Were they gay? (Jack & Ennis)

[AZ.bbm]

But Ennis del Mar is Annie Proulx's character, she invented him, and that is what she said he did.

Some thoughts:

I think AP indicated that Ennis was merely inclined to roll over to the wall and go to sleep, not that he slavishly did so.(?)

his yearning for low paid, long-houred ranch work, his propensity to roll to the wall and sleep as soon as he hit the bed,

Guys who work hard, come home and down a full meal, often tend to want sleep more than they want sex.
After Jack resurfaced, Ennis' interest in Alma (whatever she was to him -- a maid, preparing his meals, raising his kids, washing his clothes, etc.) simply waned to nothing. Apparently he rarely took her or his kids anywhere. He loved them all, in his own benignly neglectful way...

But he wanted sex from Alma and she gave it to him, willingly, and the purported anal sex didn't produce any kids, therefore the lines about his failure to use contraception, and he not wanting no more of his kids were hyperbole, too.  What Alma was steamed about more than anything was Ennis' prolonged alienation of his affections away from her, affections to which she had become accustomed prior to the advent of Jack Twist.


Ennis' vacations in the outback with Jack, under the conditions that he himself would set up, would be mostly about Ennis having his cake and eating it, too.

[Sandy]

~snip~But he wanted sex from Alma and she gave it to him, willingly, and the purported anal sex didn't produce any kids, therefore the lines about his failure to use contraception, and he not wanting no more of his kids were hyperbole, too. ~snip~

I don't think there's anything purported about the anal sex with Alma; it's pretty evident from the book and from the movie. It was Alma's concern about Ennis using contraception to avoid additional children until they could afford them. That offered him an excuse not to have sex with her. It don't think it's hyperbole.

The claim made elsewhere that Ennis performed anal sex because that's what he saw barnyard animals doing it that way, not because he was interested in gay sex, suggests that people who had never seen barnyard animals couldn't conceive of anal sex. And to equate anal sex with barnyard activity is just another version of Rick Santorum's man-on-dog sex.

[garyd]

SIDEBAR:  I looked in the script and it says his office is "a Hartford Branch of Magnavox."
(I guess they changed it to Magnatech later on.)

I have not read the whole thing, but I also found some interesting tidbits (like it says that when
Cathy discovers Frank with a man in his office that he is blond, shirtless and fondling him--it wasn't
filmed that way!) extended scenes and a lengthy enough voice-over by Cathy at the end of the film,
which I believe was rightly omitted.

Hey Lyle, thanks for the sidebar.
yeah, I obviously got it wrong about the location of the office and I appreciate the correction from both you and Sandy.

LOL, did not know about the "shirtless and fondling" part either.  (or the change from Magnavox to Megawhatever). 
I suppose the reason Haynes did not film them engaging in anal sex is due to the fact that Frank, being from Hartford, more than likely had never
witnessed barnyard sex so, you know, what did he know?
Good 'ol Frank, just another straight dude who figured out how to play on two different teams. 

[Lyle (Mooska)]

I suppose the reason Haynes did not film them engaging in anal sex is due to the fact that Frank, being from Hartford, more than likely had never witnessed barnyard sex so, you know, what did he know?

 LMAO!

[AZ.bbm]

I don't think there's anything purported about the anal sex with Alma; it's pretty evident from the book and from the movie. It was Alma's concern about Ennis using contraception to avoid additional children until they could afford them. That offered him an excuse not to have sex with her. It don't think it's hyperbole.

The claim made elsewhere that Ennis performed anal sex because that's what he saw barnyard animals doing it that way, not because he was interested in gay sex, suggests that people who had never seen barnyard animals couldn't conceive of anal sex. And to equate anal sex with barnyard activity is just another version of Rick Santorum's man-on-dog sex.

-Talk about 'overreaching.'

It may come as a surprise that 'anal sex' is NOT equivalent to 'rear-entry' sex; nor is anal sex the sort of thing that animals practice (AFAIK). There was no mention of bestiality in Brokeback Mountain; I don't know what you and Mr. Santorum are referencing.


I disagree about Ennis and anal sex.  It's not evident in the film that Ennis is having anal sex with his wife; that's conjectural...  I certainly would never claimed that he was having anal sex (although I suspected that might have been the case, n one instance I don't know, I didn't ask around).  


Regardless of sexual orientation some guys prefer the anal mode of intercourse... Has anyone done a study to determine whether practicing bisexuals prefer anal sex over vaginal sex, generally?


Okay, anyway, if Ennis was so enamored of anal sex -- as has been suggested in this thread ad infinitum -- and he was unable to perform for Alma any other way, then logically no question about more babies would have ever arisen, and the lines about contraception and not affording kids, etc., were toss-outs.

But wait! -- we see Ennis mounting his naked wife, face-to-face, preparing to have full-on, missionary-style, heterosexual intercourse with her. (-Egads!!!)
I really can't see that Ennis would be just faking being aroused by his wife and effecting intromission as well when he could have simply rolled over and gone to sleep. (?)


 

[AZ.bbm]

Hey Lyle, thanks for the sidebar.
yeah, I obviously got it wrong about the location of the office and I appreciate the correction from both you and Sandy.

LOL, did not know about the "shirtless and fondling" part either.  (or the change from Magnavox to Megawhatever). 
I suppose the reason Haynes did not film them engaging in anal sex is due to the fact that Frank, being from Hartford, more than likely had never
witnessed barnyard sex so, you know, what did he know?
Good 'ol Frank, just another straight dude who figured out how to play on two different teams. 

-(I really don't understand your lust for sarcasm.)

Just sayin.

[royandronnie]

Earlier I mentioned that Ennis was mimicking the behavior of the animals he'd grown up around on the ranches. The sex would be full-throttle, quick, rough, wordless, rear-entry... This mode of sex would seem to perfectly fit Ennis' introverted persona. Even the SS narrator found the lack of communication between them re the sex to be perplexing.

I know that men and women can actually prefer rear-entry sex, for various reasons. But I don't think we can determine their sexual orientation via their preference for rear-entry sex.
And I agree with the other posters who insist that this particular preference in Ennis should not be taken out of the context of his life and viewed in isolation.

Hey, AZ…

The only thing is, when male animals fully penetrate female animals, it's for one purpose only: procreation. And males that deposited sperm in the wrong opening would be genetically unfit--so they only utilize the vaginal opening. Now, some males mount other males--I don't know if horses and cows do it--but this is a dominance ritual, and no semen is deposited. I also don't know if there's full penetration, but I don't think so. And as for quick--this type of "sex" is, I think, almost momentary. Sooooo…Ennis would have learned that rear-entry sex penetrates the opening the babies come out of, not the other one. Which would be the correct lesson, procreatively speaking. And remember that there is a difference between "rear entry" and "anal" sex. I don't think Alma would have minded the former. But without preparation, certainly, she sure minds the latter. And later, of course, presuming that it continued after the Reunion, she knows why Ennis prefers, or at least regularly indulges in, this kind of sex, and she would have reason to hate it even more.

Ennis, of course--as Des has said--has no choice, if he wants to have full sex with Jack. With Alma, he has a choice, and chooses to have sex with her in a way that allows him to fantasize that it's Jack, though we're never told he actually does so. Nor do we know that he ever told Jack he made Alma have anal sex. I suspect he didn't.

I wouldn't hold Ennis too closely to the "hunderd times," by the way. I've always been struck that it's such a small number--not because it suggests he didn't do it very often, as you have opined--but because a hundred seems to be Ennis' idea of hyperbole. Think about it--he's trying to convey to Jack that he frequently pulled off thinking of Jack. if you were Ennis, what number would you have used? A thousand? A million? Those seem to me much more likely--I wanked all the time, thinking about you. That's what he's actually saying. But his horizons are so limited that a hundred seems like a huge number. It's another of Annie's lovely, subtle touches that beautifully define character.

[Desecra]

Okay, anyway, if Ennis was so enamored of anal sex -- as has been suggested in this thread ad infinitum -- and he was unable to perform for Alma any other way, then logically no question about more babies would have ever arisen, and the lines about contraception and not affording kids, etc., were toss-outs.

But wait! -- we see Ennis mounting his naked wife, face-to-face, preparing to have full-on, missionary-style, heterosexual intercourse with her. (-Egads!!!)
I really can't see that Ennis would be just faking being aroused by his wife and effecting intromission as well when he could have simply rolled over and gone to sleep. (?)

He was able to perform with Alma.   He just doesn't really want to, so avoids it.    It's obviously not essential to be attracted to someone to be able to have an orgasm while with them.  A combination of physical stimulation and perhaps fantasy is enough, but it looks like Ennis finds both of those easier through anal sex with Alma than through vaginal sex.  He essentially uses Alma as a masturbatory object.   And that's the trick that anal sex allows him to play himself.  He uses Alma in that way, while believing he's attracted to her.   But he (on the mountain) believes he's using Jack in that way, when in reality he's attracted to him.   Anal sex allows him to avoid knowing things.   That's what he "likes" about it.   He can avoid knowing he's attracted to Jack, initially, and avoid knowing he's not attracted to Alma. 

I don't think it's anything to do with a general preference for anal sex, or even rear entry sex.  It's quite specific. 

This is the short story only, and to be honest, I'm not clear about how much of that aspect is in the film.   Probably not very much, as in the film, Ennis clearly doesn't manage to believe that he isn't attracted to Jack on Brokeback.   So I could agree that anal sex might have a slightly different meaning in the film, less specific. 

[AZ.bbm]

Hey, AZ…

The only thing is, when male animals fully penetrate female animals, it's for one purpose only: procreation. And males that deposited sperm in the wrong opening would be genetically unfit--so they only utilize the vaginal opening. Now, some males mount other males--I don't know if horses and cows do it--but this is a dominance ritual, and no semen is deposited. I also don't know if there's full penetration, but I don't think so. And as for quick--this type of "sex" is, I think, almost momentary. Sooooo…Ennis would have learned that rear-entry sex penetrates the opening the babies come out of, not the other one. Which would be the correct lesson, procreatively speaking. And remember that there is a difference between "rear entry" and "anal" sex. I don't think Alma would have minded the former. But without preparation, certainly, she sure minds the latter. And later, of course, presuming that it continued after the Reunion, she knows why Ennis prefers, or at least regularly indulges in, this kind of sex, and she would have reason to hate it even more.

-Good point!
I saw the film before I read the SS; I had no idea what was going on...and once he flipped her over, the scene was over in seconds.

Ennis...has no choice, if he wants to have full sex with Jack. With Alma, he has a choice, and chooses to have sex with her in a way that allows him to fantasize that it's Jack....

-Roger, that.

Or, we could say that Ennis chooses a style of sex that resonates with his A) sense of 'machismo,' or B) 'gayness,' or C) whatever else suits him....

I wouldn't hold Ennis too closely to the "hunderd times," by the way. I've always been struck that it's such a small number--not because it suggests he didn't do it very often, as you have opined--but because a hundred seems to be Ennis' idea of hyperbole. Think about it--he's trying to convey to Jack that he frequently pulled off thinking of Jack. if you were Ennis, what number would you have used? A thousand? A million? Those seem to me much more likely--I wanked all the time, thinking about you. That's what he's actually saying. But his horizons are so limited that a hundred seems like a huge number. It's another of Annie's lovely, subtle touches that beautifully define character.

-Actually I've always felt that the number '100' was being used metaphorically to signify 'a huge amount.'

 

[janjo]

Some thoughts:

I think AP indicated that Ennis was merely inclined to roll over to the wall and go to sleep, not that he slavishly did so.(?)Guys who work hard, come home and down a full meal, often tend to want sleep more than they want sex.
After Jack resurfaced, Ennis' interest in Alma (whatever she was to him -- a maid, preparing his meals, raising his kids, washing his clothes, etc.) simply waned to nothing. Apparently he rarely took her or his kids anywhere. He loved them all, in his own benignly neglectful way...

But he wanted sex from Alma and she gave it to him, willingly, and the purported anal sex didn't produce any kids, therefore the lines about his failure to use contraception, and he not wanting no more of his kids were hyperbole, too.  What Alma was steamed about more than anything was Ennis' prolonged alienation of his affections away from her, affections to which she had become accustomed prior to the advent of Jack Twist.


Ennis' vacations in the outback with Jack, under the conditions that he himself would set up, would be mostly about Ennis having his cake and eating it, too.

Isn't there a strong indication of Ennis's preferences in the fact that how ever exhausted he is, he doesn't "roll to the wall and sleep" when he is with Jack?
Being "exhausted" and having a "headache" are regular excuses to avoid sex with someone you are a) angry with, b) no longer fancy etc etc.

[Paul029]

The past few pages suggest to me that answering the (recent) question, "Was Ennis gay?", as well as the underlying question, What is gay?", has involved interpretations that are grounded in various individuals' personal experience. I think that can set up a number of misleading garden paths. It leads to equivocation over what "gay" means, physical acts, personal orientation and societal evaluation or various combinations of all three. It leads to a situation where even though one has same-sex physical encounters and even same-sex desires, one does not identify as gay because of the societal stigma it carries. So at the very least, we need to be aware of what our various definitions of gay are to have a reasonable discussion.

I noted threads and threads ago that Nabokov once said that in reading literature, one should never identify with the characters because, in essence, literature is not a virtual reality game or an emotional surrogate, but an art form. Adopting such an attitude might help us refrain from the more contentious aspects of the recent exchanges.

Might I suggest we re-phrase the question as, "Does the story of Brokeback Mountain make sense if Ennis and Jack are straight?" My own answer to the question is that it does not make sense, given the 20-year time frame, given the intense desires of the two main characters for each other. Without the assumption they are gay, the story doesn't make much sense, except as a sociological footnote.

I’ve selected your quote, Sandy, because it’s prompted me to (tentatively) enter the fray.
While I’ve been following the recent discussion with some interest, I’ve refrained from entering it for a number of reasons, one of which is that I value my toes when about to step into a maelström.  

A couple of points:

1) Your reference to “personal experience” (potentially) leading to equivocation about the meaning of ‘gay’ (behaviour, personal orientation, external evaluation/stigma, or all three) is apt, as filtering Proulx’s story through one’s own emotional lens is liable to lead one to misconstrue what she wrote. (Janjo put it well when she said, inter alia, “Ennis del Mar is Annie Proulx's character, she invented him, and that is what she said he did.”)

Garyd also commented on New Criticism, a term with which I was previously unfamiliar, and I quote, from the following site, two sections which caught my eye:

http://www.lawrence.edu/dept/english/courses/60a/newcrit.html

The "Intentional Fallacy" is the mistake of attempting to understand the author's intentions when interpreting a literary work.
Such an approach is fallacious because the meaning of a work should be contained solely within the work itself, and attempts to understand the author's intention violate the autonomy of the work.

The "Affective Fallacy" is the mistake of equating a work with its emotional effects upon an audience.
The new critics believed that a text should not have to be understood relative to the responses of its readers; its merit (and meaning) must be inherent.

These seem to indicate that:

• An author’s (stated?) intentions should be put aside when one interprets (decodes?) a work of literature; and
• one’s personal/emotional response/s may/might bring one to misconceive the work’s meaning.

Firstly, I’ve been hauled over the coals in the past for refusing to accept anything Proulx said, post-publication, about what her story was about, or what it meant—after the event.
What she wrote is what she wrote, and I, for one, don’t need an author to tell me what to think. (Sorry, Annie.)
 
Secondly, I doubt that at any stage my personal experiences have “coloured” my reading of her text, and in fact my personal experiences (whatever they may be) are no-one’s business but my own.  

So, I guess I’m (unintentionally) an adherent of New Criticism.


2) You’ve mentioned the twenty-year time frame, but I’ve noticed that occasional references have been made to Ennis’s (nascent) sexual orientation as far back as 1953.

The original question (with your amendments)—“Were Ennis and Jack gay, straight or bisexual?”—has no attached time frame conditions, and wonder why it is that you’ve specified that period (presumably from the summer of 1963 to Jack’s death in 1983), yet it excludes not only story Ennis’s childhood but the story’s post-1983 Prologue.

While my post is directed to Sandy, it by no means implies that the responses of others will be unwelcome.

Hopefully, not to be told to POQ.  

[Sandy]

Okay, Paul, I'll have a go at it. But the comments you made that seem to require answering are based on garyd's posts.

I think there are (at least) 'strong' and 'weak' versions of the two fallacies. The strong version of the intentional fallacy is that we gain direct access to the mind, thoughts and intentions of the author/writer/director from the creative products they have made. That is, we become some sort of psychoanalyst of Proulx from the evidence of her writings. This is bad psychoanalysis and worse literary/cinematic criticism. I agree with garyd that the answers to the questions raised by the story are to be found in the story. If--and this is the weak version of the intentional fallacy--we have to refer to explicit statements that the author made about her story, then we haven't done our job of understanding the story on its own terms, as a work of art in and of itself, and not some psychic extension of the author. The intentional fallacy is more palatable when it is directed at the story (and not from the story to the creator) and as a supplement to what we can learn from the story itself.

[Sandy]

I'm still going, Paul.

The affective fallacy is similar, but it focuses on emotions and not intentions/ideas. However, since the characters in fiction have their emotional responses fixed by the author, they cannot change as a result of our reading or viewing. We cannot test our emotional reception of the characters in the story against alternatives because the story is fixed. This leads some readers/viewers to identify with the characters and project their own feelings onto those characters. They then become attached to defending their interpretation of the story and characters for because of an emotional reason, but in the strong version of the fallacy that is circular: you have already identified your emotions with the character's. We can be moved by stories, certainly. But we cannot interact with them the same way we interact with real individuals in emotional and intellectual give and take. To attempt to do so risks turning the story into an unhealthy emotional surrogate for our emotional states and ignoring the role the emotions play in the characters' motivations, actions, etc. in the story. Charles Dickens was a great one to use characters' emotion to bind together story lines and drive plots. I don't think he was engaged in offering therapeutic solutions. IMO.

[Sandy]

It may come as a surprise that 'anal sex' is NOT equivalent to 'rear-entry' sex; nor is anal sex the sort of thing that animals practice (AFAIK). There was no mention of bestiality in Brokeback Mountain; I don't know what you and Mr. Santorum are referencing.//I disagree about Ennis and anal sex.  It's not evident in the film that Ennis is having anal sex with his wife; that's conjectural...  I certainly would never claimed that he was having anal sex (although I suspected that might have been the case, n one instance I don't know, I didn't ask around). ~snip~

Hey, I'm not the one who introduced the distinction between anal and rear-entry vaginal sex into the discussion, to paint Ennis as some poster boy for straight male sex. And I'm not the one who suggested that Ennis learned his moves from animals. Recall that the 'no manual' comment comes when he flips Jack, not Alma. I really don't have much to add to what desecra has convincingly argued. The short story makes it quite clear that Ennis flipped Alma for anal sex to help him fantasize about Jack. In the movie, Alma is miserable when Ennis flips her. I think she would have welcomed rear-entry vaginal sex. Many women prefer in it the late stages of pregnancy and for variety. But anal sex, not so much. Far from heaven for her, far from overreaching for me. (Manages to two up two loose ends.)

[fofol]

-(I really don't understand your lust for sarcasm.)

One man's sarcasm is another man's heterosexuality as he has sex with another man.