Did Brokeback Mountain really change the way Hollywood – and the world – deal with homos? This “Brokeback Jeter” clip and some startling evidence say “no”.
While many people hailed gay cowboy drama Brokeback Mountain as a groundbreaking cinematic event, a Entertainment Weekly report says otherwise.
…Brokeback was more than a movie. It was a phenomenon that commanded the cultural conversation for months, from Jay Leno to YouTube to the cover of The New Yorker. More important, it proved that straight audiences would snap up tickets to a same-sex romance. Since then, a few gay-themed films have been released (e.g., Notes on a Scandal). But seemingly no studio – nor any studio art-house division – has greenlit a film with a gay lead character. ”I don’t think any studio responded by saying, ‘Quick, dust off whatever gay dramas we have!”’ says one former studio head. As surprising as it seemed that Brokeback could lose the Oscar to Crash, the real shock is just now setting in: Brokeback may have changed nothing.
It seems all Brokeback did was introduce another insult or clever one-liner into the cultural lexicon, as exhibited by the baseball fan in the video above.
Proceed At Your Own Risk offers this assessment:
Brokeback Mountain was just another pretty bauble used to distract us. It also turned a straight man into a gay sex symbol. The hollowness and hopelessness of that says it all.
And as I’ve said many times in the past, visibility has nothing to do with equal rights. In fact, all visibility means is that we’re easier to find and manage. And it won’t be until we’re unmanageable that laws will pass and we’ll assume our rightful place at the Constitutional table.
This could very well be true: Hollywood and Washington have long had a love affair. And it’s usually pretty straight.
mozzer13
In this asshole’s defense, I think most anyone would presume that screwing Mariah Carey would turn one gay.
Rt. Rev. Dr. RES
Let me begin by saying that I was born in 1946. Yes, I’m 61 and old enough to have walked into gay bars as an adult in 1967, before Stonewall. Canada and the USA were neanderthals where we were concerned. However, at that time, the medical and psychiatric communities had us listed under abnormal behaviour. You know , what the Catholic pope as pontiff and cardinal still describes us is that very old protocol. Objectively disordered, bullocks to the Prada queen. He is just another bishop with a better job and a fancier wardrobe.
Brokeback Mountain is about that time. It speaks to the author’s commentary in seeing a 65 plus guy looking with envy upon a happy gen x couple.
Heath Ledger, the Aussie suprahet, actually met his current wife, and produced their daughter during the filming of this movie. She was his on screen wife.
Jake G. has been and continues to be an enigma like others in Hollywood. His sexual orientation has often been discussed despite his many hetero relationships in the open. He has never been married.
The loss of the Oscar notwithstanding, I have seen several of this director and they are never a clean story about homoerotic love gone good. One whose name eludes me, had a Taiwanese person go through a straight marriage and actually pregs the wife despite the fact that he had a gay life partner. He remains married to her, with baby, and the life partner is invited to be third wheel.
Heath and Jake went out of their way on programmes to ridicule their homosexual roles. After a time, I wanted them to win absolutely nothing.
Hollywood is straight, straight love, straight sex, straight adultery, straight chronic divorce, and comic relief effeminate or tragic gays. If they are real, they are asexual beings who can hug and peck.
Woof
Ang Lee – Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon RULED and so did the homo cowboys
Robert-Chicago
I’m very confused about what the take-home message from the Brokeback Jeter clip is. At first, it appeared to me to be a homophobic guy taunting a metrosexual (?) baseball player. But, he’s got “Brokeback” spelled out on the back of his shirt. So is this loser straight, gay, just annoying? Even his friends don’t join him in his chant, presuming he has friends.
I’m really not sure what this guy is trying to say by his jeers.
I don’t think that he counts as evidence that Brokeback Mountain had little long-term positive impact. Maybe Brokeback Mountain didn’t change things much, but this guy in the clip isn’t proof enough.
I’m also don’t know what evidence in this post counts as “startling.”
WWH
“And it won’t be until we’re unmanageable that laws will pass and we’ll assume our rightful place at the Constitutional table” I’m afraid he might be right. It took being unmanageable to “solve” the AIDS crisis and it may well take being unmanageable again to gain equal protection under the law.
faghag
OK first of all i have no idea who that guy is and whether i should give a fuck about him , but going back to the subject of gay cinema in Hollywood, i believe that many film studios couldn’t care less about making another gay friendly movie.
Yes i did love Brokeback but i did also feel shortchanged by the finished product, Annie Proulx’ story was sexy and erotic but sadly Hollywood decided to sanitise it, in a way i would have prefered it if the movie had been made by a lesser known studio with unknown actors.
Hotrodbuddy
Have I been living under a rock? I have no clue what this is about. Could someone please explain what I have missed? I saw Brokeback Mountain, great movie by the way. But who the hell is this Jeter guy?
vince
“…visibility has nothing to do with equal rights. In fact, all visibility means is that we’re easier to find and manage. And it won’t be until we’re unmanageable that laws will pass and we’ll assume our rightful place at the Constitutional table.”
amen. amen. amen.
Leland Frances
Rev. Rev. Rev. Is it early onset Alzheimer’s at 61, substance abuse, or some other form of mental challenge that causes you to so often be factually wrong and so often reduce topics to absurdity.
1. Michelle Williams, Ledger’s costar in BBM, is NOT “his current wife.” Not only did they never marry, they are no longer together as a couple. Even if they had married and had eighty kids what is your point? That he had no right to do what he wanted in his private life because he was playing a gay/bi character in a film? Was that new Commandment, Your Holiness, only in effect while the film was being made or for the rest of his life? Not only is either absurd and “heterophobic” on its face, but its logical extension is that no gay actor can play a straight character unless he pledges himself to celibacy in HIS private life.
2. The other Lee film whose title your apparent brain damage prevents you from remembering was “The Wedding Banquet.” Contrary to your absurd reduction of it to an intentionally homophobic movie about someone self-loathing, it has been praised as a beautiful film about a good gay man who, like millions of others everywhere, including dare I say even Paradise, er Canada, is not yet strong enough to tell his parents he’s gay. It’s further complicated by the fact that they are conservative, native-born and still-resident Taiwanese. Surely someone who enjoys so much pontificating, er presenting himself as broadly learned and wise, knows that emphasis on marriage and family, rejection of gayness, is typically exceptionally oppressive and unforgiving among Asian cultures, even among families with several generation in North America and elsewhere outside Asia. Someone like you who apparently came out to the world the moment he realized he was gay at age 3, never made a wrong decision, etc., etc. The gay Asian character and his American Caucasian partner did the best they knew how to do in the situation at the time. They had come to care for the woman and wanted to share rearing the child. Again, if you weren’t so gleefully solipsistic, you would know variations of that happen more often than many realize. Do you demonize forever every gay man or woman in real life who ever felt compelled to get married and had children [there are millions] or just those fictional ones in Ang Lee films?
3. “Banquet,” like BBM, sought to dramatize to the nongay audience the costs to others of their homophobia. And were precautionary tales to gays who had not yet made some of their characters’ mistakes. For both, Lee deserves our praise and appreciation REGARDLESS of what anyone thinks of them as “art.”
4. Having cared 24-7 for a parent who died with Alzheimer’s, I know that variations of “hallucination” are symptoms as well as the familiar forgetfulness So one will try to be kind and not say that your claim that Heath and Jake “went out of their way” to “ridicule their homosexual roles” is a willful lie. Neither of them were particularly articulate but that’s not their job and a characteristic shared by many actual gay men and women celebrities and Jake said some things that were more “uninformed” than anything else and his immaturity allowed him to be talked into an absurd routine on “Saturday Night Life” [by older, more experienced writers/producers that I would indict for homophobia]. But your ignorant misrepresentation of what they did is so extreme as to be offensive to your reader, let alone them. If you have proof, e.g., direct quotes from interviews you can document, please present them.
5. As to the original thread topic, anyone who thinks that one film after some 100 years of Hollywood homophobia was going to destroy the results of the celluloid closet is him/herself a fool. Or two films; or five; or ten. Anymore than racism and sexism and xenophobia have been eliminated by the multiplicity of films attempting to combat those bigotries for decades longer. We have MUCH farther to go in all of these areas, and progress is only held back by those who declare our friends enemies and their fantasies reality.
WWH
You Canadians have way too much time on your hands!!!
Leland Frances
faghag, no disrepect, but other than [thankfully] removing the moment where Ennis urinates in his sink and Jack’s father beats him as a boy in some bizarre conflict over circumcision which took nothing from the main story, how did Hollywood “sanitize” BBM? Or have you seen several pumping your buddy in the rump a pup tent mainstream movies that I’m unaware of? In which case, please forward their names so I can rent them. : – )
Thanks.
faghag
My dear Leland Frances ,well if you go back and read the book, you’ll notice that THE boys first sexual encounter was a lot steamier , all we were left with in the movie was a lame ass fumble in the dark or as I like to call it: a spit , two pumps and a squirt.
I hope that didn’t gross you out too much LOL
Rt. Rev. Dr. RES
My spouse just told me that the reason that Leland Frances posts here is because even Shakespeare had pit humour for a certain segment of the audience.
There are individuals who appreciate his vulgar ad hominems and disrespectful discourse.
WWH- That is exactly the definition of retirement. For an hour or so, Leland Frances and others raise my blood pressure so that I do not have to check to see if I have a toe tag that I missed this morning. LOL
faghag
dear rev
Leland is a hot slut and I for one am a fan of their “vulgar ad hominems and disrespectful discourse” as you put it.
so there.
andrew
Jeter – Derek Jeter of the New York Yankees, silly.
faghag
Thanks Andrew, but i still don’t get it, something was lost in translation i guess.
They do say, Britain and America are two nations seperated by the same language.
Paul Raposo
“how did Hollywood ‘sanitize’ BBM?”
Adding story lines about their marriages which never occurred in the short story and removing the scene that takes place in the hotel room.
Leland Frances
faghag, hush now or our dirty little secret will be out! If they could only adore your perineum calla lily tattoo as often as I. No wonder that steaming sexy Chris Meloni from “Oz” and “L&O: SVU” calls it the most erotic part of the body.
As much as I would have reveled in longer BBM sex scenes and, yum yum, the “Full Heathy and Jakey,†given that it was clearly made more with the intent of trying to ease nongay audiences into acceptance, I understand Lee’s relatively faithful adherence to the original short story description: “[The bedroll] was big enough, warm enough, and in a little while they deepened their intimacy considerably. Ennis ran full-throttle on all roads whether fence mending or money spending, and he wanted none of it when Jack seized his left hand and brought it to his erect cock. Ennis jerked his hand away as though he’d touched fire, got to his knees, unbuckled his belt, shoved his pants down, hauled Jack onto all fours and, with the help of the clear slick and a little spit, entered him, nothing he’d done before but no instruction manual needed. They went at it in silence except for a few sharp intakes of breath and Jack’s choked ‘gun’s goin off’, then out, down, and asleep.†But I still luvs ya, ma petite fag hag, and want to have your babies. :- )
Paul, while the movie scene began in the “Motel Siesta†after they had finished “jouncing a bed,†and, unfortunately, didn’t show Ennis “still half tumescent,†it was included, while some of the dialogue there, as I recall, was used in other scenes. As for the greater exposition of their marriages, it served to lengthen the film from a very short story of less than 11,000 words, and further dramatize the emotional turmoil homophobia subjected both the men to and their wives and families. Far from “sanitizing,†one of its main messages, again, is the cost of pressuring people into acting against who they are. We’re each entitled to our subjective reactions, of course, but I yield to the story’s creator, Annie Proulx:
“AP: How did you feel about seeing it on the big screen?
Proulx: It was really quite a shock because I had had nothing to do with the film. So for 18 months, I had no idea what was happening. I had no idea if it was going to be good or frightful or scary, if it was going to be terribly lost or sentimentalized or what. When I saw it in September, I was astonished. The thing that happened while I was writing the story eight years ago is that from thinking so much about the characters and putting so much time into them, they became embedded in my consciousness. They became as real to me as real, walk-around, breathe-oxygen people. It took a long time to get these characters out of my head so I could get on with work. Then when I saw the film, they came rushing back. It was extraordinary—just wham—they were with me again.
AP: What did you think of the performances by Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal?
Proulx: I thought they were magnificent, both of them. Jake Gyllenhaal’s Jack Twist…wasn’t the Jack Twist that I had in mind when I wrote this story. The Jack that I saw was jumpier, homely. But Gyllenhaal’s sensitivity and subtleness in this role is just huge. The scenes he’s in have a kind of quicksilver feel to them. Heath Ledger is just almost really beyond description as far as I’m concerned. He got inside the story more deeply than I did. All that thinking about the character of Ennis that was so hard for me to get, Ledger just was there. He did indeed move inside the skin of the character, not just in the shirt but inside the person. It was remarkable.†– “The Advocate,†12/05
As for Rev, once again your only retort to facts disputing your recurring verbal explosive diarrhea, er, assertions, is to attack the messenger. You have patented “vulgar ad hominems and disrepectful discourse” about everyone from Barney Frank and Nancy Pelosi to Hillary to anyone involved in the most [if not universally] beloved gay film of all time to fill in the blank. [Given your jejune jingoism, one would have thought you would have praised it simply for having been filmed in Calgary.] Do they issue special dispensations in Canada or is not what you assert good for the ganders good for the old goose? One could wrap every response to your litanies of nonsense and non sequiturs into a silk purse but 99% of what you say would still be a cornucopia of sows’ ears, e.g., your undocumented claim that the leads “ridiculed†their characters.
My dear late mother once confused a can of Lysol for her hair spray. Fortunately, I discovered it before Lysol went into her eyes as well as on her hair. Her delusion resulted from her being deep into the well of Alzheimer’s. What is your excuse?
Dom
I think the main reason that Hollywood shies away from gay-themed films, even after the success of BBM (and despite the protestations of the right-wing Christofacists who had a tendency to say the movie bombed at the BO, any film that costs $14M and grosses almost $200M is a remarkable success: to match this, the film Titanic would have had to gross almost $3Billion) is the fact that Hollywood is still full of these old stupid mother-fuckers who still bring their 1952 attitudes into the present (remember how upset Tony Curtis and Ernest Borgnine were at the film? But they would have KILLED to have a role that good during their careers). It is the same reason that the Oscars always used to nominate or award Best Picture to the biggest epic that cost the most money (that God-awful laughably pretentious “Ben-Hur” in 1959, and who can forget when that monumental musical turkey called “Doctor Dolittle”- probably one of the worst musicals ever made and a box-office disaster but it cost a fucking fortune -was nominated for BP in 1968). And don’t think that Hollywood LOVES the gays, as the right-wing always likes to tell. When Hollywood has had a choice in portraying a group of people truthfully or by stereotype, they have ALWAYS chosen the stereo type – the queenly, repulsive gay, the lazy , shiftless Negro, the Arab terrorist, the submissive woman, the Asian speaking pidgin-English, the noble savage Native American – the list is too long to type. Funny, but even Jack Nicholson was shocked that BBM lost Best Picture, and he said he voted for it. But Hollywood did its best to keep BBM from winning because we couldn’t have a movie about a pair of butt-fucking faggots win now, could we?
Dom
…and one more thing. I do not think the movie upset a lot of str8 men because of the sex; I honestly believe it was the tenderness and raw emotion between the two main characters that made homophobes start screeching to the rafters. We are only supposed to fuck, remember? – we are not supposed to be capable of true and everlasting love. I mean, that would make us human, wouldn’t it?
Rt. Rev. Dr. RES
You know, I for one will disregard or shun any postings by faghag and leland frances.
Leland Frances
Your point about male-male intimacy phobia is well-taken, Dom. I once read of a class of medical school students who were fine with the gay sex act parts of an educational film they were watching but began to squirm like naked men on an ant hill when the couple simply kissed.
Matt
2 good points, Dom: Absolutely the negative reaction of straight male audience members, Hollywood types, and others, likely had more to do with seeing male-male intimacy and affection than buggery–after all, straight porn features anal sex all the time, so no big shocker there. And you’re bang-on-target re the depiction of homo-sexuals by the presumably Liberal Hollywood Elite. Even in BBM, there is a violent death and a pathetic loneliness conclusion for the main homos. In other films we’re mincing, lisping queens (I only mince and lisp on occasion), or psychopathic murderers who ultimately meet grisly ends, or loney, or miserable, or diseased. Rarely are we accountants going about our business and making a nice quick pasta thing back home after work.
Heather_L_James
The game was being played in Baltimore, the nation’s perennial leader in sexually transmitted infections. The guy obviously has untreated syphilis and has slipped in to general paresis.