Pictured Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal in Brokeback Mountain, opening mid December in Chicago.
'The biggest challenges from within the community are unsafe sex and stupidity such as this crystal meth epidemic. I know that there are gay people who say that external homophobia causes this addiction, but I don't buy it. Lesbians face the same homophobia and we don't see large numbers of lesbians hooked on crystal. There is a romance with self-destruction in our community with things like barebacking, crystal and the down-low closet cases.' — Gay writer Dan Savage to Cleveland's Gay People's Chronicle, Oct. 7.
'The queer frontier looks like middle school. People are coming out younger and younger, which is great because it eliminates all those tortured, wasted teenage years in the closet. It also decreases the likelihood that people will continue behaving like teenagers into their 20s, 30s and 40s, like my generation did. Or is still doing.' — Dykes To Watch Out For cartoonist Alison Bechdel to the Dallas Voice, Oct. 28.
'Texas, I thank you, and my wife thanks you. You have strengthened our marriage, providing us with a bulwark against the onslaught of homosexuals in love. Was there ever a more insidious threat to holy matrimony than the unholy alliance between two men or two women? The mere thought is enough to send you scurrying to the nearest Bible, hoping, of course, that you do not come across Romans 14:13—'Let us therefore no longer pass judgment on one another, but resolve instead never to put a stumbling block or hindrance in the way of another.'' — Robert Seltzer writing in the San Antonio Express-News on Nov. 13 after Texas voters amended the state's constitution to ban same-sex marriage.
'No American film before has portrayed love between two men as something this pure and sacred. As such, it has the potential to change the national conversation and to challenge people's ideas about the value and validity of same-sex relationships. In the meantime, it's already upended decades of Hollywood conventional wisdom. ... The kissing and the sex scenes are fierce and full-blooded.' — Newsweek on the upcoming movie Brokeback Mountain, Nov. 21. [ Interviews in next week's Windy City Times. ]
'I never thought twice about it. For one thing, I never felt like I had anything at stake, and I think if you make decisions based on society's opinions, you're going to make boring choices. What terrified me was self-doubt. I knew that if I was going to do justice to this character, to this story and to this form of love, I was really going to have to mature as an actor, and as a person.' —Actor Heath Ledger on his role as a gay cowboy in the upcoming film Brokeback Mountain, to Newsweek, Nov. 21.
'Based on the short story by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Annie Proulx, Brokeback is the tale of Ennis Del Mar ( Heath Ledger ) and Jack Twist ( Jake Gyllenhaal ) , two ranch hands who, in the summer of 1963, are hired to herd sheep on Wyoming's Brokeback Mountain. There, separated from the rest of the world, their laconic friendship develops, almost by accident, into a sexual relationship. As the summer ends, the two men are forced to separate, and they discover that their feelings for each other are stronger than they imagined. Jack dreams of buying a ranch together. Ennis thinks they'll be killed if anyone suspects their relationship. And so they marry women and have children, and for 20 years live apart, seeing each other only on rare camping trips, trying to hold on to the innocence and beauty of that first summer on the mountain. ... Proulx's story caused a sensation when it appeared in The New Yorker eight years ago. Its raw masculinity, spare dialogue and lonely imagery subverted the myth of the American cowboy and obliterated gay stereotypes. It also felt like a sledgehammer to the chest.' — Newsweek.
'While I was working on this story, I was occasionally close to tears. I felt guilty that their lives were so difficult, yet there was nothing I could do about it. It couldn't end any other way.' — Annie Proulx.
'The military fired only one Arabic language speaker for homosexuality in fiscal year 2004 and no Farsi speakers, according to new data obtained from the Pentagon. By contrast, in the first ten years of the don't ask, don't tell policy up until 2003, the military fired 54 Arabic and 9 Farsi speakers for homosexuality. The FY 2004 figures were obtained from the Pentagon by Congressman Marty Meehan, D-Mass., and the Center for the Study of Sexual Minorities in the Military ( CSSMM ) , a research institute at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and reported in an Associated Press story. The figures for the first ten years of 'don't ask, don't tell' were reported in a recent Government Accountability Office study. According to the new data, the military discharged a total of 32 foreign language speakers in fiscal year 2004, including 22 Spanish, 3 Korean and French, and one Chinese, German, Tagalog, and Arabic language speakers.' — From a Center for the Study of Sexual Minorities in the Military press release.
