There’s a real good review of Brokeback Mountain in The New York Review Of Books now. I’ve read dozens of reviews and articles on Brokeback, and this is the only one I’ve seen that actually discusses what makes the film different from other "star-crossed lover" tragedies. For all that everyone is calling the tragic love story in Brokeback "universal", it isn’t in one very central respect and it is frustrating me no end that no one is talking about this, because it really needs to be talked about. Well, someone has finally talked about it:

Indeed, a month after the movie’s release most of the reviews were resisting, indignantly, the popular tendency to refer to it as "the gay cowboy movie." "It is much more than that glib description implies," the critic of the Minneapolis Star Tribune sniffed. "This is a human story."

…

Because I am as admiring as almost everyone else of the film’s many excellences, it seems to me necessary to counter this special emphasis in the way the film is being promoted and received. For to see Brokeback Mountain as a love story, or even as a film about universal human emotions, is to misconstrue it very seriously – and in so doing inevitably to diminish its real achievement.

Both narratively and visually, Brokeback Mountain is a tragedy about the specifically gay phenomenon of the "closet" – about the disastrous emotional and moral consequences of erotic self-repression and of the social intolerance that first causes and then exacerbates it…

It could be that nowadays people, especially young people, don’t see the closet as being a realistic option in their lives, and don’t experience its corrosive effect on a person’s soul firsthand anymore, either in their own lives if they are themselves gay, or in the lives of their gay friends, most of whom nowadays are out, even if not all that comfortably out. But there are more then gay teens being forced into Love In Action to learn to hate themselves. There are grown adults, hating themselves for what they are, who voluntarily check themselves into these places to have their homosexuality cured. Self hatred and it’s prison, the closet, is still there, is still very real in people’s lives, and it is Still destroying lives as surely as it destroyed the lives of the lovers in Brokeback Mountain.

In another review that decried the use of the term "gay cowboy movie" ("a cruel simplification"), the Chicago Sun-Times’s critic, Roger Ebert, wrote with ostensible compassion about the dilemma of Jack and Ennis, declaring that "their tragedy is universal. It could be about two women, or lovers from different religious or ethnic groups – any ‘forbidden’ love." This is well-meaning but seriously misguided. The tragedy of heterosexual lovers from different religious or ethnic groups is, essentially, a social tragedy; as we watch it unfold, we are meant to be outraged by the irrationality of social strictures that prevent the two from loving each other, strictures that the lovers themselves may legitimately rail against and despise.

But those lovers, however star-crossed, never despise themselves. As Brokeback makes so eloquently clear, the tragedy of gay lovers like Ennis and Jack is only secondarily a social tragedy. Their tragedy, which starts well before the lovers ever meet, is primarily a psychological tragedy, a tragedy of psyches scarred from the very first stirrings of an erotic desire which the world around them – beginning in earliest childhood, in the bosom of their families, as Ennis’s grim flashback is meant to remind us – represents as unhealthy, hateful, and deadly. Romeo and Juliet (and we) may hate the outside world, the Capulets and Montagues, may hate Verona; but because they learn to hate homosexuality so early on, young people with homosexual impulses more often than not grow up hating themselves: they believe that there’s something wrong with themselves long before they can understand that there’s something wrong with society. This is the truth that Heath Ledger, who plays Ennis, clearly understands – "Fear was instilled in him at an early age, and so the way he loved disgusted him," the actor has said – and that is so brilliantly conveyed by his deservedly acclaimed performance. On screen, Ennis’s self-repression and self-loathing are given startling physical form: the awkward, almost hobbled quality of his gait, the constricted gestures, the way in which he barely opens his mouth when he talks all speak eloquently of a man who is tormented simply by being in his own body – by being himself.

Some people would disagree that gay teens grow up hating themselves "more often then not", but it is still happening to kids, and it is the horror at the center of LIA’s teen program "Refuge". Smid wants to deliver gay teens into the wasteland of despair that Ennis and Jack experienced throughout their lives. This is what Smid, and everyone who is a part of the ex-gay movement, calls righteous. But it is a nightmare no one should have to live. Everyone needs to love, and be loved in return. It is a basic human need.

The real achievement of Brokeback Mountain is not that it tells a universal love story that happens to have gay characters in it, but that it tells a distinctively gay story that happens to be so well told that any feeling person can be moved by it. If you insist, as so many have, that the story of Jack and Ennis is OK to watch and sympathize with because they’re not really homosexual – that they’re more like the heart of America than like "gay people" – you’re pushing them back into the closet whose narrow and suffocating confines Ang Lee and his collaborators have so beautifully and harrowingly exposed.

You should go read the whole thing. It really gets to the central sadness of this story. I’ve read the short story it was based on and I am old enough to recall some of what it was like for gay people back in the 1960s, when the story opens. I wasn’t yet aware of my own sexual orientation back then, that wouldn’t come about until the 1970s and my late teens. But I know how it was. The disgust and contempt for homosexuals was nearly universal. You could be fired from any job, have a professional license revoked or not granted, tossed out of your apartment, arrested and thrown in jail simply for being in a gay bar when the cops raided it, or any gathering of gay people. There were laws on the books in many cities, forbidding bars and restaurants from serving known homosexuals. Your name would be put on a sexual offenders list, whether you had actually done anything to anyone or not, simply because of what you were. And every Every news story or article about people like you described you to the rest of the world in the worst possible terms. You were a pervert, a psycho, mentally deranged, a dangerous lurking sexual predator. In my 8th grade sex ed class back in 1968, they taught us that homosexuals typically killed the people they had sex with.

Thankfully it’s not nearly as bad nowadays. But what the right wing, what the religious right cannot do to society as a whole, they’re still trying to do at the local level, and to individual gay people whenever and wherever they can. They want us to hate ourselves. They want to take any chance for love and happiness away from us, no matter how small. Witness the bitter opposition to even allowing same sex couples the simple right to be with and care for each other in the hospital. And they want to make gay teens who are comfortable with what they are, come to fear and then to loath their sexual nature. That is why places like Love In Action exist. The closet is still a terrible reality in America today, and if the religious right has its way, it will once again be the dominant reality of gay people’s lives. What makes Brokeback Mountain different from other star-crossed lover stories, is how it is making accessible to the rest of America that uniquely gay experience of the closet. Now you know what it’s like to be in there. Do you understand now why we fight?

This needs to be discussed, because America needs to see, finally, that the monsters, the sexual predators, were never their homosexual neighbors. Some people take sexual pleasure from others against their will. But there is another, more depraved kind of sexual predator, who takes pleasure in destroying in others, that capacity for sexual intimacy, that capacity to love and trust, and receive the love and trust of another. They justify the emptiness in their own hearts by murdering the hopes and dreams of their neighbors. They witness the death of love in others, and are reassured that their own heartless souls are the essential human reality, and the quest for love and intimacy is a pathetic, if not a wicked illusion. There’s your monster.