A molehill to a ‘Mountain’

I was talking with a friend the other day about Oscar contenders and asked if he had seen “Brokeback Mountain” yet. He said he hadn’t and that he didn’t intend to see it unless he had a woman to accompany him.

Ed, which is his name, went on to explain that he had broken up with the person he’d been dating for several months and at the moment lacked female companionship.

I said, “What’s that got to do with whether or not you see the movie?”

“I’m just not going alone or with another guy,” he said.

“Take your mother.”

“That,” he declared self-righteously, “wouldn’t do it.”

And then I got it. If he went alone or with a male friend, someone might think he was, you know, “light.” For those who don’t hang around beer bars, that’s a term employed by certain polite members of the blue-collar set to denote someone who is gay.

Wondering if this were a prevailing attitude among men who are more masculine than, say, fashion designers or ballet dancers, I asked another outdoor worker, Rob, if he had seen the movie. He replied that he had not and would not. The reason he gave was that he’s a Christian.

To the best of my memory, there wasn’t a religious reference in “Brokeback.” No scenes of devil worship or celebrations honoring Baal. It was about two men who, well, liked each other. A lot. OK, it was a love story.

But Rob told me that homosexuality violates God’s word. I could find it, he said, in the Bible.

When I got home that night, I tried to locate a reference to the so-called love that must not be spoken in my annotated Bible but came up empty. I looked under “homosexuality,” “gays” and even “forbidden desire.” Zilch. I suppose it’s there in some remote corner of Leviticus or Deuteronomy, but I sure couldn’t find it.

I telephoned Rob the next day to ask where it was in the Bible, but he wouldn’t answer. I also wanted to know if it was OK with God for a cowboy to have sex with a cowgirl, and he hung up on me, but not before using a term which, I am positive, you won’t find in the Good Book.

The movie was a masterful piece of filmmaking. I only winced twice. No, three times. I winced at the kiss too. When we left the theater, my wife said, “I’ll bet Tom Mix never did that.” He was an old-time cowboy hero.

“That’s hard to say,” I said. “He did seem to use a lot of makeup. Especially lipstick.”

“It was their idea of on-screen makeup. Even Zorro wore rouge.”

I’m not sure what cowboys did, or what they’re doing, out on the range. I keep thinking about the lyrics to the song that went, “You don’t know what lonesome is till you get to herding cows.” A man can be driven to doing a lot of things, I guess, with no one for company but another cowpoke and a couple of hundred Longhorns.

I asked a gay man what he thought of “Brokeback Mountain.” Call him Paul. He shrugged. “It was OK,” he said.

“Just OK?”

“It had flaws.”

Initially taken aback by a gay man’s tepid attitude toward a hit movie about two gay men in love, I came to realize that I was a victim of my own preconceptions. It did not necessarily follow that people of a particular sexual orientation should like the idea of watching them make love on the big screen. I’m not big on groping movies even when they involve couples of the opposite sex.

Only a real fuzz-brain would assume that all gays, all straights, all men, all women, all blacks, all Latinos or all Asians are alike. I have a Chinese American friend who wouldn’t eat Chinese food if you dragged him into P.F. Chang’s and chained him to a chair. I feel that way about Mexican food. I am emotionally incapable of eating a taco.

We are the creations of our progenitors, fashioned from the same clay that fashioned them. We inherit their biases and hardly notice the slow crawl of social change taking place around us. Observing a shift in attitudes is the cultural equivalent of watching a tree grow. One day it’s 10 feet tall, a year later it’s 12 feet tall. But you never actually see it grow. Change occurs when we’re not looking.

I saw “Brokeback Mountain” a second time, just to test my own attitudes. I still winced three times. But as I walked out, I was behind a group of young people. They were raving about how good it was. Not what a great gay movie it was, but what a compelling love story it was.

And in their fresh, unbiased attitude toward what was indeed a beautifully composed film, I thought I perceived a tree growing in America.

Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He can be reached at al.martinez@latimes.com.