“The Gay Cowboy Movie”

This chapter examines how the “gay cowboy movie” tag condensed the slippages in thinking required to sustain this dualism, which structured accounts of the reception to Brokeback Mountain (2005). Because the tag's indelible attachment to the film carried with it implications of mockery and scorn, the tag became the banner cry of those most offended by the film's supposed repudiation of John Wayne and the Marlboro Man. Likewise, the tag was indirectly referenced by assertions from the other side of the gender divide that, as a universal love story, Brokeback Mountain was much more than a gay movie. Nevertheless, the tag's omnipresence in the public discourse about Brokeback interrupted this dominant account of its reception by refocusing attention on the film's homoerotic specificity, which is, after all, what audiences were responding to in one way or another. It is in this context, that Brokeback Mountain worked most effectively as a “gay cowboy movie.”