I first saw Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain in 2005, at a three-screen, not-for-profit cinema in suburban Washington state. I went with my then-boyfriend, and for the next two hours and fourteen minutes, I wept silently next to him.

At 16, I came into political consciousness as the second Bush administration fought to maintain a conservative bulwark against progress by endorsing a constitutional amendment defining marriage in strictly heterosexual terms. While I was out, I felt righteously angry that others felt I should hide who I knew myself to be.

Twenty years after the film’s release, Brokeback Mountain returned to theaters. The end of June also marked a decade of nationwide marriage equality thanks to Obergefell v. Hodges, in which the Supreme Court granted homosexual couples the “equal dignity” afforded to our heterosexual counterparts. Today, I go to the movies with my husband. And sitting in the cool, dark of the cinema last week, I reflected on the ways Brokeback Mountain helped change the national discourse and still resonates in deep, meaningful ways for people across the country.

Based on a short story of the same name by Annie Proulx, the film depicts the lives, often tangled and tortuous, of two cowboys, Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal). First hired in the summer of 1963 to tend sheep on Wyoming’s Brokeback Mountain, Ennis and Jack tentatively fall into romance. But bound by the strict social codes of mid-century rural America, the men spend the next two decades pursuing each other in starts and stops, alone, together, on Brokeback Mountain.

A resounding commercial and critical success, the film grossed $178 million globally on a $14 million budget during its initial release. It garnered eight Academy Award nominations and won three: Ang Lee for Best Director, writers Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana for Best Adapted Screenplay, and composer Gustavo Santaolalla for Best Original Score.

When the film lost Best Picture to Paul Haggis’ Crash — a loss many consider one of the greatest upsets in Academy history — Brokeback fans protested by paying for full-page ads in trade journals that thanked the filmmakers for “transforming countless lives through the most honored film of the year.”

That kind of outpouring of support for any movie, and especially a gay, adult-oriented melodrama, remains rare. But Brokeback Mountain marked a breakthrough for queer representation on screen. Even in the early aughts, many in Hollywood deemed the prospect of playing an unabashedly gay character on screen career suicide.

Frank Little saw the film during its initial run in Washington, D.C. twenty years ago. “There seemed to be a buzz in the gay community about how groundbreaking it was,” Little recalls. The most important aspect of the film’s release, according to Little, remains “how monumental it was to have two straight actors — two straight, very popular, A-list actors — play those characters.”

Jeffrey Romero Middents, an Associate Professor of Literature at American University, studies movie stardom and notes that, in the case of the late Heath Ledger, “instead of dooming his career, it actually turned him into a bona fide old school movie star, which says something about the movie as much as it says about him.”

Full of furtive glances and grunted responses, Brokeback Mountain meditates not only on a romantic connection between two men but on the many unspoken rules and regulations that govern homosociality — the ways that men interact with one another — and masculinity. During their first weeks on the mountain together, Ennis and Jack speak in a stunted staccato and rarely meet the other’s eyes.

When Ennis washes himself, Jack steals glances, holding his breath between drags on an ashy cigarette. They act, in other words, how the hegemony of hetero-culture trains men to act. In these moments, Lee’s movie operates similarly to the classic Western pictures that dominated the U.S. box office in the mid-twentieth century. Those films, with their swaggering gunslingers and expressions of ur-masculinity embodied by the brawny strength of stars like Randolph Scott, helped define American manliness at midcentury.

With Jack and Ennis often unable or unwilling to violate this masculine code, the film throbs with the tension between attraction and action. Without words to articulate their inner selves, Ennis and Jack substitute action for language. Their first sexual encounter occurs wordlessly. Sleeping together for warmth on the windswept mountain, Jack reaches for Ennis. The moment oscillates between desire and danger. As society trains men, violence stopgaps more complicated, emotionally responsible reactions. For Jack and Ennis, the encounter changes them ineffably. The following day, they do not speak until sunset.

“This is a one-shot thing we got goin’ on,” Ennis mumbles, before adding, “Y’know I ain’t queer.” “Me neither,” Jack mutters.

The queer experience is not monolithic, but with all their complexities, Brokeback‘s characters register truthfully to many viewers. Ryan Marchand, who saw the film as an undergrad in 2005, believes that it gets to the heart of an entanglement of “yearning and repression” that, to him, feels like a “universal queer experience.”

“I think that’s the comfort I was able to find in the film,” Marchand says. “It somehow made me feel less alone.”

Whether in a cinema or at home, Brokeback Mountain connected many men to a community that they seldom saw or otherwise interacted with. Stuart Wright, only twelve during the film’s initial theatrical run, discovered the DVD at his local video store, noticing the film’s “obviously gay” cover art.

“At the time I had pretty much accepted the fact that I was into other boys, but I really had no other gay media in my life,” Wright says. “So my understanding of what it meant to be gay was completely limited to my imagination.”

Wright rented the film every single week from then on and credits those viewings as a “starting point in finding the courage within myself to start telling people” about his sexuality. For men like Marchand and Wright, Brokeback made accepting one’s differences easier, and the film’s existence confirmed — and still confirms — the existence of queer folks everywhere.

Other viewers, especially men in their late teens and early twenties, or those not yet out, took measures to see the film in secret, often driving miles out of their way to see the picture.

Matt Martin recalls seeing it at a suburban multiplex outside New York City. “We were old enough to go off on our own, but it still felt clandestine,” he says. Another, who lived in small town Texas, chose to see Brokeback on a weeknight, when cinema attendance lessens, to avoid running into anyone he knew.

Those too young to attend the film theatrically in 2005 found ways to watch the film at home. Martin Tadashi recounts “secretly borrowing it at Blockbuster and having to watch it on a portable DVD player.”

Another man first watched the film in short segments on DVD while his parents were out of the house. And still another viewed the film on cable in his family’s basement, vigilantly changing the channel whenever someone threatened to come downstairs. Will Rupert played hooky from middle school to torrent the film on the family computer. “I went in as a tween wanting to be titillated but instead, I just sobbed a lot in my childhood home while my mom was at work,” Rupert recalls.

The film’s tragic narrative presents a briary challenge. Even though Wright rented the film weekly and took comfort in the relationship on screen, he “used to turn off the TV at the final scene” of Ennis and Jack together. “I desperately wanted the ending to change,” he says.

Arriving seven years after the callous murder of Matthew Shepard thrust calls for expanded federal hate crime legislation into the national spotlight — and nearly four years before it would be signed into law — and set in a similar wide-open, Wyoming landscape, Brokeback Mountain‘s scenes of cruel violence serve as all-too real reminder of the brutalities enacted against queer people everywhere. “The film captured how dangerous life felt socially,” Jerry Thomas, who saw the film when he was 24, remembers. “The precariousness of our lives just really hit me and stuck.”

Melodramas like Brokeback Mountain makes painfully real the challenges faced by previous generations of queer people. Exposure as a homosexual poses risks to one’s physical safety and life, while the weighty solitude of difference scars the soul. Lee’s and cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto’s achingly expressionistic images of rolling rivers, cooled by melting glacier ice, and still mountain lakes, snow-packed peaks in the distance, externalize the internalized isolation felt by men like Ennis and Jack, who developed relationships away from the prying eyes of a society often violently opposed to queer existence.

Their loneliness becomes physical on the film’s visual plane, and the mountain’s rugged, raw expanse doubles their visceral emotions. Meeting for meager stints a few times annually for twenty years, Ennis and Jack only ever come together completely on Brokeback. “What we got is Brokeback Mountain,” Jack tells Ennis near the end of the film. “Everything’s built on it, that’s all we got.”

Jack and Ennis spent twenty years going back to Brokeback. So have audiences. But their story does not have to be ours. Fate differentiates tragedy and melodrama. One offers a narrative of foregone conclusions; the other forces us to question how our society operates by underscoring what Susan Sontag once described as “the arbitrariness of the taboos constructed by art and morals.”

The inability to express oneself, the self-imposed closeting, and the reactionary violence of ignorance and prejudice are not inevitabilities of our culture. When Brokeback Mountain concluded last week, the auditorium hushed as many in the audience choked back sobs. And though I cried, Brokeback reminds me why I fight.

Nor am I alone. “It was genuinely the first movie I saw that even had the possibility of a real gay relationship,” Clay Howard says, who first saw the film on Netflix when he was 14. “Even with the tragedy of it all, it still proved to me the possibility of gay love.”

Likewise, Justin Porter says that the film’s closing moments underline how “short life is and the importance of living unapologetically.” For Sam Wilburn, the film serves as a “vital reminder” of both our shared past and “the fight people still have to weather.” Much has changed since 2005, but the great work continues.

Twenty years after its initial release, Brokeback Mountain remains profoundly important personally and politically. Last week, the Supreme Court endorsed de facto censorship of queer lives by holding in Mahmoud v. Tayor that the First Amendment allows parents to opt their children out of engagement with LGBTQ narratives, countenancing the existence of queer people places, according to Justice Samuel Alito, “an unconstitutional burden” on others.

Films like Brokeback Mountain remind us that no one — not even the Supreme Court — can opt-out of the reality that LGBTQ Americans exist across the country, even in the smallest towns, or on the most desolate, wind-whipped mountains. Our hope remains, as Justice Kennedy wrote a decade ago in Obergefell, “not to be condemned to live in loneliness.”

Brokeback Mountain confirms that this rugged land, enriched by our lives, is our land, too.

Brokeback Mountain is currently playing in select theaters nationwide as part of a rerelease. It is also available for streaming on Prime Video. Visit www.amazon.com.

Paul T. Klein is a film historian and cultural critic. Follow him on Bluesky at @ptklein.com and on Letterboxd at @ptklein, or read more at www.howtoreadmovies.com.