We hate to admit it, but all this modern mania for has simply passed us by. At this point, we're dreading the inevitable trip to the Embarcadero to watch the damn thing, borne solely out of our sense of obligation to stay on the cutting edge of anything related to buggery. (And even that motivation has waned, now that the movie's being advertised as a heterosexual love story.) Honestly, it's only barely opened and already jokes about its title are more passé than pretending that "Target" is pronounced like it's French. Le sigh.
But who'd have guessed that BM isn't the first big-ticket homocowboy film to screen in SF? Lonesome Cowboys was a semi-comprehensible Warhol-wank that appeared about 40 years ago at the San Francisco International Film Festival. In keeping with the SFIFF's enduring theme of snooty snoozefests, LC was, as far as we can make out, a meandering, unsynchronized montage of western icons and gentialia that immediately attracted the attention of the naughty monkeys at the FBI. You can read the bureau's hilariously clinical review on The Smoking Gun, which includes the line, "All of the males in the cast displayed homsexual tendencies and conducted themselves toward one another in an effeminate manner." Wearing chaps has that effect on us, too.
Brokeback Mountain