And The Pedestal You Rode Up On, Too

If you insist, as so many have, that the story of Jack and Ennis is OK to watch and sympathize with because they're not really homosexual — that they're more like the heart of America than like "gay people" — you're pushing them back into the closet whose narrow and suffocating confines Ang Lee and his collaborators have so beautifully and harrowingly exposed. --Daniel Mendelsohn