The rocky political trail that led to Brokeback

As the groundbreaking film Brokeback Mountain faces its brightest spotlight yet on Oscar night March 5—eight nominations, including Best Picture—its unique place in our cultural history is already secure. With its wave of critical raves and awards, venomous counterreaction and talk of a heartland backlash, and endless jokes about “the gay cowboy movie,” there’s never been anything quite like it.

Yet amid all the media coverage and general hoopla, a vital link in its evolution has been largely overlooked: the unprecedented emergence of gay performers, entertainment executives, and other key figures from the Hollywood closet that took place long before the short story by Annie Proulx was turned into the most talked about American movie since Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ. This personal exodus from secrecy and shame by so many in Hollywood’s creative community has had a profound impact on movies, TV programming, and our culture in general, with Brokeback Mountain only the latest and most notable example. Brokeback may have been principally made by heterosexuals, but only after Hollywood’s most fearless homosexuals paved the way.

Ten or 15 years ago, Brokeback Mountain would not have reached the production stage, certainly not as a mainstream Hollywood movie with a major director like Ang Lee and name actors like Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal in the leading roles. Prior to Brokeback, Hollywood produced other prominent gay-themed films—silly comedies like The Birdcage, with its flamboyant gay characters, and earnest message dramas like Philadelphia, in which the gay protagonist dies of AIDS complications. But before Brokeback, there had never been a major motion picture that portrayed love between men so sensitively and unabashedly, giving it as much due on the big screen as heterosexual romance has always been accorded.

It didn’t happen by accident, or in a social or political vacuum. It comes after decades of increasing gay activism, gay legal and political progress, and gradual changes in the media’s coverage and the public’s perception of homosexuality. Largely forgotten in this cultural transformation is the controversial role played by “outing”—a term coined by militant gay activists who began exposing closeted celebrities and other public figures as a potent new political weapon in 1989.

Outing got its start in the pages of OutWeek, a militant gay New York weekly that began exposing influential public figures who were known to be secretly gay. The idea was to increase gay visibility, and with it political power, and to bolster the effort for more AIDS funding, prevention, and treatment. OutWeek’s bold approach caught on with other gay activists and struck abject fear into Hollywood. As the mainstream media covered the issue, the names of “outed” individuals soon found their way into publications like Newsweek, People, and Daily Variety. How to cover this phenomenon had mainstream editors flummoxed, because journalists had historically protected certain celebrities by falsely portraying them as heterosexual, a time-honored collusion between the entertainment industry and the media that many gay activists felt reinforced the stigma and validated the shame.