Via Some Guys Are Normal, Ben at Scattered Words, who is questioning homosexuality (but probably not in the same sense as physicists are questioning dark matter), finds that someone at Christianity Today didn’t think Brokeback Mountain was such a bad flick after all…

Homosexuality has been like a ghost, hiding in the shadows of my shame, telling me I can never reach my full potential as a Christian. As strange and contradictory as it may sound, seeing Brokeback Mountain helped me bury that ghost and begin moving forward.

What I saw in Brokeback Mountain tore my heart apart. I cried with Alma when she discovered the truth about Ennis and Jack. I also cried for the countless wives in real life who know that their husbands are leading a secret existence. I cried even harder for the men, more in number than we realize, who are trapped in sexual sin and don’t know how to escape it. And as I wept, I wondered if God could use me to help reach some of them with his grace and delivering power.

No scene touched me more than the one in which Ennis’s daughter pays him a visit after Jack dies, and tells him he needs to buy some furniture to liven up his cold and barren trailer. Ennis responds, "If you ain’t got nothin, you don’t need nothin." I made up my mind then and there that I would not let homosexuality rob me like it had robbed Ennis.

No you drooling moron…homosexuality didn’t rob Ennis, a goddamn tire iron swung by all the force hate could give it robbed him.  Twice…

"You won’t catch me again," said Jack. "Listen. I’m thinkin, tell you what, if you and me had a little ranch together, little cow and calf operation, your horses, it’d be some sweet life. Like I said, I’m gettin out a rodeo. I ain’t no broke-dick rider but I don’t got the bucks a ride out this slump I’m in and I don’t got the bones a keep gettin wrecked. I got it figured, got this plan, Ennis, how we can do it, you and me. Lureen’s old man, you bet he’d give me a bunch if I’d get lost. Already more or less said it — "

"Whoa, whoa, whoa. It ain’t goin a be that way. We can’t. I’m stuck with what I got, caught in my own loop. Can’t get out of it. Jack, I don’t want a be like them guys you see around sometimes. And I don’t want a be dead. There was these two old guys ranched together down home, Earl and Rich — Dad would pass a remark when he seen them. They was a joke even though they was pretty tough old birds. I was what, nine years old and they found Earl dead in a irrigation ditch. They’d took a tire iron to him, spurred him up, drug him around by his dick until it pulled off, just bloody pulp. What the tire iron done looked like pieces a burned tomatoes all over him, nose tore down from skiddin on gravel."

"You seen that?"

"Dad made sure I seen it. Took me to see it…"

Annie Proulx,  "Brokeback Mountain"

That’s what robbed Ennis.  That’s what stole from him his capacity to love and accept love from another man.  Nearly every review of the film I’ve seen has commented on how perfectly the actor who played him, Heath Ledger, captured the sense of a man completely uncomfortable inside his own skin, so completely inhibited he can barely talk.  Shame.  Guilt.  Self loathing.  It’s not enough for the hatemongers to make other people hate us.  We have to hate ourselves too.  We have to hate ourselves even more then they hate us.  Because only by hating ourselves that much, will we keep punishing ourselves for simply existing, for just being alive and walking this good earth along with them and breathing their air, when they’re not able to punish us for it with their own two hands.  And those of us who never fell into or who manage to escape that bottomless pit of shame and self loathing, still have to deal with the hate and all the myriad ways, large and small, that it cheats us out of one of this life’s most perfect joys. 

That’s what robbed Ennis.  And it robs all of us.  Some of us more then others…horribly more.  I’ve never hated myself and never tried to obliterate myself in reckless squalor, or an all controlling self-annihilating religious cult.  I’ve never lost a lover to the tire iron.  I’ve never been forced against my will into ex-gay therapy.  But I can count in months the time in my life I’ve had someone to love, and that’s partly because I’ve fallen in love so many times with other guys, who could not love and desire whole heartedly, because they were so ashamed to love and desire at all.

Hate, and the tire iron.  One way or another it robs us all.  It robbed me…and it robbed you too. Mr. Belkofer.