A gay film.

Richard Alleva has written one of the best reviews of Brokeback Mountain, particularly in articulating the seamless collaboration of scriptwriters, Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana, and director, Ang Lee. Yet in joining the chorus of critics who deny Brokeback is a gay film (for documentation, see Daniel Mendelsohn in the New York Review of Books, February 23), Alleva suppresses the fact that Brokeback, in Mendelsohn's words, "is a tragedy about the specifically gay phenomenon of the 'closet'--about the disastrous emotional and moral consequences of erotic self-repression and of the social intolerance that first causes and then exacerbates it." Yes, the theme of the movie may be universalized, as Alleva does, to suggest "the tragedy of emotional apartheid [which] none of us, no matter what our sexual orientation, is ever safe from," but at its literal level the film is about two men whose fundamental sense of self is constituted by their affective response to other men and what happens when that identity is repressed. In each case we see a father who loves his children, but whose relationship with them is stunted by the fundamental dishonesty at the core of his life. This depiction is relevant to the issue of homosexual priests. Experience may suggest that gay clerics can be as chaste as their straight brothers. Yet they cannot live the lie of pretending to be straight. To do so would be as if one went through life pretending not to be Jewish or black or Irish. Something as fundamental as one's sexual identity cannot be locked in the closet, buried in the deepest recesses of one's psyche. It must be acknowledged and shared with family and friends, colleagues and superiors.

THE REVIEWER REPLIES:

Assuming that Brokeback has indeed won the Oscar, we can also assume that we'll never know exactly why it won. I was probably too sweeping in my cynicism about the Motion Picture Academy, and I happen to agree with everything Chuck Anziulewicz says about the film itself.

I thank Frank Oveis for his compliment and will try to pinpoint just where I disagree with him and Daniel Mendelsohn. Just what is a "gay movie," or play or novel? Is it simply a story about gay characters or is it a work imbued with gay sensibility? Mendelsohn and Oveis believe the former, I the latter. But what is gay sensibility in a work of art? The answer lies in history. Because homosexuals of the last two millennia in the Western world were compelled to keep their sexual natures secret, homosexual artists developed ways of looking at the world that were ironic, comically deflating, spoofy, artificially grandiose, campy. (In fact, Susan Sontag's famous "Notes on Camp" was mainly an essay about gay sensibility.) I intend none of those adjectives as pejorative; these attitudes have resulted in superb works of entertainment for both straights and gays: Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest and Salome, the novels of Ronald Firbank, Noel Coward's plays, the drawings of Aubrey Beardsley, the films of Derek Jarman and John Waters. Note that Earnest and most of Noel Coward's plays have no gay characters, but, because of their sensibility, they are very much gay plays. On the other hand, there are plenty of stories that are gay-themed but lack a gay sensibility: Death in Venice, James's The Pupil, Gide's The Immoralist, movies such as Victim, Midnight Cowboy, and ... yes, Broke-back Mountain. These productions are neither straight nor gay. They are simply works of art.

RICHARD ALLEVA

FRANK OVEIS

New York, N.Y.