{"id":498111,"date":"2026-06-27T11:12:13","date_gmt":"2026-06-27T11:12:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/498111\/"},"modified":"2026-06-27T11:12:13","modified_gmt":"2026-06-27T11:12:13","slug":"watching-brokeback-mountain-kept-me-in-the-closet-culture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/498111\/","title":{"rendered":"Watching Brokeback Mountain kept me in the closet | Culture"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was 14 years old the first time I\u00a0saw two men kiss on screen. It was 2006, and my mum had rented Brokeback Mountain<\/a> from our local Blockbuster. She said it was a \u201cspecial\u201d movie night for \u201cjust the two of us\u201d.<\/p>\n

For the next 134 minutes, I watched two sheep herders, Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake\u00a0Gyllenhaal), 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\u2019s untimely death, and alludes to the possibility that he was the victim of a vicious homophobic hate crime.<\/p>\n

When this desperately sad film finally finished, my mum turned to me and matter-of-factly asked: \u201cIs there anything you want to say?\u201d My whole body burned with shame as I shook my\u00a0head and ran out of the room.<\/p>\n

This was my mum\u2019s 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\u00a0poster of Legolas in my room. What I\u00a0tried 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.<\/p>\n

double quotation markIt was years until I returned to Brokeback Mountain. I wrote it off\u00a0as a film I didn\u2019t like to avoid my painful memories<\/p>\n

In fact, watching Brokeback Mountain had the opposite effect to what my mum had intended. In it, Jack says to Ennis: \u201cI wish I knew how to quit you.\u201d The \u201cyou\u201d for me at that time meant my attraction to men. I\u00a0hated who I was so much that all I\u00a0took from the film was that being gay\u00a0meant one of two things: living a\u00a0miserable life or death. I shrank further back into the closet.<\/p>\n

Besides, a year earlier, Canada had legalised same-sex marriage, and the rhetoric around the decision had been toxic. At school, most of my peers were unsettlingly keen to make the case that it was \u201cunnatural\u201d and \u201cwrong\u201d for two men to get married. After that, I put a deadbolt and extra lock on my closet door. It took me a long time to shake my belief that I could not live and be loved as an out gay man.<\/p>\n

I eventually sought out LGBTQ+ stories in TV, film and literature to expand my understanding of what life\u00a0could be like. By the 2010s, the hard work of activists meant that it was increasingly common to see queer\u00a0stories and characters in the mainstream. The TV series Glee showed me that it was possible to love\u00a0out loud. The Harvey Milk biopic taught me the political value of\u00a0visibility. Janet Mock\u2019s memoir Redefining Realness, which tells her story growing up as a transgender woman in Hawaii, helped me understand what it means to be part of a community and to fight for others.<\/p>\n

It would be years before I returned to Brokeback Mountain. I wrote it off\u00a0as a film I just didn\u2019t like, a flimsy deflection to avoid the painful memories of the person I was back then. That was until a friend brought me to a special Pride screening in 2018.<\/p>\n

My second trip to Brokeback felt like a long overdue release. The opening notes of Gustavo Santaolalla\u2019s haunting score filled my eyes with tears that would not stop flowing for the duration of the film. No longer a\u00a0scared, shamed young boy, it almost felt as if I were watching for the first time. I could appreciate the film\u2019s aching restraint, and the depth of denialism Ennis goes through to survive in small-town USA. I saw myself in Jack, the romantic dreamer, who wants a love that exists in more than just stolen moments.<\/p>\n

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Brokeback Mountain is now one of\u00a0my favourite films. I watch it at least\u00a0once a year. I cried at the stage adaptation in London three years ago.<\/p>\n

My mum would explain to me years\u00a0later that she was willing to try anything to save her struggling son. Not every mum would do that for their\u00a0queer child. So in a way, I\u2019m grateful that she put on Brokeback Mountain all those years ago because it was her way of saying: \u201cI love you for\u00a0who you are.\u201d I just couldn\u2019t hear it\u00a0at the time \u2013 but I do now.<\/p>\n

Share your cultural awakenings<\/p>\n

You can tell us how a cultural moment has prompted you to make a major life change by filling in the form below or emailing us on\u00a0cultural.awakening@theguardian.com.<\/p>\n

Your responses, which can be anonymous, are secure as the form is encrypted and only the Guardian has access to your contributions. We will only use the data you provide us for the purpose of the feature and we will delete any personal data when we no longer require it for this purpose. For alternative ways to get in touch securely please see our tips guide<\/a>.Show more<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I was 14 years old the first time I\u00a0saw two men kiss on screen. It was 2006, and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":498112,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[156,409,111,139,69],"class_list":["post-498111","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-movies","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/498111","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=498111"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/498111\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/498112"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=498111"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=498111"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=498111"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}