I saw an early screening of Brokeback Mountain in Miami with my dad.
Stay with me. I’d found an ad in the Sun-Sentinel offering free tickets to see the movie in advance. It might have been a test screening. I’d been dying to see it, but I wasn’t out as queer, so asking a friend to go with me seemed risky. My thought process was that my dad, who was still drinking at the time, was more oblivious. He’d ask fewer questions and tell fewer people at school than someone my own age. We also lived in Fort Lauderdale. Miami was an hour away, and I wasn’t allowed to drive that far yet. I’d have to explain to my parents where I was going. It was easier to just take one of them.
Luckily, neither of them were conservative or evangelical. In 2004, my mom had driven me around in her minivan to remove Bush/Cheney signs from our neighbors’ front lawns. When I was eight, we all dressed as the Teletubbies for Purim, and my dad enthusiastically took on Tinky-Winky. This was at the height of a gay panic because Tink was purple and carried a purse.
I pitched Brokeback Mountain to my dad as simply “a gay cowboy movie.” He was in. I remember getting to the theater, and it was just me, my dad, and a room full of queer men. When the movie ended with that heart-rending scene of Ennis sniffing Jack’s jacket, there was presumably not a dry eye in the house. I certainly was crying. The lights came up, and the first thing my asked me was, “What the hell?”
I was caught. Oh no. He was upset he’d had to sit through Jake Gyllenhaal bottoming with spit. But that wasn’t the case. “I thought this was going to be a comedy!” He was also tearing up. “I heard gay cowboys and I thought how could that not be a comedy???” (Years later, we saw Sweeney Todd and, upon hearing the first song, he groaned and said, “A musical? I thought ‘demon barber’ meant it was a horror movie!!”) He didn’t care that Brokeback was a love story between two men. He just hadn’t been prepared to be so emotionally devastated. He was mad I hadn’t cleared up that the “gay cowboy movie” wasn’t going to have the light tone of Blazing Saddles.
I was a senior in high school when Brokeback premiered. I secretly watched shows like the U.S. version of Queer As Folk and Logo’s Noah’s Arc. I read every book I could find on Allen Ginsberg and Harvey Milk. I had crushes on Lance Bass (who would come out in the summer of 2006) and David Hyde Pierce (who would come out a year later). It might have been harder for my parents to sense anything gay going on with me, because I was very into boys. Those boys were just gay.
When it looked like Brokeback was going to sweep awards season, I couldn’t believe it. Queerness wouldn’t be a joke anymore. I was overly emotionally attached to making sure the people around me — family, friends, strangers on Livejournal — respected LGB people. They deserved the right to marry! They deserved workplace protections! They deserved to be part of our society! I had big feelings about gay rights, because I was just the best little ally.
The 2006 Academy Awards were some of the most queer to date. Capote, a film chronicling gay writer Truman Capote’s reporting on the 1959 murder of the Clutter family, was nominated for Best Picture. For better or worse, that same year also saw Felicity Huffman nominated for Best Actress for Transamerica. This legitimized a two-decades-long stretch of cis people playing trans women poorly. Julia Serano writes really intelligently about the “putting on lipstick quota” depicted in Transamerica in her iconic book Whipping Girl. I have no memory of Transamerica affecting me in any way. Even though I would come out as a trans guy in 2023, I didn’t connect to this movie at all.
I was too busy stanning Brokeback. I was so impressed both Jake and Heath Ledger, two heterosexual heartthrobs, were playing gay and taking it seriously. I felt honored that straight people cared enough to make queer art. A Best Picture win would change hearts and minds. I just knew it. Brokeback Mountain won the BAFTA, then the Golden Globe, the Producer’s Guild, Indie Spirit, etc.
Then it was March 5, 2006 and time for the Oscars! I don’t remember where I was watching. It was most likely at home with my parents in the living room of our house, which was just above the bedroom where I wrote my gay fanfiction. It was all happening!
Dustin Hoffman presented Brokeback with Best Adapted Screenplay. Taiwanese-American director Ang Lee won for Best Director. It was the 78th awards, and only 21 times before had a film taken Best Director and not also Best Picture. All the other directing nominees were white men. Ang’s speech touched on how Jack and Ennis taught him about “not just all the gay men and women whose love is denied by society but just as important, the greatness of love itself.” A straight man was on my TV saying the word “gay” and winning an award! It was a lock. Jack Nicholson got on stage to announce Best Picture.
Then, even Jack looked shocked to say that the winner was Paul Haggis’ Crash. He actually mouthed “whoa” after he read the card. In the distant future, Andy Cohen would ask Michelle Williams on Watch What Happens Live her thoughts on losing to Crash, and her reply sums up my reaction at the time: “I mean, what was Crash?!” Yeah! What. the. fuck. was. Crash???”
I am white and, to be completely transparent, I remember petulantly thinking Academy voters must care more about race (the subject of Crash) than about sexuality. Once again, gay people were slighted. I felt personally scorned! I hadn’t seen Crash, but I was sad! I was being so dramatic about it. It confirmed every joke about Lee’s masterpiece was an arrow to the chest that wouldn’t be removed by a big award.
Two white people, director Haggis and producer Cathy Schulman, walked up to accept Crash’s Best Picture statue. They spoke about “love, tolerance, and truth.” Schulman thanked “people all around the world who have been touched by this message.” I was annoyed. At 17-years-old, it was more important to me that straight people didn’t win for a gay movie, than that white people did win for a movie about race. This was stupid of me. I was convinced that homophobia was at play. I vowed to boycott the Oscars. (I never did.)
The next day, I was thrilled to read op-eds labeling Crash the worst Best Picture winner in history, but Brokeback losing that night was yet another setback in my coming out journey.
