THE GUARDIAN: The first time I saw the film, I convinced myself I didn’t like it. Now it’s one of my favourites
I was 14 years old the first time I saw two men kiss on screen. It was 2006, and my mum had rented Brokeback Mountain from our local Blockbuster. She said it was a “special” movie night for “just the two of us”.
For the next 134 minutes, I watched two sheep herders, Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal), fall in love in the beautiful Wyoming countryside, only for that love to be suffocated by rigid expectations of masculinity and self-contempt. The film culminates in Jack’s untimely death, and alludes to the possibility that he was the victim of a vicious homophobic hate crime.
When this desperately sad film finally finished, my mum turned to me and matter-of-factly asked: “Is there anything you want to say?” My whole body burned with shame as I shook my head and ran out of the room.
This was my mum’s well-intentioned but misguided attempt to coax me out of the closet. She was right: I am gay. When I eventually came out to my family, it was hardly a surprise. I was the boy who cried for three days when Geri left the Spice Girls and had a poster of Legolas in my room. What I tried so hard to suppress was really quite obvious. But it would be another six years before I said the words aloud to myself and others. » | Jeffrey Ingold | Saturday, June 27, 2026
