Friday afternoon on Brokeback Mountain

I decided to take the afternoon off and take in the 4:00 p.m. showing of Brokeback Mountain at the Paramount Theater on Richmond Street in downtown Toronto.

Brokeback, based on a short story by National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Annie Proulx, is one of those films that, it seems, every other gay man in the world but me has seen. I wasn't sure what to expect, but I knew that whatever I was going to experience from the film, I wanted to experience it in private. I took a seat on the highest row in the theater with no one on either side of me.

In the ninety minutes that followed, my heart and mind were kicked around like footballs.

I'm not going to review the movie, per se, in this journal since my friend and fellow writer, David W. Shelton, has done it wonderfully well on his own blog, which I urge you to visit at www.davidwshelton.blogspot.com, although I think it may warrant an essay by me later on the site, or elsewhere.

That having been said, the overriding afterburn of this powerful, elegant film is the sense of the tragedy of living in a sub-articulate time and place, where the harsh and inviolabe code of the much-fetishized "cowboy" ideal---macho, stoic, silent, and enduring---demands such cruel tribute from the men who live by it, either by choice or circumstance.

I don't know what I expected. There's a part of me, I suppose, that expected to be titillated in some cynical, middle-aged way by the sexy notion of love between rough, handsome young cowboys. The "cowboy thing" has never had particular resonance for me as a fetish, but I'm not immune to the thought of Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal in a pup tent in Wyoming.

But the tension of the story never let up enough for me forget the fact that even if Jack hadn't died at the end of the film, their love story, forbidden as it was, was already leavened with tragedy by virtue of the fact that it had to remain hidden. The fact that Ennis could literally not imagine a world where two men could live as lovers in ranch country, and in fact didn't have the language available to him to express that tragedy, much less the later tragedy of Jack's murder, broke my heart in a way that was completely free of sentimentality.

Annie Proulx, who has written about her story on her website www.annieproulx.com, has said that the characters of Jack and Ennis came fully from her imagination and were not based on anyone she knew. Who could doubt that from a writer of her consequential talent? If anything, it is a tribute to her gifts that she could create two characters whose lives on the page (and on the screen) so stunningly evoke the truth of what life was like for gay men of that time and background who didn't have words for what they were.

In the end, Brokeback Mountain is a portentously moving meditation, not only on forbidden love, but also on class, region, and era. It's also a searing comment on the fierce cost of masculinity and homophobia, a cost borne most dramatically by the men, but also by the women in whose lives the men are inextricably bound.

When Brian and I were in Los Angeles this past Christmas, we stayed at the Chateau Marmont, quite naturally as a couple. Outside, there were huge billboards along Sunset Boulevard advertising this film that would later sweep the Golden Globes (as it will likely do to the Oscars later. )

My mind roamed back to the year I moved to Toronto, 1982. I was 19. I remember watching Making Love in a nearly empty theater on Yonge Street, then slinking out as unobtrusively as possible. The film died silently, and almost took the careers of the two actors playing the couple, Harry Hamlin and Michael Ontkean, along with it in spite of their significant talent and body of work. They both made comebacks, and the film is due to be released on DVD next month, almost 25 years later.

How times change. In films, and in life.

As I write this, it's again snowing outside our house, and Brian is out at the gym. When he comes home, we'll have dinner, watch tv, and share the news of our day like most of the couples on our street. It's 2006, not 1963. And thank God for that.

As gay men especially, we can afford, now and then, to remember our forbears---the Ennises and Jacks who made lives and love for themselves in the face of constant threat and violence. We can honour them silently, and realize that the lives many of us take for granted today would have been, to them, literally unimaginable.

If Brokeback Mountain has another legacy besides standing tall as Ang Lee's finest work yet, let it be that the film has perhaps touched a harsh, smug corner of middle America, and invited it to look at this epic love story, and ask itself if the pain engendered by those times was really the best manifestation of "traditional values," and if that type of values is what it really wants a retun to.