The Gay Cowboy Thing

“The Gay Cowboy Thing”
. 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. [make sure to imput thesis after the rest of the essay is written]
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 (“non-straight ” being limited to mostly gay men at that time) would be seen as highly controversial,
With many homo-centric and homonormative stories, the plot of the story revolves solely around the fact that the main characters are not straight. All the challenges that a character might face in during the story, as well as the entirety of a character’s development, are related to the sexual orientation of the character. This does not reflect the reality of queer experience. There is more (or should be more) substance to a character’s story arc and development than their sexual orientation to the same extent of that of any heterosexal character. When one happens to stumble across a heterosexual love story, the common reaction is not along the lines of “this is a straight love story, about straight people, they story is about them being straight”, reason being that more often than not the plot has more substance than just its heterosexual aspects. However, when it comes to queer-centric love stories, the most common reaction follows the lines of “this is a gay story, about two gay people, and is about them being gay”, due to the lack of substance to the plot. Weather the plot actually lacks substance or the public’s reaction to the work reduces the plot and reception of the work, the result is problematic. In regards to the plot of the film “Brokeback Mountain” , John Bebe explained : “ in the screenplay that emerged little happens to the young men until they suddenly get sexual with each other, and relatively little happens after. The most intense scenes in the film are really flashbacks, colored by fantasies about the fearsome consequences of male coupling in Wyoming and Texas” (John Bebe, pg