The movie is all we have. That and the memories of a what A.P. wrote for us....
...That is how Brokeback Mountain is. It was a fictional 1963-1983. We can't relive it. We can try. But it lives on in our hearts.
Jake is still here. But Jake is not Jack. Jack and Ennis live in every Brokies heart.
I miss Jack. I miss Ennis. That is why I am a Brokie.
Until last week when I found BetterMost, I'd never heard the term "Brokie", but when I found this place I soon realised that that was the name for what I am, and this place feels like home. For two years I wandered around thinking I was half crazy most of the time, but now finding a name for it and others who are the same as me, the relief is more than I can put into words.
Brokeback is more than a film, and Jack and Ennis are more than characters. To me they're real people, which the logical part of my head says is crazy because I
know they're fictional characters created by A.P., but at the same time I
know that they're
real. If I said that on any other forum on the web, or in RL I'd be laughed out of town, but for me a big part of being a brokie is believing in Jack and Ennis. I came out of that cinema after I saw Brokeback for the first time feeling as though I'd lost something beyond words, and as
Nutmeg Guy says, Jack and Ennis live in my heart.
Understanding every single facet of the story and the film, and every nuance and symbolism is just something I
have to do.
Hello, my name is Lynne and I am a Brokie. 
Yes, I self-identify as a Brokie and am out in my real life as one to almost everyone I know. (There are still some evangelical Christian cousins who are unaware, but I have made up my mind to discuss it with them next time I see them.)
I love it when I am able to work Brokeback Mountain into a conversation with a stranger, to possibly plant a seed that will encourage him or her to rent the movie, with niggle of hope that they will be moved the way I was.
I have given away more copies of the DVD than I can count.
I can relate to
Lynne too. I find myself not trying to "convert" people to Brokie-ism, because I don't think a Brokie can be made - it's something from within yourself. I thought it was interesting though,
ineedcrayons' idea of Brokie-ism being a little mystical
being a Brokie has always seemed a bit mystical to me -- like we were all chosen by some higher power, though believe me I usually don't think in those terms. To show you how much I don't think in those terms, I'll note that when I say "chosen," what comes to mind is not the Jews of the Old Testament as much as the characters in Stephen King's The Stand, who, when a bio-warfare experiment gone awry wipes out 99+ percent of the planet's population, remain immune and then all gather and telepathically gravitate toward Las Vegas for a final showdown between Good and Evil.
I haven't yet bought my ticket to Vegas. But I've always been struck by the fact that, aside from our fascination with BBM, there's no single quality that all Brokies have in common, and there's no single quality that separates us from many of the world's non-Brokies. And yet it's a very, very powerful identity. So to me, being a Brokie is mysterious and possibly even metaphysical.
"The Stand" is just about my favourite novel, and I've read it more times than I care to remember. There is something incredibly mystical about being a Brokie though.
Ineedcrayons is right, there's probably no single quality that separates us from non-Brokies, but one thing that's struck me about BetterMost is that I've never before encountered a web forum with quite the same atmosphere as here. Lots of forums have a sense of "community" and many are fairly friendly, but BetterMost has some unique quality that I can't quite put into words - people here are tolerant, accepting, open to new ideas, non-judgemental, enquiring, passionate about their beliefs - but none of those descriptions fit and can be pinned down as something that's uniquely Brokie.
I hesitate to use the word; I don't want to cause offence, but there's something mystical about being a Brokie that makes it almost like a religion. We believe in Jack and Ennis unconditionally - we don't need proof of their existence, whether they are truly a product of AP's imagination, or whether they have some basis in fact. We believe in the message of the story/film, and we even pore over the story and the screenplay as though it's a sacred text. Maybe religion's too strong a word, but as Amanda said at the start of the thread, it's certainly a culture.
The only thing I can figure out that we all have in common so far is that for us all, Brokeback and being a Brokie has changed our lives in some way.
