Homos on the range: a look at how liberal cultural elites gave "blockbuster" stature to a perverse movie--Brokeback Mountain--and what they hoped to accomplish.

John Wayne and Gary Cooper must be spinning in their graves. Liberal as Hollywood is, they never would have thought the industry they loved would put out a movie in which the protagonists are cowboys who give the term "rough riders" a new, blue meaning. But alas, Tinseltown has obliged with Brokeback Mountain.

Based on Annie Proulx's short story for The New Yorker, it is the tale of two sodomite sheepherders, Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) and the aptly named Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal), who "fall in love" when forced into a tent on a cold night watching the herd. The reviews are raves, and the film, which Entertainment Weekly called "the year's most daring love story," won top honors at the Critics Choice and Golden Globe awards. Unlike The Passion of the Christ, it is a lead-pipe cinch to lasso a few Oscars.

The press notices would have you believe this film raked in money and bested The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe in per theater revenue on its opening weekend. But that's only half the truth. Brokeback Mountain appears successful because of its popularity in liberal pockets of America, where it opened, but it isn't the blockbuster the boosters of buggery hoped it would be. After seven weeks it earned $42 million, but trailed behind Narnia, which collected about $272 million. Even adjusting for the number of screens on which the former was shown compared to the latter, 1,196 to 2,757, cutting the number of screens in half for Narnia would still produce a figure exceeding $130 million. Doubling the number of screens for Brokeback Mountain would generate $84 million. Walk the Line, the story of Johnny Cash, opened on fewer screens than Brokeback Mountain, 1,125, and in 10 weeks pulled in $102 million. Much as its promoters might hope, this Brokeback Mountain story did not "resonate" with America at large.

Indeed, the day it supposedly broke all records, according to the Gay Rights Watch website, it opened in three cities: New York, Los Angeles, and, you guessed it, the City by the Bay.

Still, given the talented writers who crafted it, including Larry McMurtry, Brokeback Mountain might really be the powerful film critics claim it is. Evil, after all, is often glamorous and tempting. Yet what people need to know isn't what reviewers think of this film and whether it "resonates," but why anyone would make such a film and why the critics are raving. To venture an opinion on that you don't need to see the film. I haven't, and I won't. You needn't lift the lid on a garbage can, after all, to know what's inside.

So why this film spun off the reels is obvious, even to the most obtuse film critic: Hollywood makes films like this not to make money but to make a point. You can make money more easily with other films, so the real object is to demonstrate that homosexuality is normal, that repressing lust is unhealthy and depressing, that sin is in the eyes of the beholder. Who better than the American cowboy, the most venerable symbol of masculinity and rectitude, to make the point?

The Reviews

Brokeback's artisans and reviewers know it's a propaganda piece. That's why they made the film and wrote the reviews, which fawned as loudly over this film as they fumed about The Passion and Gods and Generals. As well, the reviews reveal how much Hollywood's leftist cultural elite depends on the critics to validate its naked propaganda.

Criticism, of course, isn't what the film received. Homoerotic mash notes were more like it. Here's Jami Bernard of New York's Daily News: "Brokeback is also about the classic American journey and what we've lost along the way, including our diminishing bond with this great land of ours." After Madam Bernard labels the homosexual cowboys "Marlboro men," you're ready to kick the coffin nails--or wonder what the critics who've embraced Brokeback are smoking.

Whatever. Bernard is cool with it. "What these two feel is eternal and nameless," she writes, and not because they feel tempted to partake of the Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name. Instead, they are "satisfying a need as primal as that for food." Bernard assures us that "the closest Ennis gets to acknowledging his feelings is when he doubles over and wretches," which begs the question of what real "primal need," when satisfied, makes a man wretch. Blinded by such passions, it's no wonder this film misses a few obvious points about "primal needs": you won't die if you don't commit sodomy, but you might die if you don't eat. Retching would tell the normal person that whatever they have consumed or done isn't a primal need, and might just be dangerous and unnatural. But mere truth couldn't stop this stagecoach for Sodom.

As you might expect, Bernard's wasn't the only nauseating review even if it was nauseating enough to make you wretch. Most reviews waxed and waned between giddy glee for these sodomites of the sagebrush and sappy salivation about The Tumescence in the Tent.

Keith Turan, the Los Angeles Times: "It's a deeply felt, emotional love story that deals with the uncharted, mysterious ways of the human heart."

Ann Hornaday, the Washington Post: "The consummation of their relationship is a brief, violent, loveless episode that over their first summer together becomes an idyll of half-naked wrestling, nuzzling by the campfire and fistfights that inevitably end in an embrace.... 'Brokeback Mountain' is indeed a watershed movie, an airing of taboos and secrets that can only be seen as welcome and deeply humanist."

Stephen Holden, the New York Times: "Yet Brokeback Mountain is ultimately not about sex (there is very little of it in the film) but about love: love stumbled into, love thwarted, love held sorrowfully in the heart.... One tender moment's reprieve from loneliness can illuminate a life."

Joe Williams, St. Louis Post Dispatch: "No mainstream movie has ever made [homosexual sodomy] seem more manly.... They make love the cowboy way, grappling and wrangling each other like livestock. It is simply one of the greatest love stories in film history."

A few cowboys out there might dispute whether dudes such as Williams, who probably couldn't hold on to his lunch money in second grade, know anything about "the cowboy way." Real cowboys, at least the normal ones, might tell Williams and his cohort they don't believe romantic love involves a "brief, violent, loveless episode ... of half-naked wrestling ... and fistfights." One also wonders how fistfights and half-naked wrestling amount to a "tender moment."

Oddly, though boilerplate homosexual propaganda posits the homosexual intercourse of two men as tantamount to the marital intimacy of man and woman, the sex in the film clearly belies that idea. Genuine love is neither aggressive nor violent. Inadvertently, the honesty of the writers, directors, and reviewers undermine the linchpin of homosexual propaganda--i.e., Adam and Eve, Adam and Steve, it makes no difference. They admit it does.

Why Cowboys?

Question is, why cowboys? Why didn't we get a story about two florists, two beauticians, two interior decorators, or better yet, two film critics? Because these are not equated with raw masculinity. The film clearly attempts to shock and awe. "See," they expect the passive, untutored viewer to conclude, "even cowboys do it. Well, it can't be that bad."

This is why the homosexual haggle turns pink with pride when a professional athlete emerges from the closet. It validates their propaganda. A famous homosexual athlete, they think, belies the public image of the homosexual as a limp-wristed fairy.

The homosexual as cowboy or football star "normalizes" him by removing him from the group that is effeminate and placing him in the group that isn't. The point? They're just like everyone else. Yet homosexuals aren't like everyone else; and not just because they can't tell the difference between an entrance and exit: they also expect society to accept, tolerate, and legalize their sin. Indeed, they have persuaded much of society that sodomy is not a sin. Thus, we get reviews about Brokeback Mountain that equate it to a traditional and genuine love story. That truth offers the second reason for using cowboys to beat the tom-toms for buggery.

The cowboy has forever symbolized strength and masculinity. He works hard, plays hard, and fights for what's right. He typifies integrity, humility, reverence, and courage. He personifies the real man. In a society that desires diversity more than it treasures objective moral truth, the homosexual cowboy is a symbol few will criticize. If cowboys, who are real men, can be homosexuals, then anyone can.

The homosexual cowboy immunizes homosexuals from criticism and protects their destructive radical agenda from the disapproval it richly deserves. Devitalizing the natural shame associated with sin creates a moral vacuum into which the cultural elite marches with the changes it wants, which don't end with merely replacing traditional symbols of manhood, but include overturning the Christian moral order itself.

Militant homosexuals don't just want to live and let live. They have an agenda, which anyone who hasn't slept through the last 40 years knows. And they demand action: the "right" to be married, mandated insurance benefits for "partners," anti-discrimination laws that would penalize Christian landlords and businessmen, and worst of all, the abolition of age-of-consent laws. Few Americans know this, and homosexual lobbyists never openly discuss it. But it's there. "Sex before eight, before it's too late," the old pedophile motto goes.

But back to the Duke and the men we used to see on the silver screen. When we saw these heroes, we knew what to expect: men depicting fictive or real historical characters who knew right from wrong. They overcame their human flaws. The good guys won.

Sadly, Brokeback Mountain conscripts that rich tradition of morally compelling chronicles to serve a destructive, anti-Christian ideology and the cultural and political elites that propagate it. In the end, they will fail because good will vanquish evil. But the fight will be a long trail of tears.