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Like many gay Utahns, Ritchie Olsen has been bursting with anticipation over "Brokeback Mountain," the acclaimed new film about a secret love affair between two Wyoming cowboys. After all, the movie could almost be the story of his life.
Olsen grew up in Neola, a conservative town of about 500 people on the southern edge of the Uintas. His family ran a small cattle ranch, where Olsen spent much of his youth on a horse. Although Olsen struggled with his attraction to men, like the characters in the film he kept quiet and married a local girl, his true nature stifled by community pressure and his own fear.
"I didn't feel like I had any other choice," said the 32-year-old, who didn't come out of the closet until he divorced his wife 18 months later and moved away. "I was expected to fit a certain image, and I did. It created a lot of anxiety."
That's why for Olsen and countless other Westerners, "Brokeback Mountain" is an event film and a hot-button topic. Besides being a rare Hollywood drama about gay romance, it may be the first high-profile movie to address homosexuality within a group rarely associated with it: the iconic cowboys of the American West. These onscreen lovers aren't San Francisco hairdressers, they're stoic Marlboro men.
After opening Wednesday in Park City, the movie arrives in Salt Lake City today amid controversy and critical praise. "Brokeback Mountain" leads all 2005 films with seven Golden Globe nods - the Utah Film Critics Society named it the year's best movie - and will almost certainly be nominated for a Best Picture Oscar next month. It also has drawn fire from conservatives who dismiss it as "homosexual propaganda" and predict it'll be greeted by empty theaters. Some conservative groups have considered protesting the movie but say they don't want to give it free publicity.
Based on a short story by Annie Proulx, the film tells the story of Ennis (Heath Ledger) and Jack (Jake Gyllenhaal), two young ranch hands hired to herd sheep on a lonely Wyoming mountaintop in the summer of 1963. Thrown together by circumstance, the pair forge an emotional bond that turns unexpectedly sexual and that neither man is equipped to define. "I ain't queer," Ennis says after their first drunken encounter. "Me neither," responds Jack.
Separated by geography and shame, the two marry women and settle down in different parts of the West, meeting for trysts in motels and by remote campfires over the next 20 years. The forbidden affair exacts an emotional toll on their marriages and on themselves.
"I found myself wondering what a gay person in such a masculine-oriented society did - whether they fled to Denver or toughed it out," Proulx told The Salt Lake Tribune in 1999 when asked about the origins of the story. "I began thinking about homophobia. In fact, the thing that destroyed the relationship between the two characters was their own homophobia."
The movie's trailer has drawn titters from moviegoers uncomfortable with its frank sexuality. And the film may bomb with religiously conservative audiences in the heartland and others who don't want to watch male actors lock lips onscreen. But after three weeks of limited release, largely in big cities where moviegoers tend to be more liberal, "Brokeback Mountain" looks like a sleeper hit. Over the Christmas holiday weekend the film earned the highest per-screen average of any new movie in the nation.
As of Thursday morning more than 155 people - an unprecedented number - had bought advance tickets for last night's midnight screening at the Broadway theater in downtown Salt Lake City. Many were members of the Utah Gay Rodeo Association, a group of part-time wranglers for whom "Brokeback Mountain" is almost a home movie.
"On the gay-rodeo circuit this movie has been talked about for almost two years," said Clark Monk, a Salt Lake City registered nurse who competes in roping and barrel-racing events. Monk hopes that "Brokeback Mountain," which lacks swishy stereotypes or an overt political agenda, will change moviegoers' attitudes towards homosexuality. "But I don't know if mainstream straight America is ready for it."
Monk, 48, grew up on a dairy farm in Spanish Fork and helped lead his family's cattle up and down Spanish Fork Canyon each spring and fall. But the religious and family pressure to conform was so great that he didn't explore his homosexuality until after he served an LDS Church mission and moved to Salt Lake City in his late 20s. Even then, he wasn't comfortable being out of the closet until he discovered the gay rodeo group.
"That kind of opened the door," he said. "I could do all the things I enjoyed as a kid and still be a gay man."
"Brokeback Mountain" is set mostly in the 1960s, when the gay-rights movement was in its infancy. But Utah's homosexual cowboys say the state's small-town attitudes toward gays aren't much more tolerant today. Milo Bardwell was raised on his grandfather's farm in Tremonton and, like most rural gay men, moved to a larger city to find acceptance. After coming out, some rural gays have been ostracized by their families.
In Tremonton, as in ranching towns throughout the West, the rugged cowboy myth leaves no room for homosexuality. But Olsen says he wouldn't trade his Neola cowboy upbringing for anything. And Bardwell, 39, who now lives in Herriman, bristles at the suggestion that his sexual orientation makes him less of a wrangler.
"It has nothing to do with how we can handle a horse or a rope. I can rope with the best of them," said Bardwell, who trains horses and competes on the gay-rodeo circuit. "We're not a bunch of sissies riding around."
If gay Utahns are lining up for "Brokeback Mountain," Utah's mainstream rodeo cowboys are almost as united in their disdain for the film.
"I wouldn't go see it for nothin'," said Lewis Feild, a rodeo coach at Utah Valley State College. "I feel the gay lifestyle is wrong. And I can guarantee you that if you talk to many people in the ranching and rodeo community, they're going to be the same way."
"Hell no, I'd never see anything like that," said Lan LaJeunesse of Morgan, the defending world bareback riding champion, who feels the movie's big-hatted romance is an affront to rodeo contestants. "That's not what cowboys are about."
In Wyoming, where the state symbol is a bronco rider and gay rights have been a sensitive issue since Matthew Shepard was murdered in Laramie in 1998, opinion over "Brokeback Mountain" appears split along similar lines.
Ben Clark, a fourth-generation rancher, saw "Brokeback Mountain" at its Dec. 10 premiere in Jackson, Wyo., where it earned a standing ovation. Clark grew up outside Jackson and felt so lonely as a gay youth that he considered suicide. He moved to Southern California in his 20s, came out as a gay man and eventually returned to Jackson, where he raises quarter horses.
"I loved the film," said Clark, 42. "It's the kind of movie that everybody, especially straight people, need to see to understand the culture we grew up in and what we go through."
On the other side of the fence is Rick Makris, a part-time rancher from Evanston, Wyo., who believes the movie will harm the state's image.
"I ain't got nothing against gay people. But Wyoming is not the place to make a gay movie about cowboys. I think it's a slap in the face," he said this week outside an Evanston ranch-supply store. "It's almost like they're making Wyoming a gay state."
Not surprisingly, Makris doesn't plan to see the movie.
"It's not for me," he said. "I'd rather go see 'King Kong.' ''