Indeed, a month after the movie’s release most of the reviews were resisting, indignantly, the popular tendency to refer to it as “the gay cowboy movie.” “It is much more than that glib description implies,” the critic of the Minneapolis Star Tribune sniffed. The two lovers here just happen to be men. The Wall Street Journal’s critic asserted that “love stories come and go, but this one stays with you-not because both lovers are men, but because their story is so full of life and longing, and true romance.” The Los Angeles Times declared the film to beĪ deeply felt, emotional love story that deals with the uncharted, mysterious ways of the human heart just as so many mainstream films have before it. The lengths to which reviewers from all over the country, representing publications of various ideological shadings, have gone in order to diminish the specifically gay element is striking, as a random sampling of the reviews collected on the film’s official Web site makes clear. Two homosexual men: it is strange to have to say it just now because the distinct emphasis of so much that has been said about the movie-in commercial advertising as well as in the adulatory reviews-has been that the story told in Brokeback Mountain is not, in fact, a gay story, but a sweeping romantic epic with “universal” appeal. And as everyone also knows, when most people hear the words “two homosexual men” or “gay,” the image that comes to mind is not likely to be one of rugged young cowboys who shoot elk and ride broncos for fun. Strange to say it, because the story is, as everyone now knows, about two young Wyoming ranch hands who fall in love as teenagers in 1963 and continue their tortured affair, furtively, over the next twenty years. To some people it will seem strange to say this to some other people, it will seem strange to have to say it.
Brokeback Mountain-the highly praised new movie as well as the short story by Annie Proulx on which the picture is faithfully based-is a tale about two homosexual men.
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