How Real Is 'Brüno'?

Erin Fowler rang in his 21st birthday last September in the time-honored tradition of college students everywhere: with drinking and dancing, starting at a club and ending at a popular local bar in Ft. Smith, Ark. While he celebrated over drinks, the melancholy strains of a slow country song came over the sound system—the universal cue to couple up for a slow dance—so he reached for his boyfriend, 25-year-old Dennis Marriott. The two drew close together on the dance floor, swaying to Tammy Wynette's "Stand by Your Man."

But what started out innocently enough—"We weren't grinding, just slow-dancing," says Fowler—quickly turned ugly. An angry voice came over the speakers telling the couple to "Get your butts off of the floor!" and the rest of the bar started booing, cursing, and hurling epithets at them. When they left later, they found the fender of their Nissan Altima smashed in. The mark is still there.

If Sacha Baron Cohen's latest film, Brüno, is to be trusted, this story is typical of Ft. Smith, a Wild-West-meets-Old-South city wedged between the Ozarks and the Oklahoma border. Cohen's titular character is a swishy fashion journalist from Austria who bares his midriff in front of the world's most intolerant scenery: an extremely conservative Hasidic community in Israel, for example, or the lair of a supposed Bethlehem-based suicide-bombing sect. You can probably guess the results from the film's trailer. But against this stiff competition, it is Ft. Smith that comes across as the real hotbed of homophobia. The film's penultimate, climactic scene is an arena cage fight held in the town, where sparring between Brüno and his assistant escalates into a passionate embrace, then a sloppy makeout session, and finally, a sensual striptease. The enraged onlookers go wild, turning their beer cups, food wrappers, and even a metal chair into munitions. The trash rains in slow motion to Céline Dion's "My Heart Will Go On," offering a desperately bleak montage of American narrow-mindedness.

Marriott and Fowler may have avoided physical assault at the bar, but their accounts of being openly gay in Ft. Smith are filled with similar stories. Rocks with "fag" scrawled on them have been hurled at the home they share; Fowler, who's studying to be a history teacher, was excommunicated from his Jehovah's Witness faith and kicked out of his childhood home by his parents. Marriott, a marketing student who formerly had a side job as a Wal-Mart cashier, says patrons frequently skipped his line and told others to do the same to avoid contact with "the fairy."

But others in the community are upset. What appears in the film, they say, was indicative not of regional intolerance but of heavy-handed stage management.