Homosexuality isn't uncharted territory

Gay subtexts in westerns have been around for decades.
By STEPHEN HUNTER
Washington Post
Last week, The New York Times had three separate pieces on the "gay western" "Brokeback Mountain," including a column by the great Frank Rich.
But ... boys, boys, calm down. It's not that big a deal.
In fact, what's remarkable about "Brokeback Mountain" is merely that for possibly the first time, homoeroticism is the text, not the subtext. But it's not like homosexuality has been unknown in the western. Like any art form, the oater represents not only the conscious of its creators, but also their subconscious. Ideas -- particularly forbidden ones among heterosexuals, like male beauty and grace, male love, male bonding and really tight blue jeans -- creep in and haunt the edges of the most mundane and straightforward macho tales about horseback he-men. Gay subtexts in westerns have been nothing special and everything ordinary for decades.
Probably the most famous gay subtext of all time on the range where the deer and the antelope play was "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" (1969), which featured two of the most beautiful men alive on the lam in the wilderness, far from the eyes of propriety and the moderating influence of civilization, and in an outdoors that was really a gigantic locker room. Was it just friendship? Well, we'll never know.
This is not to say that Robert Redford or Paul Newman or director George Roy Hill or screenwriter William Goldman is gay, not that there's anything wrong with that. But it is to note the curious intimacy between Butch and the Kid was more heartfelt than any intimacy between either hero and Katharine Ross' freckly schoolmarm.
Wild observations
Then there's Sam Peckinpah's "The Wild Bunch." (That title!) Again, it's men alone way out in the wild. These fellows, being outlaws, may be well beyond other laws, too. But the strongest gay vibration in "The Wild Bunch" (also 1969) was cut out of the early release versions and is viewable only on the director's cut. It's the strange, powerful relationship between gang leader Pike Bishop (William Holden) and his nominal pursuer, former partner and buddy and possible lover Deke Thornton (Robert Ryan). The two are so entwined that Peckinpah allows them to share a reverie, even though one is the pursued and one the pursuer: It's ... their last night together. Like Ennis and Jack in "Brokeback Mountain," they have no vocabulary to discuss what they feel. So they do the most intimate thing men can do together and not be called gay, and that's go whoring. It's a night, Peckinpah shows us, they remember simultaneously.
So what's the gayest cowboy movie ever made? Most experts offer up "Red River" (1948) and the strange, passionate love-hate thing between John Wayne and Montgomery Clift. It's now known that Clift was gay, and that colors the way in which his twisted dance with the Duke is seen. On the evidence of the film itself, it probably didn't occur to many people in 1948, which for all its intensity, feels more Oedipal than homosexual. It's a drama of generational usurpation as second-in-command Clift leads a coup against the insane Wayne; the latter recovers his wits but can't be shed of his anger, and he tracks the boy down and the two have an epic punch-out.
"Bend of the River"
No, the gayest cowpoke yarn ever told has to be Anthony Mann's "Bend of the River" from 1952, with Jimmy Stewart and Arthur Kennedy. It was one of five "psychological" westerns Mann and Stewart made together from '50 to '55 (I just caught "The Man From Laramie," their 1955 riff on "King Lear," on TCM: fabulous).
As the film sets up, Stewart rescues Kennedy from hanging and takes him on as an "assistant" wagon master on a trek west. Kennedy is everything Stewart is proud of being himself: tough, brave, capable, strong, wise, cunning. In the most ambiguous, indeed one of the weirdest passages in a western, the consummation of the bond is formed when the two men sneak out to attack Indians who are planning to ambush the wagon train the next day. Unusual for Mann, with his great sense of landscape and space, the two men slither through the bushes like commandos, low, dirty, feral, and do their work with knives in the dark. It's not "manly" at all but rather a transformation of someone's idea of the lowest urban rat work, of underground action. You think: Hmm. What's that all about?
Of course you see where this is going. Kennedy's character is flawed; he betrays Stewart. Stewart tracks him down and the climactic fight has the implication of a ritual of purification: It's in a river, Stewart finally knocks the man out, he's taken by the current into rapids and drowns. Stewart emerges, in some sense "cleansed" from his flirtation with inversion, his heterosexuality restored.