Tears for Queers: Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain, Hollywood, and American Attitudes toward Homosexuality

Every once in a while a film comes along that changes our perceptions so much that cinema history thereafter has to arrange itself around it . . . Brokeback Mountain is just such a film. Even for audiences educated by a decade of the New Queer Cinema phenomenon ... it's a shift in scope and tenor so profound as to signal a new era. -B. Ruby Rich on Brokeback Mountain Ang Lee's film adaptation of Annie Proulx's short story "Brokeback Mountain" has widely been praised as a brave and daring film. Supposedly it takes on the iconic image of the cowboy as the epitome of American heterosexual masculinity and exposes the fact that, in the words of singer/ songwriter Ned Sublette, "cowboys are frequently, secretly fond of each other."1 Review after review referred to Lee's film as the first ever "gay Western" (Clark, "New Vistas"; Clark, "Westerns"; A. Thompson) or "gay cowboy movie" (Stein; Clarke 29; A. Thompson; D'Angelo) and hails it as a "genre bending" (A. Thompson) "groundbreaker" (Clark, "Westerns," A. Thompson,) of a movie that has "queered" the Western (Rich 8). When Brokeback Mountain won three Academy Awards in 2006 (for Best Original Score, Best Adapted Screen Play, and Best Director), critics saw this official approbation as a sign of a radical breakthrough in the representation of homosexuality on screen and commended Hollywood for its boldness in humanizing love between two men in a mainstream film for the very first time.2 Ingrid Sischy, former editor-in-chief of Interview, interpreted this purported change in the representation of male-male affection as "a sign of America's readiness to humanize and civilize its attitude towards homosexuality" (88). Claims of such seismic shifts in social attitudes towards homosexuality are greatly exaggerated. Now that discussions in mainstream and queer publications, in blogs, and on-line chat rooms are themselves history, there is sufficient critical distance to reconsider assertions concerning the historic significance of Lee's film. In particular, this essay will examine definitions of Brokeback Mountain as a "genre-busting" (Johnson 988) queer Western and the first gay love story, which supposedly not only constituted a radical break in the history of homosexuality in American movies, but also ushered in a kinder, gentler attitude towards homosexuality in American society. In fact, neither of these claims will hold up if one considers Lee's film in the context of the history of representing homosexuality in American cinema. Cowboys, Queers, and the Western When it comes to analyzing the representation of homosexuality in American films no book has been as been as influential as Vito Russo's The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies (1981). No doubt, the impact of Russo's text was further enhanced by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman's 1995 documentary film based on the book. While The Celluloid Closet may lack the theoretical sophistication of much contemporary queer film criticism, it will prove helpful here for two specific reasons. To begin with, as Michael Bronski argues in a recent review essay, "the continuing power of Russo's book resides in its political analysis of social and cultural homophobia" (emphasis added). In addition to Russo's critique of homophobia as a socio-cultural phenomenon (rather than mere personal aversion), The Celluloid Closet is also notable for its sheer encyclopedic coverage of homosexuality in films ranging from the silent era to the early 1980s (in Russo's book) or the early 1990s (in Epstein and Friedman's eponymous documentary). One thing The Celluloid Closet makes clear is that Ennis del Mar and Jack Twist are no more the first gay cowboys in American film than Brokeback Mountain is the first queer Western. Perhaps what comes to mind most immediately when one thinks about homosexuality and the Western genre are Western spoofs, from Andy Warhol's Lonesome Cowboys (1969) to Mel Brooks' Blazing Saddles (1974). …