Brokeback Mountain (2005) and the Unbearable Violence of Gay Love
In 2005, the United States found itself in a renewed culture war over the place of homosexuality in society. Just two years prior, the Supreme Court overruled Bowers v. Hardwick to establish sodomy laws as unconstitutional. None of this was new to civil rights activists, of course. Gay rights had been part of the national conversation for decades, especially in the wake of Stonewall (1969) and the DSM’s redefinition of homosexuality as non-pathological (1973). By 2005, the year Brokeback Mountain blew up the box office, Massachusetts had legalized same-sex marriage and a flurry of bans had swept the country, ushering in an era not just of tacit acceptance of bigotry against gay people but also of systemic, government-supported bigotry. All this was hot on the heels of decades of brutal murders of gay people, and an especially tumultuous 1990s, which saw well over a dozen murders and executions of gay men (and women), some of them so high profile that they would eventually lead to legislation designed to protect gay people from (or at least create greater punishment for) murderous homophobes. For a young man raised in a deeply homophobic culture, all of this was a bit of a shock, not least of all because my mother was a gay woman, and for about a decade up until 2005, my life had been packed with gay people being people with regular people problems. And here we were being asked as citizens to determine if other citizens had the right to live their lives without government interference. For me, there was no question that same-sex marriage should be legal.