Brokeback Mountain may win a slew of Oscars, said Mickey Kaus in Slate.com, but not because most Americans loved the movie. Gay activists and Hollywood liberals are crowing that the gay love story about two cowboys is 'œsweeping the heartland,' filling theaters even in the red states. That proves, they say, that mainstream America is more tolerant and open-minded about homosexuality than conservatives would like to believe. The trouble with the 'œheartland breakout' story line is that it isn't true. The same activists made exactly the same claims about Michael Moore's Bush-bashing documentary Fahrenheit 9/11, insisting that its popularity in Peoria and Tallahassee spelled doom for Bush's chances in the 2004 election. Later, a closer look at the numbers revealed that Fahrenheit 'œuniformly underperformed in red state cities,' selling most of its tickets in liberal strongholds such as New York and San Francisco. If it seems odd to you that farmers and Bible Belters are lining up around the block to watch two men have anal sex in a tent, well, that could be because they aren't.
That scene might still make most straight men cringe, said Andrew Sullivan in Time, but Brokeback Mountain is nonetheless a bona fide mainstream hit. The film has made $72 million so far at the U.S. box office—hardly Titanic numbers, but excellent for an artsy film, and nearly twice as much as for any of this year's other nominees for Best Picture. It has found such a sizable audience because, like Romeo and Juliet and Casablanca, it's a classic story of lovers who face tremendous obstacles. And obstacles don't come much greater than being a pair of repressed, married homosexuals in the macho West of the early 1960s. This isn't a film about being gay; it's about 'œlove and longing and loss,' and those themes are 'œuniversal.'
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