Brokeback Mountain Creates A Buzz in Wyoming

The release in mid-December of the gay-love movie, “Brokeback Mountain,” will add a new dimension to the state's cowboy myth.
Starring Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal as two Wyoming cowboys whose summer love affair on the high plains lasts throughout their lives, “Brokeback Mountain” is a screen adaptation by famed Western writer Larry McMurtry of a story by the same name published in Annie Proulx's 1999 book, “Close Range.”
The stories in “Close Range” struck a sour note with some Wyoming readers, Proulx said after speaking in Casper this spring.
"Lots of Wyoming people hated 'Close Range,'" she said.
Proulx explained that when a writer places deviant characters in a setting people love, the writer will get a lot of flak. But as a historian and an observer, she said she writes what she sees.
"It is dysfunction that attracts me," she said.
Proulx's book, “The Shipping News,” was made into a major motion picture in 2001 starring Kevin Spacey and Julianne Moore.
Through her New York publicist, Proulx, who lives in Centennial, declined to be interviewed for this story.

Above all, a love story
Steve Jimenez, a New York City-based writer and filmmaker who produced ABC News' "20/20" program last November, “The Matthew Shepard Story: Secrets of a Murder,” saw “Brokeback Mountain” over Labor Day at the Telluride Film Festival in Colorado.
“I think that 'Brokeback Mountain' is an intimate view of the kind of human relationship that culturally has often been hidden from us but has always been there,” he said.
At the Telluride Film Festival, he said, “People responded to this movie as a love story -- it wasn't a gay story, it was a love story, and that's what people found moving about it.”
Will the movie do anything to ameliorate Wyoming's notoriety as the state where gay University of Wyoming student Matthew Shepard was murdered?
“I think that the Matthew Shepard tragedy, sadly, showed us many dimensions of hate, and I think in many ways 'Brokeback Mountain' offers an antidote to that,” he said. “It offers an audience the opportunity to see love that happens between two members of the same sex ... and we seldom have seen portraits of this kind of intimacy.”
The opportunity accorded by this film, he said, can bring about a better understanding of homosexuality, and that it exists everywhere -- even in the Cowboy State.
“This kind of storytelling is long overdue,” he said.

Gay realities
Jason Marsden of Casper, who "came out" in the national media following the killing of Shepard, was featured with his partner, Casper Mayor Guy Padgett, in Time Magazine in 2003, in a story about being gay in Wyoming.
“We live in a place that most of the people in this country don't know anything about,” he said. “It's a complicated place for all sorts of people who come here for all sorts of reasons, and we're still fighting with each other about what Wyoming's all about.”
At any given time, Marsden said, “there are three or four sound bytes in circulation about Wyoming.” They include wolves in Wyoming, the Wild West, Matthew Shepard's killing, and any number of news events ranging from coal-bed methane to snowstorms on Interstate 80, he said.
The release of “Brokeback Mountain,” he said, will bring just one more such sound byte.
“The unspoken assumption in all of this is, 'Isn't that weird? Isn't that different from what we thought Wyoming was?'” he said.
Marsden says he thinks the film will appeal mainly to “coastal audiences,” and that it is unlikely people in rural Wyoming are going to drive any great distance to see it in theaters.
“That movie is never going to penetrate the consciousness of Wyoming people,” he said. “To be perfectly honest, I think the movie will be a footnote referenced mostly among people who follow art house film.”
However, he said, “What (Proulx) wrote and what they're doing with this movie is important -- it's showing that every walk of life, every profession, every state, every county has gay people.”
Chuck Browning, a champion rodeo cowboy in the International Gay Rodeo Association, who graduated from Kelly Walsh High School in 1981, knows the truth about gay cowboys: He is one.
“I've always considered Wyoming to be in a little bit of a vacuum,” he said. “People are hung up on tradition and are not aware of what's actually going on.”
A resident of the Phoenix area, Browning said he left Wyoming for college in Billings, Mont., but didn't stay in the region: “l didn't feel that the communities there would be accepting of me,” he said.
He said “Brokeback Mountain” probably won't change Wyoming's straight-cowboy image, but that people shouldn't dismiss the message about true love.
“They're closing their mind to beauty,” Browning said.

Hurting the cowboy image?
Kaycee playwright Sandy Dixon doesn't care to open her mind to the story line of “Brokeback Mountain,” she said.
A lifelong Wyomingite, Dixon said she has never encountered a gay cowboy, and doesn't think it's right for Proulx and Hollywood to portray Wyoming as a state with gay cowboys.
Her message to the writers of “Brokeback Mountain” is this: “Don't try and take what we had, which was wonderful -- the cowboys that settled the state and made it what it was -- don't ruin that image just to sell a book.”
She added, “There's nothing better than plain old cowboys and the plain old history without embellishing it to suit everyone.”
Regarding the reaction of Wyoming people to the film, Dixon said it depends on the viewer: “Those that want to make a queer story out of it, they will, and those that know real cowboys will say it's all hogwash.”
Conversely, the gay and entertainment media appear tickled about the prospects of cowboy love, saying "Brokeback Mountain" is a masterpiece that could be the greatest gay movie of all time.
Writes Stephen Holt of the Washington (D.C.) Blade, "This unbearably beautiful love story between two hunky and seemingly straight cowboys is a mainstream Hollywood film. And director Ang Lee hasn’t watered down the gay content (or the abundant nudity and explicit love scenes) one iota. He’s opened the characters’ and the film’s heart by treating the stoic Ennis (Heath Ledger) and wild man Jack (Jake Gyllenhaal), with the dignity, depth and subtlety that make a great love story unforgettable."

A boon to tourism?
Meanwhile, Michell Howard of the state's Travel and Tourism Division says her agency is already hearing a buzz that people in other countries are expressing interest in visiting Wyoming because of “Brokeback Mountain.”
"It's gotten rave reviews from the international community,” she said. “I don't know if they're more tolerant or something, but they're viewing it as a great Western movie.”
That the movie wasn't actually shot in Wyoming -- Canada offered better incentives to the filmmakers -- isn't staunching the enthusiasm for travel here from overseas, she said.
“We're just looking at the positive, beneficial side of a movie set in Wyoming,” Howard said.
from Casper Star Tribune