Brokeback Mountain, both the original story and it’s movie adaptation, have acquired the cultural label of “that gay cowboy story”, reason being that the main characters are queer. A large portion of americans will hear the phrase “the gay cowboy story” and automatically associate it with Brokeback Mountain. Even my lesbian parents praise the film and the story for being controversial for the time. Indeed, during the time in which both the story and the film were created, there was very little representation of queerness in any form.
However, since my parent’s generation, LGBTQ+ representation in media and literature has made numerous advancements. In the time of my parents (roughly the past fifty years), having any non-straight characters
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On the other hand, sophisticated gay men in urban enclaves complain of conservatism and retrogression, a soppy package wrapped around an out-of-date stereotype (Ruby B. Rich, pg 48)”. As a pansexual, I have encountered this dilemma, and will say that this dilemma is one that is constant and consistently aggravating. It is positive to find your conservative relatives, who are unexposed to non-heteronormative issues, watching and reading Brokeback Mountain, as it exposes them to aspects of queer life, yet, as the LGBTQ+ community , there is a strong desire to have representation that feels personally relatable, unbiased, and …show more content…
As as author, or even a filmmaker, your goal is to create content that your intended readership or audience relates to. Relatability is defined as “[establishing] a social or sympathetic relationship with a person or thing” (dictionary.reference.com). When used in regards to a piece of work, it is the act of crafting one’s character to come across as relatable to the intended readership or audience. To be “universally relatable” means to create content that is as relatable as possible to as much of the intended readership or audience as possible. Given that Jack and Ennis’s character’s, two white and seemingly “straightish” men, are most closely relatable to those who are white and heterosexual, they therefore would have an intended audience of such