Humor: Gay Guide to 'Brokeback'

[Norajane]

Nope. It's the team for me.

I'm thinking of Watchmen. Which is still one of the best things I've ever read.

Favourite scene. Dr Manhattan and The Comedian watching Richard Nixon arrive for Victory in Vietnam Day.

The Comedian: It's all just a joke.
Dr. Manhattan: The burnt out villages? The young boys with necklaces of human ears? These are a joke?
The Comedian: I never said it was a good joke.

It had really interesting characters, a fantastic plot, the artwork was great and it even changed my perspective of the universe a little.

But it all had to work together.

And none of the women characters in it had a whip.

I always liked the whole team thing in the Superfriends cartoon...banding together to save the world from doom!

Or maybe I just always wanted Wonder Woman's invisible plane.

 

[Lisa Denton]

I'm waiting for the female version "Brokeback Valley".


http://i16.photobucket.com/albums/b11/LisaDenton/Untitled-1g.jpg

 

[3113]

Favourite scene. Dr Manhattan and The Comedian watching Richard Nixon arrive for Victory in Vietnam Day.

The Comedian: It's all just a joke.
Dr. Manhattan: The burnt out villages? The young boys with necklaces of human ears? These are a joke?
The Comedian: I never said it was a good joke.

Um...but we're talking about comics with female protagonists beloved by men. My point was that boys only get interested in a female protagonist if she's either busty/leather or cyberpunk tough. So the question isn't what's your fave comic book--or what draws you to any comic book--it's who is your favorite female protagonist in a comic? And why? I'm afraid Watchman doesn't have any such thing. It's main female character is in the background, at best, and does very little except when she talks Dr. Manhattan into acting.

My guess is that if we got into a discussion of Watchman, no female character would get mentioned. You'd want to talk Dr. Manhattan, or the Comedian, or Roschach...not about the girls. And you said yourself, you read it for the team, not the girl. So which book DO you read for the girl? And why? For a hormonal charge--or because she's truely cool?

Now, if you'd care to mention, say, Halo Jones as your fave female protagonist...maybe I'll reconsider although she's arguably cyber-punkish.

Or if you really want to impress me, and say that it's not the hormones, then tell me your fave female protagonist was Crazy Jane from Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol. Then I'll believe it's not the hormones.

 

[3113]

I'm waiting for the female version "Brokeback Valley"

LOL!

Okay, so where are their cowgirl hats?

P.S. I bet they don't moan and complain about not being able to love each other...and they most certainly DO go into the valley to fish...don't they?

 

[3113]

Or maybe I just always wanted Wonder Woman's invisible plane.

I always wondered about that plane. I mean...you could see her inside it, so what good was it that the plane was invisible? You still knew where she was...and by extention, where the plane was...

And how did she see the steering wheel and the controls?

 

[Lisa Denton]

LOL!

Okay, so where are their cowgirl hats?

P.S. I bet they don't moan and complain about not being able to love each other...and they most certainly DO go into the valley to fish...don't they?

They only wear thier hats when playin "Ridem Cowgirl"

 

[rgraham666]

Um...but we're talking about comics with female protagonists beloved by men. My point was that boys only get interested in a female protagonist if she's either busty/leather or cyberpunk tough. So the question isn't what's your fave comic book--or what draws you to any comic book--it's who is your favorite female protagonist in a comic? And why? I'm afraid Watchman doesn't have any such thing. It's main female character is in the background, at best, and does very little except when she talks Dr. Manhattan into acting.

My guess is that if we got into a discussion of Watchman, no female character would get mentioned. You'd want to talk Dr. Manhattan, or the Comedian, or Roschach...not about the girls. And you said yourself, you read it for the team, not the girl. So which book DO you read for the girl? And why? For a hormonal charge--or because she's truely cool?

Now, if you'd care to mention, say, Halo Jones as your fave female protagonist...maybe I'll reconsider although she's arguably cyber-punkish.

Or if you really want to impress me, and say that it's not the hormones, then tell me your fave female protagonist was Crazy Jane from Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol. Then I'll believe it's not the hormones.

Odd. I thought we were talking about why we liked comic books generally. Shrugs. Different perspectives, et al.

(Takes a long think. Who did I lust after among all the comic book women around?)

I lusted after Martha Washington in Give Me Liberty.

I also had it bad for Judge Anderson.

Are these women cool? That's entirely your decision. I like 'em.

 

[Colleen Thomas]

have you read the books?? It's even MORE obvious in the books... the womenfolk are nowhere near as alive as they are in the movies... they're almost footnotes for pete's sake!

Well, Eowyn is fairly active in the books. Galadriel is also more prominent in the books. If you read the Silmarillion, there are several female characters of note.

The books are basically fantasy action/adventure. Until the advent of theirves world and Dragonlance, I don't think women were cast as leads in manyof the genre. Conan the barbarian, some of Edgar rice Burrors heros, Kane. I can conjur up memories of several heros and anti heros from my readings when I was younger, but I can't come up with a single female lead who was commercially successful enough to make it into the used bin where I spent my allowance on books until Dragonlance.

I suspect the prime mover was a lot more traditional gender roles than homoerotic. AS well as the target audience, primarily young men and boys.

 

[Svenskaflicka]

This is very true. I remember telling a children's lit class that Harry Potter would have gone nowhere if it had been "Harriet Potter."

The thing is, girls can read and identify with the male protagonist of a book (in most cases). But men--and this is, IMHO, a matter of nuture and culture, not nature--cannot or are not allowed to identify with female protagonists. Which is why you won't see any little boys reading Anne of Green Gables (too embarassing even if they wanted to), but you will see little girls reading Where the Red Fern Grows and other "boy" books that contain almost no girls. Not embarassing, perfectly acceptable.

Boys usually only get interested in strong, female protagonists when they, the boys, reach puberty, and the fictional females are in comic book form (and I mean "comic book" in the best of all possible ways)--that is, when they're tough and cyber-punkish and sexy. Catwoman, for example, sells very well with guys from adolescence on up. She's busty, naughty, dangerous and she's got a whip

I do have hope, though - when I was, like 7 or 8, I was in the library, and this Big Boy (12) came in and looked through the shelves, and walked away with all the books in a serie about "Kulla-Gulla" - a classic Swedish novel in 19 or 20 parts about a little orphan girl who works as a servant girl for a very poor family, only to later discover that she's the lost granddaughter of the local big shot. It takes place in the 1920'ies, I think, and it's a lot of dialect and realistic speech in it. I liked it a lot, but I was, too, so brought up by society that I was surprised to see a big boy of 12 years like the series - say what you want about it, but there are NO male action heroes in it!

I cling on to that memory as a motivation, when the guys in my world seem more "male" than usual.

 

[3113]

Odd. I thought we were talking about why we liked comic books generally. Shrugs. Different perspectives, et al.

My bad. There were two posts that lead up to the final comment on comic books. I guess it wasn't at all clear.

What I said was that boys aren't usually intested in female protagonists while young (that is, boys won't usually read books that star girls, like Anne of Green Gables...unless, of course, it's required reading by the teacher). But they will start to read comic books with female heroines when they near puberty if those comics have a heroine who is either sexy in her costume or cyberpunkish or dominatrix dangerous--or any combo thereof.

Like Catwoman who is popular enough with guys that she can have a book all her own.

Someone asked me if I thought this was caused by hormones and I said, as you saw, yes. I think it's primarily hormones.

Now as for your choices, I think Judge Anderson fits into the above categories in looks (though she is also cool in personality)--but Martha Washington is fairly unique.

 

[rgraham666]

My bad. There were two posts that lead up to the final comment on comic books. I guess it wasn't at all clear.

What I said was that boys aren't usually intested in female protagonists while young (that is, boys won't usually read books that star girls, like Anne of Green Gables...unless, of course, it's required reading by the teacher). But they will start to read comic books with female heroines when they near puberty if those comics have a heroine who is either sexy in her costume or cyberpunkish or dominatrix dangerous--or any combo thereof.

Like Catwoman who is popular enough with guys that she can have a book all her own.

Someone asked me if I thought this was caused by hormones and I said, as you saw, yes. I think it's primarily hormones.

Now as for your choices, I think Judge Anderson fits into the above categories in looks (though she is also cool in personality)--but Martha Washington is fairly unique.

De nada. If we understood each other all the time, we'd be a hive mind, and bored out of our collective gourd.

It's always been personality for me. Looks are nice, but character is sexy. I really like character.

 

[Boota]

The turn of this thread kind of makes me think of the way the female protagonist is the rule more than the exception in all the slasher films. Which, I am sure, is primarily hormonal in attractiveness to the target audience of those films.

 

[Bishonen]

As if I wasn't in love with Heath Ledger already...

 

[Svenskaflicka]

"Concerned Women for America" have this to say about Brokeback:

Starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger, Brokeback Mountain is the story of two sheep-herding cowboys in Wyoming who begin a homosexual relationship on the range in the 1960s, and continue their affair even after the two men marry women. The $13-million film swept the major categories, including Best Picture, among critics in Los Angeles, Boston and New York, and garnered seven Golden Globe nominations from foreign film critics. The Oscars, which will be awarded on March 5, 2006, are expected to include Brokeback among the nominees.


“Brokeback is the ‘Perfect Storm’ of Hollywood’s war on morality,” said Robert Knight, director of Concerned Women for America’s (CWA’s) Culture & Family Institute (CFI). “It combines high production values with a lowdown attack on morality. It’s a mockery of the Western genre embodied by every movie cowboy from John Wayne to Gene Autry to Kevin Costner. I can’t think of a more effective way to annoy and alienate most movie-going Americans than to show two cowboys lusting after each other and even smooching.


“Although the film reportedly portrays some problems with adultery, it comes down on the side of ‘being who you are,’ which means having whatever perverse and unfaithful relationship you want. Homosexual activists have openly boasted that they hope this film ‘will change minds.’ I think I’d put it differently. If it encourages even one confused boy to engage in sex with another male, that makes it an instrument of corruption, not one of enlightenment.”

Ofcourse, it would be much better to corrupt confused young boys into engaging in waiting for the wedding night with a girl.