A Working Class Gay Love Story

Rating: 10/10 (6 January 2006)

Having just come from the premiere showing of Brokeback Mountain in my city, the thing that struck me is that it is a working class story. Strip away all the glamour and mystique about being a cowboy and we are talking about two knock around working class men in Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal. Ledger and Gyllenhaal could have been steelworkers, auto workers, plumbers, even sanitation men. Technically speaking they're not even cowboys, they're sheepherders. That's how they meet, Randy Quaid hires them to watch his sheep which are grazing on government land on Brokeback Mountain. They certainly aren't in professions that are dominated by gays.
The story is that on that mountain, the gay urge in both of them comes out and they begin an over 20 year relationship from that summer on Brokeback. This however is 1963, six years before Stonewall, and a generation before any open gay life comes to the state of Wyoming. It's still a dangerous place Wyoming as the ghost of Matthew Shepard would so testify.
So Ennis Delmar and Jack Twist are forced for the sake of convention to lead false lives. Both marry and have children, and both even love their families. But the romance is reserved for each other.
Brokeback Mountain for today's audience speaks to whole generations of Gay/Lesbian/Bisexual/Transgendered people for whom living an open life was not an option. I hope a lot of the young people see it and realize how hard it was for their elders to be as open as so many more gay folk are.
The film also speaks to what it is still like for many GLBT people in a rural setting. Even back in 1963 Ennis and Jack had they lived in a large city, might have found a community with some kind of support. Their aloneness is the real heart of Brokeback Mountain.
Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal deliver some Oscar calibre performances here. Given the normal tradition of the Academy if they both receive Best Actor nominations, they might just split the vote and neither will get it.
Brokeback Mountain will no doubt take some awards away at this year's Oscar ceremonies in any event. Hopefully for the producers who had the courage to bring this story to the screen.
Maybe someone should be searching now for a property concerning two women and also transgendered people and what aloneness they felt in generations past.