Homosexuality In Annie Proulx's Brokeback Mountain

Similarly, in Annie Proulx’s ‘Brokeback Mountain’ and its subsequent love story that begins in rural Wyoming in 1963 where homosexuality was still illegal due to sodomy laws, the character of Ennis also denied his sexual identity even from himself when he tells his male lover Jack “I’m not no queer” (Proulx, n.d., p. 6) during sex. Even in 1968 when the American Psychological Association reclassified homosexuality and moved it ‘… from the category of sociopathic personality disorder and listed it together with other sexual deviations such as fetishism, pedophilia' (Fejes, 2008, p. 29), which lessened its severity as a mental disorder, it still left a negative stigma due to the other conditions that were within the same category. The media of America reported on homosexuality '... typically still viewing it as a tragic sickness' (Fejes, 2008, p. 28) in the mid-1960s but people still believed that homosexual men in particular were the perpetrators of sexual attacks on children (Berkowitz, 2015, p. 81) hence why many homosexual men refused to acknowledge their sexuality from the fear of being accused.

Jack and Ennis '... cannot divorce their masculinity from their expected heteronormative social roles and ultimately they deny the fulfillment of their true selves.' (Pullen, 2005, p. 156) due to the lack of revised model for sexuality at the time. Ennis even questions if other people experience homosexual desire when he tells Jack that he’s “… been lookin at people on the street. This happen a other