Gay Cowboy Controversy

Today I was reading the Globe at lunch, and came across an article titled "The Passion of the Cowboy." This was an opinion piece about the less-than-stellar, but not abysmal ticket sales for Brokeback Mountain.

Why will ''Brokeback" fail to break out? First and foremost, outside of major cities, many Americans remain jittery at best and disapproving at worst of homosexuality. Even in oh-so-tolerant Hollywood, it's amusing to see ''Brokeback" stars Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal play up their home-on-the-range heterosexuality in publicity interviews. Not that there is anything wrong with that.

I've been a little disappointed in the apparent "I'm not a gay, but I play one in the movies" attitude that Heath and Jake display in their press interviews. But while Hollywood is tolerant of movies that show gay people as flamboyant, Carson-Kressley types, I think Hollywood is not tolerant of showing gay people with emotions and problems, which is why Brokeback isn't just some "gay movie." Few movies I can think of off the top of my head (granted, I don't see many movies) use gay men seriously. Usually, they're the funny best friend to Julia Roberts or Renee Zellwieger, and I'm glad for the change of pace.

Beam continues:

Newspapers like the Globe and The New York Times often write about the world as they would like it to be -- a world resembling, say, Manhattan or Cambridge -- not the world as they find it. (A world, for instance, where a right-wing Catholic can make $370 million on a movie about Jesus Christ.) Hilariously, the Times dispatched a reporter to Lusk, Wyo., to round up a few gay cowboys, as if to say: ''See? They're really out there."...

The Globe and the Times write about the world as they would like to see it because people need to get the hell over their narrow vision of what the world is. Gay people have been here just as long as the rest of us. You may not be comfortable with it, you may not approve of homosexuality, but tolerance should be taught. I haven't ever seen the Globe waxing poetic about assless chaps. Brokeback Mountain is a good movie. End of story. I'm sure that most people who imagine a "gay cowboy movie" imagine loads of gratuitous sex scenes, as Beam points out...

Another explanation for the limited appeal of ''Brokeback" is that millions of moviegoers don't want to see men making love to each other on the screen. ''If heterosexual men in heartland America don't flock to see 'Brokeback Mountain' it's not because they're bigoted," Kaus writes. ''It's because they're heterosexual."...

Okay. I was one of the other group that can be described as "millions of moviegoers" that found the idea of Heath and Jake going at it as very appealing. Heterosexual men love to see women making out or engaging in sex together, and many women go to movies that have women engaging in sexual acts. If a guy is such a pussy that he can't stomach about two minutes of alluded sexual activity, you may have a closet case, ladies. Watching gay people "have sex" (in Brokeback: grab a penis under a blanket, see clothes removed, a short kiss, cut to the outside of the tent) doesn't make you gay. It doesn't make you part of gay culture. It's a damn movie, people! Also, for the boobie-loving men in the audience, there's a few long shots of naked women without shirts, and lots of heterosexual sex as well. Far more than the gay sex. Sadly.


Beam wraps up with this nice paragraph:

If this were a routine boy-girl oater, you could laugh at yourself for spending $9 to ogle sexual disport in the sagebrush. But, alas, it's so much more: a story of men ''crippled by a society that tells them how a man must behave and what he must feel" -- Ebert again. So endure the heavy-handed morality play; just don't plan on having a good time.

Did Alex Beam and I not see the same movie? Of course there's heavy-handed morality in a movie about homosexual men in the 1960s; it was a huge moral issue. It is a huge moral issue, in the year of two-thousand aught six. What does it say about our society that a movie that presents gay men as two serious people with actual problems and lives and not a one-person Mardi Gras float rankles us so thoroughly? Of course it's not a fun movie; not all movies are. That's why Brokeback Mountain is nominated for a Best Drama Golden Globe-- it's not The Producers.
I think that the importance of Brokeback Mountain isn't in shattering any box-office records in 2006. The importance is is that someone in Hollywood decided that a movie with gay men doesn't have to be The Birdcage, but can come from places other than beauty salons or the entertainment industry, and it didn't immediately tank at the box office. Even if the parts of the country that aren't Cambridge or Manhattan don't see Brokeback Mountain, they'll at least understand that the movie isn't about gay hair stylists, but about cowboys from Wyoming. Breaking down the prejudice against people we don't understand is how we get to tolerance. The more conservative members of society don't have to go to pride parades, but should make an effort to understand people other than themselves.