A hard mountain to climb

I've been reading a lot of user reviews of Brokeback Mountain on Yahoo! Movies. The number of people who give the movie failing marks is under 10 percent--which, overall, is not bad for a mainstream forum. The comments are not surprising but nonetheless disturbing. Judging from the dismissive comments of the dissidents, homophobia is vibrant and plentiful, and not just in the red states. Then there are people who can't put aside their differences and look at the overarching theme of loss and regret. I'm not surprised when heterosexual men bash the film as so much Hollywood propaganda, since they have probably never had to question their sexual identities and lead double lives.

Some take offense at using the sacred American cowboy as a gay archetype. There couldn't have been a better symbol. Cowboys represent self-reliance, loneliness, resourcefulness, strength--qualities that gay men cultivate out of necessity. But this movie is not about queer life. It's about two people who love each other and are forced apart by circumstances. As a result, they and everyone in their lives are unhappy. The film is not only breathtaking and heartbreaking, but also realistic and unsentimental.

The scenery in Brokeback is a vital character in reinforcing the movie's themes. Mountains represent isolation, struggle, determination, enticement, danger, retreat. They are beautiful but unpredictable. Jack and Ennis are rather like the sheep they herd, moving in the direction they are told to go in rather than fighting the tide. "I ain't no sinner," Ennis tells Jack, "but that's because I ain't had the opportunity." After the ranch hands have their first encounter, a sheep is found gutted, presumably by a coyote, communicating perhaps the moral consequence of their action.

Wyoming is not the only place where a story like Jack and Ennis's could, and still does, take place. My late father, who grew up in 1950s and 1960s New York City, spent his entire life denying his sexuality and leading a double life. Like the men in Brokeback, he hid it well. I always wondered whether my father, with whom I had a contentious, and later diplomatic, relationship, ever understood the depth of misery produced by his failure at self-acceptance.

At age 8 I vividly remember going to Connecticut with mom and dad and a friend of dad's named Bill. Bill and dad worked together. One weekend Bill invited us to go out on his motorboat on the Long Island Sound, after we had lunch at a seafood restaurant on City Island. I was both scared and excited about going on the boat. Then a big storm rolled in and we couldn't go on the boat.

Why I remember this incident I don't know. But after all these years I still have this feeling that Bill and my father were lovers. I remember Bill being slight and a little effeminate. That's all I really remember. When I asked my mother about Bill, she said it was funny I had brought him up, since she had been thinking about him too the other day. Like me, though, she doesn't remember much else about him. The scene in Brokeback Mountain in which Ennis and Jack see each other after 4 years reminded me of that day.

Dad left for work every morning at 5:00 a.m., even though his subway ride to work to Manhattan was only 45 minutes. He didn't get home most nights until after 8:00 p.m. and was in bed by 10:00 p.m. This was his daily routine for as long as I can remember. Mom thinks he must have gotten off work early and spent the rest of the afternoon doing "whatever it was he did." Dad came home drunk pretty much every night, and by the time I went out on my own at 21, he sometimes just didn't come home.

My mother had inklings about my father, but by her own admission she did not know any gay people and the only ones she knew about conformed to the Quentin Crisp stereotype. The word "gay" was not even in mainstream usage, and homosexuality was still on the American Psychiatric Association's list of personality disorders. Once, when mom and dad were first dating, dad took mom to a bar in the West Village (remember, this was mid-1950s). There were no women in the bar. After a few drinks dad tried to tell mom that he liked men, but mom just laughed it off. She was, she said, very naive. And my father did not seem like a sexual deviant to her.

Over the years there were incidents that in retrospect were clear indications dad was gay, but she was confronted by the reality only once, a few years before my father died. My father was on the phone in the kitchen. Mom picked up the phone in the living room to call her sister and heard my father say, "I can't leave her." And then--a male voice on the other end said, "So, where does that leave us?" She quickly hung up the phone and never asked my father about it. To this day she still doesn't know the real story, and now she never will.

This was the first Christmas I spent with my mother and two brothers since dad died 5 years ago. We had such a nice time together, the first time I can honestly say that. Holidays with dad were always tense and forced. The Thanksgiving scene in Brokeback was just like that in our house. Dad was a secretive and tortured person, a man who wanted to care about us but didn't--and couldn't--care about himself. He always seemed to be seething with rage, which alcohol allowed him to express. He ended up poisoning his body and soul by drinking and letting shame eat away at him. He always seemed to be holding back a huge part of himself, afraid that if he were to open the floodgates everyone around him would go down with him. So, like Ennis in Brokeback, he shut himself down and, as some reviewers aptly described it, caved in on himself.

People who see Brokeback as a story of infidelity and adultery, or even gay love, are sadly missing the point. Brokeback teachs a great moral lesson about the consequences that come from being unable to accept who you are. Even now, the mountain is no longer unsurmountable, but for some people it's too hard to climb.