February 2006 blogposts

Brokeback Mountain: Getting It

Brokeback Mountain continues to rack up awards and reel in the box-office, which is good. The film deserves the accolades and the wider audience. And I promise to get off the all-Brokeback-24/7 kick I've been on, really I do! (I can stop ANYTIME. I. WANT.)

I'm tempted to send to my family and straight friends a link to this excellent and thought-provoking review of the movie (warning: spoilers) appearing in an upcoming isue of The New York Review of Books:

Both narratively and visually, Brokeback Mountain is a tragedy about the specifically gay phenomenon of the "closet"—about the disastrous emotional and moral consequences of erotic self-repression and of the social intolerance that first causes and then exacerbates it...Their tragedy, which starts well before the lovers ever meet, is primarily a psychological tragedy, a tragedy of psyches scarred from the very first stirrings of an erotic desire which the world around them—beginning in earliest childhood, in the bosom of their families, as Ennis's grim flashback is meant to remind us—represents as unhealthy, hateful, and deadly.

Source: Daniel Mendelsohn, "An Affair to Remember", The New York Review of Books, Volume 53, Number 3, February 23, 2006

And THAT's the message I want to get out: that it's the way our society is structured that—still—that makes it all the more difficult for women and men to LEARN HOW TO LOVE THEMSELVES REGARDLESS OF WHETHER THEY ARE QUEER OR STRAIGHT. And I have been walking proof of the damage that can be done, damage that I am still struggling to overcome after two decades of difficult, painful work. Sometimes I just get so angry I want to scream at people for not "getting it".

Brokeback Mountain brings that message home in such a powerful way, that I hope more people see it, and more people "get it".

Feeling The Gap

I've been trying to get a handle on what's wrong with me lately, and I kinda sorta touch on it in this post I made to the Dave Cullen Brokeback Mountain community forum ten days ago:

People have been talking a lot on this forum about finding or meeting a soul-mate, a love you are destined to be with. And I had a thought about this.

At 42, I finally feel like I've worked through all the emotional and mental crap (well, almost all of it) that comes with being raised in a society where you church and your family imprint on you that gay = wrong.

But I look around me and I see this: half of the potentially soul-mateable men ouit there are stuck somewhere along in their process. They're stuck in the closet, or stuck living an elaborate double life that they think no one else knows about. Or they're taking drugs or booze or sex to dull the pain of their lives, and they get stuck there. Or they killed themselves as teenagers, or later as adults, because they couldn't deal with the mismatch between what their society expected and what they wanted.

What I'm trying to say is this: that even though I might, for the first time in my life, actually be ready to meet--and appreciate--Mr. Soulmate, who's to say that Mr. Soulmate isn't still wandering around out there, stuck somewhere, unavailable? I realize that this sort of thing could happen just as easily with straight relationships. But somehow it seems that the bumps of growing up gay either force you to become mature quickly, or keep you stuck and immature.

Not sure if any of this makes sense, but I think it might be why I feel that maybe there's nobody out there for me. I'm not depressed about it--at least, not much or not often. But it is something I've thought about since I've seen the movie Brokeback Mountain. What if the perfect guy for me is living in some sham marriage and doing guys on the side just to feel some pleasure in his miserable Ennisy life? He and I would never connect.

And I'm not saying that I would WANT to connect with someone who still has so much work ahead of him left to do. (As if I wanted another make-work project.)

But what I guess I'm trying to say is, I can feel that gap, that absence--that space where somebody should be, and isn't.

Which probably explains why I'm listening to Mark Weigle on my headphones and quietly crying in front of my PC at work, tucked away in the back office where nobody can see me cry.