Broken

S and I went to see Brokeback Mountain today, because I insisted, and he isn't averse to seeing "hot girl boobs".  Sad but true. 

You know, a few weeks ago, I read the story, and loved it, and I wrote about the need for us to frame the debate about sexuality in terms of love, but my sincere belief that it will never happen.  I still think that; I think as a culture we're waaaaay too obsessed about sex to change the way we look at this issue from sex to love. 

But, this movie just brings home how fucking sad it is that we can't.  I can't fucking say enough how much this movie speaks to the destruction that permeates lives when love isn't allowed to just be.  I simply don't understand how any human being can look at any love, any kind of love between two human beings (of consensual age blah blah blah; I'm not talking about anything sinister here) and pronounce it perverted and wrong.  These men did hurt people besides themselves, but they did it because they couldn't live their lives loving each other.  If no societal taboo had existed in the first place, neither one would have married a woman and hurt her so damn much. 

The torture that these men felt because of their feelings for one another--and I think it's important for me to say that I really did get the sense that their love was based on more than sex--is simply inhuman.  It's inhuman that we allow other humans to feel that way because we think men having sex with other men is "icky".  (For the record, I don't.  I find the image of two hot men kissing and more very, very erotic.  Also for the record, it's not as if this was some cheap porno sex.  It felt more to me.)  It's hard for me to accept that we could condemn anyone to a life that broken.  It's a severely dysfunctional attitude, I think. 

It's also very, very condescending.  In some ways, we're (as a culture, not as individuals) looking down our noses and telling people that our love is in some way better, or more pure than theirs.  And it makes me sick.  Then again, so many times, I think it's got nothing to do with love, because half the people who attack homosexuals can't get past the idea of two boys going at it.  It all comes back to reframing the debate, and making it about love. 

Anyway, I did like the movie.  It was very good, and very sad.  And I sat in the movie theater thinking, what kind of society let's humans live like this?  Who are we that we frown so heavily on such a wonderful thing as love?  We're missing the point.  That's all I could think.

Comments

I couldn't get any of the (probably homophobic) men in my family to go with me, so I went to see this movie by myself yesterday. Amazing--story, acting--is all I have to say. Their loss! S.N.