{"id":1797,"date":"2016-12-05T20:35:18","date_gmt":"2016-12-06T00:35:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/?p=1797"},"modified":"2016-12-05T20:35:18","modified_gmt":"2016-12-06T00:35:18","slug":"brokeback-mountain-and-moonlight-with-love","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/?p=1797","title":{"rendered":"Brokeback Mountain and Moonlight, with Love"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"moonlight\"<\/a>This essay was published in the Durham Herald-Sun<\/em> on Sunday, December 4, 2016.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

When my older daughter was at Riverside High, the theater program performed \u201cThe Laramie Project,\u201d a collaboration of author Moises Kaufman, people in Laramie, Wyoming, and members of the Tectonic Theater Project. It was performed first in 2000 and uses multiple voices to tell a real story, the 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard.\u00a0 The event that precipitates the production, every time, is the brutal death of a young man murdered because he is gay.\u00a0 The story begins with a tragedy.<\/p>\n

Annie Proulx set her 1997 short story \u201cBrokeback Mountain\u201d in Wyoming. She opens with these words:<\/p>\n

They were raised on small, poor ranches in opposite corners of the state, Jack Twist in Lightning Flat, up on the Montana border, Ennis del Mar from around Sage, near the Utah line, both high-school drop-out country boys with no prospects, brought up to hard work and privation, both rough-mannered, rough-spoken, inured to the stoic life.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This love story ends as Jack is murdered with a tire-iron after attempting, finally, to stop living a lie. Ennis offers to help Jack\u2019s parents take his ashes to Brokeback Mountain. Jack\u2019s mother, who Proulx implies has a clue and a heart, offers for Ennis to visit Jack\u2019s boyhood bedroom.\u00a0 Proulx describes what Ennis finds:<\/p>\n

The shirt seemed heavy until he saw there was another shirt inside it, the sleeves carefully worked down inside Jack\u2019s sleeves. It was his own plaid shirt, lost, he\u2019d thought, long ago in some damn laundry, his dirty shirt, the pocket ripped, buttons missing, stolen by Jack and hidden here inside Jack\u2019s own shirt, the pair like two skins, one inside the other, two in one.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Proulx\u2019s prose and characters are so familiar I can visualize their gait, hear the cadence of their voices. I grew up loving men who are \u201cinured to the stoic life.\u201d\u00a0 Texan Larry McMurtry co-wrote the screenplay with Diana Lynn Ossana for the 2005 film.\u00a0 I have not seen the movie.\u00a0 I knew too many boys and girls suffocated by a setting where they could not live the truth of daylight.\u00a0 The only suicides I knew growing up were of people who others whispered about, often with a tsk tsking that implied death was better than living gay.\u00a0 As one friend wrote, a town like my hometown is a place \u201cyou dearly love but never feel relaxed in.\u201d<\/p>\n

People have, in my hearing, used the words \u201cBrokeback Mountain\u201d as a derision, drawn from a visceral fear of men who are gay in secret. This is absurd, given these same people do not want anyone to be gay not<\/em> in secret.\u00a0 Fear of the undetected gay coupling is a nonsense that acknowledges God makes some of God\u2019s beloved children gay, linked to a refusal to bless love between two gay people.\u00a0 This nonsense is written into movies attended by congregations as a fellowship outing \u2013 where men marked as \u201ceffeminate\u201d are mocked, used as comic relief in supposed morality plays or to accelerate comedy in self-loathing slapsticks about \u201cfamily life.\u201d<\/p>\n

[Let those with ears to hear, please hear.\u00a0 You know what I am talking about.]<\/p>\n

I am grateful for the 2016 film Moonlight<\/em>.\u00a0 I am grateful the Carolina Theatre brought this to Durham.\u00a0 The film is based on a play by Tarrell Alvin McCraney, and the screenplay was written and directed by Barry Jenkins.\u00a0 McCraney and Jenkins offer a blessing that does not mock or evade hatred.\u00a0 McCraney and Jenkins have also offered a story that shows a man coming out in a way not linked to death.\u00a0 They wrote neither a comedy nor a tragedy.\u00a0 They wrote a life.<\/p>\n

In his November 4, 2016 essay \u201cThe Sad, Surreal Experience of Seeing an Audience Laugh at Moonlight<\/em>,\u201d E. Alex Jung writes:<\/p>\n

It was a Friday night . . . and the screening was completely sold out. Early on, though, one scene made me realize I might have picked a bad audience: It\u2019s in the first third of the movie, where our young hero Chiron is sitting at the dining table with his surrogate parents, Juan and Teresa (Mahershala Ali and Janelle Mon\u00e1e). He asks them, point-blank, \u201cWhat\u2019s a faggot?\u201d It\u2019s a moment that feels like a gut punch. When I first saw it, I held my breath, waiting to hear what Juan would say. He explained that it was a negative word used to describe men who liked other men. Then came the next question, \u201cAm I a faggot?\u201d A group of women behind me started giggling at the first question and were full-on laughing by the second \u2014 so much so that they drowned out Juan\u2019s response. I was perplexed: Were we watching the same movie?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I pray people will see the film. I pray people will hear and, eventually, not laugh.\u00a0 And I fervently pray that children from Texas to Wyoming to Durham, North Carolina will see on screen the possibility of their own beautiful truth.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This essay was published in the Durham Herald-Sun on Sunday, December 4, 2016.   When my older daughter was at Riverside High, the theater program performed \u201cThe Laramie Project,\u201d a collaboration of author Moises Kaufman, people in Laramie, Wyoming, and members of the Tectonic Theater Project. It was performed first in 2000 and uses multiple […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[6,9,11,10,221,210,223,207,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1797","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-announcements","category-church","category-durham","category-ethics","category-football","category-journalism","category-lgbtq","category-love","category-organizing"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7EotM-sZ","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1797","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1797"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1797\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1799,"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1797\/revisions\/1799"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1797"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1797"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1797"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}