This month, the St. Andrew's board of trustees officially released Cary McNair and his family from their $3 million pledge to the school's capital campaign after McNair objected to the use of "Brokeback Mountain" as reading material in a 12th-grade English class.

"Brokeback Mountain" tells the story of two male ranch hands who fall in love and have a homosexual relationship over many years. The story contains details of gay sex acts. It appeared first in the Oct. 13, 1997, issue of The New Yorker magazine, then as part of a collection of Proulx's short stories, titled "Close Range."

"St. Andrew's has a policy not to accept conditional gifts, whether it's $5 or $500,000. When the McNair family looked at their gift in a conditional manner, then the school could not accept it," said Bill Miller, who was asked by St. Andrew's to serve as its spokesman for this story.

Miller, a public relations consultant, has three children at St. Andrew's, and his wife, Catherine, serves on the board of trustees.

St. Andrew's, an Episcopal school that opened in 1952, has more than 750 students. This school year, annual tuition, not including fees, ranges from $10,600 for first grade to $14,000 for high school. Its annual fund, which the school uses toward operating costs, is more than $500,000, and it is conducting a $14.5 million capital campaign.

In January, St. Andrew's announced the McNairs' donation as part of $11.7 million it had raised toward construction of a middle school and expansion of the high school. Miller said that returning the gift does not affect the school's ability to proceed with its construction projects.

Cary McNair is the son of Robert McNair, oilman and owner of the Houston Texans football team.

Cary McNair, a film producer, said he is holding St. Andrew's to its own rules, and that reading and discussing stories involving homosexual sex runs counter to the school's mission statement, in which it promises to provide "a Christian environment" and "to develop moral behavior."

"Why would SAS (St. Andrew's School) promote classroom discussion on pornographic material concerning deviant behavior?" McNair said in an Aug. 17 letter to St. Andrew's trustee Paul Bury. "An apparent agenda at the Upper School is developing that is detrimental to SAS's future."

Miller said "Brokeback Mountain" is only optional reading and has been taught for five years without complaint. The story does not appear on a required reading list on the class Web site.

The tale probably will not be taught next year, Miller said, because the teacher, Kimberly Horne, does not include books in her class that have been adapted as motion pictures. Focus Features is scheduled to release the film adaptation of "Brokeback Mountain" in December.

McNair, who has children at the school in the fifth, eighth and ninth grades, said in interviews that he also was troubled by what he believed was improper content in school plays and bias against Christian extracurricular groups at the school.

Calls were made to more than a dozen St. Andrew's administrators, board members and parents' organization leaders. All were either unavailable or declined to comment for this story.

Faculty members also declined to comment, saying that the school told them not to discuss the matter with the news media.

There is a long tradition of public objections to books in American classrooms and libraries, especially when the stories explore sex. But in recent years, there has been an increase in complaints about stories depicting homosexuality, according to the American Library Association.

Three of the 10 most frequently challenged books in 2004 were cited for having homosexual themes, the highest number in a decade, according to the association.

Of the 6,364 challenges recorded by the association from 1990 to 2000, 1,607 were made because of "sexually explicit" material, and 515 were objections to material with a homosexual theme or "promoting homosexuality."

"Part of it is that more literature is being published that addresses gay themes for different audiences," said Beverley Becker, associate director for the association's Office for Intellectual Freedom. "And then I think the fact that the gay marriage debate has been so huge over the past two years or so is very directly related to the increase in challenges."

Becker said her office has not received complaints about any of Proulx's works, but that "doesn't mean they haven't happened." Becker estimated that only 20 percent to 25 percent of all challenges are ever recorded by the association, and only a handful have come from private schools in her six years with the organization.

The "Brokeback Mountain" controversy has split the St. Andrew's community and mirrors the schism within the Episcopalian church, bitterly divided over the ordination of gay clergy.

McNair said one school trustee, whom he declined to name, suggested that he enroll his children in the Regents School, a more conservative Christian private school in Austin.

The furor also has spilled over onto the Internet. People from across the country, most of whom do not claim to have any ties to Austin or the school, have engaged in heated, often vitriolic, debate on Episcopalian message boards over the school's actions.

In early May, the McNairs and fellow St. Andrew's parents Julie and Ben Crenshaw met with St. Andrew's Head of School Lucy Nazro to protest the school's choice to not recognize the National Day of Prayer but to participate in the National Day of Silence -- a national, youth-run effort to highlight the actual silencing of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people because of harassment, bias and abuse.

However, the meeting soon turned to the use of "Brokeback Mountain" in the English class.

Professional golfer Ben Crenshaw declined an interview, but in a statement he said, "All three of my children have attended St. Andrew's Episcopal School, and my wife and I have been longtime supporters of the school. Like other parents, we share the same legitimate concerns that the McNairs have."

At that meeting, Nazro told McNair that the school's National Day of Silence observance would not be repeated, but in subsequent meetings, she said that the school did not believe the story was inappropriate.

On Aug. 1, Kate McNair informed board President Kathryn Runnells that the family no longer wanted its name on the school building and that the school should pursue donations from alternate sources.

Horne declined to comment for this story. On the class Web site, she described her class philosophy: "I wouldn't be doing this if I didn't truly believe that literature can change each individual in radical ways. I believe literature gives us access to information we can not get anywhere else -- what it may truly be like to be other people, to live in a different time and place, to know different people than we know. I think this knowledge can give us the chance to be better humans and therefore, help the world be a better place."

While both sides say that any rancor between the McNairs and the school has long subsided, for now it remains an uneasy peace.

"You see it in the faces in the halls," McNair said. "It's caused tension in relationships with people who have always been friendly. So it's tenuous."

END

VirtueOnline first broke this story on 8/30/2005

http://www.virtueonline.org/portal/modules/news/article.php?storyid=2932