Gary Indiana's Review of Brokeback Mountain

[...]
The insular quality of American life reinforces a stubborn naïveté about sexual matters that's been part of our national character from the outset. The hermetic communities pictured in Brokeback Mountain illustrate sociologist Kai T. Erikson's findings in Wayward Puritans (1966)—that American communities have always defined themselves in terms of who doesn't belong in them. The deviant, whether religious, political, or sexual, has always needed to be identified from among the existing population, then exterminated or expelled. The expunged have tended to found their own little territories, which in turn establish their identities by driving out the unorthodox—who have to be invented if they don't already exist. (Slaves, of course, were imported, and assigned a negative status as legitimate inhabitants.) From the days of the Massachusetts Bay Colony to the present, American exceptionalism begins on the microcosmic level. In this respect, Brokeback Mountain is a pungent slice of an essentially unchanging reality.
[...]