previous column next column back to archives
This is a transcript of a conversation that transpired between myself and my friend Sunger at 6:21 last Tuesday night, on the phone (I called him while sitting at my desk wearing sweatpants):
ME: Um, what are you up to later?
SUNGER: Nothing. I was going to work out but I don’t really feel like it. Why? What are you doing?
ME: I’m trying to get a bunch of dudes together to watch Brokeback Mountain.
(Sunger laughing)
ME: I’m serious.
(more of Sunger laughing)
ME: Really. I’m serious.
(laughter stops)
SUNGER: You are?
ME: Yes.
SUNGER: Why?
ME: Because it’s supposed to be a good movie. And it will be funny for my column if a bunch of straight guys get together to watch Brokeback. I’ll make you dinner, I’ve got beer… You can eat for free, drink for free… Come on. It’ll be fun.
SUNGER: No it won’t.
ME: Yes it will. Come over.
SUNGER: No way.
I had thought it would be an interesting sociological study to rent Brokeback Mountain, invite over several of my buddies, and see what happened. But there was a problem – I couldn’t whet anyone’s appetite. This, apparently, was because Brokeback Mountain is a movie about gay cowboys.
The plot of Brokeback Mountain, which should have won the Oscar for Best Picture (but only because Syriana wasn’t nominated), is almost immaterial. Basically two cowboys (Jake Gyllenhaal - the forward one, and Heath Ledger - the shy one) spend a summer on a mountain in Wyoming wrestling, having sex, and wrestling some more. They then go their separate ways, marry (women), and see each other only occasionally when they go on one of their planned “fishing trips.” But for the purposes of this column, and in the opinions of most straight males (who haven’t seen the movie) the only aspect of the film worthy of mention is the activity that comes between “wrestling” and “wrestling some more.”
(The film has also made “Hey, want to meet me at Brokeback Mountain?” the single most used joke of 2005-2006, and likewise made the following scenario extremely awkward, when in years past it wouldn’t have been awkward at all: a guy shows up at a costume party dressed as a cowboy, only to realize that another guy is already at the party dressed as a cowboy.)
Sunger was my first choice to watch the movie with me because he’s the most staunchly homophobic (or as he would probably say, staunchly heterosexual) man I know. Just the thought of two males in a tent making out tends to turn Sunger squeamish and for some reason extremely giggly.
“Why won’t you come over?” I asked.
“Because,” Sunger said, “I don’t like watching that kind of thing. What kind of movies don’t you like? Really scary movies? So what if I invited you over to watch Saw 2, or some other horror movie that you found just completely repulsive? Would you want to watch it?”
“No,” I said. “But if you offered me free dinner and beer I might.”
And most guys I know will do pretty much anything if free dinner and free beer are involved. People know this - it’s why every meeting on every college campus - from the Medeival Knights Club to the Sexual Assault Awareness Committee to the Sexually Assaulted Medeival Knights Clubommittee - gives away free pizza. Maybe those meetings aren’t always well attended, but they probably would be if the club chairs gave away Budweiser with the pizza.
But dangle food and beer as the carrot behind the stick that is Brokeback Mountain and you get no interest whatsoever. You’d think I was inviting Sunger over to have unprotected sex with an HIV-positive grizzly bear.
I called Joey, too, but he said he had to have dinner with his girlfriend and then read, which sounded like a complete lie.
I gave up. I would just wait until Dods got home from work and make him watch it with me. But Dods never came home that night. I think Sunger called him.
So I watched it by myself.
Whatever.
The question is: Why do straight men refuse to watch this movie?
Okay, sure, there are some men, like me, who will watch it, but I am a guy who has never had a girlfriend who didn’t at one point during our relationship accuse me of being gay. And then there’s my dad (who watched the movie with his wife Daria), but he’s
A) related to me
B) a man who wears a wig to most social gatherings, and
C) a man who once wore a dress during a speech to the local high school’s graduating class (he wanted to protest the fact that neither he nor any of the other speakers were women).
So we should probably assume that any guy who watches this movie is at least a two on the Kinsey scale.
And okay, sure, the immediately obvious reason men refuse to watch this movie is because they “don’t want to see gay sex,” but I’m looking for deeper answers, more penetrating ones, the kind that really probe the depths of one’s metaphorical rectum.
It’s not just fear of what we find “repulsive” as Sunger so delicately phrased it (and to be fair, he called Saw 2 repulsive, not Brokeback Mountain, but I’m making a point here, so I’ll twist his words however I see fit). We watch some television programs and mpg files just because they’re repulsive (I’m thinking specifically of Fear Factor, The Simple Life, and this one video where there’s a horse and a girl who seem to be in love with each other). So either Brokeback presents a unique form of repulsion, or men are afraid of something else, something excruciatingly humiliating…
We’re afraid of it moving.
We’re afraid of it (the penis) becoming aroused. Nothing is scarier to a straight man than having to admit, like George Castanza after he visits a male masseuse, that “it moved.”
Because “it” is out of our control. There’s no telling when an erection will arrive, but when it presents itself and you ask it why it’s there, it always says, “Dude. Something is turning you on.”
So this is why most straight men won’t watch Brokeback. It’s not really about Jake and Heath. It’s about us. It’s about knowing that one little piece of us (or big for some) acts on its own accord, rearing up to cast judgment upon our souls whenever it likes. Movement doesn’t necessarily mean we’re gay, but it does mean that we’re not entirely straight.
(That same accusation, by the way, was directed toward me the other night in a bar when I made a Just Like Heaven reference, but I defended myself by saying that I had only watched the movie because I was on a plane, and the reference really was perfect because I was sitting on this very uncomfortable bench in the bar and I felt exactly like Mark Ruffalo when he’s looking for an apartment with an adequately comfortable sofa).
Perhaps you’re wondering if “it” moved for me when I watched Brokeback, and I want you to know that it absolutely did not.
Not even close.
No way.
And if it did, I wouldn't tell you.
previous column next column back to archives
adam@theadamwhite.com |
