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The next night, Dad wanted to go back to The Abbey to take Alberto a gift, to thank him for our supper. Alberto insisted that we stay — and again: corner table, free food, free drinks. The owner ("I'm from Ohio! I miss it so much!") knelt at Dad's side and invited us to a Bacardi party in the back, where humpy shirtless boys brought appletinis to my Dad, who thanked them very much, and asked, "What's your name?"
The party photographer swooped in to snap our picture, and extra shots of Karen, and the bar owner hugged her and said, "Two days in Hollywood and already the paparazzi are after you!" She squealed with delight.
Everybody in the bar looked and smiled at them, and I realized: they were like drag queens. Camp figures, in the best sense — good country people whom you'd never imagine, in your most deranged, dadaist fantasies, to see at The Abbey. ("I feel like I've got straw comin' out of my sleeves," Karen had groaned when she first arrived in town.) They obviously did not belong, yet so thoroughly enjoyed themselves and everyone they met, that no one in that bar could feel embarrassed about himself — which removed all of our easiest excuses for judging one another. I had never felt so comfortable, so unself-conscious, in a gay bar in my life.
My Dad had finally made it to Hollywood. (Well, West Hollywood, anyway.) That night he played a role that he may
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These are central conflicts of gay identity: I want to go to the rodeo, but I want a cowboy to kiss me.
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not even have known he was playing. He was trying to understand what it was like to live in my world. He did a better job of it than I often do — and helped teach me to do a better job of it myself.
These are central conflicts of gay identity: I want to go to the Abbey, but I want my Dad to come with me; I want to go to the rodeo, but I want a cowboy to kiss me. The popularity of Brokeback Mountain's tragic love story measures America's progress toward becoming a place where gay men can build their lives on love. With terrible clarity, it also describes a tension that still exists in the life of practically every gay man I know.
Like Ennis, most gay men have the fantasy that our great love is, or should be, sui generis. Like him we've told ourselves "I ain't queer" — until, like Jack, we realize that we are — or decide that we want to become, or have to become — queer, or gay, or whatever we decide to call it, if we are to accept the desires that are built into our bones and find a way to let them help us thrive.
In that way, every man who comes out is playing a role. The role cannot be categorically defined: being gay requires no one to do drag or lift weights or collect antiques. But participation in gay life — moving beyond forbidden feelings and hard-ons, to create relationships and social networks that honor and satisfy our desires — is always a decision, and requires a bit of a performance, and has to be re-made again and again: we have to decide not to be ashamed.
Of Brokeback Mountain's lovers, Jack is the one who understands this. He's the one who can imagine a gay life, and the role-playing it requires, because while Ennis is a farmhand, Jack rides the rodeo.
The cowboys I got to know best in Fort Worth with didn't ride very well that weekend. After the last day's competition, I asked
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"Everything goes wrong, but even 'til the last event of the day, you'll still be thinking, 'Maybe it's gonna start now.'"
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one of them, a top rough-stock rider, how he kept going when his performance was so off kilter. He said, "I might come out a total failure. Let me try again. You just live with your failure 'til the next day, and plan on doing it better the next time. Everything goes wrong, but even 'til the last event of the last day, you'll still be thinking, Maybe it's gonna start now."
Back at my hotel that night, I decided to call Dad and tell him where I was. I picked up the phone, and I remembered that it was his birthday. Guilty, I pretended I hadn't forgotten. I could hear the relief in his voice.
"Isn't it funny," I said, "that after all the vacations out West, after all of your cowboy movies, and you bugging me to be interested in this stuff, that I'd finally end up at my first rodeo — but with a bunch of gay guys?" I was blunderingly trying to please him, to say that my being here gave us something in common.
"Oh, this isn't your first rodeo," he said.
When I was little — about four or five, he thinks — he took me to a rodeo in Russell, Kansas. It was a slow day. "Nobody rode very well, the bulls all seemed sleepy, and about five hours into it, you looked up at me — I can still see you, plain as day — and you said, 'Daddy, when does the rodeo start?'"
He laughed, maybe the friendliest laugh I'd ever heard from him. "I said, 'You know, son, that's a very good question. I was wondering the same thing myself. But I wasn't going to say it out loud.'" n°
©2006 Michael Joseph Gross and hooksexup.com
| ABOUT THE AUTHOR: |
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Michael Joseph Gross is the author of Starstruck: When a Fan Gets Close to Fame. He has written for the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the Atlantic Monthly, Entertainment Weekly, Elle, the Nation, and many other magazines and newspapers. He won the PEN/New England's 2002 Discovery Award for nonfiction. He lives in California. |
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