I’m doing this Blogging A to Z thing for the month of April 2026. I did this 10 years ago, and it was pretty random. For this month at least, I’m going to focus on queer media – movies, books, TV, etc., by, for, or about queer people.
Note – I’m using AI to generate images. If you’ve seen the movie, you understand the significance of the shirts. I think it’s hilarious how completely WordPress’ AI missed the point.
One night in the mid 90’s, Pulitzer Prize winning author Annie Proulx observed a middle-aged man watching other men play pool in a bar in Wyoming and began to imagine what life would be like for a typical gay ranch hand. I don’t know how she made the leap from watching someone play pool to gay ranch hand, but here we go…
60 or so drafts later, her typical gay ranch hands became Ennis Delmar and Jack Twist, two 19-year-old high school dropouts hired to herd sheep on the fictional Brokeback Mountain in 1963. I imagine she set the story in 1963 because by the mid 90’s, even Wyoming had gay bars. The short story appeared in The New Yorker in 1997 and became a movie in 2005 starring Heath Ledger as Ennis and Jake Gyllenhaal as Jack.
The gist of the story is that Jack and Ennis meet, have a bunch of awkward sex but not much conversation (“… saying not a goddam word except once Ennis said, “I’m not no queer,” and Jack jumped in with “Me neither. A one-shot thing. Nobody’s business but ours.“), and then go their separate ways. Four years later, they reconnect and begin an affair that lasts another 16 years. And then Jack is killed in a hate crime and Ennis is left alone in his grief. And somehow this is seen as an epic romance.
Unpopular opinion: Ennis deserves the sad and lonely ending.
I’ll explain.
In the glimpses we get into their separate lives, Jack ends up in Texas married to Lureen, with a meaningless managerial role in the company she inherits from her father. He cheats on her with both men and women. Not exactly admirable behavior, but the inability to keep his pants on seems to be his major fault.
Ennis stays in Wyoming, marries Alma, and works a series of dead end jobs. Ennis is an all-around terrible husband. Aside from the relationship with Jack, he’s uncommunicative, short-tempered, and sexually abusive, the last point being weirdly glossed over in both the story and film.
Throughout their affair, Jack holds out hope that he and Ennis can eventually be together, and Ennis repeatedly stomps on that dream.
At one point in the story, after Alma finally divorces him, Ennis tells Jack that he’s been “putting the blocks” to a woman who works in a bar he frequents. The movie gives this woman a name, Cassie, and includes a little subplot wherein she and Ennis date for awhile but he ghosts her. When she eventually confronts him, it comes out that he’s no fun and barely speaks.
So why do people fall in love with this guy?
The takeaway from Brokeback Mountain is that for gay men in the American West in the 1960s and 1970s, life was miserable, and likely to end in violence or solitude. While there is probably some truth to that, it bothers me that when Annie Proulx imagined life for a typical gay ranch hand, she came up with a dullard with a mean streak and a sad sack who meets a violent death.
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