Blokeback

I've been patronizing a decent little video store near my apartment for the past few months. It doesn't have the world's greatest selection, but it's got plenty of new releases, a lot of classics and a ton of TV shows. (They've also got more Bollywood than anyone needs.) So I've been catching up on "The OC" and "The Sopranos," shows I love for very different reasons. And in stark contrast to the Blockbuster in my hometown of Cerritos, Calif. - where the manager for the longest time was the spindly, angry ex-JV baseball coach at my high school - the two Sudanese who work this video store are really friendly and pretty cool. They've also been more than understanding when I've kept DVDs for 3-4 weeks at a time because of traveling, laziness, unwillingness to drive in Nairobi in the rain, etc.

(Side note: one of the clerks, this girl who looks about 22, refuses to learn my name, despite my having spent enough money there in the past six months to probably cover her rent. She makes up for this by calling me Hrithik Roshan, which I think is fantastic, and I'm not going to ask her to stop.)

The other day, however, I had a slightly off-putting experience. I went in to retrieve the next few "Sopranos" discs and generally shoot the shit. Hrithik-girl went through her usual spiel of recommending some horrendous teen melodrama (this particular day it was the latest season of "One Tree Hill," which had just arrived). Then she asked if I'd seen "Brokeback Mountain." I said I'd just seen it in South Africa with my girlfriend. Her face went blank.

"Did you like it?" she asked. Her tone suggested I'd told her I just got a colonic.

A little too quickly, perhaps, I said, "Yeah, I thought it was great."

She and another girl behind the counter looked at each other. "You're the only guy I know who's even seen it," Hrithik-girl said. She eyed me suspiciously. "How could you watch it?"

"Well, you know, it won all those awards. I really like the director. The acting was excellent. And plus, I really like movies where two male actors have sex with each other."

I didn't say that last part, but I might as well have. Here in my oasis of westerndom in Nairobi, where I can rent the gory "Sopranos" and the salacious "OC" with equal ease, I'd forgotten how foreign something like "Brokeback" can seem to the average Kenyan. The movie didn't make it to the movie theaters here, and it's hard even to get a decent bootleg on the streets (it helps if you pronounce it "Blokeback," like the Kenyans do, inverting their "r's" and "l's" so charmingly). Homosexuality is illegal here, and a lot of people don't have any patience for the thought of it, let alone its projection on a movie screen. When the movie came out in the U.S., friends and I debated when it would make its Kenyan premiere, and the consensus was sometime after Nairobi got an NFL team - or L.A., for that matter.

So I was fighting a losing battle with video-store girl. I asked her if she'd seen it - again, that colonic face. Did she know anyone who'd seen it? "One guy said that if he even saw a copy of the DVD, he would burn it." She looked at me again. "I didn't think you were like that, Hrithik Roshan," she said, and she and her friend started to giggle.

There was nothing to say to that. I gave her my name for the thousandth time, she made a note in the computer, and I was out the door with my "Sopranos."