Brokeback mountain: 20 Years Later, a Watershed Moment for Gay Representation

Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal in Brokeback Mountain” />

Twenty years ago, Ang Lee‘s drama about the love between two male sheep herders was finally released after a long struggle to get it made. It was a watershed moment for gay representation that balanced playing by Hollywood’s rules and changing them.

When it was released in 2005, Brokeback Mountain entered the collective consciousness in a way that is vanishingly rare for a film with queer subject matter. Even non-cinephiles woudl have been aware of the “gay cowboy movie”,as it was frequently enough described in the press,and the subsequent controversy when it lost the Academy Award for best picture to Crash,a clumsy crime film that now regularly appears on lists of the worst Oscar winners ever.

Brokeback Mountain did take home three Oscars,including a prestigious best director prize for Ang Lee,and remains a beloved gay touchstone.Actor Paul Mescal recently complained that it feels “lazy and frustrating” to compare his upcoming film The history of Sound, a period romance in which he and Josh O’Connor play travelling lovers in rural Maine, to Lee’s tender neo-Western about romantically attracted sheep herders Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal). Whether you agree with Mescal or not,the persistent comparisons are a sign of Brokeback Mountain’s enduring impact and popularity. Indeed, to mark its 20th anniversary, Lee’s film is now being re-released in US cinemas this week for a limited engagement.

Adapted by screenwriters Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana from a 1997 short story by Annie Proulx,Brokeback Mountain was a relatively novel proposition back in 2004. “The fact its two leads were handsome A-list male stars and [it showed] their characters in a romantic story together was groundbreaking,” says Tim Teeman, author of In Bed With Gore Vidal: Hustlers, Hollywood, and the Private World of an American Master. This view is broadly echoed by queer film critic Manuel Betancourt, author of Hello Stranger: Musings on Modern Intimacies, who says the film’s success with critics and audiences alike felt like the start of a “new era of gay representation [on screen]”.

At the time, Brokeback mountain looked like a surprising pivot from director Ang Lee, who had recently made the 2003 superhero film Hulk, though his other directing credits ranged from an acclaimed Jane Austen adaptation (1995’s Sense and Sensibility) to a hugely triumphant martial arts film (2000’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon). The film’s core cast was a quartet of hotly-tipped rising stars in their twenties: Ledger and Anne Hathaway would go on to win Oscars for subsequent roles, while Gyllenhaal and Michelle Williams are rarely far from the awards season conversation.

How it was Pioneering

“It’s easy to take for granted the way that Brokeback Mountain,with its starry cast and A-list director,profoundly changed the shape of LGBTQ+ representation in the mainstream,” argues Kyle Turner,author of The Queer Film Guide: 100 Films That Tell LGBTIA+ Stories. Turner notes that “the wave of mainstream queer moves in the 90s” tended to “toggle between Aids-related dramas like Philadelphia (1993) and and the Band Played On (1993), and lighter comedies like The Birdcage (1996) and In & Out (1997)”. By contrast, he believes that Brokeback Mountain carved out a new niche as a “straightforward and serious” film that won “newfound respectability” for a romantic story involving same-sex lovers.

That story begins in rural Wyoming in 1963, when drifters Ennis and Jack are hired by a local rancher to herd sheep through grazing ground on the titular brokeback Mountain.One night, with their inhibitions loosened by moonshine, Jack makes a pass at Ennis and the two men have sex in a tent – a pretty audacious scene for a mainstream film in 2005. When Brokeback Mountain came out in December 2005, Ossana, who was also the film’s producer, made a point of attending screenings in some of the US’s more conservative states to gauge the audience’s reaction. “The theatres were packed, and in every theater it was the same – after the tent scene, five or six people would get up to leave,” she tells the BBC.

The biggest problem was casting Ennis. Actors would commit and then back out, or they just were too afraid based upon what their representatives were telling them – Diana Ossana

Brokeback Mountain grows sadder and more anguished after Ennis and jack consummate their relationship.Their sheep-herding summer ends with the two men scrapping, presumably in frustration at the romantic feelings they dare not acknowledge. Ennis then marries his fianceé Alma (Williams), while jack meets and marries rodeo rider Lureen (Hathaway).It’s four years before the two men meet again, at which point Jack asks Ennis to leave Alma and build a life with him. Heartbreakingly, it’s a giant leap that Ennis can’t bring himself to make. “Everyone talks about the 1960s being a time of ‘free love’, but it was actually a very narrow-minded and restrictive time for many people in America – that’s what the hippies were rebelling against,” Ossana says.

Disclaimer: This article provides commentary on a film and does not offer any health, financial, or legal advice.

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