>Anyway, I've long been fascinated with the way "gay community" is
>synonymous with everything but flyover country -- as if gays only live in
>cities or something.
I know what you're saying. I grew up in Oklahoma and had a blast in the "gay community" there in the early 80s. But don't you think there's a big difference, even in the cities, between the early 60s and the 70s and afterward. I mean there's a reason Stonewall is celebrated as a watershed.
I forwarded Brian's review to a friend of mine who grew up in Kentucky and has now long lived in San Francisco and Los Angeles. He didn't count to ten before replying, but here's what part of what he said about it:
one of the most moving scenes in the film for me was where Jack is urging Ennis to defy convention and live openly with him, but Ennis, correctly, notes that such a relationship is clearly impossible in the world in which they live (As I've mentioned to you on more than one occasion, to have openly acknowledged my sexuality in the small rural town I grew up in in the 60s would have been to sentence myself to death. So, you can imagine what would have happened to these guys in a place like Wyoming. And I'm sorry that Mr. Dauth doesn't appreciate that reality (probably because he came of age in the post-Gay Lib world and lives in New York or San Francisco.)) The fact that Jack's death in the end is ambiguous also underscores how in the rural America of his time (and ours) you really wouldn't know whether he died from a bashing or an accident because no one would be able to openly address his sexuality (again, my uncle died of AIDs, but the family couldn't bring itself to acknowledge his homosexuality so the story was he contracted it from a tainted blood transfusion. It's possible he did, but his demise is certainly "ambiguous" to say the least.)
In fact, I think the historical significance of this film is that it will now allow us to begin to recover the lost world of American gay rural life, and, for that matter, of a homosexual world that isn't urban, intellectual, campy, witty, bitter, and doomed (a la Boys in the Band),