Aguirre as slimy? Sure but what does that have to do with him not reacting much to lovey-dovey stuff? 10 minutes-and the sex was quick and rough according to AP. We are meant to think he saw pretty much one whole session. And he didn't stroke out. So clearly, it was man/man expedient sex; nothing he would have thought was queer. Do we now say Aguirre would be ok seeing what we saw at the Reunion? come on.....
Then why did he deliver the news of UH's recovery "fixing Jack with his bold stare" and "not bothering to dismount?" It doesn't sound to me as though he was completely cool with it, either. He was at least patronizing, at most contemptuous.
The thing is that Aguirre watched the entire act, certainly most of it and the end. "…watched them through his 10x42 binos for ten minutes one day, waiting until they'd buttoned up…" How polite of him, not to interrupt or embarrass his hired hands at their expedient sex. He was being a voyeur. We are meant to react negatively to his intrusion on their privacy--he enjoyed the show, then waited so they wouldn't know he'd been watching--
because watching could also be construed as queer.
Different men in the story react to them in different ways, all negative, but
only Ennis' father is seen as dangerously homophobic. There may be a message here, too--as you say below, Ennis' demons are there in his head by BB: that while the danger is real, Ennis makes it worse than it is.
The idea of the 'wrong' guy seeing them-that's interesting, but it is extraneous to the story, I think.
Do you? I don't. Ennis has no way of knowing what kind of guy is going to see them. Not a good risk to take.
I think the info is contained within-the characters we need for Ennis to do battle with are there, either in his head or in his life. So Aguirre is the one-he is the guy from Sage, on BBM, and there is no way to explain away how Ennis had to have been told by Jack that his Uncle had pneuomonia by Aguirre-but he STILL continues to have sex with Jack, knowing its possible to get caught. And it takes a trauma-the bloody nose and the ministering to do that in the end..where was it with the idea of being SEEN? There is no fear on Ennis's part-not because he has no risk of being seen-that's over with when AGuirre shows up-but he will not be seen as queer. He will be seen as an expedient poker.
I do understand what you're saying. But nobody was sitting up there parsing whether it was queer sex or okay sex. The concept of being queer wasn't one Ennis had closely examined at 19. I'm sure of that. (Four years later, faced with the knowledge that he loved Jack, he had bolstered himself with this "I'm STILL not queer" idea.) There were two kinds of sex--with women, and queer. Mansex=queer=dead. Earl was a horror that simply shut down any intellectual examinations or exceptions he might have made into the question of whether it was okay to have sex with a man under any conditions. The problem was that then he found himself in a situation where he discovered, by accident and with the help of booze and a late hour, that he wanted to have sex with a man. It's certainly not irrelevant that their first encounter is from behind, but it also serves to emphasize Ennis' tendency to dominate, and the sudden, almost unavoidable aspect of the encounter. They were pulled together like magnets. There's no reason it couldn't have been f2f, leaving Ennis' denials aside for the moment, but artistically, the savage quality of it does show the passion that overcame Ennis' fears and loathing and the immature quality of their early relationship as well as hinting that Ennis even in the throes of passion had some reservations about the whole thing.
Again, not being a man, I don't know--would all fours be the default position, the one that would first be chosen? That's not an irrelevant consideration either, but I suspect the answer would vary. Certainly it is a position that gives Ennis tremendous power, which is also relevant. He is setting the pace.
I see you are arguing the year later-but why? AP tells us when AJ was born; Ennis's comment is tied to that time-the sucking and the squalling of the baby recalls the squalling of Jack's harmonica...Why is this point so heatedly argued? It always puzzles me... Does it really not follow?
It isn't that it doesn't follow. I'm not saying it didn't take a year for Ennis to ADMIT, to allow himself to understand, what was really wrong. I'm just saying that "everything seemed mixed" and "headlong fall" show quite clearly that Ennis was AWARE of emotional turmoil with regard to Jack, and what they had been doing, long before a year. This is before the dry heaves, too: he was already sick.
Not knowing for a year fits in with his denial-it doesn't really fit with anything else, because if he knew how he felt on BBM, or upon leaving-he'd have behaved somewhat differently. We would not have exactly the same turn-out as we do, I don't think.
Why not? I would call hauling off and belting your best friend/lover over an accidental nosebleed and the aftermath, and then pretending like nothing happened, ESSENTIAL denial. Because if you admit even to yourself that something was wrong enough to cause that punch, you admit there is a real problem. And Ennis was busy deciding it was food poisoning.
Again, i think Mini has produced IMO, of course, an airtight finding that tells me ever more that Ennis was in denial, and prevented them from doing anything that would take him out of it; and there is no way Aguirre would have let the kind of passion we see in the Reunion go by without doing someting about it, or saying something about-the most he can muster is, 'you boys screwed up, spent too much time away from the sheep ,etc, etc.' He never actually calls him queer......
In addition, one of the main arguments here has been that Ennis could do ANYTHING because he had no fears of being seen....now its clear, if he was doing what has been imagined, he WOULD be very scared, once he knew Aguirre made trips up to see them. The argument no longer stands, in that light.
I know I sound maybe too certain... It clicked into place for me with Mini's point.
Ah, but there's denial, and there's
denial. You and MinAngel make, for me, too fine a point; that as long as Ennis restricted the hell out of everything, it was okay if ANYBODY saw it, just two horny men doing what they needed to do. I think that Ennis shut down any thinking the moment he woke up in the red dawn and saw what he had done.And we must not forget that the trigger for the punch is not only the bloody nose, but also the knowledge, forced on him by the early recall before he's finished building the nice neat little box in which it would have been put away forever, that he's been having sex with a man. If all these restrictions made him so comfortable with the sex, then why would the bloody nose and a bit of wiping with a sleeve bother him? Because some part of him knows IN THAT MOMENT that it wasn't expedient, no matter what they didn't do. Because some part of him knows IN THAT MOMENT that he feels something "wrong." As long as he could pretend no one knew, no one saw, it was okay. He wasn't cool at all with being seen, he simply chose not to believe he
could be seen. MUCH easier to believe nobody saw you, or could see you, than to parse what seeing you might mean. Girls don't think they're going to get pregnant. Boys don't believe they're going to have problems driving drunk. These are blanket denials, made by inexperience. When you're nineteen, you're bulletproof. You can believe ten impossible things before breakfast. Ennis didn't worry about being seen because he didn't believe anyone saw them. The door is still wide open. If you're going to fit his behavior into what's written, don't forget these words either:
"There were only the two of them on the mountain, flying in the euphoric, bitter air…suspended above ordinary affairs… They believed themselves invisible…"