First, I think multiple readings of a film are pretty much what anyone writing and directing a film intended to be a hit are trying to achieve. You need to get the widest audience possible, so the text has to have enough play in it that it can appeal to chicks, progressive het men, Stretch Armstrong Liberals, queers, and the men who go because their girlfriends want them to see a big strong man break down and cry after his lover leaves.
Second, I was thinking after reading y'all (coz I haven't seen the film) that from what David describes, Yoshie's and Brian's reaction to the death at the end of the film are reasonable.
As a young man, one is warned that "going off the ranch" on your own will get you killed. Then, at the end, one dies but we are left to wonder if it was due to a gay hate crime. (I don't think a writer/screenplay writer chooses an ambiguous ending like that for no reason.)
Like the man who tried to go "off the ranch", he must die. It doesn't matter why he died, but that he must die.
It's not that he must die just for the plotline, though that's part of it.[1] He has to die, for the story of the murder and the viewing of the corpse would have been pointless. The same story of repression could have been told by some other device: a beating, merciless playground bullying, the possibilities are endless.
By leaving the ending ambiguous, it allows people to project on to the film their own interpretations. They can be pissed about gay oppression, assuming it's a gay hate crime, believing that, otherwise, their love would have be realized. They can assume it was just a horrible tragedy and too bad these guys couldn't have taken advantage of the advances achieved by the gay rights movement by the end of the 70s. They can feel ambivalent themselves, perhaps even hoping that it was a gay hate crime as punishment -- because they aren't exactly as hip as they'd believed. They can, like others, be upset with the death as punishment ending, seeing it as yet another instantiation of gay oppression -- to be expected.
Bitch | Lab http://blog.pulpculture.org