Issue Number 957 | The Brokeback Mountain effect | Advocate.com The Brokeback Mountain effect  | Commentary | Advocate.com

Continental promo
|| Home > Commentary  ||
 

The Brokeback Mountain effect

The historic cultural success of Brokeback Mountain owes much to the film’s quality and emotional power—and a little to George W. Bush and the antigay Right. But can a movie advance gay equality?
Excerpted from The Advocate  February 28, 2006

West Hollywood, Calif., resident Doug Eichler strolled into Regal Cinemas’ Avenue 13 multiplex the day after Christmas, keen to see the film his friends and neighbors (including this writer) had been raving about—the so-called gay cowboy flick Brokeback Mountain. Visiting his in-laws for the holidays, Eichler had no reason to think it would be difficult to find a seat: The Avenue 13 is in Rolling Hills Estates, a posh bedroom community on the Palos Verdes peninsula 20-odd miles south and a world away from the liberal gay enclave of West Hollywood. Voters here in 2004 favored George W. Bush by 15 percentage points.

And yet when Eichler walked into a large stadium-style theater showing Brokeback, it was absolutely packed. Eichler saw families, older married women and men, groups of teenage girls, and straight high schoolers on dates. He saw precisely one gay male couple. And he saw that the only seats left were literally in the front row. As Eichler settled in for the trailers, he couldn’t help but wonder if these people had any idea what they were about to see.

He needn’t have worried. There were no groans, no inappropriate titters, no popcorn thrown at the screen. The audience watched ranch hands Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) fall in love while herding sheep in the Wyoming mountains in 1963—and then furtively continue their romance over 20 years while marrying women and building separate families—with rapt attention. Well, save for one moment. When Ennis and Jack engaged in their first sexual encounter in a pup tent on a cold Wyoming night, a teenager sitting directly behind Eichler turned to his girlfriend and whispered, “Oh, man, he’s getting it in the butt.” His date immediately shushed him: “Shut up! It’s art.”

As the film concluded and the credits began to roll, the audience even broke into applause.

Never before has a gay-themed film been as written about, reviewed, lauded, awarded, discussed, dissected, parodied, and hyped as Brokeback Mountain, so it’s easy to forget amid this din that the film is deeply moving millions nationwide one theater and one screen at a time, communities sitting together in the dark and emotionally connecting with this story. And not just where one would expect. A theater manager in Mason City, Iowa, reported receiving a petition asking him to bring the film to his screens (he was planning to anyway). The AMC Southroads 20 in Tulsa, Okla., received thank-you calls after it started screening Brokeback on January 6; there was so much demand, in fact, the theater had to add a screen for the first few showings. Newspapers from Columbus, Ohio, to Tallahassee, Fla., to small-town Joplin, Mo., have all run stories essentially saying the same thing: Good news, folks, Brokeback Mountain is coming to town!

Vary also writes for Entertainment Weekly and Variety.

Reader Comments

These comments are reproduced as written by visitors to this Web site. They have not been edited for content, grammar, or spelling. The viewpoints appearing here are those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflect the opinion or views of advocate.com, The Advocate, or its affiliates.

Be the first to comment on this story.

Back to top

Submit a comment for this story:

*Type your comment here (Required, 1000 characters max. HTML formatting and hyperlinks are NOT permitted.):

*Name (Required): 

*Hometown (Required): 

*E-mail address: (Required, but will not be displayed)

Is this comment for publication? 
Yes   No

Daytime phone number: (Required for print publication only and will not be displayed)

Please enter the words you see in the box, in order and separated by a space. Doing so helps prevent automated programs from abusing this service.

  

If you would like to submit a comment for posting, please fill out the form above. 

All comments submitted via this form are subject to posting or publication. (To send a private letter to an Advocate editor or writer, please use the e-mail button at the top of the page, or use snail mail.) If you would like your comment considered for publication in The Advocate magazine, please include your full name, your city of residence, and a phone number where you can be reached during business hours so that we can confirm your identity. Your e-mail address and telephone number are strictly confidential and will not be shared or used for any purpose other than to contact you about your comment.

See the Contact page for sending comments for reasons other than responding to Advocate editorial and news stories.

Please note that comments sent by fax or snail mail are unlikely to be posted, although they will be considered for publication along with all letters received via e-mail or via this Web page. Comments that chiefly concern Advocate.com content will be considered for posting only on the Web site. The Advocate reserves the right to edit submitted comments for grammar, spelling, obscenities, or libel; we will, however, do our best to preserve the original comment's style and intent. Comments considered for publication in The Advocate magazine may also be edited for length.