The Exceptions That Prove the Rule

I'm glad to report that succeeding articles in The Brokeback Book have been much better than David Leavitt's opening clunker. Even Daniel Mendelssohn, whose The Elusive Embrace: Desire and the Riddle of Identity (Knopf, 1999) annoyed me so much a decade ago, wrote a very smart review of the film for the New York Review of Books that is reprinted here. After that, Mun-hou Lo's "Backs Unbroken: Ang Lee, Forbearance, and the Closet" is a very interesting look at the concepts of repression and forbearance in Chinese culture, comparing Brokeback Mountain to Lee's earlier films The Wedding Banquet and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon in their treatment of this theme. James Morrison's "Back to the Ranch Ag'in: Brokeback Mountain and Gay Civil Rights" covers a lot of ground, including male romances in American literature as analyzed by the critic Leslie Fiedler, and the role of nature in the story and the film.

But now I'm in the middle of Chris Freeman's "'Jack, I Swear': Some Promises to Gay Culture from Mainstream Hollywood," which centers on the talismanic shirts from the film, bought by a gay collector in 2008. Freeman writes at one point:

What we know, as viewers with some historical and critical distance from this imaginary but all too real scenario, is that a life together for lovers like Jack and Ennis was almost unimaginable, particularly in the West of legend [111].

I guess it depends partly on what you mean by "lovers like Jack and Ennis" and "unimaginable." We know of quite a few male couples who lived together in US history, though we can rarely be sure that they were lovers, for very good reasons. To me that means that a life together for two men is quite imaginable, even if they didn't bugger each other on the front porch of the old homestead every Saturday night. In James Fenimore Cooper's novel The Pioneers, set in the 1780s, the aged Deerslayer and Chingachook (called Mohegan) live together in a cabin. In Cooper's Red Rover, two male friends, partners since they survived a shipwreck together, have raised a foundling to adulthood. In The Pilot, two seamen "wind up living together in a remote cabin deep in the North American wilderness" (Chris Packard, Queer Cowboys [Palgrave Macmillan, 2006], 34). Abraham Lincoln shared not just a room but a bed with Joshua Speed for four years after his arrival in Springfield, Illinois. The fantasy of two male friends running a ranch together recurs in movie Westerns of the 1940s and 1950s, and is referred to in John Steinbeck's short novel Of Mice and Men. I'm not claiming that any of these couples were sodomitical, but that's not the point: the point is that two loving friends could and did live together, not just in the wilderness but in town, without exciting suspicion. (Incidentally, Patricial Nell Warren gives a much more nuanced and informed account of this phenomenon in her essay "Real Gay Cowboys and Brokeback Mountain", included in The Brokeback Book.)

(I haven't mentioned female couples here because of the male-to-male focus of Brokeback Mountain, but of course there's a long tradition of women living together too.)

Freeman goes on:

Domestic gay life in big cities wasn't a great deal different: an urban gay male couple during the early 1960s, when the film's first summer is set, was a rare thing. In his memoir My Lives, author Edmund White notes that when he first moved to New York in 1962 and lived with his lover, "two men living together was still a new thing in those days -- at least we knew only one other couple" [112].

Freeman then cites the Only Gays In The Village of Los Angeles, Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy -- "and in their case, the exception proved the rule that it was almost never done" (112). Bachardy and Isherwood stood out because of Isherwood's fame as a writer, the thirty-year difference in their ages, and their refusal to pretend that they weren't a couple; they were an exception to the rule of the closet, not to a supposed rule of male couples not living together. (It would have been nearly impossible for them to try to pass as roommates, given the age difference.) Even in Los Angeles, there had been the earlier case of Cary Grant and Randoph Scott, who lived together openly as bachelors in the 1930s -- so blatant that they were latent. Again, the nature of their relationship remains controversial, but the point is that two men could and did live together; there was nothing "unimaginable" about it.

It's always dangerous to overgeneralize from what "we knew," especially in a city as big as New York. There were several famous male couples living in New York during the 1960s, among them Gore Vidal and Howard Austen, William Flanagan and Edward Albee, Paul Cadmus and Jon Andersson, Donald Windham and Sandy Campbell, Truman Capote and Jack Dunphy, and others less famous, such as the diarist Donald Vining and his partner Richmond Purinton. There were others; these are just some examples I can remember off the top of my head. Those who weren't famous mostly aren't recorded, so it's easy to pretend they didn't exist. But it might have been easier for the obscure than for the famous to live together openly.

I admit that there was plenty of social pressure against same-sex couples living together, but the fact remains that a good many people defied it or worked around it. Once again I find myself wondering why gay people are so often determined to erase our history.

Those Who Remember History Are Doomed to Bang Their Heads Against the Wall -- Forever

I've begun reading The Brokeback Book, a collection of articles on Brokeback Mountain edited by William R. Handley and published this year by the University of Nebraska Press. Some of the articles are new, but others appeared before. One of these is David Leavitt's 2005 review of the film, which originally appeared at Slate. Leavitt is a novelist himself, but that doesn't really qualify him to write about either gay fiction or gay film. He showed himself to be quite ignorant on both subjects, in fact.

Of Jack Twist's pickup of a male hustler in Juarez, Mexico, Leavitt wrote:

For just a few seconds, we get a glimpse of the urban nightscape that was the locus of the very gay movies that might have been playing, in big cities, at the moment when the scene takes place—movies like Nighthawks and Taxi zum Klo, in which sexual profligacy is at once celebrated as a form of liberation and mourned as a pallid substitute for meaningful connection.

(Nighthawks is a British film, directed by Paul Hallam, that was released in 1978; the German Taxi zum Klo, directed by Frank Ripploh, was released in 1980.) Whatever else can be said about it, Jack's connection in Ciudad Juárez is something he could have found in most smaller cities in the US, and even many small towns, and he might not even have had to pay for the sex he found there. There's nothing specifically "urban" about that "nightscape." Juárez, lying just across the border, is simply convenient for a closeted Texan whose distant boyfriend wasn't available.

Leavitt went on:

It goes without saying that Brokeback Mountain is an entirely different kind of film. Perhaps it takes a woman to create a tale in which two men experience sex and love as a single thunderbolt, welding them together for life; certainly Proulx's story is a far cry from such canonical gay novels as Edmund White's The Farewell Symphony or Allan Hollinghurst's The Swimming Pool Library, which poeticize urban promiscuity and sexual adventuring. Proulx, by contrast, exalts coupledom by linking it to nature.

I suppose that The Swimming Pool Library (1988) and The Farewell Symphony (1997) are "canonical," but they're not the only canonical gay male novels. I presume Leavitt chose these two to make Brokeback Mountain look as utterly different from "canonical gay novels" as possible. He could just as well have cited his own novel, The Lost Language of Cranes (1986), which also depicted "urban promiscuity and sexual adventuring." But he chose to ignore any number of other canonical gay male novels built around coupledom, from Christopher Isherwood's A Single Man (1964) to Patricia Nell Warren's The Front Runner (1973) to Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City (1976-2010) to most of Christopher Bram's novels, starting with Surprising Myself (1987), and so on down to the present.

The same is true of films. I liked Brokeback Mountain when it was first released, but I think I was less impressed by it than many people were, including many gay men, because I knew what had gone before it; it didn't feel unique and unprecedented to me. When I think of gay male films, most of the best and most interesting were made independently of Hollywood, which preferred to use gay men and lesbians as symbols of dehumanized evil or mockery. From A Very Natural Thing (1974) to Parting Glances (1986) to Torch Song Trilogy (1988) to Brokeback Mountain director Ang Lee's The Wedding Banquet (1993), independent cinema about gay men can't be reduced to a celebration of urban sexual adventuring opposed to coupledom in a state of nature. For that matter, Richard Amory's 1966 pulp Song of the Loon and its sequels depicted sexual adventuring and romantic coupledom in the nineteenth-century Pacific Northwest. Song of the Loon was even made into a 1970 softcore film.

Remember that, except for The Swimming Pool Library, we're just talking about films and books produced in the United States. Look to traditions of homosexual literature in Europe, Latin America, Asia, and elsewhere, and Leavitt's account stands exposed more nakedly as the narrow and simplistic copout it is. It doesn't help that in the 1990s Leavitt co-edited an anthology of "homosexual literature in English from 1748 to 1914", and another of international gay writing. Of course, they may be as inadequate as this review; I haven't seen them. But it's hard to believe he's really as ignorant as he comes across in his review of Brokeback Mountain.

And of course, I've done a lot of complaining about the reductive and inaccurate accounts of gay history and literature produced by academics. Or about the distorted picture of gay history promulgated by self-serving hacks like Andrew Sullivan. (Leavitt has a history of the same sort of distortion, most notably a baffling essay on how Andrew Holleran's Dancer from the Dance freaked him out as a young fagling. Everyone's entitled to his own opinion, of course, but Leavitt seriously misread the book. Lev Raphael wrote a critical response to Leavitt for the Lambda Book Review in 1995, which unfortunately isn't available online.) This is a problem that extends beyond GLBTQ history, but I feel it acutely in that domain. Handley no doubt included Leavitt's review as a historical curiosity; I hope that other pieces in The Brokeback Book are better.