Where Have All the Cowboys Gone

 Caught part of "Brokeback Mountain" on TCM last night. I didn't understand it. Why in the Hell would a couple fellas want to do something like that?!

What is the point of being a cowboy, when there are no Indians to fight?!

Well, I guess there was more to it than that. 

In 2005 when the movie came out, I was living in Memphis. I was friendly with a neighbor- I honestly don't recall her name- but I had taken to calling her "Katrina Gal" as she had come up from near New Orleans around when Hurricane Katrina hit. I say "around" because she later told me that she had left Louisiana one day before Katrina "for reasons", so she wasn't part of the flood of refugees coming to town at the time. However, she took advantage of the amenities offered to refugees and that was alright. She might have missed getting wet, but she sure needed to get dry, just the same. 

She was an odd girl, chubby and about the palest white skin I've ever seen. She had truth issues, but what do you really want in a neighbor? I didn't believe her when she told me she was part of the Aryan Brotherhood for example. OK. She was maybe a little bipolar. Hard to get a read on her. 

One day she comes over to tell me about how she had met the gay couple who lived in the house adjacent to the apartment complex where we lived. She came over and told me how fabulous they were. The shaved head guy was "the top" and the other guy was "the bottom" she explained, and they were a "delightful" couple, she told me. I'm sure they were. To my other friends in the complex, they were "the gaybors". These were young people, enlightened to a good degree, so they were just clowning. Nobody really cared. In fact, Eric's girlfriend, Shelly, thought the bald guy was hot. When informed he was gay, she replied, "Oh, I could change him..." I think she was serious. I don't think she could though. It doesn't work that way, I hear. 

It was nice that Katrina Gal made new friends though. It didn't last long. 

The next day she comes knocking on my door and she had a DVD copy of "Brokeback Mountain". She did not have a good review. She let loose with a barrage of homophobic slurs and epithets that I probably better not post here. I was hoping her new friends, Top & Bottom, couldn't hear her. It wasn't so much that she hated the movie as she hated the homosexuality. Like I said, a little bipolar maybe. 

Well, I had heard the storyline and obviously a lot of people felt like that. This was after the theatrical release so most of that controversy had settled down. I watched it with an open, cinematic mind. Cinematography was excellent! I have a cousin in Wyoming. Her husband is an amateur photographer with a very professional eye. I get a calendar every year from them featuring his work. It looks like a beautiful place to live. I loved the old, mostly Ford, trucks in the movie too. Though this was in living color, the stark reality of how people lived in these sad little towns among all that beauty, eking out life the best they could, rivaled "The Last Picture Show" for flat-out, cinematic wearisome existence. Maybe it's just me, but I find beauty in that. I don't judge people's worth, or happiness based on how they live, or where they live. It's what they do and how they feel about themselves that defines them. 

These were two unhappy guys though. Ennis and Jack were very conflicted, ambling along in two worlds, beginning in the early 1960's. They were attracted to each other, Jack knew why, but Ennis wasn't sure. Well, they found out right quick. 

We've seen same-sex couples making out before. Waiting for a streetcar one night in New Orleans, I saw two cute girls making out. I approved. I liked it. Good for them. Of course, it occurred to me that they had probably just hooked up that evening like I was doing at the time with girls. Lust and love get confused a lot in this world. There were 4 or 5 young teen black boys enjoying the show, egging the girls on. It was all giggles and "Kiss her again!" Kind of a sideshow. The girls obliged. 

Seeing guys make out though, that's not the same. I'm not even sure that too many women fantasize about that. Leastways, they don't get off on it like us fellas do with women. Katrina Gal might have thought she did until she saw the movie. So, yeah, a little unnerving to see a couple of guys going at it. That's where the movie broke ground theatrically, but where it really knocked moviegoers socks off was, these guys fell in love. If I recall correctly, many people weren't ready for that. 

I felt so bad for Ennis's wife when she looked out the door of their apartment over the town laundromat and saw her husband passionately kissing his buddy. She was clearly not ready for that type of betrayal, nor expecting it. To me, the whole movie seemed to be about betrayal. At times, the two guys betrayed each other, but the betrayal of wives and children was so heartbreaking, so unnecessary to happen. They had this other life that society would not let them live, so they went about the practicing of normalcy that society accepted. They married and had kids. They loved their wives, I think, but their hearts were in each other's minds. The duplicity got me. But I understood then as now why they did it. It's just shameful to cage other people into your secret, but it has been going on since time immemorial. A clear theme in the film was that two single men absolutely not live together as a couple without risking the violent disapproval of other men. As a boy, Ennis's father had dragged him and his brother to see the body of one gay man who had been horrifically beaten to death by some other men. His dick had been pulled off. The dad wanted to show his boys what happened to men who chose not to be men. Ennis had to figure that daddy was one of the men who had done the deed. 

No spoiler alert here, but that is what happened to Jack later on. His secret got out and he was murdered for it. 

People need to be who they are, not what society expects or forces them to be. Here in 2025, Ennis and Jack could live their gay life, perhaps even in Wyoming. I'm not sure, but maybe. They sure could not in the 60's and 70's. In these trumpian times with the stranglehold that the evangelical Xtian 'Project 2025' is jamming down our societal throats though, perhaps for not much longer. The goal of tyranny is the empowered group's forced acceptance of their own ideals on to everyone else. There might be some wiggle room for their own people (Lindsey Graham comes to mind) but conformity is the order of the time. And, you know, that sucks. 

I don't care what two men, or two women do with their private lives, and neither should government or society at large or small. That's their business. As long as no one gets hurt. People being forced to hide their lives, does no one good. These days people can't hide their skin or religion either, but it's coming to that. America might be going back into the closet, sexually and morally. People should never live in fear of what they look like who they love or how others fear they are. This can't end well. It never does.