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.
All of this is important to understand the cultural context in which Brokeback Mountain (2005; dir. Ang Lee) appears. While the film centers on a roughly twenty year span from 1963 to the 1980s, it appears in a time when much of the conversation about gay rights seemed mired in the divisions between the rural and the urban, something I saw first hand in my small mountain town in California in the 90s and 2000s. That dynamic is firmly in place in Brokeback Mountain, as the central gay characters, Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal), meet in the deep country of Wyoming but ultimately lead drastically different lives: Ennis in rural Wyoming and Jack in considerably less rural Texas (here, I refer more particularly to the technological “urbanity” rather than skyscrapers). These different lives befit their personalities, with the more outgoing and vocal Jack using his financial success in Texas to launch more daring forays into his burgeoning homosexuality while Ennis’ extremely rural life allows him to remain secluded from prying and explicitly violent eyes. Jack is strongly suggested to have been murdered for being gay in parallel to Ennis’ childhood story of his father showing him the mutilated corpse of a gay man, and so Ennis’ reluctance to give himself fully over to his feelings makes a disturbing sort of sense.
Those different lives also become central to the way Ennis and Jack explore their sexuality and relationship, which Ennis cannot imagine outside of the “paradise” of Brokeback, the fictional remote mountain from which the film receives its name; Jack, on the other hand, seeks connection on a more permanent basis, and the consequences of that desperate desire for connection are dire. Jack’s death, in this respect, reminds one of the wall of murders and executions of gay men (and women) within my lifetime: a horrid, painful reminder that being gay has always been a risk.
Though Brokeback Mountain is envisioned as a kind of romance, the film itself is more accurately described as a depressing and brutal portrayal of the individual and societal costs of homophobia, including on those who might see themselves as gay. Ennis and Jack’s profound differences in expression paint a horrifying picture of psychological violence, especially as each man grapples with the fact that their society does not want them to exist. Of the two, Ennis’ repressed homosexuality manifests quite frequently in violence, as if his mind and body are literally at war and the only outlet is someone else. We see this manifest against Jack after their sexual awakening on Brokeback; Ennis battles back and forth with violently rejecting Jack, tormented, it seems, by feelings he doesn’t understand and his society refuses to acknowledge as valid. Even the way Ennis pursues his physical relationship with Jack comes across as a man fighting his “fight or flight” reflexes, both desperately grabbing for Jack and seeming to push him away at the same time. That violence is sometimes redirected at Ennis’ future wife, Alma, and even at unsuspecting people on the street, making Ennis volatile like a wind-up toy. His efforts to repress his sexuality build tension so deep in his body that his jaw seems to compress, as if everything were trapped in that one space. Here, Ledger’s performance is profound, as so much of what he does is caught up in small moments.
In contrast, Jack’s pursuits are less cautious and more vocal. While he does hide his true self from most, he also ventures to Mexico for trysts with gay men (probably prostitutes) and even pursues a fantasy mountain life (off screen) with another presumed gay man, which is ultimately scuttled by Jack’s violent death. Comparatively, Jack’s outbursts are less pronounced than Ennis’, and manifest primarily in sexual escapades or even a verbal altercation with his father-in-law, images that are familiar in any familial context. Yet, while Ennis’ caution builds to boiling points of physical and emotional violence, Jack’s ability to “be free” ultimately brings violence to his doorstep. Brokeback Mountain seems to suggest that violence is an inescapable consequence of being a gay man in the United States: either you are violent from the feelings you repress or you express those feelings and violence comes for you in broad daylight.
That inescapable violence makes for a suffocating experience, however important its rural portrayal might be. There is no sense of hope in this story because hope is already foreclosed. There are no fantasies of gay romances here; indeed, Ennis rejects Jack’s fantasy about living in a cabin in the mountains as a delusion that can only end with their deaths and with the destruction of their family lives (a theme worth exploring elsewhere). And, indeed, that is what happens, but it is Ennis who escapes to a lonely life with only Jack’s bloody shirt and coat to comfort him. Brokeback Mountain essentially tells us that while gay romantic fantasies are impossibilities in a realistic portrayal of 60s-80s America, the alternative is to hide the metaphorical body of your gay romance in the closet — right where your sexuality must stay. Suffocating is not quite the right word for this. Depressing doesn’t quite capture it either. Unbearable is a better word.
Brokeback Mountain is an unbearably violent and disturbing endpoint for gay love. Ang Lee’s direction is brilliant — the cinematography and acting equally so — and one would be hard pressed to argue that this film isn’t an important milestone in American cinema. But it is also a horrifically violent tragedy of the lives ruined by a deeply homophobic and deeply repressive U.S. society that is still with us today. And as we close in on Valentine’s Day, I’m forced to reckon with what it means that so many of our portrayals of gay lives involve reliving the horrific tragedies of a society that still can’t quite accept people for who they are.
