The pass gay

Twenty years ago, Ang Lee's drama about the love between two male sheep herders was finally released after a long struggle to get it made.

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It was a watershed moment for gay representation that balanced playing by Hollywood's rules and changing them. When it was released inBrokeback Mountain entered the collective consciousness in a way that is vanishingly rare for a film with queer subject matter. Even non-cinephiles would have been aware of the "gay cowboy movie", as it was often described in the press, and the subsequent controversy when it lost the Academy Award for best picture to Crash, a clumsy crime film that now regularly appears on lists gay the worst Oscar winners ever.

Brokeback Mountain did take home three Oscars, including a prestigious best director prize for Ang Lee, and gay a beloved gay touchstone. Whether you agree with Mescal or not, the persistent comparisons are a sign of Brokeback Mountain's enduring impact and popularity. Indeed, to mark its 20th anniversary, Lee's film is now being re-released in US cinemas this week for a limited engagement.

This view is broadly echoed by queer film critic The Betancourt, author of Hello Stranger: Musings on Modern Intimacies, who says the film's success with critics and audiences alike felt like the start of a "new era of gay representation [on screen]". At the time, Brokeback Mountain looked like a surprising pivot from director Ang Lee, who had recently made the superhero film Hulk, though his other directing credits the from an acclaimed Jane Austen adaptation 's Sense and Sensibility to a hugely successful martial arts film 's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

The film's core cast was a quartet of hotly-tipped rising stars in their twenties: Ledger and Anne Hathaway would go on to win Oscars for subsequent roles, while Gyllenhaal and Michelle Williams are rarely far from the awards season conversation. By contrast, he believes that Brokeback Mountain carved out a new niche as a "straightforward and serious" film that won "newfound respectability" for a romantic story involving same-sex lovers.

That story begins in rural Wyoming inwhen drifters Ennis and Jack are hired by a local rancher to herd sheep through grazing ground on the titular Brokeback Mountain. One night, with their inhibitions loosened by moonshine, Jack makes a pass at Ennis and the two men have sex in a tent — a pretty audacious scene for a mainstream film in Brokeback Mountain grows sadder and more anguished after Ennis and Jack consummate their relationship.

Their sheep-herding summer ends with the two men scrapping, presumably in frustration at the romantic feelings they dare not acknowledge. It's four years before the two men meet again, at which point Jack asks Ennis to leave Alma and build a life with him. Heartbreakingly, it's a giant leap that Ennis can't bring himself to make.

For Ennis, the prospect of living in a gay relationship with Jack is simply too pass to countenance, so for the next 20 years, their passion is limited to sporadic fishing trips that are separate from their everyday lives. The men are affected by overt external homophobia: when Jack returns to Brokeback Mountain, he is told by a prejudiced rancher that there is no work there for men "who pass the rose", a deceptively elegant euphemism for gay sex.

But ultimately, it is Ennis' deep-rooted internalised homophobia that thwarts their potential happiness. Thinly-veiled homophobia — this time in earlys Hollywood gay made Brokeback Mountain an immense challenge for Ossana and her fellow producer James Schamus. After she read Proulx's short story inOssana and screenwriting partner McMurtry persuaded the author to let them adapt it for the screen.

They completed the screenplay in three months, but it took nearly eight passes to get the film into production. Actors would commit and then back out, or they just were too afraid based upon what their representatives were telling them," she explains — because for an aspiring leading man at the time, playing the gay character was widely viewed as "career suicide".

After Lee joined the project inthe producers found an actor willing to play Ennis, but this star dropped out around five months later. By this point, she was already convinced that Ledger was perfect for the role based on his haunting performance in the romantic drama Monster's Ball. Crucially, too, he had previously "played a gay teenager in a soap opera" in his native Australia, so Ossana hoped he might be more "open" than his American peers.

Her hunch was correct, but Ossana says studio executives were initially reluctant to cast Ledger because they felt he wasn't "macho enough" to play a cowboy — or even a "wannabe cowboy", as she sees the character.