The Brokeback Book\u27s subtitle suggests that it aims to be something more comprehensive than a collection of essays on Annie Proulx\u27s story or director Ang Lee\u27s film. In this respect, this impressive book works well to bring together some previously published essays, such as those by David Leavitt and Daniel Mendelsohn, which took particular positions on the debates around the gayness of the film, and places them alongside direct and indirect responses to such critical readings. Hence we have the producer of the film James Schamus\u27s reply to Mendelsohn in which he argues that through mainstreaming gayness we disturb the given sites-some closeted, some not-from which gay identities struggle for recognition, or new essays such as Mun-Hou Lo\u27s discussion of forbearance, Vanessa Osborne\u27s piece on Marxist notions of the laboring body, or Judith Halberstam on queering the Western. Thus the book clearly interests itself in the phenomenon of both story and film, revealing the intense cultural politics of a circulating text that has had an incredible significance to the lives of gay and straight communities
