Brutal Love

"Jack, I don't want a be like them guys you see around sometimes. And I don't want a be dead. There was these two old guys ranched together down home, Earl and Rich--Dad would pass a remark when he seen them. They was a joke even though they was pretty touch old birds. I was what, nine years old and they found Earl dead in a irrigation ditch. They'd took a tire iron to him, spurred him up, drug him around by his dick until it pulled off, just bloody pulp. What the tire iron done looked like pieces a burned tomatoes all over him, nose tore down from skiddin on gravel" (270).

When I first read this scene I was struck by how gruesome it was and how gruesome the people who committed this murder must have been, but when I thought about the story as a whole, I was brought back to this scene not only because it is possibly what happened to Jack, but also because it shows the way people looked on gay love at the time. It actually goes a long way in telling the reader exactly how much they were risking in continuing their relationship. Because this story reflects backward in time, this scene does a lot to show the reader how gay love was thought of.

There is an interesting symmetry in the way Jack and Ennis's love for each other and the death they possibly face in continuing to love each other. Because they seem so violent with each other in the bedroom, they therefore must also face a very violent death should the society at large discover their relationship. If their love for each other was not so brutal, but rather passive on one side or both, it would be impossible to believe that they would stay together facing such a gruesome deaths.

In this story, love is always represented in a brutal way. Does this story reflect on society in the fact that love might always be brutal, either emotionally or physically?