Is it queer enough for you?

I wrote a couple of weeks ago that the promoters of Brokeback Mountain have misrepresented the film, no doubt with the best of intentions as well as practical, i.e. financial ones. Daniel Mendelsohn, author of The Elusive Embrace (if you haven't read it, seek it, one of the few coming-out narratives I'll recommend), getting impatient with the critics and publicity machine which seek to turn Brokeback Mountain into a "universal love story." He especially takes issue with Roger Ebert's defense: "It could be about two women, or lovers from different religious or ethnic groups—any 'forbidden' love." No way:

The tragedy of heterosexual lovers from different religious or ethnic groups is, essentially, a social tragedy; as we watch it unfold, we are meant to be outraged by the irrationality of social strictures that prevent the two from loving each other, strictures that the lovers themselves may legitimately rail against and despise.

But homosexual love, so often thwarted in Jack Twist and Ennis Del Mar's time, is different in that it provokes a self-loathing that's corrosive and often tragic -- a "psychological tragedy," Mendelsohn avers, although he's too quick to blame that bugaboo "society."

Plainly, the strategy has worked. I keep commenting on this film despite my caviling (it wasn't even my favorite movie of the year although it came close) because now its impact has seeped into the culture. When my students want to discuss it in class (I may ask them to read the story), when my parents complain about "Hollywood" trying "to shovel gay stuff down our throats," when my student colleagues are downloading bits of the film to watch in the newsroom -- this is clearly a mass cultural phenomenon; and like all totems, you need to take a swing at it with a sharp ax.