#Magic gay sex art movie#
Brokeback Mountain is not only a movie about a time when homosexuality was murderously taboo, but also about the way a man can waste his life, not do what he wanted to, miss his chance, or fail to know how much he loved someone. (I began to think of going to the theater every hour just to watch the audience walk out.) But that shouldn’t have surprised me.
At a later screening, however, while watching a Brokeback audience leave the theater as I stood there waiting for a ticket, there were several young gay men wiping tears away. Indeed, the next person I phoned-a man who’d told friends at the gay gym afterwards about the movie-said he wasn’t sure younger gays would get Brokeback, if they would not dismiss the whole storyline because they couldn’t understand why anyone would repress his homosexual longings.
It was only when he said, “I don’t want to bring you down, but…” that I could tell I was in some sort of semi-hysterical reaction that was probably explained by mid-life crisis or the Christmas blues I had been hoping to escape when I went into the theater-i.e., what one brought to the work of art as well as the work of art itself. I was so upset I went home and phoned a friend in New York who had seen it the previous week. I was relieved to know it was already dark outside, glad I did not have to walk past a gauntlet of people waiting for the next show. A few of us remained in the dark theater, on our feet, listening to Willie Nelson sing “He was a friend of mine,” watching every single credit unroll until only the corporate logos remained. Then, the last twenty or 25 minutes, the whole movie rose onto another plane altogether, and when it ended I wondered how most of the audience was able to stand up so quickly, gather their coats and leave. The relentless bleakness, the one-note, unrelieved gloom, made me impatient. There were even times when I found myself looking at my watch, or thinking the movie should end here. There had been so much buzz and praise for this film that I was proudly prepared to be the first kid on my block to hate the picture and, to be honest, it was not very long after it began that I found myself wishing Fred and Ginger would burst onto the set and tap dance across the screen, like Dom DeLuise at the end of Blazing Saddles. As I counted the thinning hairs on the head of the man in front of me, I thought: The sadness of Brokeback begins outside the theater.
The gay men were lined up, in our individual solitude, waiting to weep. The college students were happily chattering away. For the former, the movie we were about to see was personal, crucial for the students, I guess it was-cool. STANDING IN LINE for Brokeback Mountain the afternoon it opened in Washington at a little theater near Dupont Circle, I saw two kinds of people: silent gay men of a certain age, and clusters of laughing college students.