The film wasn’t poking fun at gay men, nor was it particularly raunchy. Instead, Lee’s film depicted the truth of the gay experience, which is that it’s just like the heterosexual one, with one big difference: At some point, no matter when you come out, your longing will have to happen in silence. This reality, painted with such quiet, heart-wrenching affection, is what gave “Brokeback” its lasting power through all the jokes and critiques; it’s what changed minds and opened hearts. And though it may be 20 years old, that essential generosity makes “Brokeback Mountain” the most pivotal film you can watch in theaters this summer.
One night in early 1941, when Harry Crews was five years old, his father nearly killed his mother with a twelve-gauge shotgun. Looking back almost four decades later, Crews didn’t find that fact particularly exceptional. This was Bacon County, Georgia, where in those days “it was not unusual for a man to shoot at his wife,” as he wrote in his memoir A Childhood: The Biography of a Place. “It was only unusual if he hit her.” Crews and his older brother heard the shot, which blew the mantelshelf off the fireplace, from their shared bed. The shot—and the silence that followed. They fled on foot, mother and sons, down the dirt road to an uncle’s house, and the next day boarded a Greyhound bus to Jacksonville, Florida. In A Childhood, Crews recalls the details of their escape: the hurriedly packed straw suitcase, his father’s fury and frantic pleading, the sight of him frozen in the doorway under a kerosene lamp. And then, in the darkness of the road, a bizarre vision: “I began to feel myself as a slick, bloodless picture looking up from a page, dressed so that all my flaws whatsoever but particularly my malformed bones were cleverly hidden.”
It’s an idea that Crews, the author of fifteen novels and countless pieces of long-form journalism, often returned to: there is the life that is lived, and then its rival, a counterlife, where every flaw is hidden and one can feel whole. “The only way to deal with the real world was to challenge it with one of your own making,” he writes in A Childhood. “Fabrication became a way of life . . . not only a way for us to understand the way we lived but also a defense against it.” What began as dissociation, a kind of trauma response, would become a program for art and life.
Bourdain probably would’ve rolled his eyes at the fake quote, maybe the candle, definitely the AI voice. But he also might’ve understood the impulse. We don’t need saints — we just need someone who reminds us to stay curious, order the cream sauce and tip well.
He never said those words. But he made us hungry for them.