Any of you think there could have been a role for a black woman in the movie?
I'm very glad that you asked this question. The answer is very likely. I've never visited Riverton, Childress, Lightning Flat, or Sage. So I cannot vouch for the ethnic make-up of these towns. But one thing Brokeback did to me was to ignite a curiosity about blacks in the American West. During an opera gig in Houston in 2006, I paid a visit to the Buffalo Soldier Museum. It was amazing. There were all kinds of art and artifacts depicting and detailing the lives of African Americans in the western states both before and after Emancipation. It was an eye-opening experience. Ranch work was at the top of the job list for black men out there, especially in Kansas which was a slave state.
Additionally, I lived in Lincoln, Nebraska for most of 1991. While there I was confronted with the fact that blacks are a secondary minority to Mexicanos in that part of the country. My conversations with blacks from the small towns in the interior and western part of the state revealed that if you were black in these places, everybody knew who you were whether you knew them or not.
