urban gay male couple during the early 1960s, when the film's first summer is set, was a rare thing. In his memoir My Lives, author Edmund White notes that when he first moved to New York in 1962 and lived with his lover, "two men living together was still a new thing in those days -- at least we knew only one other couple" [112].

Freeman then cites the Only Gays In The Village of Los Angeles, Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy -- "and in their case, the exception proved the rule that it was almost never done" (112). Bachardy and Isherwood stood out because of Isherwood's fame as a writer, the thirty-year difference in their ages, and their refusal to pretend that they weren't a couple; they were an exception to the rule of the closet, not to a supposed rule of male couples not living together. (It would have been nearly impossible for them to try to pass as roommates, given the age difference.) Even in Los Angeles, there had been the earlier case of Cary Grant and Randoph Scott, who lived together openly as bachelors in the 1930s -- so blatant that they were latent. Again, the nature of their relationship remains controversial, but the point is that two men could and did live together; there was nothing "unimaginable" about it.

It's always dangerous to overgeneralize from what "we knew," especially in a city as big as New York. There were several famous male couples living in New York during the 1960s, among them Gore Vidal and Howard Austen, William Flanagan and Edward Albee, Paul Cadmus and Jon Andersson, Donald Windham and Sandy Campbell, Truman Capote and Jack Dunphy, and others less famous, such as the diarist Donald Vining and his partner Richmond Purinton. There were others; these are just some examples I can remember off the top of my head. Those who weren't famous mostly aren't recorded, so it's easy to pretend they didn't exist. But it might have been easier for the obscure than for the famous to live together openly.

I admit that there was plenty of social pressure against same-sex couples living together, but the fact remains that a good many people defied it or worked around it. Once again I find myself wondering why gay people are so often determined to erase our history.

The Exceptions That Prove the Rule

I'm glad to report that succeeding articles in The Brokeback Book have been much better than David Leavitt's opening clunker. Even Daniel Mendelssohn, whose The Elusive Embrace: Desire and the Riddle of Identity (Knopf, 1999) annoyed me so much a decade ago, wrote a very smart review of the film for the New York Review of Books that is reprinted here. After that, Mun-hou Lo's "Backs Unbroken: Ang Lee, Forbearance, and the Closet" is a very interesting look at the concepts of repression and forbearance in Chinese culture, comparing Brokeback Mountain to Lee's earlier films The Wedding Banquet and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon in their treatment of this theme. James Morrison's "Back to the Ranch Ag'in: Brokeback Mountain and Gay Civil Rights" covers a lot of ground, including male romances in American literature as analyzed by the critic Leslie Fiedler, and the role of nature in the story and the film.

But now I'm in the middle of Chris Freeman's "'Jack, I Swear': Some Promises to Gay Culture from Mainstream Hollywood," which centers on the talismanic shirts from the film, bought by a gay collector in 2008. Freeman writes at one point:

What we know, as viewers with some historical and critical distance from this imaginary but all too real scenario, is that a life together for lovers like Jack and Ennis was almost unimaginable, particularly in the West of legend [111].

I guess it depends partly on what you mean by "lovers like Jack and Ennis" and "unimaginable." We know of quite a few male couples who lived together in US history, though we can rarely be sure that they were lovers, for very good reasons. To me that means that a life together for two men is quite imaginable, even if they didn't bugger each other on the front porch of the old homestead every Saturday night. In James Fenimore Cooper's novel The Pioneers, set in the 1780s, the aged Deerslayer and Chingachook (called Mohegan) live together in a cabin. In Cooper's Red Rover, two male friends, partners since they survived a shipwreck together, have raised a foundling to adulthood. In The Pilot, two seamen "wind up living together in a remote cabin deep in the North American wilderness" (Chris Packard, Queer Cowboys [Palgrave Macmillan, 2006], 34). Abraham Lincoln shared not just a room but a bed with Joshua Speed for four years after his arrival in Springfield, Illinois. The fantasy of two male friends running a ranch together recurs in movie Westerns of the 1940s and 1950s, and is referred to in John Steinbeck's short novel Of Mice and Men. I'm not claiming that any of these couples were sodomitical, but that's not the point: the point is that two loving friends could and did live together, not just in the wilderness but in town, without exciting suspicion. (Incidentally, Patricial Nell Warren gives a much more nuanced and informed account of this phenomenon in her essay "Real Gay Cowboys and Brokeback Mountain", included in The Brokeback Book.)

(I haven't mentioned female couples here because of the male-to-male focus of Brokeback Mountain, but of course there's a long tradition of women living together too.)

Freeman goes on:

Domestic gay life in big cities wasn't a great deal different: an urban gay male couple during the early 1960s, when the film's first summer is set, was a rare thing. In his memoir My Lives, author Edmund White notes that when he first moved to New York in 1962 and lived with his lover, "two men living together was still a new thing in those days -- at least we knew only one other couple" [112].

Freeman then cites the Only Gays In The Village of Los Angeles, Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy -- "and in their case, the exception proved the rule that it was almost never done" (112). Bachardy and Isherwood stood out because of Isherwood's fame as a writer, the thirty-year difference in their ages, and their refusal to pretend that they weren't a couple; they were an exception to the rule of the closet, not to a supposed rule of male couples not living together. (It would have been nearly impossible for them to try to pass as roommates, given the age difference.) Even in Los Angeles, there had been the earlier case of Cary Grant and Randoph Scott, who lived together openly as bachelors in the 1930s -- so blatant that they were latent. Again, the nature of their relationship remains controversial, but the point is that two men could and did live together; there was nothing "unimaginable" about it.

It's always dangerous to overgeneralize from what "we knew," especially in a city as big as New York. There were several famous male couples living in New York during the 1960s, among them Gore Vidal and Howard Austen, William Flanagan and Edward Albee, Paul Cadmus and Jon Andersson, Donald Windham and Sandy Campbell, Truman Capote and Jack Dunphy, and others less famous, such as the diarist Donald Vining and his partner Richmond Purinton. There were others; these are just some examples I can remember off the top of my head. Those who weren't famous mostly aren't recorded, so it's easy to pretend they didn't exist. But it might have been easier for the obscure than for the famous to live together openly.

I admit that there was plenty of social pressure against same-sex couples living together, but the fact remains that a good many people defied it or worked around it. Once again I find myself wondering why gay people are so often determined to erase our history.

Those Who Remember History Are Doomed to Bang Their Heads Against the Wall -- Forever

I've begun reading The Brokeback Book, a collection of articles on Brokeback Mountain edited by William R. Handley and published this year by the University of Nebraska Press. Some of the articles are new, but others appeared before. One of these is David Leavitt's 2005 review of the film, which originally appeared at Slate. Leavitt is a novelist himself, but that doesn't really qualify him to write about either gay fiction or gay film. He showed himself to be quite ignorant on both subjects, in fact.

Of Jack Twist's pickup of a male hustler in Juarez, Mexico, Leavitt wrote:

For just a few seconds, we get a glimpse of the urban nightscape that was the locus of the very gay movies that might have been playing, in big cities, at the moment when the scene takes place—movies like Nighthawks and Taxi zum Klo, in which sexual profligacy is at once celebrated as a form of liberation and mourned as a pallid substitute for meaningful connection.

(Nighthawks is a British film, directed by Paul Hallam, that was released in 1978; the German Taxi zum Klo, directed by Frank Ripploh, was released in 1980.) Whatever else can be said about it, Jack's connection in Ciudad Juárez is something he could have found in most smaller cities in the US, and even many small towns, and he might not even have had to pay for the sex he found there. There's nothing specifically "urban" about that "nightscape." Juárez, lying just across the border, is simply convenient for a closeted Texan whose distant boyfriend wasn't available.

Leavitt went on:

It goes without saying that Brokeback Mountain is an entirely different kind of film. Perhaps it takes a woman to create a tale in which two men experience sex and love as a single thunderbolt, welding them together for life; certainly Proulx's story is a far cry from such canonical gay novels as Edmund White's The Farewell Symphony or Allan Hollinghurst's The Swimming Pool Library, which poeticize urban promiscuity and sexual adventuring. Proulx, by contrast, exalts coupledom by linking it to nature.

I suppose that The Swimming Pool Library (1988) and The Farewell Symphony (1997) are "canonical," but they're not the only canonical gay male novels. I presume Leavitt chose these two to make Brokeback Mountain look as utterly different from "canonical gay novels" as possible. He could just as well have cited his own novel, The Lost Language of Cranes (1986), which also depicted "urban promiscuity and sexual adventuring." But he chose to ignore any number of other canonical gay male novels built around coupledom, from Christopher Isherwood's A Single Man (1964) to Patricia Nell Warren's The Front Runner (1973) to Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City (1976-2010) to most of Christopher Bram's novels, staring with Surprising Myself (1987), and so on down to the present.

The same is true of films. I liked Brokeback Mountain when it was first released, but I think I was less impressed by it than many people were, including many gay men, because I knew what had gone before it; it didn't feel unique and unprecedented to me. When I think of gay male films, most of the best and most interesting were made independently of Hollywood, which preferred to use gay men and lesbians as symbols of dehumanized evil or mockery. From A Very Natural Thing (1974) to Parting Glances (1986) to Torch Song Trilogy (1988) to Brokeback Mountain director Ang Lee's The Wedding Banquet (1993), independent cinema about gay men can't be reduced to a celebration of urban sexual adventuring opposed to coupledom in a state of nature. For that matter, Richard Amory's 1966 pulp Song of the Loon and its sequels depicted sexual adventuring and romantic coupledom in the nineteenth-century Pacific Northwest. Song of the Loon was even made into a 1970 softcore film.

Remember that, except for The Swimming Pool Library, we're just talking about films and books produced in the United States. Look to traditions of homosexual literature in Europe, Latin America, Asia, and elsewhere, and Leavitt's account stands exposed more nakedly as the narrow and simplistic construct it is. It doesn't help that in the 1990s Leavitt co-edited an anthology of "homosexual literature in English from 1748 to 1914", and another of international gay writing. Of course, they may be as inadequate as this review; I haven't seen them. But it's hard to believe he's really as ignorant as he comes across in his review of Brokeback Mountain.

And of course, I've done a lot of complaining about the reductive and inaccurate accounts of gay history and literature produced by academics. Or about the distorted picture of gay history promulgated by self-serving hacks like Andrew Sullivan. (Leavitt has a history of the same sort of distortion, most notably a baffling essay on how Andrew Holleran's Dancer from the Dance freaked him out as a young fagling. Everyone's entitled to his own opinion, of course, but Leavitt seriously misread the book. Lev Raphael wrote a critical response to Leavitt for the Lambda Book Review in 1995, which unfortunately isn't available online.) This is a problem that extends beyond GLBTQ history, but I feel it acutely in that domain. Handley no doubt included Leavitt's review as a historical curiosity; I hope that other pieces in The Brokeback Book are better.

Those Who Remember History Are Doomed to Bang Their Heads Against the Wall -- Forever

I've begun reading The Brokeback Book, a collection of articles on Brokeback Mountain edited by William R. Handley and published this year by the University of Nebraska Press. Some of the articles are new, but others appeared before. One of these is David Leavitt's 2005 review of the film, which originally appeared at Slate. Leavitt is a novelist himself, but that doesn't really qualify him to write about either gay fiction or gay film. He showed himself to be quite ignorant on both subjects, in fact.

Of Jack Twist's pickup of a male hustler in Juarez, Mexico, Leavitt wrote:

For just a few seconds, we get a glimpse of the urban nightscape that was the locus of the very gay movies that might have been playing, in big cities, at the moment when the scene takes place—movies like Nighthawks and Taxi zum Klo, in which sexual profligacy is at once celebrated as a form of liberation and mourned as a pallid substitute for meaningful connection.

(Nighthawks is a British film, directed by Paul Hallam, that was released in 1978; the German Taxi zum Klo, directed by Frank Ripploh, was released in 1980.) Whatever else can be said about it, Jack's connection in Ciudad Juárez is something he could have found in most smaller cities in the US, and even many small towns, and he might not even have had to pay for the sex he found there. There's nothing specifically "urban" about that "nightscape." Juárez, lying just across the border, is simply convenient for a closeted Texan whose distant boyfriend wasn't available.

Leavitt went on:

It goes without saying that Brokeback Mountain is an entirely different kind of film. Perhaps it takes a woman to create a tale in which two men experience sex and love as a single thunderbolt, welding them together for life; certainly Proulx's story is a far cry from such canonical gay novels as Edmund White's The Farewell Symphony or Allan Hollinghurst's The Swimming Pool Library, which poeticize urban promiscuity and sexual adventuring. Proulx, by contrast, exalts coupledom by linking it to nature.

I suppose that The Swimming Pool Library (1988) and The Farewell Symphony (1997) are "canonical," but they're not the only canonical gay male novels. I presume Leavitt chose these two to make Brokeback Mountain look as utterly different from "canonical gay novels" as possible. He could just as well have cited his own novel, The Lost Language of Cranes (1986), which also depicted "urban promiscuity and sexual adventuring." But he chose to ignore any number of other canonical gay male novels built around coupledom, from Christopher Isherwood's A Single Man (1964) to Patricia Nell Warren's The Front Runner (1973) to Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City (1976-2010) to most of Christopher Bram's novels, staring with Surprising Myself (1987), and so on down to the present.

The same is true of films. I liked Brokeback Mountain when it was first released, but I think I was less impressed by it than many people were, including many gay men, because I knew what had gone before it; it didn't feel unique and unprecedented to me. When I think of gay male films, most of the best and most interesting were made independently of Hollywood, which preferred to use gay men and lesbians as symbols of dehumanized evil or mockery. From A Very Natural Thing (1974) to Parting Glances (1986) to Torch Song Trilogy (1988) to Brokeback Mountain director Ang Lee's The Wedding Banquet (1993), independent cinema about gay men can't be reduced to a celebration of urban sexual adventuring opposed to coupledom in a state of nature. For that matter, Richard Amory's 1966 pulp Song of the Loon and its sequels depicted sexual adventuring and romantic coupledom in the nineteenth-century Pacific Northwest. Song of the Loon was even made into a 1970 softcore film.

Remember that, except for The Swimming Pool Library, we're just talking about films and books produced in the United States. Look to traditions of homosexual literature in Europe, Latin America, Asia, and elsewhere, and Leavitt's account stands exposed more nakedly as the narrow and simplistic construct it is. It doesn't help that in the 1990s Leavitt co-edited an anthology of "homosexual literature in English from 1748 to 1914", and another of international gay writing. Of course, they may be as inadequate as this review; I haven't seen them. But it's hard to believe he's really as ignorant as he comes across in his review of Brokeback Mountain.

And of course, I've done a lot of complaining about the reductive and inaccurate accounts of gay history and literature produced by academics. Or about the distorted picture of gay history promulgated by self-serving hacks like Andrew Sullivan. (Leavitt has a history of the same sort of distortion, most notably a baffling essay on how Andrew Holleran's Dancer from the Dance freaked him out as a young fagling. Everyone's entitled to his own opinion, of course, but Leavitt seriously misread the book. Lev Raphael wrote a critical response to Leavitt for the Lambda Book Review in 1995, which unfortunately isn't available online.) This is a problem that extends beyond GLBTQ history, but I feel it acutely in that domain. Handley no doubt included Leavitt's review as a historical curiosity; I hope that other pieces in The Brokeback Book are better.

I'm Not a Queer, But My Buddy Is

It occurred to me today that in many cases it might be better to substitute the term "common sense" for "essentialism" in many discussions of gender and sexuality. That's partly because I don't much respect common sense, of course, and much of what Everybody Knows about men and women, queers and normal folks, doesn't deserve much respect. It seems to me that if you pay attention you must very soon start to notice all the gaping holes in what Everybody Knows, and I've found that most people, if you get them alone, will admit this. But it's also Common Sense that you don't point out those gaping holes in public. I have to remember what happened to the kid who pointed out that the Emperor didn't really have anything on: she was dragged away by Security, who tortured her for days until she named her communist terrorist accomplices, and then she and her whole family were executed, publicly and slowly.

Common sense is very powerful stuff. The common-sense notion of the Queer as wrongly sexed -- the she-male, the girlyman, the he-she, the diesel dyke -- was taken over by nineteenth-century doctors and christened the Invert, the Third Sex, the Homosexual, and this notion still underlies most "scientific" discourse today. It leads to hopeless contradictions, but these are ignored.

Social construction theories have their own contradictions, but the reason they inspire so much fury among such a wide range of people is that they go against Common Sense. What everyone can plainly see is not always true; often people see plainly what isn't there at all. This bothers those people who, in Clifford Geertz's words, are "afraid reality is going to go away unless we believe really hard in it" -- if I don't believe everything you believe, then obviously I don't believe in anything. That's just common sense.

Anyway. One of the more revelatory examples of the trouble with Common Sense was Brokeback Mountain, whose success inspired a great deal of fussing over the story, Universality, whether the characters were gay, whether the characters were cowboys, and so on. The best writing on I saw on the subject at the time was Larry Gross's piece "Year of the Queer: Hollywood and Homosexuality", especially page 3 and after, though Alan Vanneman's snark-laden piece for Bright Lights Film Journal also sticks in my mind, notably for its takedown of the film's tagline "Love Is a Force of Nature": "We humans stopped doing 'Nature' 50,000 years ago, when we learned to talk good and paint pretty pictures on a wall."

Myself, being an anti-platonist, a social constructionist, a relativist, virtually a nihilist, I saw the movie twice without wondering whether Jack and Ennis were gay. If you'd asked me at the time I'd probably have said it was because I am gay and had no investment in denying that two men who had passionate sex with each other over a twenty-year period were gay; but also that if two men could have passionate sex with each other for twenty-years without being gay, that would be a fine poke in the eye of Common Sense too, so it was a win-win situation.

So imagine my surprise when I found Stephen O. Murray's review of the film at Epinions.com. I have a lot of respect for Murray, who's a controversial figure in the field of whatever-you-want-to-call-it: he was working before Queer Theory and kept on going throughout Queer Theory's hegemony; he's as cranky, crusty and curmudgeonly as I aspire to be; he's ferociously learned, with a merciless Bullshit Detector. I've read most of his books, at least those published since 1990 or so. But on Brokeback Mountain he bogged down in the question of whether Jack and Ennis were gay, and (In My Hubristic Opinion) he came down wrong on just about every point. After reading his review I wrote a rejoinder, which I then sat on for a year or so before I got an Epinions account and finally posted it there. I'm now posting it here, with a few very minor changes, as a sort of prologue or overture to the big Social Constructionist question.
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Are they gay? Who knows? It's amazing how much doublethink turns up even in gay reviewers, though. Sociologist Stephen O. Murray, for instance, agrees with Heath Ledger that Ennis is "not gay", as if Heath Ledger were an expert in such matters. Ennis says, "I ain't no queer" -- that's a noun, not an adjective -- and Jack says, "Me neither." Murray of all people should know better. He's the guy who's famous for writing that he has "been told by young Latinos with semen inside their rectums that they `never get fucked.'" Denials of this kind are not always false; but they can't be taken as always true either. Why sure, if they say they aren't queers, they must not be! Neither was Rock Hudson, or Kevin Spacey, or Nathan Lane until he changed his mind and said he was! And Richard Nixon wasn't a crook -- he said so!

Ennis refers to "this thing, it grabs hold of us". Does this prove that they have been possessed by a spirit that forces them to have sex together? In other writings Murray jeers at Foucauldians who indulge in what he calls "discourse creationism," but that is what he's doing here. What a (fictional!) character says is always true, to be taken at face value. If you don't say you're gay or think of yourself as gay, you're not -- until you say you are, and then, presto change-O!

Murray overlooks the scene late in the film where Ennis asks Jack if he ever gets the feeling that everybody is looking at him, and they know? Fit that question together with Ennis's childhood memory of being forced by his father (his hand firm on the back of the boy's neck) to look at the mutilated corpse of a queerbashed gay man, and it's significant that the word "fear" or its synonyms never appear in Murray's descriptions of Ennis's feelings. I thought it was obvious, for example, that among the emotions Ennis felt when his ex-wife confronted him about his relationship with Jack, was abject screaming terror. ""Panic" (as in "homosexual panic") also comes to mind. Maybe less obvious, but also explained by the memory, is Ennis's crawling into an alley to weep and retch and punch a wall as their first separation begins.

As Murray points out, the idea that he might be killed for loving another man was not at all paranoid or unrealistic. His unwillingness to leave Wyoming for somewhat safer climes -- there is, after all, plenty of horrific antigay violence in cities like New York and San Francisco, it is not limited to rural areas -- is interesting: Ennis is terrified, but (like a horse in a burning barn?) he won't leave. Murray writes, "Ennis believes that men cannot mate for life", but I don't see how the film supports this claim. I think Ennis knows men can mate for life -- the two "old guys" did just that -- but he's obsessed with the fear that their lives will be cut short by violence. His murderous jealousy also is evidence that he knows he is mated to Jack for life.

Murray takes for granted that Jack is the queer one, because he makes "the first (and second and various later) move"; Ennis is a straight guy who happens to fall in love with another man. (Why is "gay" an illicit descriptor, but "straight" isn't?) Yes, Jack makes the first move, but what he offers is not his ass but his cock. Ennis responds by penetrating him. Tradition has it, of course, that Penetrator equals Real Man equals Not Queer. But Ennis apparently didn't need any time to become erect himself; was he lying there hard the whole time? I wouldn't be surprised. In the original story, Proulx endowed Ennis with a mystic knowledge of what to do. Perhaps because he'd been thinking about doing it even before he met Jack? A straight guy isn't supposed to respond to another man's sexual offer by turning him over. Ennis's reluctance to share the tent in the first place is not proof that he hadn't noticed Jack erotically -- rather the opposite. As for the later moves, I'm not sure how Murray is counting them, but it is Ennis who comes to Jack in the tent to initiate their second night together. I think that's crucial, for it shows that Ennis is not just a guy who can't say no.

Murray says that "they are not cowboys. They ride horses in their line of work, but they are responsible for sheep, and anyone who has seen very many westerns knows that the cattle barons and the would-be sheep-raisers are recurrent foes. Jack, for a time, is a 'rodeo cowboy,' riding bulls." After Ennis's summer tending sheep with Jack, he works on ranches with cattle. I think that Murray is defining "cowboy" far too strictly here, and I really don't understand why some people work themselves into such a lather over whether this is a "gay cowboy" movie or not; is it because cowboys aren't universal enough, or their feelings don't matter? Or is it because cowboys are too universal, and they can't be gay or America will fall? I really don't get it.

As Murray also complains, "The word 'gay' is bandied about very loosely in regard to the movie"; but then, "gay" does not have a strict meaning. "Ennis and Jack have homosexual sex, but neither has a self-identification as gay (and, as I have explained at considerable length in American Gay, self-identification, at least intrapsychically, is the criterion of gay)." American Gay is a fine book, but while Murray can define "gay" strictly for his own writing purposes, he can't require other people to hew to his definition, and most don't.

He goes on say that Brokeback is not a "gay movie" because "The story was written by a straight woman, adapted for the screen by a straight couple, directed by a straight man, and stars straight movie stars". So, Of Human Bondage is a homosexual novel because, though it has no gay content, it was written by a homosexual? What constitutes a "gay novel" or "gay play" or "gay movie" has been much debated over the years. Gay playwright Robert Patrick playfully defined a gay play as a play that sleeps with other plays of the same sex. Murray's definition might work for him, but I think that for most people, a movie with central same-sex content is a "gay movie" regardless of the sexual orientation of the writers, directors, or stars, or second assistant grip.

Murray continues:

In rural Wyoming it seems plausible for someone who spends his waking hours outdoors not to know of the emergence of gay communities during the 1970s. It, however, seems more difficult to imagine that by the early 1980s Jack would not have learned that somewhere (in Texas, even) there were gay bars and gay circles and gay neighborhoods. Jack is less isolated (both in general and from media) than Ennis. Instead of crossing the Rio Grande at Ciudad Juarez, he could have tooled over to Houston... but he didn't, and continued to dream of splendid isolation a deux on a ranch with Ennis (who never left Wyoming). I'm definitely not saying that Jack wanted an urban gay lifestyle. What he did want was more conceivable and obtainable after "almost twenty years" (a specification that crops up at one of their brief reunions in the wilds).

That reminds me: how does Ennis know "what they got for boys like you in Mexico", if he's so ignorant and isolated and all? I suspect that Jack's self-limitation is best explained as a result of Proulx's naivete (in interviews she's made much of her personal ignorance, as an old straight woman), and perhaps her own wish to keep her characters uncontaminated by urban gay lifestyles. But I've also known gay men who, even though they lived in cities with gay resources, refused to use them, or even to admit that they were there, while dreaming that Jack Armstrong the All-American Boy would come knocking on their doors one night and take them away from all this. Murray should know that "gay" is still a stigmatized identity, and that closet cases often have intricate strategies to avoid applying it to themselves even "intrapsychically." There's a widespread tendency to treat them as sophisticated thinkers so soaked with integrity that they won't apply a label to themselves unless it truly fits, no matter how much they want to, when it really is the other way around. Think, by analogy, of the difficulty of the strategies people have for identifying themselves as alcoholics. Just because Jack is less paralyzed than Ennis, it doesn't mean he's ready to move to the Montrose in Houston. (Where he might also be queer-bashed.) But then, he was only 39 when he died. Murray must know, as I do, men who came out later in life than that.

Brokeback Mountain, Murray declares ex cathedra, "is a story of the tragic internalization of homo-hatred, not a movie about `gay cowboys.'" False antithesis. The movie is both, and more.

I'm Not a Queer, But My Buddy Is

It occurred to me today that in many cases it might be better to substitute the term "common sense" for "essentialism" in many discussions of gender and sexuality. That's partly because I don't much respect common sense, of course, and much of what Everybody Knows about men and women, queers and normal folks, doesn't deserve much respect. It seems to me that if you pay attention you must very soon start to notice all the gaping holes in what Everybody Knows, and I've found that most people, if you get them alone, will admit this. But it's also Common Sense that you don't point out those gaping holes in public. I have to remember what happened to the kid who pointed out that the Emperor didn't really have anything on: she was dragged away by Security, who tortured her for days until she named her communist terrorist accomplices, and then she and her whole family were executed, publicly and slowly.

Common sense is very powerful stuff. The common-sense notion of the Queer as wrongly sexed -- the she-male, the girlyman, the he-she, the diesel dyke -- was taken over by nineteenth-century doctors and christened the Invert, the Third Sex, the Homosexual, and this notion still underlies most "scientific" discourse today. It leads to hopeless contradictions, but these are ignored.

Social construction theories have their own contradictions, but the reason they inspire so much fury among such a wide range of people is that they go against Common Sense. What everyone can plainly see is not always true; often people see plainly what isn't there at all. This bothers those people who, in Clifford Geertz's words, are "afraid reality is going to go away unless we believe really hard in it" -- if I don't believe everything you believe, then obviously I don't believe in anything. That's just common sense.

Anyway. One of the more revelatory examples of the trouble with Common Sense was Brokeback Mountain, whose success inspired a great deal of fussing over the story, Universality, whether the characters were gay, whether the characters were cowboys, and so on. The best writing on I saw on the subject at the time was Larry Gross's piece "Year of the Queer: Hollywood and Homosexuality", especially page 3 and after, though Alan Vanneman's snark-laden piece for Bright Lights Film Journal also sticks in my mind, notably for its takedown of the film's tagline "Love Is a Force of Nature": "We humans stopped doing 'Nature' 50,000 years ago, when we learned to talk good and paint pretty pictures on a wall."

Myself, being an anti-platonist, a social constructionist, a relativist, virtually a nihilist, I saw the movie twice without wondering whether Jack and Ennis were gay. If you'd asked me at the time I'd probably have said it was because I am gay and had no investment in denying that two men who had passionate sex with each other over a twenty-year period were gay; but also that if two men could have passionate sex with each other for twenty-years without being gay, that would be a fine poke in the eye of Common Sense too, so it was a win-win situation.

So imagine my surprise when I found Stephen O. Murray's review of the film at Epinions.com. I have a lot of respect for Murray, who's a controversial figure in the field of whatever-you-want-to-call-it: he was working before Queer Theory and kept on going throughout Queer Theory's hegemony; he's as cranky, crusty and curmudgeonly as I aspire to be; he's ferociously learned, with a merciless Bullshit Detector. I've read most of his books, at least those published since 1990 or so. But on Brokeback Mountain he bogged down in the question of whether Jack and Ennis were gay, and (In My Hubristic Opinion) he came down wrong on just about every point. After reading his review I wrote a rejoinder, which I then sat on for a year or so before I got an Epinions account and finally posted it there. I'm now posting it here, with a few very minor changes, as a sort of prologue or overture to the big Social Constructionist question.
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Are they gay? Who knows? It's amazing how much doublethink turns up even in gay reviewers, though. Sociologist Stephen O. Murray, for instance, agrees with Heath Ledger that Ennis is "not gay", as if Heath Ledger were an expert in such matters. Ennis says, "I ain't no queer" -- that's a noun, not an adjective -- and Jack says, "Me neither." Murray of all people should know better. He's the guy who's famous for writing that he has "been told by young Latinos with semen inside their rectums that they `never get fucked.'" Denials of this kind are not always false; but they can't be taken as always true either. Why sure, if they say they aren't queers, they must not be! Neither was Rock Hudson, or Kevin Spacey, or Nathan Lane until he changed his mind and said he was! And Richard Nixon wasn't a crook -- he said so!

Ennis refers to "this thing, it grabs hold of us". Does this prove that they have been possessed by a spirit that forces them to have sex together? In other writings Murray jeers at Foucauldians who indulge in what he calls "discourse creationism," but that is what he's doing here. What a (fictional!) character says is always true, to be taken at face value. If you don't say you're gay or think of yourself as gay, you're not -- until you say you are, and then, presto change-O!

Murray overlooks the scene late in the film where Ennis asks Jack if he ever gets the feeling that everybody is looking at him, and they know? Fit that question together with Ennis's childhood memory of being forced by his father (his hand firm on the back of the boy's neck) to look at the mutilated corpse of a queerbashed gay man, and it's significant that the word "fear" or its synonyms never appear in Murray's descriptions of Ennis's feelings. I thought it was obvious, for example, that among the emotions Ennis felt when his ex-wife confronted him about his relationship with Jack, was abject screaming terror. ""Panic" (as in "homosexual panic") also comes to mind. Maybe less obvious, but also explained by the memory, is Ennis's crawling into an alley to weep and retch and punch a wall as their first separation begins.

As Murray points out, the idea that he might be killed for loving another man was not at all paranoid or unrealistic. His unwillingness to leave Wyoming for somewhat safer climes -- there is, after all, plenty of horrific antigay violence in cities like New York and San Francisco, it is not limited to rural areas -- is interesting: Ennis is terrified, but (like a horse in a burning barn?) he won't leave. Murray writes, "Ennis believes that men cannot mate for life", but I don't see how the film supports this claim. I think Ennis knows men can mate for life -- the two "old guys" did just that -- but he's obsessed with the fear that their lives will be cut short by violence. His murderous jealousy also is evidence that he knows he is mated to Jack for life.

Murray takes for granted that Jack is the queer one, because he makes "the first (and second and various later) move"; Ennis is a straight guy who happens to fall in love with another man. (Why is "gay" an illicit descriptor, but "straight" isn't?) Yes, Jack makes the first move, but what he offers is not his ass but his cock. Ennis responds by penetrating him. Tradition has it, of course, that Penetrator equals Real Man equals Not Queer. But Ennis apparently didn't need any time to become erect himself; was he lying there hard the whole time? I wouldn't be surprised. In the original story, Proulx endowed Ennis with a mystic knowledge of what to do. Perhaps because he'd been thinking about doing it even before he met Jack? A straight guy isn't supposed to respond to another man's sexual offer by turning him over. Ennis's reluctance to share the tent in the first place is not proof that he hadn't noticed Jack erotically -- rather the opposite. As for the later moves, I'm not sure how Murray is counting them, but it is Ennis who comes to Jack in the tent to initiate their second night together. I think that's crucial, for it shows that Ennis is not just a guy who can't say no.

Murray says that "they are not cowboys. They ride horses in their line of work, but they are responsible for sheep, and anyone who has seen very many westerns knows that the cattle barons and the would-be sheep-raisers are recurrent foes. Jack, for a time, is a 'rodeo cowboy,' riding bulls." After Ennis's summer tending sheep with Jack, he works on ranches with cattle. I think that Murray is defining "cowboy" far too strictly here, and I really don't understand why some people work themselves into such a lather over whether this is a "gay cowboy" movie or not; is it because cowboys aren't universal enough, or their feelings don't matter? Or is it because cowboys are too universal, and they can't be gay or America will fall? I really don't get it.

As Murray also complains, "The word 'gay' is bandied about very loosely in regard to the movie"; but then, "gay" does not have a strict meaning. "Ennis and Jack have homosexual sex, but neither has a self-identification as gay (and, as I have explained at considerable length in American Gay, self-identification, at least intrapsychically, is the criterion of gay)." American Gay is a fine book, but while Murray can define "gay" strictly for his own writing purposes, he can't require other people to hew to his definition, and most don't.

He goes on say that Brokeback is not a "gay movie" because "The story was written by a straight woman, adapted for the screen by a straight couple, directed by a straight man, and stars straight movie stars". So, Of Human Bondage is a homosexual novel because, though it has no gay content, it was written by a homosexual? What constitutes a "gay novel" or "gay play" or "gay movie" has been much debated over the years. Gay playwright Robert Patrick playfully defined a gay play as a play that sleeps with other plays of the same sex. Murray's definition might work for him, but I think that for most people, a movie with central same-sex content is a "gay movie" regardless of the sexual orientation of the writers, directors, or stars, or second assistant grip.

Murray continues:

In rural Wyoming it seems plausible for someone who spends his waking hours outdoors not to know of the emergence of gay communities during the 1970s. It, however, seems more difficult to imagine that by the early 1980s Jack would not have learned that somewhere (in Texas, even) there were gay bars and gay circles and gay neighborhoods. Jack is less isolated (both in general and from media) than Ennis. Instead of crossing the Rio Grande at Ciudad Juarez, he could have tooled over to Houston... but he didn't, and continued to dream of splendid isolation a deux on a ranch with Ennis (who never left Wyoming). I'm definitely not saying that Jack wanted an urban gay lifestyle. What he did want was more conceivable and obtainable after "almost twenty years" (a specification that crops up at one of their brief reunions in the wilds).

That reminds me: how does Ennis know "what they got for boys like you in Mexico", if he's so ignorant and isolated and all? I suspect that Jack's self-limitation is best explained as a result of Proulx's naivete (in interviews she's made much of her personal ignorance, as an old straight woman), and perhaps her own wish to keep her characters uncontaminated by urban gay lifestyles. But I've also known gay men who, even though they lived in cities with gay resources, refused to use them, or even to admit that they were there, while dreaming that Jack Armstrong the All-American Boy would come knocking on their doors one night and take them away from all this. Murray should know that "gay" is still a stigmatized identity, and that closet cases often have intricate strategies to avoid applying it to themselves even "intrapsychically." There's a widespread tendency to treat them as sophisticated thinkers so soaked with integrity that they won't apply a label to themselves unless it truly fits, no matter how much they want to, when it really is the other way around. Think, by analogy, of the difficulty of the strategies people have for identifying themselves as alcoholics. Just because Jack is less paralyzed than Ennis, it doesn't mean he's ready to move to the Montrose in Houston. (Where he might also be queer-bashed.) But then, he was only 39 when he died. Murray must know, as I do, men who came out later in life than that.

Brokeback Mountain, Murray declares ex cathedra, "is a story of the tragic internalization of homo-hatred, not a movie about `gay cowboys.'" False antithesis. The movie is both, and more.