Best Sex Writing 2006

I’ve seen Brokeback Mountain twice now, and each time have left the theater unutterably, helplessly sad. I cannot deny the power of true and passionate art to move us, and moved I was, even more after the second try. Yet I wondered about and even mistrusted the gray helplessness that for days I couldn’t shake.

Some of us have spent years fighting the miserable fate that this heartbreaking film awards to its two thwarted men in love. Is it worth being dragged back, if only through the movie screen and my easily led imagination, to such a dangerous place? For gay and nongay viewers both, I’m surprised to find that the answer is yes.

Like so many others whose real lives never fully emerge in the give-and-take of popular culture, I grew up ravenous to read any book or see any movie in which something, anything, gay managed to peek through. At first it made no difference whether the fiction was lurid—as in John Rechy’s City of Night—or the films nasty and belittling. We pre-Stonewallers pored over these secret treats as if they were Rosetta Stones that someday we’d be able to decipher.

And so I became more than a little impatient when I finally realized that it was up to the culture to decipher me.

I was sitting in a theater next to Vito Russo, an ebullient activist and author of The Celluloid Closet, a groundbreaking book about gay film history. We were there because a new movie, Making Love, starring Harry Hamlin, Michael Ontkean, and Charlie’s Angel Kate Jackson, was oh-so-quietly touted as the first big Hollywood film about a gay relationship.

Too bad that dead direction resulted in a tepid movie, not nearly as rich or risky as John Schlesinger’s 1971 Sunday Bloody Sunday, an art-house gem about a three-way relationship starring the glorious Glenda Jackson and masterful Peter Finch. Yet, when Michael’s and Harry’s lips first touched, in close-up, on that wide, wide screen, Vito and I turned to each other and even in the darkness could see our eyes moisten up.

Nothing needed to be said. Although we expected that some people in most audiences would laugh and retch and more or less run screaming toward the door (which is exactly what happened) when faced with the indisputable cinematic evidence that two men could love, a bridge had been crossed and nothing would be the same.

Vito Russo died of AIDS eight years later, and, for good or for bad, that calamitous disease became popular culture’s primary gay vehicle, leavened by the occasional feisty drag queen or limp best buddy. Perhaps you remember Tom Hanks in the kissless AIDS classic named after the City of Brotherly Love.

Now, almost awash in a televised queer materialism that is anxious to say our gay troubles are over, we have another Making Love—with no Vito to turn to. The “bridge” itself, though much better built, is sadly very much the same. But this time, will the great mass audience, my neighbors and colleagues, my readers and friends, stay in their seats and cross it?

I don’t want to be a spoiler for you who are planning to go see it, but I can attempt to say why Brokeback Mountain, set in rural Wyoming from the 1960s to the ’80s, is so shattering.

The story, by Wyoming resident Annie Proulx, on which the faithful screenplay is based was written a short time before the young gay man Matthew Shepard was beaten and murdered outside Laramie, with a vista of Brokebacks as background. Don’t get your spurs tangled in the cheap joke that this is a movie about “gay cowboys.” Its main characters are—as the author herself has said—merely two dirt-poor and unconnected young men who…

Who are written into a story in which they, because of their class, upbringing, and inescapable values, values they live and breathe, seem to have no choice but to come to desolate conclusions. One man is trapped by fear, by the utter absence of personal possibility. And so the other man, who has hints of how their love could live, is trapped as well.

Theirs is an American tragedy of the old school, put in motion by the same fictional fatalism that says gingham girlfriend Shelley Winters must be taken out in a rowboat to the middle of a lake and drowned, and starry-eyed climber Montgomery Clift, looking for his place in the sun, must be the one to push her.

In spite of its nervous packaging and self-serving studio quotes, Brokeback isn’t a universal Romeo and Juliet, a tale of love hampered that anyone can enjoy. It’s a story of gay love hampered, gay love destroyed—enjoy it if you can.

When I first visited Laramie sometime in the mid-1970s, a gay and lesbian group had just formed at the city’s university. Would I go on campus radio and talk about gay life, a cordial professor asked? Of course, I said—and the next day the request was withdrawn, no explanation. My Laramie hosts also warned me not to walk the trim and pleasant streets of the town alone.

Just before World War I, English author E. M. Forster wrote a novel called Maurice—the too-lush movie was made in 1987—about two quite different men from quite different classes who fall thoroughly in love. The book wasn’t published until the author died decades later; he was afraid, he had said, of offending his mother.

The English cards were stacked, no doubt, against this pair too, but Forster, to his eternal credit, gives them a fantasy out, an escape to an arcadian world where they and their like may do as their hearts demand. Forster found a fictional hope.

Odd fact is that the fussy author managed to live happily with his working-class policeman lover for quite a long time, no arcadia needed.

I can’t tell you that Brokeback Mountain is a great film, great in the Citizen Kane sense. What I can say is what makes it unique—a word all writers fear to use—and exquisitely touching.

There’s a scene early on, as the two men are getting to know each other during their first summer on Brokeback, when Ennis (Heath Ledger) strips and washes himself from a basin. Jack (Jake Gyllenhaal), in the foreground, out of some combination of decency, embarrassment, and sweet care, doesn’t turn around to steal a glance.

The absence of familiar workaday lust, and then the overwhelming rush of sexual passion and riveting, wrenching, inconceivable love is absolutely new.