Rodney Croome . gay advocate

Art, lit, film, TV, bio, history, science

A shower of sparks

Why Brokeback Mountain will change everything.

When the curtains parted at the screening of Brokeback Mountain I attended on Australia Day so did the clouds over some rarely recalled memories.

The first and simplest was of my first “gay movie”, “My Beautiful Laundrette”.

I was an isolated, closeted 21 year old taking a break from an undergraduate summer job to see a film, any film.

The completely unexpected, passionate kiss between Johnny and Omar leapt off the screen and into my heart. It said men who love men are everywhere. I went to the next seven screenings to learn from Omar and Johnny everything they had to teach.

Out LGBT people, with access to many images and stories about same-sex love, tend to forget how a single, loving gay kiss on a flickering screen can galvanise in the lonely or the fearful the will to change, to be themselves, to find that love.

Brokeback Mountain will do what Will and Grace, Queer Eye and Big Brother can never do. It will leap into the hearts of thousands of lost and desperate teenagers. It will tell them that the love they seek knows no boundaries of custom, class, place or time. It will tell them that such limitless love can belong to them.

***

My next memory was as grim as the first was up-lifting.

It was of the moment, just a couple of years after Johnny and Omar, when, amongst a small group of young idealists hoping to reform Tasmania’s anti-gay laws, I was the least reluctant to speak to the media.

Learning of what was about to happen, several older gay Tasmanians begged me not to proceed. Their concern was partly for an LGBT community they believed would collapse under the backlash, but also for me, for they were utterly convinced by the truly awful things they had seen that I would be killed by the relentless fists of bashers.

I haven’t the words to describe how certain they were that a deep logic of Tasmanian life sentenced to death anyone who did what I was contemplating.

But I saw the same certainty – that revelation means death - in Ennis Del Mar’s eyes and heard it in his mumbling voice, as he explained to Jack Twist why their love would never descend from the mountain.

Obviously I dismissed the advice I received as valuable only as another reason for me to act. The violence would only end if people stood up to it.

I guess I was right. No-one has ever laid a hand on me, and that horrid, old certainty has faded in the minds of almost everyone in Tasmania.

But I have to admit there’s still a bleak part of my soul that fears Del Mar’s tire-iron logic is inescapable, that submerged under the New Tolerant Tasmania, far away from laws, policies, pop culture, basic fellow-feeling or any vestige of civilization, inhabiting some deep place like the love it hates, inchoate violence lies waiting for the right time to strike.

At the very least what I experienced on the threshold of my activist career helps me understand that what drove Ennis was more than unreflective anxiety.

The assessment of many Brokeback Mountain viewers is that “Ennis’s up-bringing/emotional constipation/unwarranted fears got in the way of him and Jack finding true happiness”.

If Ennis had the opportunity and the desire to respond he might simply say, “I’m lonesome, but I’m still alive”.

***

Peter Craven made one unforgivable mistake in his otherwise beautiful review of Brokeback. He said “it serves no cause”.

Would he have said this of a film about an American black man and white women living early last century and conducting a life-long affair in secret for fear he’ll be lynched, an affair which ends because their fear becomes fact?

No, because homophobia is still a more acceptable prejudice than racism. Tire irons still inspire much less indignation than the noose.

But with films like Brokeback challenging anti-gay prejudice the end’s in sight.

I’m prepared to make this bold claim on the basis of the third memory Brokeback uncovered.

It was from my late childhood, and was of my parents and I watching “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” on TV.

I couldn’t help but notice how wrapped up they were in that movie, despite being fairly conservative people, unconcerned with politics or events in other countries.

When I asked them about this, out poured their memories of the film’s first-release controversy and hype, how it hit the screens and the headlines at just the time they, and every other white Australian, were being asked to decide whether to admit Aborigines to full citizenship, and how moved they were by such a powerful tale told in a way they could relate to.

Brokeback is having the same impact.

The day I saw it, I sat behind four straight, early middle-aged, blue-collar blokes obviously dragged along by the wives and girlfriends who sat between them.

Before the film started they cracked the lamest jokes about condoms and mounting, but five minutes in and for the rest of the film, they were silent, staring at the screens with mouths agape.

The Brokeback world of poor-paid jobs, bad bosses, broken-down cars, monotonous food, poverty, uncertainty, anxiety, indignity, wives who don’t understand and love besieged by circumstances - this film version of a Bruce Springsteen song - it’s their world, one rarely if ever represented on the silver screen.

Every poll on LGBT human rights shows that it is precisely middle-aged, blue-collar men who are the most hesitant about supporting justice.

Brokeback reaches out to and moves them, in just the same way “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” reached out to and moved my parents’ generation.

The result will be a sudden increase in support for equality that will take everyone by surprise.

Then, in years to come, when the men who sat in front of me watch Brokeback Mountain with their grandkids, they’ll recall a time when a French lesbian won the tennis, male pop stars started marrying their boyfriends, and some government joker showed up at work to tell them not to discriminate, how Judy Jackson made it legal in Tassie, how old Bush and Howard tried to stop it all, how the world was on the brink of a great transformation, and how it all suddenly made sense to them when they first saw Brokeback Mountain.

***

From decades hence to decades past; my final memories seem more dream than reality, but are more real for that.

I’m seven, maybe eight, and I’m watching two old farm women play cards.

At game end one rises to leave and I rise with her. But they pause and their hands touch and clasp across the table.

The story goes they were uncontrollable in their youth, riding their horses at reckless speed across the mountains to wild places farmer’s daughters rarely trod.

Now their linked hands say to me they know the time of parting is close. In that clasp I see a prayer offered up to their almighty and merciful God that the parting won’t last long.

At about the same time in my young life I was first entrusted to carry syrupy green cordial to the men baling our paddocks.

In my recollections, one of the men lifting hay bales on to the trailer is my best school friend’s father.

I follow his gaze as it settles again and again on the contract farm-hand atop the trailer, stacking the bales he’s thrown.

Suddenly, a bale leaves the ground, flies through the air and lands at the farm-hand’s feet, lifted and thrown by my friend’s father in one sleek movement as if it weighs nothing.

The farm-hand stops in his tracks, returns the farmer’s gaze, and rewards the effort with a smile as dazzling as the sun above.

Only later did I hear the gossip about my friend’s father, that his wife turned to drink because of “marital problems”, that he “got round” with other men, and, yes, that folks were suspicious about how often he went up into the mountains “fishing”.

Much later still my mother’s growing familiarity with a once-forbidden vocabulary allowed her to reluctantly admit that the man concerned “was a homosexual”.

But it didn’t take words to wake me up to the difference in this man. The beatings were enough for that.

When his son and I misbehaved, he would fly into a rage like nothing I ever saw in that already violent time and place.

Something pent-up, inexhaustible and so sudden it must always have been lurking just below the surface, would vent itself on our small bodies.

That his violence was so clearly not about whatever we had done somehow made it less physically painful. But we cried all the more for witnessing how profound was the pain of the man who beat us.

It seemed to me back then no contradiction that this hot-tempered man was also more sensitive than his peers.

With infinite tenderness he would cradle a warm just-dead lamb, a rabbit he had shot, or his son sobbing hot tears down cheeks still red from the blows.

My friend’s father is old now, and I have been led to believe he lives alone.

But like Ennis Del Mar he has a comfort.

Often I watched as the tender farmer and the old, card-gaming women looked up at the mountain that dominated our lives.

The same gaze of longing and knowing I had seen exchanged by the women, or fall on the farm-hand, was inspired by the great blue rocky backdrop beneath, and sometimes beyond which, our lives were staged.

The mountain was their resort in a uncomprehending world, its beauty redeemed them from fear and bitterness, and above all it promised that love endures despite everything.

Remember that. Mountains are there to remind us that love survives all its assailants.

You or I might end up living in a caravan somewhere, with nothing but an old shirt to weep over.

Everything we love and build might be smashed to atoms on history’s anvil.

But the sparks from that destruction will light a thousand new fires burning brighter and hotter than we can imagine.

Brokeback Mountain has sent the sparks from a million shattered lives showering across the world.

Now watch what wonders are forged in the flames.

***

In other news,

The Muriels aren’t quite as impressed with Brokeback as yours truly.

Queerpenguin describes the relationship between the Brokeback boys and their mountain in the most beautiful way.

The Dreadster has been quick to cotton on to one of the most important nasty-con axioms: people, events and beautiful things (like gay cowboy movies) are only important insofar as they give you an opportunity to belittle everyone who doesn’t agree with you.

And

I will be off-island till next Wednesday. Posts will be intermittent until then.

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