Red Mountain, Brokeback River...same story

The first review of Brokeback Mountain in a mainstream publication. J. Hoberman realizes that Ang Lee's adaptation of the E. Anne Proulx story is the culmination of a genre rather than its end:

The western has always been the most idyllically homosocial of modes—and often one concerned with the programmatic exclusion of women. This is hardly a secret and thus the true cowboy love between tight-lipped Ennis and doe-eyed Jack precipitates the not-so-latent theme of early-'70s oaters like The Wild Rovers and The Hired Hand—not to mention Andy Warhol's hilarious disco western Lonesome Cowboys and its more conventional Hollywood analogue Midnight Cowboy. (Conventional up to a point, that is: Midnight Cowboy not only made a gay fashion statement but included Joe Buck's incredulous cri de coeur, "Are you telling me that John Wayne is a fag?!")

David Thomson detected a similar repressed homo hysteria in Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid, in which Robert Redford and Paul Newman can barely contain their delight in each other's company:

She knows that the real romance is those two handsome boys and their endless conversational double act. And she is obliged enough to Sundance for going through the amatory motions with her (because men were still gentlemen in those days), but she knew what Sundance's little moustache meant all along. We all knew - same way we all knew when "W' slapped "Brownie" on the back and told the world what a good job he's done. The message is clear: some guys just have no sense when it comes to being with other guys

Speaking of containing delight, neither could Phoebe. Would she care to post an early draft of her review?