Seeing the film and reading this board has made me realize that our culture has changed so much since the 1960s. Coming of age in the 1960s was a strange, schizophrenic experience, especially in the midwestern part of the U.S. That's where and when I'm from. On the one hand, conformance was the goal, but on the other hand, the Kinsey report had just been published, and it shocked the midwestern bedrock to its core.
Then came the student rebellion and rejection of the prevailing mores. As a college graduate in a medium size midwestern city, I was part of a crowd of young people whose lives seemed to be put on hold. There were no good jobs, so I fell in with fellow waiters and other service people as well as artistic types. We were, as Kinsey called it, "polymorphously perverse"--there were male couples, female couples, and mixed couples as well as people who played the field, "open marriages," and everything in between. For a while, I enjoyed having a gay lover, and he was just as functional in every way as straight lovers I had known.
It all came crashing down when this mysterious disease later called AIDS developed. It seems like the U.S. became much more puritanical after that. In some ways, Brokeback Mountain brings back the attitudes of the 1960s and 1970s for me, both the feeling that anything is possible between two people no matter who they are, and also the crushing repression of the homophobic conforming midwestern culture.