I guess I should put up a SPOILER ALERT here. If you haven’t seen Brokeback Mountain, or read the short story it’s based on, you might not want to read further for now.

Gene Shalit, who like me, refused to change his hair style decades after it went out of fashion, voiced a little establishment contempt for Brokeback Mountain and gay people on Thursday, proving once again that everything you know about aging hippies is probably wrong, unless you lived through that time in America and saw it for yourself. They called it the do your own thing 60s, the decade of peace love and understanding…or sex drugs and rock and roll if you went to trade school. 1967 was the summer of love, and everyone was feelin’ groovy. But all those good vibrations pretty much only applied if you were a heterosexual.

I was there, I lived through that period of time, that horrible, angry, exhilarating time of backlash against racism, Vietnam, and the stifling conformity of the 1950s, and I am here to tell you that when it came to gays, the hippies, the heads and the radicals could be every bit as bigoted and hostile as Nixon’s silent majority. That faggots were the product of a dying decadent materialistic capitalist imperialist culture seemed at times to be one of the few things the various counter cultures could all agree on. And if it takes a lot of hard brutal painful work to open a closed mind, let me tell you it takes a hundred times that to open a mind that thinks it’s already quite open thank you. And some of them never did. Gene Shalit, who never held a candle to Davey Marlin-Jones, being yet another Case In Point.

Last Thursday, Shalit dumped on Brokeback Mountain, calling it “wildly overpraised, but not by me. But not content simply to let the air out of a film he thought was overpraised he went further, calling Jake Gyllenhaal’s character Jack a “sexual predator, and lamely adding that Jack just didn’t get Ennis’ “implied response ‘Better desolate then never’. This was of a piece with the jackass sheep jokes that peppered his review. But calling Jack a sexual predator for simply pursuing the man he loved, a man who loved him too, is no joking matter. That’s what the religious right, called real life Wyoming resident Matthew Shepard after his murder began making headlines, and it’s how bigots think. When heterosexuals pursue the objects of their affections that’s romance. When homosexuals do the same thing they’re dangerous sexual predators who have it coming. And Shalit, having watched Brokeback Mountain, had to know that Jack Twist ended up being brutally beaten to death for his sexual orientation, like so many gay men were back then, and still are today.

TO: today@nbc.com
FROM: Bruce Garrett
SUBJECT: Gene Shalit Brokeback Mountain Review

What the hell is wrong with Gene Shalit? No…wait…what the hell is wrong with you for letting this dime store bigot review a movie about gay men and homophobia?

And bigot he is. It’s written all over that review. Ennis wasn’t telling Jack “Better desolate then never, he was saying “Better desolate then dead. Christ on a stick! A cinder block could have watched that film, or read the short story it was based on, and comprehended that…but not Shalit. And there’s reason: anti-gay violence doesn’t seem all that unusual or offensive to him. What he finds unusual and offensive is the idea that a gay person might want to try and live their lives as the people they are, despite that violence.

And to call Jack a sexual predator is just spitting in the face of every gay person who ever tried to make love succeed in a world of prejudice and hate. Was Rick Blaine in Casablanca a sexual predator when he tried to pressure Ilsa into leaving Victor for him? Was Slim in To Have And Have Not a sexual predator when she stole a kiss from Steve, just to see if she’d like it? Shalit can only see a sexual predator in Jack, because he cannot see the human being for the homosexual. In Shalit’s world, anti-gay violence should win over love and honest desire, and any gay person who thinks otherwise is a sexual predator. But no…they’re brave and honest about themselves in a way that clearly offends Shalit. That’s how bigots react when they see even the smallest shred of pride in people they think ought to be ashamed of themselves.

Hey…I hear Shalit has a gay son. Well so did Charles Socarides. But Socarides didn’t have the forum to spread his venom all over America that you gave Shalit last Thursday. How many gay sons did he call sexual predators on your show? How many parents now loath their gay sons a little more? How many gay bashers feel a little more justified now, knowing the people they bash aren’t lovers, but sexual predators? You let your film reviewer give gay bashers from one end of this country to another permission to hate, during a review of a film that graphically represents what that hate does to gay people. You let your film reviewer tell your audience that a gay man who was beaten to death with a tire iron was a sexual predator, simply for loving another man who loved him, and insisting that their love had a right to exist. Is that supposed to mean he had it coming? You can be sure that’s the message that was received. Is there anyone working on the Today Show, or at NBC, who has a functioning conscience? Anyone at all?

—
Bruce Garrett
Baltimore, Maryland.

You can watch Shalit’s review yourself via the GLAAD website here. Or use this handy contact info (via GLAAD) to express your feelings about Shalit’s use of the term ‘sexual predator’ to describe a gay man who simply believes the love he shares with another has a right to exist on its own terms:

The Today Show
30 Rockefeller Plaza
Room 380 E
New York, NY 10112-0002.

Telephone:
212-664-4602 [If the viewer comment mailbox is full, ask to speak to someone else]
Fax 212-664-7209.

Email: today@nbc.com