Yippie I ay Yippie I oh all you gay caballeros! The Chuck Wagon special tonight is genuine WIENER, and of course the obligatory baked beans.

I had gay gags galore at the ready when I knew I would be reviewing the current talk of the movie world, Bareback Mountain about two lonesome young cowpokes, Ennis (Keith Ledger) and Jack (Maggie Gyllenhall – I mean Jake Gyllenhall) who get it on together among the sheep herds of upper Wyoming.

To say that John Wayne has turned over in his grave doesn’t cut the Grey Poupon. He’s spinning like a dreidel! He probably doesn’t remember that we have quite a tradition of gay westerns in this country. There’s Oklahomo and Seven Brothers for Seven Brothers, just to name two blockbusters. Though Bareback is not a film of the old gun-slinging West, the time frame covers the years from 1963 to 1983. Also, this film is anything but hot, gay porn; but is instead quite understated: quiet, cold, lonely and sad, which makes it a fine piece of work. Academy Award worthy? I think not. But yet another surprising piece of Americana by the Taiwanese director Ang Lee who has given us the sublime Sense and Sensibility and The Ice Storm, not to mention the international smash, Crouching Tiger.

Jack and Ennis meet in a lonely place looking for work. At first I didn’t recognize Randy Quaid as the fatso foreman who hires them for a long, lonely season riding herd in the high country. Act one shows the two men doing their daily chores, and we see they’re both chaps who know their job and do it well, dividing the campsite duties: tent maintenance, cooking, and the obligatory bad grub over the campfire – passing a pint to kill the taste.

Ennis is the strong silent type. His voice is so deep and western that sometimes you feel the need for subtitles. He’s a decent but humorless fellow who early on lost his parents in a car wreck. Jack is more talkative and expressive, and alert gaydar mavens will recognize him as the fem to-be. The more revealing tasks start to be shown: washing clothes in the buff at water’s edge, etc.

So to cut right to the bare-back action, one night Ennis, sleeping next to the campfire, is cold as a well-digger’s ass, so he crawls into the tent with Jack. And in a Wyoming minute the passionate clinch is on and Jack flaps over for some mighty fine manly buggering. Oooh-la-la!

As dawn breaks, Ennis opens the tent-flap and of course is mortified. In the days that follow there is no discussion of that night in the tent except that they both proclaim that they’re not queer. But as time goes by the body contact resumes – sometimes outdoors where the fatso foreman watches from afar with binoculars.

But finally the season’s over and our two young wranglers go their separate ways: Jack back to Texas and Ennis to his Wyoming dot on the map. And in a razor sharp cut Ennis is in church marrying his hometown gal – most likely to prove to himself that he’s “okay.” So they begin an impoverished life together, and soon two baby girls enter the family. They’re as poor as dirt and live with hardly more conveniences than their frontier ancestors. Further assurance that all gays are not wussies is seeing the well-cut Ennis beat the tar out of a couple scum-buckets using cuss words near his little girls.

Meanwhile, Jack is back in the considerably more lively Texas beer halls and is making a living as a so-so bucking bronco rider in the rodeo. Director Lee makes up for the film’s relative lack of action by cutting a fast-paced storyline. Jack then meets his wife-to-be in a beer-soaked hoe-down. She’s real purdy and is living her wild youth, but she’s also the daughter of an upwardly mobile family who sell state-of-the-art tractors. Anyway, she’s eyeballing Jack all night from across the room and finally comes over and belts out the funniest line of the film: “What are you waiting for, a mating call?” Outside they bang in the car.

With the passing of time Jack visits Ennis. They kiss and hug passionately around the side of the house, but E’s wife sees them from an upstairs window, and of course is crushed but says nothing as the two buds go off for a four-day “fishing trip.” Again, a sharp cut shows us a motel where Jack and Ennis are in bed as happy as clams.

Back in Texas, Jack marries his fine-looking “car” girl and soon one offspring, a boy, is conceived. Though Jack has a tad of the gift-of-gab, he’s really a nobody from nowhere, and her family hates him. She herself is no dummy, and is in fact a competent business-woman. So it must be noted to Director Lee and his writers that the viewers find this marriage not altogether believable.

Back in dreary Wyoming, with every Ennis/Jack fishing trip the fights with the little woman escalate, and as the kids grow close to their young teens, their mom and pop are divorced.

Back in Texas, Jack shows his more gay-than-straight predilections as we follow him into the back-alleyways of El Paso looking for gay-beaner prostitutes. In one of their last fishing trips Jack tells Ennis of his El Paso nights, then makes a plea for he and Ennis to get ranch and live together. No-go says Ennis.

After a very long time Ennis can’t resist a pay phone call to Jack and speaks to Jack’s wife, still a piece of ass doing office paperwork, and as cool as a cucumber she tells Ennis of Jack’s fate.

Ennis, entering the long descent into middle and old age, but pretty much the same manly wrangler he was twenty years ago – perhaps a little more glib – speaks with his oldest daughter in his bleak trailer. She tells him of her upcoming marriage. They have a shot together, and when she leaves, Ennis opens the curtain revealing an open field of green. And as the end titles roll, a very nice touch is hearing Willie Nelson sing Bob Dylan’s He Was a Friend of Mine.

Go see Brokeback Mountain, and all of us who are lukewarm on the gay thing, try to conjure up a little compassion for men who are alone – in prison or with job descriptions which exclude the proximity of females.

However, the gay polemicists, recruiters, and fag-wavers would have you believe that every gay is BORN that way. WRONG. Men (and women) can fall into being homos for numerous reasons, the worst of which is not having the gumption to go out and do the sometimes hard-work of catching a person of the opposite sex – especially if you’re not “cuuute,” or you’re just too damn lazy and take the path of least resistance by doing it with any man in the familio.

Then there’s just the innocent fumbling of toddlers who aren’t corrected by their careless breeders. The last example here is just the ordinary chap who perhaps has had one too many drinks and stumbles into the monstrosity of a homosexual encounter. This fellow will most likely put the incident into his larger memory vault of odd experiences and continue on his way down life’s highway.

Moreover, let’s not be bamboozled by the ever-mounting propaganda of the so-called same-sexers. These people will be dealt with sharply in the not-too-distant future. And you can bet your Nostradamus decoder ring on it!

So, get along little doggies, but watch your back.