Sex, or the communicative code

Some observers of the relationship between Jack and Ennis in Brokeback Mountain (Proulx, 2006) might suggest that sex alone was sufficient foundation for the

development and maintenance of this interaction. These critics would cite the vigour with which the sex in their relationship was pursued, from the initial stages of open-air activities right through the summer, ‘sheep be damned’ (Proulx, 2006: 291), to the meeting of Jack and Ennis four years later, not having seen one another in the interim and ‘within twenty minutes, were in the Motel Siesta jouncing a bed’ (Proulx, 2006:

296). It seems unlikely, however, that they had ‘reconstituted themselves as something like an ethnic group, one whose distinctive folkloric custom was sexual voracity’

(Sontag, 1989: 76). The sexual aspect of the relationship between Jack and Ennis must above all be kept secret, for it was this that endangered their lives. It was only in the privacy of hotel rooms for example that Jack and Ennis could engage the sexual passion they felt for one another. And whereas most couples require a level of privacy for sexual intimacy, for Jack and Ennis, any public affection was impossible. Here too, the possibility of disclosing their thoughts and feelings opened up in this private world.

Secrecy provided a safe place in which to construct their relationship: ‘Secret

relationships provide a harbor from the normative world where an apparently ideal relationship can be constructed and individuation and trust created’ (Richardson, 1988:

218).

Jack and Ennis sought this haven away from the ‘normative world’ in order to express their true feelings, their desires and their love, in whichever roundabout ways. In one such encounter, after discussing the possibilities of their relationship, Jack exclaims,

‘Friend…We got us a fuckin situation here. Got to figure out what to do’ (Proulx, 2006:

299). In this privacy too, they were able to reconcile moral quandaries felt keenly about their sexual relationship. In some ways, the relationship of Jack and Ennis approaches a pure relationship, for it is in privacy that the intimacy they share overcomes the moral

dilemma (as they see it) of their relationship. Giddens describes this process in the following way:

Passion has become privatised; yet its implications and resonance are far from private. Sexuality has become one main element of the striving for intimacy, but it addresses problems and stimulates feelings which are not restricted to a personal relation between two human beings. In intimate sexual relationships, people today frequently find their greatest moral satisfactions in life. (Giddens, 1992: 205)

In many ways, however, the relationship of Jack and Ennis goes further than privacy – they attempt to keep it a secret. Logically, the more sexual partners with whom they engaged, the more likely it was that their secret would be revealed. Much later, just before Jack dies, he remembers ‘that distant summer on Brokeback when Ennis had come up behind him and pulled him close, the silent embrace satisfying some shared and sexless hunger’ (Proulx, 2006: 310). The vivid descriptions of Jack and Ennis’

sexual encounters several times in Brokeback Mountain (Proulx, 2006) are always set, however, within the context of attempted secrecy, not merely privacy. For up on

Brokeback it is from the gaze of their employer that they must hide (Proulx, 2006: 291), and back in town, from the gaze of just about everyone (Proulx, 2006: 301).

Nonetheless, it is in the context of this secret, forbidden relationship that their love for one another can develop – out of sight of the censure of the society in which they lived.

It is within such relationships that ‘The world-out-there, the normative social structure with its roles and rules, expectations and obligations, can be laid aside as the couple constructs a world-in-here, a world freer of normative social constraint and cultural definitions’ (Richardson, 1988: 212). The ‘world-in-here’ for Jack and Ennis allowed them to express their love for one another. After spending the night together in a hotel room, Jack exclaims, ‘Old Brokeback got us good and it sure ain’t over. We gotta work out what the fuck we’re goin a do now’ (Proulx, 2006: 299).

While an indispensably important aspect of the relationship of Jack and Ennis, it is here suggested that sex alone would be insufficient to sustain such a protracted and sporadic interaction. Jack confesses: ‘Count the damn few times we been together in twenty years…then tell me you’ll kill me for needin it and not hardly never getting it…I can’t

make it on a couple of high-altitude fucks once or twice a year’ (Proulx, 2006: 309). If sex is insufficient, and the processes of mutual disclosure and trust are all but absent, what has kept the relationship of Jack and Ennis alive and so vital between the once or twice per year fishing and hunting trips that they make together? A shared identity, a lack of happiness and the submission to the same external criteria solidified the relationship of Jack and Ennis so that these features become both ‘symbolic of and reflexively constitutive of the relationship itself’ (Jamieson, 1999: 490). The possibility of a pure relationship is all but lost, for ‘intimacy is the other face of privacy, or at least only becomes possible (or desired) given substantial privacy’ (Giddens, 1992: 94).

Despite the impossibility of their relationship, it was the love that Jack and Ennis felt for one another that drew them together over all those miles and years. At one of their last meetings, Jack said, ‘You’re too much for me, Ennis, you son of a whoreson bitch. I wish I knew how to quit you’ (Proulx, 2006: 309). Jack wasn’t able to quit Ennis – he was attacked and killed before he could.

One of the friends of the quasi-autobiographical protagonist in Calendar Boy, when describing the process of meeting someone new as a potential sexual partner, stated,

‘You stare at strangers you like, and if they stare back, then you go up and talk to them’

(Quan, 2001: 159). This friend is then revealed as the person who was ‘the start of my great education on how to be gay – not the self-acceptance part, which I was already quite good at – but the men part’ (Quan, 2001: 159). This protagonist of Calendar Boy (Quan, 2001) learns from his friend, that the men part of being gay is as simple as

communicating that you’re available for sex and it all takes off from there. The outcome of this education, as this protagonist begins to develop a relationship with a new person, is the surprise of waiting until a second date before sex with this new person: ‘Since I usually sleep with men on the first date, or sleep with them before I make a first date, I thought it was a good start’ (Quan, 2001: 218). As a reflection of the changing attitudes towards sexuality and sexual behaviour in late modernity, this character in Calendar Boy performs very well. He represents in many ways the emerging interpretations of

‘plastic sexuality’ (Giddens, 1992) and the breaking of ties with traditional modes of love and sexuality.

These attitudes may be described in the following way:

Sexual development and sexual satisfaction henceforth became bound to the reflexive project of the self…Sexuality has then become, as Luhmann (Love as Passion, Cambridge, Polity, 1986) might put it, a ‘communicative code’ rather than a phenomenon integrated with the wider exigencies of human experience. In sexual behaviour, a distinction had always been drawn between pleasure and procreation. When the new connections between sexuality and intimacy were formed, however, sexuality became much more completely separated from procreation than before. Sexuality became doubly-constituted as a medium of self-realisation and as a prime means, as well as an expression, of intimacy. Sexuality here has lost its extrinsic connections with wider traditions and ethics, as well as with the succession of the generations. Sexuality remains, or rather becomes, a central focus for ‘experience’, and the word ‘experience’ comes to have a particular significance in relation to sexual life. Yet this ‘experience’ has little to do with the existential domains with which sex in some sense places us in contact. (Giddens, 1992: 164)

The ‘experience’ of sex in the relationship of John and Tim in Holding the Man (Conigrave, 1995) is elemental to their reflexive projects of self.