Brokeback Albany
In celebration of Pride month, I offer this glimpse of Gay America a mere eight years ago, in an essay I wrote in 2015. Next week, I will offer a view from today.
I drove out to Albany to see my friend Bertrand Fay perform his monologue of Annie Proulx’s short story, “Brokeback Mountain” at the Emeritus Center of the University at Albany. A dozen and half people in a narrow room witnessed a performance that would illuminate any Broadway theater. Bert’s interpretation of Ms. Proulx’s prose was well worth the three-hour drive each way.
Returning along the Pike, cresting the Berkshires at night, I recalled the first time I read “Brokeback Mountain,” well before the movie made those inhospitable slopes a household name. I absorbed Ennis and Jack in one sitting, just before bed. Then didn’t sleep that night. The entire next day the two lousy sheep hands filled my mind. I reread the story, amazed how Annie Proulx managed to create these two guys, contemporary to me in age, utterly different in every other respect, except how Ennis and I were both uncomfortable in our skin.
The movie came and went with deserved splash. A copy of the story sat on my bed table for years. I read it whenever I needed to calibrate my emotional compass. Each reading revealed new insight. Over time, the satisfaction those boys shared superseded the tragedy that befell them. In another time, in another world, Ennis and Jack could have had more. But what they had was better than nothing.
We are moving toward that other time, that other world. It’s possible for some, though not yet all, to lead fulfilling lives without having to conform to the norms drilled into us in the 1950’s. My sexuality presents no real obstacles, save those remnants of fear still etched my head. Yet my residual homophobia lingers. I’m embarrassed to report that I still double take men holding hands. When I scrutinize wedding announcements in the Times. I ache to fathom what those guys possess that I lack. In theory, I could hold a man’s hand. I could marry. My conscious mind approves it all. But the indoctrination that because I am different I am unworthy lingers. The shame I absorbed so deep when I was so young never cleanses free.
Bertrand Faye is a remarkable raconteur, mining Annie Proulx’s fable with such finesse that he unearthed my own psyche in the process. His performance notes, included below, describe this short story’s contribution to our evolving attitudes and legal standing of homosexuals. But what resonated for me was how Bert brought Ennis and Jack to life in a new way. Specific characters from afar who came to life in Albany to help me, and so many others, grapple with our murky pasts.
On Brokeback Mountain
Bertrand Fay, 2015
Harold Bloom, America’s preeminent literary critic, describes imaginative literature, or literary fiction, as that writing which possesses the qualities of aesthetic splendor, cognitive power, and wisdom, a literature that, among other things, contributes significantly to the contemporary public discourse, prompting it, enlightening it, moving it to new depths of social understanding, the human way of being in the world, and to social practice. This is our experience, certainly, at the hands of such authors as Beecher Stowe; Whitman; Steinbeck; the Latin American writers, Borges and Marquez; and surely Toni Morrison, the 1993 Nobel laureate in literature, who was honored at the awards ceremony in Oslo with these words: “…she regards the African presence in her country as a vital but unarticulated prerequisite for the fulfillment of the American dream.”
In the United States, over the last decades of the 20th century and the years thus far of the 21st century, there have been extraordinary changes in our public attitudes towards homosexuality, its fact, its nature, its humanness. There have been changes in policy regarding the military service of homosexual persons; states have enacted same-sex marriage laws; and the U.S. Supreme Court rendered two landmark decisions regarding same-sex unions in June, 2013, a further Court decision pending this year. Many of us, relatives and friends, have welcomed such changes for those whom we hold dear. Others of us have been able to ritualize long-lived loves, their dignity and worth recognized at last in ceremonies the same as those that legitimized the unions of our parents.
As one considers the evolution that has thus taken place in our country, one surely cites Annie Proulx’s short story, “Brokeback Mountain,” as a contributor to our national discourse on the subject of same-sex relationships. “As a writer of fiction my interest has focused on social change,” states Ms. Proulx in her essay, “Getting Movied,” included in the publication Brokeback Mountain, Story to Screenplay (Scribner4, New York, 2005). The author writes that her narrative developed from a consideration of what it might be like for a gay man to grow up in homophobic rural Wyoming, or, for that matter, anywhere else in the United States. Thus, “Brokeback Mountain,” about two high school drop-out country boys, shaped “in their opinions and their self-knowledge by the world around them,” and finding themselves in heretofore uncharted emotional depths, is a story both of destructive fear, internal and external, and of the triumphant personal agon that is ever at the core of the human experience and endeavor. If the story, in its first appearance, spoke to a large readership, in its re-expression as an award-winning film by Ang Lee, it spoke to, and challenged, millions.
“Brokeback Mountain” is a story bracingly raw in its directness; disarmingly simple in its narrative, lyrically beautiful in its prose. A story of two young men attempting to come to terms with a shared truth, it is a powerful, wise, and trustworthy work of American literature offering us much as we continue to move towards the realization of a cherished democratic ideal.
