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17 “The Gay Cowboy Movie”: Queer Masculinity on Brokeback Mountain
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Chapter 17 “The Gay Cowboy Movie”: Queer Masculinity on Brokeback Mountain Steven Cohan Before Brokeback Mountain opened theatrically in December 2005, commercial prospects were uncertain for “this ostensible gay Western,” as Todd McCarthy (2005) called it when reviewing the film at the Telluride film festival for Daily Variety. The gay male demographic was assured, of course, but the film’s potential to attract a crossover audience remained an open question. “With critical support,” McCarthy observed, “Focus [Films] should have little trouble stirring interest among older, sophisticated viewers in urban markets, but trying to cross this risky venture over into wider release reps a marketing challenge for the ages; paradoxically , young women may well constitute the group that will like the film best.” Following its premiere in several of those urban markets, reviews of Brokeback Mountain appreciated its groundbreaking gay story as far as Hollywood was concerned, but, in describing the film’s achievement, these reviews treated it as a contemporary equivalent of a 1940s social problem film, with homophobia succeeding the postwar era’s anti-Semitism or racism as the pressing issue. This framework resulted from the circumstantial timing of the film’s release upon the heels of the gay marriage debate as well as the coincidental resemblance of the Brokeback narrative—in the Wyoming setting, the death of Jack Twist—to the brutal hate-crime killing of Matthew Shepard. The New York Times’s Stephen Holden (2005) concluded his favorable review by reminding his readers: “‘Brokeback Mountain’ is not quite the period piece that some would like to imagine. America’s squeaky closet doors may have swung open far enough for a gay rodeo circuit to flourish. But let’s not kid ourselves. In large segments of American society, especially in sports and the military, those doors remain sealed. The murder of Matthew Shepard, after all, took place in ‘Brokeback’ territory.” A few weeks later, as Brokeback Mountain successfully broadened out across the country, the mainstream press and Internet news sites tried to account for the unexpected popularity beyond urban markets of what had by this point become i-xii_1-262_Gled.indd 233 12/13/11 11:18 AM 234 Steven Cohan widely known as “the gay cowboy movie.” By now, however, its social currency as a period study of internalized homophobia with contemporary significance had pretty much disappeared from the national coverage, which seemed to condense into the “gay cowboy movie” tag all reference to the same-sex desire driving the central relationship of Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal ). The consensus among commentators, as McCarthy had predicted, was that straight women, packing the multiplexes in all locations, whether attending alone, with friends, or with begrudging husbands and dates, readily “got” the film, whereas straight men did not—or they were afraid to. In confirmation of the heterosexual panic that this film could instill in straight men, the gay cowboy jokes began as soon as Brokeback Mountain opened at year’s end, too. The jokes provided fodder for TV comics and cartoonists, while expressing indignation at this film’s apparent sullying of both a cherished icon of masculinity and the myth of the American West as celebrated by the movies. From this twinned perspective of Brokeback Mountain’s seemingly axiomatic appeal to women on the one hand and the homophobic disavowal of that appeal through the gay cowboy jokes on the other, the public discourse recounting audience responses to the film heterosexualized its affect according to gender. Regardless of their sex, engaged viewers were feminized through their emotional reaction to the film, while alienated viewers, including those who refused to buy a ticket, were masculinized. Both gendered responses, moreover, were positioned at a distance from the homoerotic intensity driving the narrative of Brokeback Mountain: if the masculinized audience simply could not get past the tent on the mountain and made fun of the movie’s cowboys for acting upon their homosexual desire, the feminized audience looked beyond the cowboys’ homosexual desire to appreciate the love story’s universality. Singly and in conjunction, these two configurations of the audience articulated the impact of Brokeback Mountain as a cultural event in terms of what it signified for heterosexuals, respecting the hegemony of a straight mainstream marketplace. In what follows I examine how the “gay cowboy movie” tag condensed the slippages in thinking required to sustain this dualism, which structured accounts of the film’s reception. Because the tag’s indelible attachment to Brokeback Mountain carried with...