Brokeback Mountain (the short story) foregrounds tensions b/w metropoliton and non metropolitian sexualities, posing questions of legitimacy and stability of metropolitian sexualities in geographical and social margins by disrupting the imperializing tendecies of the metropolitian sexual voices. The story was first published in the New Yorker (Oct 13, 1997) and it easy to imagine how some metropolitian might have interperted it: a sadly familar tale of homosexuality and redneck homophobic violence, set incidently, if eloquently in Wyhoming. Indeed it would be easy to read Brokeback Mountain as the story of gay men sititutated in a place and time that had yet to come to terms with homosexuality. However, mainstream reviewers, impressed with the universal qaulities of the book have insisted that it was not only gay liteture...They are right, if possibly for the wrong reasons. For while gay literture can resonate as wildly as any other, there is no mention of Gay or Lesbian in Brokeback mountain. The charachters in Brokeback are not gay because they are not possesed of sexual orientations that are generalized or transferable to others of their sex... De-Centering Sexualities: Politics and Representations Beyond the Metropolis
edited by Richard Phillips, David E Shuttleton, Diane Watt (2-3)

There was some open space between what he knew and what he tried to believe, but nothing could be done about it, and if you cant fix it, you gotta stand it Annie Prolux, Brokeback Mountain, in Wisconsin Stoires, 58, qouted as opening epigram, ibid

For all of this silence, this open space, there remains proable cause. The cowboys meet and fall in love on Brokeback mountain,and their love from then on is situtated in and associated with that mountain, and natural settings and open spaces more genuinely. On that mountain they have sex by the fire, in the tent, and in the open. Later, when they meet up it is ostenabily to hunt and fish, again they find natural enviroments that accomadte their love in a manner, that society, wil all of its towns and farms, could not. (ibid 4)

The "problem film" often equates sexual excitement with "love," and often ends with the reconciled lovers implicitly living happily ever after—not the case here, but probably never the case when sex is the only real adhesive between two people, anyway. Even so, Brokeback Mountain (opening December 9) suggests that the opposite could be true, if only other people could respect all kinds of love, not just the kind they imagine they themselves enjoy...What Ennis and Jack both refer to as "this thing," established early, is more or less the same thing that glued Rock Hudson and Jane Wyman together in Magnificent Obsession, yet separated them in All That Heaven Allows—a socially inappropriate love, rendered acceptable in the former movie by Rock Hudson's dedication and skills as an eye surgeon, but made impossible in the latter by his low station as a gardener. Needless to say, "this thing" activates Neanderthal reactions in the rowdy cultural backwaters of the film, necessitating a tragic conclusion with calculated echoes of the Matthew Shepard murder....Consider Brokeback Mountain's overt pandering to Rousseauian notions of the American West and its insularity, the toughness and self-sufficiency of its tight-lipped, xenophobic denizens, its rituals of faith and patriotism. You could say that simply depicting this hillbilly heaven accurately is itself an unsettling criticism, yet the effect, again, is to make it seem, in many ways, admirable—its unflagging work ethic, its quasi-mystical connection to harvest, soil, livestock, and weather.... (about the film, Gary Indiana, Village Voice, Nov 29 2005)

...Both narratively and visually, Brokeback Mountain is a tragedy about the specifically gay phenomenon of the "closet"—about the disastrous emotional and moral consequences of erotic self-repression and of the social intolerance that first causes and then exacerbates it. What love story there is occurs early on in the film, and briefly: a summer's idyll herding sheep on a Wyoming mountain, during which two lonely youths, taciturn Ennis and high-spirited Jack, fall into bed, and then in love, with each other. The sole visual representation of their happiness in love is a single brief shot of the two shirtless youths horsing around in the grass. That shot is eerily—and significantly—silent, voiceless: it turns out that what we are seeing is what the boys' boss is seeing through his binoculars as he spies on them. After that—because their love for each other can't be fitted into the lives they think they must lead—misery pursues and finally destroys the two men and everyone with whom they come in contact with the relentless thoroughness you associate with Greek tragedy. By the end of the drama, indeed, whole families have been laid waste. Ennis's marriage to a conventional, sweet-natured girl disintegrates, savaging her simple illusions and spoiling the home life of his two daughters; Jack's nervy young wife, Lureen, devolves into a brittle shrew, her increasingly elaborate and artificial hairstyles serving as a visual marker of the ever-growing mendacity that underlies the couple's relationship. Even an appealing young waitress, with whom Ennis after his divorce has a flirtation (an episode much amplified from a bare mention in the original story), is made miserable by her brief contact with a man who is as enigmatic to himself as he is to her. If Jack and Ennis are tainted, it's not because they're gay, but because they pretend not to be; it's the lie that poisons everyone they touch....
New York Review of Books 2/23/06 Daniel MEndelshon