I spend a lot of time venting in here as to the filter placed on the news by the papers in Texas, especially the Dallas Morning-News ("DaMN" for short).
Today, the DaMN has a problem on its hands, "Brokeback Mountain."
The cinema is a reliable and important source of content for newspapers, and this year "BM" is a candidate to sweep all of the major awards as Best Picture. Many of you have seen the film, and there are many reviews available on the Internet. BM is a powerful story of love outside marriage, where the protagonists are gay. BM brings home the point gays may come from wherever, live wherever, look like whomever and, particularly, are as human as anyone.
This last part- the underlying humanity- is a problem for Texas, a state where the Republican governor, Rick Perry,
supports gays being imprisoned and
told gays to leave the state, a state where
gay marriage was recently defeated 76-24 in a statewide referendum. A radical Republican, Governor Perry is adored by the right-wingers on the DaMN Editorial Board.
DaMN's Rod Dreher, in a review of BM published as an Op-Ed, obliterates being gay from BM. Dreher doesn't really hide his right-wing agenda, attributing his interest in BM to a right-wing blog and using sophomoric terms like "pro-gay propaganda" in his prose. According to Dreher, the sole point of BM is the immaturity and selfishness of the protagonists and the devastating impacts this has on their families.
... both men are overgrown boys who waste their lives searching for something they've lost, and which might be irrecoverable. They are boys who refuse to become men, or to be more precise, do not, for various reasons, have the wherewithal to understand how to become men in their bleak situation.
I guess "real men" aren't gay anymore.
In case Dreher's dismissal of human love from the relationship of the protagonists was a bit subtle, he includes the Freeper Cliff's Notes near the end:
It is impossible to watch this movie and think that all would be well with Jack and Ennis if only we'd legalize gay marriage. ...In the end, Brokeback Mountain is not about the need to normalize homosexuality,...
For the record, I have no problem with many of the ideas of Dreher. What discourages me is his stubborn refusal to concede the role societal "normalization" of homosexuality would play in tragedies like the one portrayed in BM. It is preposterous for Dreher to ask Texans to refuse to consider BM in the context of gay marriage- the easiest way to avoid a tragedy like BM would be for young gays in love to get married. Dreher could simply concede this fact, but doing so would unsettle a large majority of Texans.
Dreher, to his credit, responds to email, in case any of you are interested.