> I also don't understand what exactly you mean by "gay love" and in
> what way this is a meaningful category, separate from love. In
> fact, what I liked best about Lee's movie was precisely that it was
> not cast as a gay love story, but as a love story.
If Brokeback Mountain were a story of a married straight man in Wyoming who has an affair over two decades with a married straight woman who moved down to Texas, few would sympathize with the main characters, especially if one of them -- like Ennis Del Mar -- moans about the burden of child support and the other -- like Jack Twist -- dreams of the day when she can have a good life with her beloved, using the money she made through her marriage to the son of a successful farm equipment salesman.
Also, this movie begins in the mid-1960s, and the protagonists' affair spans a couple of decades. But the world of Brokeback Mountain is apparently hermetically sealed and insulated from all the momentous social changes -- especially concerning gender and sexuality -- that happened in those decades. Alma (marred to Ennis) and Lureen (married to Jack) inexplicably put up with loveless marriage with little sexual passion for too long (Alma at least manages to divorce Ennis half way through the film). And It's one thing for Ennis and Jack -- born provincial -- to be in the closet in 1964; it's another thing for them to be stubbornly stuck in it in 1984! Ennis' refusal to leave Riverton, Wyoming and have a new life with Jack in New York, San Francisco, or whatever -- as so many real- life gay men and lesbians from small towns have -- even _after_ getting divorced by his wife doesn't make sense (by then at least Jack has money even though Ennis appears poor throughout the movie, and, more importantly, Jack wants Ennis to be with him every day and "pops the question" a couple of times!).
To make a plot like this movie's credible, you would have to begin it in the mid-1940s and end it before the mid-1960s.
In Ang Lee's universe, it's as if the sixties and seventies' sexual uprisings either didn't happen (Brokeback Mountain) or were fundamentally misguided and ended only tragically (The Ice Storm). Only his Regency venture (Sense and Sensibility) ends happily (but in that case he had to, based on Jane Austen's plot). For Lee, it's been all downhill since 1817 or thereabout?
Yoshie Furuhashi <http://montages.blogspot.com> <http://monthlyreview.org> <http://mrzine.org>