Ennis Del Mar, Jack Twist, And Me



Let us now wax rhapsodic on Brokeback Mountain, the most extraordinary movie I’ve ever seen.

Seriously, it’s amazing. Absolutely beautiful. Without flaw. Every shot, every word of dialog, every plot development. There will be my life before I saw Brokeback Mountain, and my life after Brokeback Mountain.

It’s a love story. And it’s my kind of love story. Not a hokey, gooey hearts and flowers love. Something found in the bargain basement of life. But the kind of love that takes an axe to everything, shatters all assumptions, changes the course of your life.

And the movie honors love, adhering to the Chryssie Hind principle: “When love walks in the room, every body stand up!” Urging all of us to keep careful watch; when love enters your life, don’t turn your back, don’t brush it aside, don’t bury it on your To Do list, don’t take a raincheck. Nothing is more important. It’s the closest thing to redemtion we get in this life. And you don’t know when you’ll get another opportunity. After all, there are no guarantees that you will.

Brokeback Mountain made me think about my job in the woodshop. And that way that men have with each other. Men who work hard, and measure the worth andvalue of another man by how hard he works. That mixture of toughness and tenderness of how men are together that shows itself in action and words can’t capture.

In a way, it’s an anti-capitalist movie. In other words, it’s a movie about two men who fall in love, but it’s not a gay movie. “Gay” has become a market niche, a commodity that you can buy. And, in fact, that you have to buy. If you want to be gay, you better clear our some space on your credit cards. This, of course, has implications for the leatherworld, too. John Ashcroft has done us a huge favor, ensuring that we won’t be assimilated into the sucking vortex anytime soon. For now, we’ll remain a counter-cultural experience. When the day comes that you wonder if you’re doing it “right,” whether your cell phone plan is the “right” cell phone plan for a leatherman (or leatherboy or leatherwoman or leatherwhatever), then you’ll know that dread day has come, and something precious and beautiful is gone forever

I also wonder if the movie will have an effect on our culture, the way movies used to have. People used to model what they saw on the big screen, finding in the depictions of Jimmy Stewart, Peter Fonda, Humphrey Bogart, James Dean, Charles Bronson, and so many others, ways to live their own lives. Gay men really haven’t had a lot of options here. Perhaps--and I realize I’m hoping for the moon and stars here--being gay in this the post-Brokeback world, won’t be seen as a terms of wardrobe, circuit parties, killer abs, and all sorts of fabulousness (which comes at a price always), but simply a matter of two men falling in love.

And it’s a political movie, too, having a similar effect on me as when I read Larry Kramer’s Reports From The Holocaust all those years ago. I will work to make this a world safe for Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist to fall in love.

Anyway. Go see the movie. I’ve buried it in enough verbiage.

Oh! And how cool is this? Just to make it clear, I’m not living in New York, Los Angeles, or San Francisco. Not even Seattle, Chicago, Houston, Miami, Atlanta, Philadelphia or Boston. I saw Brokeback Mountain in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. Which is not exactly the Heartland, but believe me, we’re out there.

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