the little gay movie that could

i'm only about the millionth blogger to write about this, but apparently our dear brokeback mountain was number one at the box office this weekend. it beat the second-place movie, which was playing in twice as many theaters, by about $50,000. and to think we were worried that it wouldn't come to baltimore.

out of curiosity, i just did a yahoo movie search to see if this little gay flick had made it to ponca city yet. it hasn't. it is, however, playing all over oklahoma city and tulsa. if it makes it to ponca, where the only theaters are a thirty-year-old two-screen firetrap, a mid-80's 4-screen "megaplex," and a renovated vaudeville theater called the Poncan, it will have done what was impossible in my mind: it will be a gay movie that hollywood had enough faith in to push into very-small-town america.

i wish that a lot of people in oklahoma could see brokeback mountain. not just the gay people. i wish that all those people i went to high school with, the ones who now have six-year-old babies, the cowboys, the farm workers, the factory workers (most of the people who now make up ponca city since the bastards at conoco/phillips closed their corporate offices) could see it. what struck me so much about this movie was the isolation of the main characters. granted, i was lucky to live in oklahoma in the 80's and 90's instead of the 60's, but that feeling--that you're the only person with these feelings, that there's no way you're ever going to find your place or be happy--was definitely there; it is, in fact, still there when i go home. if i've been out to dinner in ponca with family and seen other gay people, they were of the ennis variety, not of the puma-and-tight-sweater-wearing variety and i certainly couldn't tell you who they were.

i want people down there to see brokeback and to understand, this. this is what we go through here. minus the horses and unprotected sex in a pup tent.