EDITOR’S NOTE: This story first appeared in the Feb. 19 Sunday Gazette-Mail. It is reprinted on the occasion of “Brokeback Mountain” winning two Oscars at the March 5 Academy Awards in Los Angeles.
By Jeff Mann
The boots are rough, dark-brown leather, with steel toes. In fact, it even says "STEEL TOE" in small, bright yellow letters on the side of each boot. Not the kind to wear through airport security--they take too long to unlace. Yet security was on my mind when I wore them on Feb. 4, at Park Place Stadium Cinemas in Charleston. That was the day my partner John and I finally saw "Brokeback Mountain," the now-famous film up for several Oscars, including Best Picture, in next Sunday's Academy Awards.
Call me paranoid. I've been given cause. During my high-school days in Hinton, West Virginia, lesbian friends and I were regularly harassed. One night, I was even punched in the face (ironically, while walking a female friend home). In college, I took karate and aikido classes and started lifting weights, trying to become stronger and tougher, just in case I ever had to defend myself or those I loved from gay-bashers. A year or so ago, I even learned a few boxing pointers.
George W. Bush's America is often a frightening place for lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender folks, with the Religious Right in a position of power it has never enjoyed before. My native Appalachia, which I am too fond of ever to leave, is certainly not a place where it is easy to be gay or lesbian, thanks in large part to the ubiquitous presence of intolerant Christian fundamentalism.
The state of Virginia, where I now teach, is especially disturbing. It possesses one of the most virulent laws against same-sex marriage, and members of the General Assembly are regularly trying to push through measures against LGBT adoptions and high-school gay/straight alliances. In 1996, a lesbian couple was murdered in Shenandoah National Park. In 2000, the colleague of an acquaintance of mine was shot to death inside a Roanoke gay bar.
Given this context, I could certainly relate to the difficulties Jack and Ennis face in "Brokeback Mountain." I read Annie Proulx's short story last fall in her collection "Close Range." A student in my Gay and Lesbian Literature class at Virginia Tech lent me the book, assuming a guy like me -- a gay country boy who wears cowboy boots a lot -- would probably relate to the tale. Of course, he was right. I devoured it, began to hunt down articles about and reviews of the film, and soon thereafter, even began to dream of the characters. I can't recall the last time I was so eager to see a movie.
Stomping out of the theater
Anyone with any sense must realize that we gay people are starved for literature, music, and films that reflect our experience. Surrounded by a frequently hostile majority, swamped by media infused with heterosexual images and values, we ache for affirming artistic mirrors of queer life. Those of us who have grown up in small-towns and the countryside and who have resisted the urge to flee to cities where gay enclaves can be found are especially hungry for queer art that reflects the rural worlds we know.
Most LGBT books and movies I know depict urban life-- in cities like New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, places I love to visit but could never stand (or afford) to live. And so I couldn't help but be deeply seized by Proulx's story of cowboys herding sheep on a Wyoming mountain and trying to conceal their love for one another in hostile small-town settings.
Though most of my time these days is spent as a professor in the world of words, it was only a few decades back that I was a Summers County boy helping his father load hay in summer and in winter driving cattle towards our Forest Hill barn. I'm not a Westerner and I'm not a cowboy, but still, even without seeing the film, I knew that it contained my life as a gay Appalachian in a way no other film ever had.
As much as I wanted to see 'Brokeback,' however, I was hesitant to view it in public, in the company of strangers who might not be sympathetic to such a story. Though many friends who'd seen it had assured me that audiences were well-behaved, a Virginia Tech colleague told me that she heard nervous laughter when she watched it in the New River Valley Mall in nearby Christiansburg. A buddy in Roanoke told me that people there got up and walked out when the main characters, Jack and Ennis, first made love. A friend in Tallahassee, Florida, told me that folks there were stomping out during the love scenes and demanding their money back.
When I think about seeing gay-themed films in public theaters, as opposed to the much-preferred private home-viewings that Netflix and inexpensive DVDs allow, I always return to "Making Love," one of the first mainstream films to deal with gay subject matter. It got to Morgantown in 1982, when I was in graduate school at WVU. How delighted my queer friends and I were finally to see gay life depicted in film. That exuberance was short-lived. When the male leads got intimate, the primarily straight audience exploded with disgust: "Oh, God! Sick! I'm gonna puke."
Much younger, much smaller, much more timid than I am now, I sat there frightened, seething with hatred, afraid to say anything, praying that they'd shut up. I was not strong, they were too many. I despised my own fear as much as or more than I despised them. Sometimes it seems to me that everything I have ever done or said has been a way of dealing with my own fear, passivity, and cowardice.
It was that audience reaction all those years ago that I could not stop thinking about as I waited, with equal measures of enthusiastic anticipation and cold dread, for "Brokeback Mountain" to get to Southwest Virginia, where I teach, or Charleston, where my partner John lives. And it was my own violent reaction to a jeering audience that I feared the most.
I am no longer that young, scared graduate student. I am 46 years old and 200 pounds, and I am more than willing to denounce homophobes and defend myself and my kind from them, either verbally or physically. A Martin Luther King statement keeps coming back to me: "Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter." As much as I wanted to see "Brokeback," I also wanted to avoid getting into a fistfight, for my days of silence are long over. A jail term, I reflected, would not improve my chances of securing tenure at Virginia Tech.
Fight or flight?
"Brokeback" is certainly not the only thing that has me brooding on homophobia in recent weeks. Though I have not personally faced such hatred for many years--my university colleagues are liberal, my neighbors understanding and friendly--it exists very close to home.
Or, rather, close to work. Anti-gay behavior is on the rise at Virginia Tech, despite the many attempts of administrators and committees to squelch it. Queer students come to me with reports of mockery and abuse that madden me. I have little in the way of parental instincts---children generally get on my nerves--but in this case, I feel as if these LGBT kids are children of mine who are in danger and whom I cannot adequately protect. These facts deepen a siege mentality already innate in me (something I sometimes blame on my Celtic blood). These unpleasant realities stir up a rage in me I find it harder and harder to turn to positive use. And rage, when it ferments and rots without constructive outlet, so often metamorphoses into despair.
Annie Proulx has clearly stated, in her essay "Getting Movied<co >," included in "Brokeback Mountain: Story to Screenplay," that her tale is "a story of destructive rural homophobia." What bitter irony, then, to worry about homophobic audience responses to a film that, at its core, is about how fear of anti-gay violence thwarts love and starves hearts. Perhaps, I thought, as "Brokeback" came to Roanoke, to Christiansburg, finally to Charleston, I could wait till the DVD was released.
But then the dreams got too bad. Proulx's story's begins with Ennis Del Mar, now a middle-aged man, about my age, I'd say, awaking from a dream about Jack Twist. Similarly, both the story I'd read and the movie images I'd seen in magazines and on-line had leached so deeply into my subconscious that I couldn't stop dreaming of Ennis and Jack. Sometimes I was traveling with them on horseback across Wyoming landscape, a terrain I've only seen in films. Sometimes, we traveled together through my native mountains of Appalachia. Sometimes I was Ennis, feeling desire, fear, rage, and grief so intense that I disturbed John with my groans and he had to shake me awake. When, finally, one night in the first week of February, I dreamed about them all night long, I realized I had to see the movie just to get out from under it.
Prepared for the worst
On Feb. 2, a teenager attacked patrons of a gay bar in New Bedford, Massachusetts. On Feb. 4, I sat in the dark at Park Place Stadium Cinemas, in downtown Charleston, wearing not the cowboy boots I usually wear, the kind most appropriate to the film, but the heaviest work boots I own, the sort I always wore on those evenings in the late '70's when I attended meetings of the gay and lesbian student group at WVU, hoping to be prepared if any frat guys showed up with baseball bats.
I sat against the back wall, waiting for the film to begin, nervously chewing on handfuls of John's popcorn. We were, from what I could tell, the only gay couple in the place, and the audience was far larger than I would have preferred. Every man who entered the room I sized up as a possible opponent. (I don't always expect the worst, but I'm always trying to prepare for it.) The audience at that 3 p.m. showing, I noted with cautious optimism, was composed for the most part of the middle-aged and elderly. No young men twice my size who might throw me against the wall, if push literally came to shove.
John, bless him -- although he knew exactly what I was thinking and fearing -- seemed as calm as ever. (How does one set up house on the rim of a volcano? Ask him.) He hadn't read the story as I had. But surely he could gauge when Jack and Ennis were about to grow intimate, because those were the spots where I sat on the edge of my seat and tensed up, waiting for the snickers or the jeers to begin, ready to leap from my seat and pick a fight.
My country brothers made love in their high-mountain tent. They kissed violently after four years apart. They sprawled naked in a motel bed together, delighting in their reunion. And that Charleston audience was absolutely silent.
When the film ended, I was, of course, quietly wrecked. "Brokeback Mountain" embodies almost all of my issues and most of my fears. But, as weak as I was with relief (no fisticuffs necessary, no jail term for me as yet), I was also welling with gratitude. As John drove us home to martinis (that evening required several) and slow-cooked Hungarian goulash, I was more thankful than ever to have him beside me and to live and work in places where we are for the most part accepted. Whatever the future brings us, we have escaped the bleak fates, the half-lived lives of Jack and Ennis.
And I was thankful for the respectful silence of that audience. Perhaps the world has changed for the better since those contemptuous shouts met "Making Love." Perhaps it was simple luck to share that particular showing of the film with those who were my age or older and thus less likely to behave badly in public. Perhaps Charleston is more a bastion of liberals than I imagined. Perhaps the past has warped me so badly that I can't believe in human goodness when it takes my hand.
Silent witness
I'm not ready to make any of those generalizations. I only know that "Brokeback Mountain" is one of the great movies of my life. I will always remember that the first time I saw it (for you can be sure I will soon own the DVD and in future years will watch it again and again). I will recall how those with whom I experienced that story recognized love and tragedy and met those eternals, those immensities, with the silence witness they deserve. That other immensity - hate -- which so shapes the fears I share with Jack and Ennis, was not among us in that darkened room, on that winter afternoon.