Brokeback Mountain

It seems fitting to write here about the film everyone is writing and talking about. As I swam my laps a few minutes ago I had to stop to keep from choking while sobs swept over me briefly. It was a caused by a recollection of the last scene before Emmit's open closet door, with Jack's jacket and shirt hanging there in its rustic shrine. My momento is a wildly colored windbreaker once worn by my too early departed Dad. I still treasure it and always will, and sometimes imagine his touch and fragrance when I slip it on. Tears run now as I recall his beard on my face, his arm across my chest. He always gave me love and trust of a kind it seemed no one else would give. And it occurs to me as I think back on this afternoon in the hushed theater (it was the quietest movie audience I can recall ever being a part of) that failure to trust was the central tragedy of the story. At a deep level I feel clearly that Emmit's wife would have tried to understand, would have succumbed to Jack's charms, may even have welcomed both into her heart--could there have been a "Paint Your Wagon" happy ending, or at least a kind of instinctual, sibling love between three of them, or even a communal family in which love conquered all? Time's story on the movie referred to a scurrilous comment about "the homosexualizing of America". What my best friend and I partook of together this afternoon was perhaps, at long last, the beginning of the "de-homophobizing of America."