Watching Brokeback Mountain kept me in the closet | culture

I I was 14 years old when I first saw two men kissing on screen. It was 2006, and my mom had rented a Brokeback Mountain from our popular local store. She said it was a “special” movie night “just for the two of us.”

Over the course of the next 134 minutes, I watch two sheepherders, Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal), fall in love in the beautiful Wyoming countryside, only for that love to be stifled by strict expectations of masculinity and self-loathing. The film culminates in Jack’s sudden death, hinting at the possibility that he was the victim of a vicious homophobic hate crime.

When this very sad movie finally ended, my mother turned to me and asked me matter-of-factly, “Is there anything you want to say?” My whole body burned with embarrassment as I shook my head and left the room.

This was my mother’s well-intentioned but misguided attempt to convince me to come out of the closet. She was right: I’m gay. When I eventually came to my family, it wasn’t a surprise. I was the boy who cried for three days when Jerry left the Spice Girls and had a Legolas poster in my room. What she had tried so hard to suppress was crystal clear. But it was another six years before I said the words out loud to myself and others.

In fact, seeing Brokeback Mountain had the opposite effect than my mother intended. In it, Jack says to Ennis: “I wish I knew how to leave you.” “You” to me at that time meant my attraction to men. I hated my character so much that all I took away from the movie was that being gay meant one of two things: live a miserable life or die. I shrunk back into the closet.

Furthermore, a year ago, Canada legalized same-sex marriage, and the rhetoric around the decision was toxic. At school, most of my classmates were alarmingly keen to prove that it was “unnatural” and “wrong” for two men to marry. Next, I put an extra lock and lock on my closet door. It took me a long time to shake my belief that I couldn’t live and be loved as a gay man.

Ultimately, I sought out LGBTQ+ stories in television, film, and literature to expand my understanding of what life could be like. By the 2000s, the hard work of activists meant that it became increasingly common to see queer stories and characters in the mainstream. The TV series Glee showed me that it is possible to love out loud. The Harvey Milk biopic taught me the political value of visibility. Janet Mock’s memoir Redefining Reality, which tells her story of growing up as a transgender woman in Hawaii, helped me understand what it means to be part of a community and fight for others.

It would be years before I returned to Brokeback Mountain. I wrote it as a movie I didn’t like, a feeble digression to avoid painful memories of the person I was at the time. That was until a friend brought me to a special pride parade in 2018.

My second trip to Brokeback felt like a long-awaited release. The opening notes of Gustavo Santaolalla’s haunting score filled my eyes with tears that did not stop flowing for the duration of the film. I was no longer a frightened and ashamed boy, but rather felt as if I was seeing him for the first time. I can appreciate the painful restraint of the film, and the depth of denial that Ines goes through in order to survive in small-town USA. I saw myself in Jack, the romantic dreamer, who wanted a love that existed in more than just stolen moments.

Brokeback Mountain is now one of my favorite movies. I watch it at least once a year. I cried at the Adaptation Theater in London three years ago.

My mother explained to me years later that she was willing to try anything to save her struggling son. Not every mother will do that for her strange child. So, in a way, I’m grateful that she was put on Brokeback Mountain all those years ago because it was her way of saying, “I love you just the way you are.” I couldn’t hear it at the time – but I do now.