On Wild Gay Love in the Wild West

Well, I just saw the straight-girl slash fan-fictionoid Ang Lee movie Brokeback Mountain. After the caveat that again - again! - a feature length movie that doesn't have two women having a conversation about anything! not even two women in one screen shot! - even still I really loved this love story.

I can't believe Heath Ledger's understated intensity. Wow. The Berkeley theater I saw it in last night was full of weeping gay couples at the end, and the quartet of us were all holding eachother and crying. I mean, in a good way. Not angry sobs. Quiet leaking.

Then we went out and processed. One revelation to think about: Bound is to the noir genre what this is to the cowboy drama. Bound's elevator scene: Brokeback's dirt parkinglot scene. You had the whole movie outlined for you, the sexual tension all balled up and lobbed at you in a wad of silence.

Then you spend the movie waiting for one or both of them to die, something you know by the bleak opening sequence and the fact that you're not seeing it in a queer film festival. In "Brokeback" you don't know what will get the guys in the end, the wilderness or the people of the land. Having grown up rural, I had my money on the people, and sadly that's a bet I'll keep winning again and again...

Now, this morning, I am reading something at work - where we do Russian environmental / indigenous rights protection - about the use of the word "wilderness" - it somehow reminds me of the sadness of the movie, that sense of an undefineable good thing lost to a system that requires definition. In this quote you have the recontextualization of that word by a person whose nation was destroyed in the defining of the wilderness.

Here's the passage:

We did not think of the great open plains, the beautiful rolling hills, and winding streams with tangled growth, as "wild." Only to the white man was nature a "wilderness" and only to him was the land "infested" with "wild" animals and "savage" people. To us it was tame. Earth was bountiful and we were surrounded with the blessings of the Great Mystery. Not until the hairy man from the east came and with brutal frenzy heaped injustices upon us and the families we loved was it "wild" for us. When the very animals of the forest began fleeing from his approach, then it was that for us the "Wild West" began.



- Chief Luther Standing Bear, Oglala Sioux Nation

Now, you can't equate a population of white "hairy" cowboys with the native nations it displaced, but reading this on the heels of "Brokeback" I have a renewed sense that this system of defining the wilderness (the undefineable, be it a relationship to land or a relationship between lovers) is universally oppressive-- it instills a wilderness of fear in working-poor white people, native peoples, anyone who by chance or position is drawn to reach for wholeness over someone else's false boundaries.