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"Yes, it's the gay cowboy movie. Get over it," wrote Ty Burr in his Boston Globe review of Brokeback Mountain (par. 1 ). Intending to rebuke any viewer who would resist the movie because of its "gay" content, Burr ends up constructing a response that has the effect of simultaneously defining and denying such content. At the same time that the statement declaratively assigns the film a very particular same-sex identity-"gay cowboy movie"-it denies the significance ofthat identity through an imperative erasure ("get over it"). Structurally, Burr's comment replicates the cultural effect of the film as a whole: at the very point that Brokeback Mountain was being praised by many American critics and commentators as a brave and daring affirmation of same-sex love1 and was being hailed by some as a defining moment in the United States' "national conversation" about sexual identity,2 both the film and many critical responses to it were deconstructing the very terms of such a conversation by dismantling the whole notion of sexual identity (as opposed to merely sexual behavior). In doing so, they were not complicating or questioning current identity categories such as "gay" or "bisexual." Rather, they were simply erasing these identities by returning male same-sex desire and practice to a position of marginality and invisibility of the sort that predates any cultural notions of sexual identity at all, even pathological ones such as those constructed by the late nineteenth-century sexologists.
In discussing Brokeback Mountain, columnist Godfrey Cheshire might argue that "'gay,' perhaps more than any other word in the language, signifies the argument over cultural values that America has been having with itself in recent years" (par. 5), but if so, the film and its American commentators do not contribute to or even recognize that argument. Instead, by more or less eliminating identity categories, they eliminate the debate altogether. Far from "challenging] people's ideas about the value and validity of samesex relationships," as Newsweek writer Sean Smith claims (68), Brokeback Mountain and many of its cultural respondents simply reassure straight audiences that such relationships do not even meaningfully exist. Thus, like Terry Castle's "apparitional lesbian,"3 the gay male of Brokeback Mountain, cowboy or not, is ultimately no more than a ghost. It is this spectral status, rather than...