gay cowboys Tagged Articles at Cinematical

If you foolishly skipped the first 10 minutes of the Oscars last night, you missed by far the best part - the opening with all the former hosts and then Stewart and Clooney in bed, combined with the reel of "real cowboys" set a standard that the rest of the show just couldn't meet. The "real cowboys" bit featured wildly homoerotic moments from a bunch of old westerns, thus proving once and for all that Brokeback Mountain is new only in that it doesn't have the production code to drive everything into subtext.

I'm sure some people were wildly offended by this "out-of-context" dirtying of the Real Men of Yore, but here's the thing: most of that stuff is just as gay in context. I mean, have you seen Red River? The tension between Montgomery Clift's and John Ireland's characters (they're the two early in the clip where the guy says "Nice. Awful nice." about the gun, while the pretty one adjusts himself.) is so obvious that you wonder how it slipped by the censors. No wonder Monty's so awkward with Joanne Dru. And the stump scene in Shane? Loaded with subtext, more than a little of it gay. It's not Jon Stewart's evil, liberal fault, people - the stuff has been there for 60 years.

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Brokeback Mountain is SO not gay - so says Bruce Strong over at Dateline: Hollywood. In his essay (which we're assuming is as intended to be satirical as it comes across), Strong argues his point with gems such as "if giving your friend a 'hand job' and having 'anal sex' on a cold night in the woods makes you 'gay', then who among us can honestly claim to be straight?" Strong also makes a compelling argument for Michelle Williams and Anne Hathaway's characters being "the two most evil characters to hit the screen in 2005".

I don't see what the big deal is. After all, the studios have been de-gayifying the film forever. Gay cowboys? What gay cowboys?

So everyone thinks that Brokeback Mountain is the first gay cowboy flick? You haven't been paying attention.

What about Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid? I mean, jeez, look at suggestive that title is. And it even has the word "butch" in it! Or how about The Wild Bunch, the Sam Peckinpah western, which features "...the tenuous bond between the film's star, William Holden, and the obvious femme fatale, Ernest Borgnine, as solid and deep as a tounge kiss from George Michael"?

That's just a couple of the observations from writers Tod Goldberg, Fred Topel, and Peter Paras. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go try to wash from my brain the image of Ernest Borgnine and William Holden doing it.

[via Lee Goldberg]