The Exceptions That Prove the Rule

I'm glad to report that succeeding articles in The Brokeback Book have been much better than David Leavitt's opening clunker. Even Daniel Mendelssohn, whose The Elusive Embrace: Desire and the Riddle of Identity (Knopf, 1999) annoyed me so much a decade ago, wrote a very smart review of the film for the New York Review of Books that is reprinted here. After that, Mun-hou Lo's "Backs Unbroken: