Winning Wyoming
Taki
Gstaad
Iwrote this last week, as we’re going to press early. It seems everyone who is anyone is staying up late on Sunday night in order to watch the Oscars, and cheer for the gay western which has been nominated for eight Academy Awards. I have not seen Brokebutt Mountain, but I hear that the film’s haunting musical score, ‘Homo on the Range’, is wonderful. But these are old, Fifties jokes, and beneath contempt. Mind you, not in Wyoming, where the author of Brokeback Mountain based her story. Wyoming is a wonderful place, where once upon a time my friend Professor Yohannes Goulandris was accosted by some ranchers who wished to know whether he was with them or against them. The good prof. had laughed when someone had seriously suggested we nuke the Soviets because their women shotputters were really men.
Be that as it may, homosexuality among cowboys in Wyoming has been sanctioned by the American academic community, the religious community, especially the C of E, the corporate world, and, of course, the media, which have regularly provided articles and celebrations of diversity, and now celebrate a gay western. Ironically, westerns died out because they showed Native Americans to be primitive, to speak in a funny manner, and make women and gays walk behind them. The Searchers, starring the Duke and directed by John Ford, is just such an example. Shane is also a great western, except there are no Indians in it. But there’s a marvellous moment when Shane, a real toughie underplayed by the great Alan Ladd, exchanges tender glances with the impeccably behaved loyal wife and mother, Jean Arthur, and it passes in a jiffy. Today, Shane would have gone for the little boy who hero-worshipped him so, Brandon de Wilde. (‘Shane, come back to me, Shane ... ’) Oh well, that’s how it goes, and it’s about time people in Wyoming grew up.
Brokeback Mountain seems to me to be a movie of the Fifties, when colour and sexual bans were broken in films such as Imitation of Life, or Back Street. What I don’t get is what the fuss is about. If Achilles could do it with Patroclus allegedly, that is — why can’t two comely Stetson-wearing studs do it? I think the media once again have taken us for a ride. Men are funny about same-sex sex. Back in 1970, in Irbid, northern Jordan, two ParisMatch photographers and I were arrested by some PLO fighters during Black September. They took us inside a house and locked us up in a room. One of the photographers, Allen Tayeb, asked me whether I was circumcised. I took exception and told him that this was no time to be asking such frivolous questions. ‘If you are, you’re dead,’ he said to me. I got the message, and told him it was much worse. I was carrying a letter to King Hussein from a girlfriend of his, the journalist Geneviève Chauvel. So we panicked and decided to eat it, and just as we took the last swallow, a Palestinian unlocked us and smilingly told us we were free to go.
Afterwards, Tayeb gave me a lecture about being touchy. He obviously thought I was an Old Etonian, but I set him straight. I wasn’t, and am not touchy about gays, but I do like to make jokes. Gianni Agnelli, David Beaufort and I had a great friend in Eric Nielsen, an old Danish queen whom Gianni and I would torture about the bellboys he would pick up in faraway, romantic places, such as Mexico and Thailand. Once I started writing for the Speccie in 1977, I mentioned the fact that Eric had survived the sinking of the Titanic because he had cross-dressed that fateful evening, and, while he pranced down the tilting deck, some old salt mistook him for a little girl and threw him inside a lifeboat. For the life of me, I couldn’t understand why Eric took it so badly. He howled and screamed abuse at me, and then spread terrible rumours that I had been a male Korean whore in a Japanese prison camp.
Poor Eric left us long ago, but he always insisted that all of his male buddies were gay, ‘otherwise why would you always stick together like a bunch of girls?’ What I find amusing is that, whereas once upon a time gay cowboys hung out in Greenwich Village gay clubs, now they’ve been transported by Hollywood to the Wyoming slopes. Gstaad has to be next. Perhaps not cowboys, but ski instructors. In fact, I’ll write a short treatment when the muse visits next. Two of our best ski instructors fall for two of our most rugged snowboarders. All four have girlfriends and are also married. To women. But the four men get drunk in the Palace Hotel nightclub one night, and rent the presidential suite for a three-day orgy. The Chamber of Commerce gets to hear of it, and all hell breaks loose. The Swiss are a conservative folk, especially up here in the mountains. I will not tell you the end of the story, however. Until I’ve sold it to Hollywood, that is.
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