--- Begin forwarded message:
From: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: 27 Dec 2005 07:43:34 -0500
To: [email protected]
Subject: [Bisexual] Brokeback Mountain review
Brokeback Mountain review.
Background for the time in which the movie is set: The first BGLTQ college student organization, the Student Homophile League at Columbia University in New York City, was founded in 1965, by bisexual organizer "Donny Donaldson". That group and other chapters that Donaldson supported students to found at other schools, built the beginnings of the modern BGLT rights movement. Their activism, including the first public challenge to the "medical model" of "homosexuality as illness" (see footage of protesters in Before Stonewall), built awaress of BGLT issues and the realization that if you built a constituency and stood your ground, you could effect positive change. These student organizations, combined with media coverage of their historic actions, built wide enough confidence for BGLT people to take a much stronger stand in the form of the Stonewall Riots in 1969. Though the Stonewall Riots raised visibility significantly higher, the founding of the Student Homophile League was the true beginning of the modern BGLT movement.
Especially before 1970, but even today, many people in "the heartland" between the Rocky Mountains and the Adirondack Mountains, didn't talk much about sex. Many people don't know the standard vocabulary for their genitals. Many men don't have a vocabulary for emotions, and certainly don't discuss them. In most rural communities, especially since the growth of agribusiness, making a living from farming or ranching is difficult, and more so every year. Not many of one's hopes and dreams for anything except working on the farm come to pass. Dwelling on this can lead to depression from which you may never emerge. When it seems that nothing can be done about to change the situation, talking about one's feelings can seem a much worse policy than not talking about them.
Brokeback Mountain starts in 1963, with the first meeting of Jack and Ennis, played by Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger. They meet in Wyoming, 35 years before Matthew Shepherd was killed there.
Jack is not talkative. Ennis speaks rarely, and almost never says more than a few words. Ennis' wife Alma, played by Michelle Williams, surmises that the two men's relationship includes sex, but never says so. Over the 20 years that the two men know each other, the times that Jack and Ennis spend together camping on Brokeback Mountain and showing (though not speaking) their love for one another are clearly precious and among the things that keep them going in between those times. But Ennis is unwilling to live with Jack, partly in fear of gaybashing. At various times in the movie, we see or hear about losses each man has experienced, experiences with gaybashing, and a little of each man's relationship with the other man and with his own wife.
Brokeback Mountain is built around silence and lack of information about the internal processes of its characters. Because none of the characters talks about thoughts and feelings, we see what happens in their lives but we don't know what they think about it or what meaning it has for them. It's not that there are no emotions. We sometimes see great joy or great suffering, but we don't know what it means to the characters Most people have strong feelings about various scenes, characters, and situations. This is true for everyone, not just viewers who identify as non-straight. Seeing the characters experience joy and sorrow, happy times and painful ones, we are drawn to fill in thoughts and meanings, based on what in our own lives resonates with what happens in the movie. Brokeback Mountain is like a Rorschach test: patterns which elicit our own thoughts and feelings about life, love, loss, sexuality, and sexual identity developmentk in the characters' lives and in our own.
I highly recommend seeing Brokeback Mountain. Find out what resonates in it for you. I can almost guarantee that something will. And afterwards, discuss it with someone else who has seen it, especially if they experienced it differently. You will learn a great deal in reflecting back on the movie, and later in reflecting back on the conversation.
Alan Hamilton, 2005/12/23
http://www.biresource.org/index.php?p=376
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