"Looking Back at Brokeback"Richard Gollance talks to gay seniors who were young men in 1963, when the Brokeback Mountain story begins.A friend recently commented to me that he thought Brokeback Mountain was more significant as a cultural phenomenon than as a film. I suspect he’s right. Its critical and popular success has been widely interpreted as reflecting Something Meaningful about our times. Of course, what that “something” is depends on who is doing the interpreting. As with any cultural phenomenon, commentators, politicians, religious leaders, opinion-makers, and activists of all stripes have rushed in to use the film as a paradigm for whatever point they want to make.Like many gay men, I have been gobbling it all up. But it finally occurred to me that most of the commentary has been made by people who haven’t lived the reality that the film portrays. I wanted to find out what the movie meant to some older gay men who actually lived through that period. I organized a roundtable discussion of gay seniors in Los Angeles to learn whether the movie reflected their individual experiences and what it meant for these men to finally see a mainstream American movie with a gay love story at its center.
The four participants were: JOHN RICHARDS, a retired high school teacher, 68 years old; GREG LARKIN, a retired musician, 79 years old; “HOWARD ARNOLD,” a retired factory worker, 74 years old (he asked that his identity be disguised); and JOHN FOURNIER, the Coordinator of Senior Programs at the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center, 65 years old.
RG: The movie’s a period piece and it begins in 1963. First of all, in 1963, were you in an urban area, a suburban area, or a rural area?
JF: Tampa, Florida.
GL: Los Angeles.
HA: A small town in New England.
JR: Rural. Very rural.
(They all laugh)
RG: And had you all begun to have sexual experiences with other men?
(All indicate that they had.)
JR: I started in grade school.
(More laughter)
RG: I’d like to hear how the closeted love relationship between the two men in the movie resonated for you. Was that at all how you remember the early ’60s as a gay man?
JF: It was exactly what I went through. You couldn’t tell anybody: This is how I feel about this person, this is someone I love. You passed them off as a friend. I had a three-year relationship that was just coming to an end in 1963. We hid it like crazy.
RG: Was there anyone you could talk to about it and how you were feeling?
JF: No, I never told anybody.
RG: No one knew about that relationship?
JF: Not till many years later. The movie brought back all those memories. I knew exactly what they were feeling. I cried my brains out, especially at the end when he hung up the shirt. The whole relationship was very disturbing. After I saw the movie, I e-mailed my family and said, I don’t want to push gay movies, but if you want to see that movie, part of my life is in that movie and you’ll get an idea of what it was like.
GL: In 1963 I was married and had four small children. I met a man in a summer theater setting, and we had a love affair for two and a half years while I was married. We broke up, and after that break-up, which was very difficult for me, my wife found out about the whole thing. I had left the poems that we wrote to each other in the glove compartment of the car. My wife didn’t drive the car very much, and I didn’t have any place in the house to put them. It was a stupid thing to do and she did find them and unfortunately she destroyed them. When I saw the movie and the emotions they displayed, in the scene where Jack is coaxing Ennis to go away and get a ranch together and they’ll live together and grow old together, that’s what my lover wanted. And I couldn’t do that. I had my wife and the children. I was madly in love with the children, and I had a sense of responsibility and duty. So I stayed with them. I didn’t really come out of the closet till after they were grown and in college.
RG: It’s been said that one of the things the movie is about is regret over missed opportunities. Do you have any sense of regret over missed opportunities?
GL: Sure. And yet there was nothing I could do about it. I was locked into a situation I had to see through to the end. It meant I had to have a lover relationship like that. My lover finally couldn’t take it anymore. When he walked away, it turned out to be more final than I had realized at the time. So when I saw the movie, I shared emotions with both characters. And I felt for Ennis’ wife, because that’s what my wife went through. Eventually she had a nervous breakdown and had to be institutionalized. The man that I had been involved with lives in Pasadena. I have not been able to make any effort to re-establish that contact.
RG: Have you thought about it?
GL: I thought about it. But that’s about it.
RG: What keeps you from doing it?
GL: I think that maybe I’m very realistic now. There’s no going back. And I’m afraid of getting hurt again.
HA: In 1963, I was very much in the closet. I was working in a small factory in this small town in New England. In those days, it wasn’t a good idea to come out. I was active in union politics, and I had a very full life. And the rest was just put aside.
RG: Am I correct in assuming you put most of your energy into your work and there wasn’t much of a romantic life or personal life?
HA: Yes. You’re right.
RG: Looking back now, do you have regrets about that?
HA: There are lots of things in life that one realizes didn’t work out too well. I don’t live in regrets. I had bigger problems than that. My family was the worst problem I ever ran into and I didn’t handle that too great. But I finally got away from it. That was much more important than anything in my personal life.
RG: So did you ever have boyfriends?
HA: Very fitfully.
RG: So you had occasional sexual encounters?
HA: Occasional, yes.
RG: Did you have girlfriends?
HA: I had some women I knew. I didn’t go out that much. I wasn’t that social.
RG: So if I characterize it as, you kept a lot of things repressed just because it was easier…?
HA: I always knew my romantic life would probably never work out very well. But I said to myself, there’s no point in complicating it by getting neurotic over it.
RG: Your romantic life with women or with men?
HA: It doesn’t matter, either way.
RG: Have you had boyfriends since?
HA: Very minimal.
RG: So where did your emotions go? We all have feelings, we all have a need to connect.
HA: I don’t know. Keeping busy. I don’t worry too much about it. I would like some things to be otherwise. But life goes on. And some things didn’t work out. And that’s the way it is.
RG: So did the movie touch any chords for you?
HA: Well, yes, it did, in the sense that I too knew that there were some things I couldn’t talk about. But I saw it less in terms of gays than in terms of general oppression. There are so many people who go through life and they have doors slammed in their faces. They’re controlled by other people. There’s a lot of oppression in our society. So I saw it more in those terms.
JR: Well, I’ve seen the movie twice and at very different times. And it brought up different things each time. The first time, I saw it before it came out in the theaters because of an invitation I had. I had no idea of what kind of movie it was, and I immediately saw it was about homosexuality. I was a little disappointed with it. It affected me emotionally, yes. I did tie in with it, but I didn’t like it. I have seen many gay movies, so it wasn’t a shock. But I was disappointed in the story. There wasn’t enough dialogue, it wasn’t like a gay film.
RG: Tell me more about what it meant to you personally.
JR: Well, of course it reminded me of home because I’m from Wyoming. I had no problem identifying. If I were lucky—if I stayed there and was lucky—I would have been Ennis. If I weren’t lucky, I could have been a potato in a potato patch.
RG: So self-loathing would have been better than feeling nothing?
JR: Well, I’m saying that looking back, I recognize that that life was very limited. In fact, I heard someone else criticize the movie: Well, the stupid guy, why didn’t both of them get out of the trap they were in and have a life? So that’s what came up for me, in a sense.
RG: Because you did get out.
JR: Darn right I did.
RG: So did you see the movie with a sense of there but for the grace of God…?
JR: Yes. A sense of relief. I’ll tell you an episode that illustrates it perfectly. I graduated from high school. And I graduated from college, at the University of Kansas. And I had my first teaching job. I was two years into teaching and I made a trip back to the farm. I met one of the kids I grew up with. He lived three or four miles away on a neighboring farm and he was about the same age as I. But he chose to stay on the farm. And I met him and I talked to him, and he was sunburned-rough, hands calloused, talked like those guys did, like Ennis. And this feeling went over me: By God, I’m glad I got off the farm because that’s where I would have been. That must have been in the early ’70s.
HA: For me, there was no one to talk to. My parents, my brothers, there was no minister, there was no teacher that I could ever talk to about any of this.
JR: Some of those small towns on the prairie had no mountains nearby to add a note of grandeur. You were just…there. The county seat had 2,500 people and that was 15 miles away. There were just the fly specks and the Ford trucks with the mud on them.
RG: Have any of you gone back to where you grew up after you came out?J
R: Many times, including to bury my father.
RG: What was it like going back into that world?
JR: It was a very emotional thing. To go back to the little one-room country grade school where I grew up. It was a monument to that life for me. It was melancholy. It was sort of like what happened to Ennis in the movie, pulling out your gut, yard by yard. Deep melancholy.
RG: I’d like to talk about what it was like seeing the movie. I wonder if any of you had a similar experience to mine. I saw it in a suburban multiplex near where I live, and I was very nervous going in. About a dozen years ago, I saw The Wedding Banquet, another Ang Lee movie with a gay theme as it turns out, at an art theater not far from the suburban multiplex. When there was a romantic scene between two men, the audience became very agitated. Some nervous laughter, some muffled comments, a lot of uncomfortable shuffling in seats. I could feel my whole body tense up. I think it’s probably an experience a lot of gay men have had in movie theaters with mixed audiences. So going into Brokeback Mountain, I looked around to see what the make-up of the audience was, and it was very mixed. Not a lot of gay men, it seemed to me. So I dreaded the love scenes. As it turned out, the audience didn’t particularly respond to them at all. At least not in a way that was noticeable.
JF: About a month before I saw it, I saw a preview of coming attractions for it. I knew what the movie was going to be about, so I was curious to hear the reaction from the audience. There was none. There was no comment made at all. And when I saw the movie itself, I was aware of the audience: Were they restless? Was there muffled conversation? Was there nervous laughter? Nothing. In fact, at the end of the movie, the audience applauded. So I thought, OK, at least this audience was OK. I can’t imagine what it would be like seeing it in a theater in Cheyenne, Wyoming. Or a southern city or something. I imagine it would be very different.
HA: I saw it in a theater in Hollywood, and there was no reaction of any kind that was unusual. But I never thought about it. I sat down to see a movie like I would at any theater.
JR: The first time I saw it was at that invitational screening and it was a very sophisticated audience so there was no big deal. But the second time was in a movie theater in Pasadena and I was curious about the audience’s reaction. I had that feeling of looking left and looking right and seeing who was there. It was a Sunday afternoon, so it was rather mixed, and some quite older people. I mean, seniors were well represented. There really was no reaction. There was no laughing or talking. I went in to see it alone. They say not many men go to see this movie alone.
(Laughter)
JF: There were quite a few seniors when I saw it, too.
JR: I really would love to interview some of those men about it, the way that you’re interviewing us.
GL: I’ve seen it twice. The first time, it kind of washed over me. It made an impression, but I didn’t get emotionally involved with the characters. The second time I saw it, I suddenly locked in to these two characters. That scene where Ennis hasn’t seen Jack in how many years and he rushes him up the steps and against the wall and kisses him, I just burst into tears. It just brought back so many moments. I remember one time, I was living in Altadena [Calif.] with my family, and my boyfriend was part of the family all the time. He’d come to Sunday dinner and stuff. My wife had a lot of family in the area, and we would do Thanksgiving dinner in different houses. Hors d’oeuvres in one house and the entrée in another house, and the dessert was always in our house. My boyfriend went along to all these places, and when it was time for the dessert, we excused ourselves and went back to my house on the pretext of getting things set up, which we did. But we also jumped into bed and had wonderful sex, with one ear open for the sound of the cars arriving. There was no gravel driveway, unfortunately. We got the bed straightened out just in time. It was just one of those rushing, impulse things. We didn’t really mean to do it. But suddenly we had the house alone, and there was the bed and we had everything ready, we were just waiting, and in a moment, we were out of our clothes and into the bed. And that came back to me when I was watching the movie. The impulse, the pent-up passion, and the release. And then of course she’s looking out the window and sees it. And that also brought back… I felt sorry for her.
RG: What was it like seeing that in a movie? Have you ever had that kind of intense identification with a gay-themed movie before?
GL: I don’t think so. No, that was something new for me. And unlike John, I haven’t been able to talk about this much with my kids or my ex-wife.
RG: Would you want to?
GL: I don’t know. I’m not sure I could answer that. When we get together—we do that twice a year—we never talk about the gay part of it.
JF: It makes me sad. Even now, I’m relating to that when I go back to see my family. They don’t ask me things.
JR: I got this cousin up in Paso Robles [Calif.] and her husband. The closest relatives I have in my life. And they know. I came out to them when I first came to Los Angeles. And they will ask no personal questions. No questions that even bring up the issue.
JF: Sometimes my nephew and my youngest niece will make jokes or make comments. But it’s just a joke. I have one niece that will ask me, “Are you seeing anybody? Is there anybody in your life?” She’s the only one. Otherwise it’s a subject that is just not talked about. My niece’s ex-husband is the one who pointed it out to me. He said, you know your family never talks about you and your life, do they? And I said, no, they don’t.
HA: So there’s more than one kind of closet.
JF: Yeah, even though they know it’s there…
HA: So being out isn’t necessarily being out. It can have very little meaning. They know, but they block it out.
JF: Yeah. I hate that feeling.
GL: They prefer to think of you as a bachelor. They will not ask. They know you’re gay, so they just will not ask. If you were a bachelor and straight, they would ask. “Are you seeing anyone?” “Can you bring them over?”
JR: “When are you going to get married, when are you going to get married?” You don’t get those questions either.
JF: My brother told me he saw the movie. He mailed me and wrote he was a little uncomfortable with a couple of the scenes. But he said, I understand your choice better now. And I wrote him back and said, you still don’t get it, it’s not a choice. Well, he was so upset, he called me and said, I am really sorry, that was a lousy choice of words, I didn’t mean it that way. What I meant was, I understand your lifestyle better now. He said, I’ve got to be honest with you. Seeing two men together has always bothered me a little. And those sex scenes in the movie when they get together, that bothered me. It bothered me because when I put myself in that situation, I’m turned off by it. But then after the movie, I put you in that situation, and I thought, oh, my God, that’s what it’s about with John. He got it. He understood. He got it now, even though we’ve talked about it for 15 or 20 years. And that’s what this movie is doing.
HA: So now we can see more movies like this, because it’s accepted.
RG: One last question. In the early 1960s, were you more Jack or Ennis?
JF: Jack.
GL: Ennis.
HA: Well, I didn’t see myself as either.
JR: I would have been a success in life to have been like Ennis. I probably wasn’t even an Ennis.
RG: Thank you all very much. I appreciate your candor.
Richard Gollance is a psychotherapist in private practice in Studio City, Calif. He is also cochair of LGAIN, the Lesbian and Gay Aging Issues Network of the American Society on Aging.
