Brokeback Mountain

Whether you think this is a good film or not (I think it is), you can’t deny that Ang Lee’s Oscar® winning film about two cowboys coming to terms with their homoesexual desires “broke” new ground when it came to bringing homosexuality to Hollywood and the movie theater.  What makes the film stand out is that much of the story centers not on our male leads (Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger) but on their families and on how society in many ways makes them hide their true desires.  And where the two leads are concerned, it is not that society is damning their homosexuality that concerns us, but the fact that society is hindering their love that makes us angry.  As Stephen Holden wrote in the NY Times:

Yet “Brokeback Mountain” is ultimately not about sex (there is very little of it in the film) but about love: love stumbled into, love thwarted, love held sorrowfully in the heart. Or, as Ms. Proulx writes, “What Jack remembered and craved in a way he could neither help nor understand was the time that distant summer on Brokeback when Ennis had come up behind him and pulled him close, the silent embrace satisfying some shared and sexless hunger.”

One tender moment’s reprieve from loneliness can illuminate a life.

I think that is why Brokeback Mountain touched and inspired so many people - not because it was about homosexuality per se, but becuase it showed that all homosexuality is, is another form of love.

Watch this film to see how it pushed the envelope and then takepart and Join The Impact by demanding equal rights for all people.

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