Riding Bareback

Larry H. Miller, owner of the NBA’s Utah Jazz or more appropriately ‘team choke’ who also owns the once modestly named Larry H. Miller Megaplex is throwing down the gauntlet in true western style by refusing to allow the movie Brokeback Mountain from being shown at his theatre. The now renamed The Megaplex 17 at Jordan Commons is the grand Mormon Temple of Salt Lake City theatres and Miller now has a new claim to fame other than his frequent psychotic courtside tirades at his long underachieving team, opponents, referrees and fans. The theatre has violated the distributor’s agreement and outraged mainstream tolerant America by pulling director Ang Lee’s gay cowboy film from being screened. Cheapjack, jackbooted, little fuckstick fascist tyrants the likes of Miller are all too commonplace in George W. Bush’s America where spying and censorship are rapidly replacing mom and apple pie as national staples.

Gayle Ruzicka, president of the ultra conservative Utah Eagle Forum, a spinoff of the national reactionary organization of big haired nutball Phyllis Schlaffly (who has a personal axe to grind with gays given that her own son has a proclivity for swallowing the pork sword) lamely tried to turn it into an issue during an appearance on DLC shill Ed Schultz’s nationally syndicated radio show by defending Miller’s ban to outrage over the movies inclusion of adultery being a bad example and against the holy institution of marriage which is held in such high regard in Utah that some men have more wives than one. Ruzicka and Miller’s use of the good ole GOP chestnut of defense of marriage is as inept as Karl Malone’s defense of Michael Jordan in the NBA Finals when the Jazz gagged against the Chicago Bulls.

Any arguments based on so called ‘moral values’ are just more of the same biased, radical religious right horseshit only served up at a higher altitude. Despite the ban of Brokeback Mountain due to alleged concerns over the content and it’s effect on children, Miller had no problem whatsoever featuring the ultra kinky sadistic gore opus Hostel which despite a script featuring numerous intense scenes of graphic dismemberment as well as sadomasochistic bloody torture performed for the perverse sexual gratification of the wealthy elicited no similar outrage. What a great metaphor for the year of our lord 2006 where the rich are free to ruthlessly fuck and utterly destroy those who are trapped below them in the pecking order in an era of government sanctioned class warfare and perhaps that is the point that director Eli Roth and promoter Quentin Tarantino sought to make but it’s still a sick and exploitative goddamned film to show to morons whose cognitive abilities are barely of a sufficient level to allow them to understand the hidden moral messages of Road Runner cartoons. But then again, that’s the way that it always is with these Republican hypocrites isn’t it? A blow job in the White House is a national emergency while the cruel, sexually depraved torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib Prison was greeted with a collective ho hum and described by some right wing propagandists as something no more serious than fraternity hazing and good ole boys just blowing off steam just like the fun loving types who tortured and murdered Matthew Shepard and Emmitt Till.

In the state of Utah it is a more than a bit ironic that gay bashing and discriminatory tactics are used to allegedly preserve the sanctity of the institution of marriage, after all this is the state were the partaking of the favors of multiple wives which would fall under any loose definition of sexually deviant behavior elsewhere is deemed to be acceptable and therefore is just another one of the great paradoxes of modern American society. Let’s see, the Mormon church denounces homosexuality but has branches that openly advocate and practice polygamy which is just another word for perversion, group sex and wife swapping. How conveniently contradictory that a love story between two men is taboo but that a man who just happens to engage in a wild orgy with his six wives who happen to be bi-sexual would be greeted with….nothing. There has always been a double standard regarding celluloid homosexual relationships when they involve lesbians.

Drawing raves from critics, Brokeback Mountain is an extremely well made film that is often described as a tender and tragic love story that just happens to feature two gay men who just happen to be cowboys, its biggest crime other than the portrayal of the normalcy and deeply human qualities of the characters is that it just happens to be anathema to the very core of a right wing strategy rooted in the systematic institutionalized scapegoating and degrading dehumanization of gays that is so necessary to the fulfillment of their ultimate end game. A guy named Hitler once made gay baiting a staple during the early days of the Nazi indoctrination of the German people, it would serve as a stepping stone on the way to the elimination of other more predominant and deeply hated groups once a precedent had been set, attacks on homosexuals were but one step down a road that led ultimately to the death camps, the wholesale slaughter of millions as well as the ruination of a nation and the damnation of its soul.

Gay people should not be objects of loathing nor targets of opportunistic political parties with fascist agendas. They are our co-workers, our friends and our family members and not convenient scapegoats who should be marginalized, targeted by hate crimes, organized pogroms or government sanctioned discrimination. The anti-gay bigotry that is used so deftly by the Republican party and New Christian Right is just another chapter in the long and sordid history of using a mutually shared trait to deprive a group of people of their human dignity.

What could be more threatening to the very kernel of the American frontier mystique that was built on the macho free riding, laconic, ass kicking cowboy archetype than a movie that smashes that mythic persona? Brokeback Mountain is seen by many of the denial based professional haters on the right as the most bitter assault on the phony John Wayne image of the USA yet as well as the biggest insult to American frontier mythology since Ozzy Osborne took a leak on the Alamo. Portraying cowboys as ruthless murders of Indian women and children may be borderline heresy to the great American concept of Manifest Destiny but to even dare to suggest that the same cowboys who butcher red people during the day just may be partaking in a bit of mutually consensual man on man sexual activity in those covered wagons during cold and lonely nights on the trail is outright apostasy.

The whole American western mythology ethos is being shaken to it’s very roots by Brokeback Mountain which may not be a bad thing in a country where the four horsemen of the apocalypse have for too long been swaggering about the world while dispensing summary justice frontier style and they look suspiciously similar to John Wayne, George W. Bush, Ronald Reagan and the Marlboro Man.