Tell you what, I've never suspected any particularly deep motive behind Jack's question, any particular probing to try find out if Ennis is gay. It's just always seemed to me to be a not unnatural response to Ennis's own peculiar statement:
(I'm adding the italics here)
Jack: You
from ranch people?
Ennis: I
was.Jack: Your folks run you off?
Even knowing that Ennis's parents are dead, it's always struck me as peculiar for him to say that he
was from ranch people. Even though his parents are dead, his background hasn't changed. He still
is from a ranching background.
TJ: I wish you wouildn't set the short story up against the movie so much. They are two different works of art. And the screenplay is yet a different woirk of art from the movie.
This, I know, is where I part company from of lot of folks. I understand that the story and the film are two separate works of art, and I intend no disrespect to anyone else's opinion, but the film wasn't created in a vacuum. In the end it still derives from the short story. I find it endlessly fascinating to compare the two, and I find it can be useful to refer to the story in places where I might find it difficult to understand what the filmmakers were trying to say in a particular scene.
I look at "everything Brokeback" as one phenomenon, not several phenomena, because this is the approach that works for me. My appreciation for the accomplishment of the filmmakers is increased when I look at what was added to "open up" the story. And I need the published screenplay because I find it unwise in discussion to trust my memory alone. (Noting where the film differs from the published screenplay is something else that I find fascinating.)
I've also seen people--nobody here, thankfully--go off in directions that are just plain wrong because they insisted on looking at the film in a vacuum, so to speak: "Jack wasn't trying to initiate sex that first time in the tent. He just wanted to snuggle up because it was cold" (I'm paraphrasing). Well, no. Jack was attempting something sexual because that's the way the
story was written, and so that's the way the
movie was written.