'Brokeback' has 'tremendous potential'

Brokeback Mountain has a huge amount of potential to do good, gay rights campaigners have stated.

The tale of two Wyoming cowboys in the 60s has already done well in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco, but will expand on Friday to more than 20 other cities.

Neil Giuliano, president of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation said: "This film has tremendous potential to connect with audiences gay and straight alike. What Brokeback Mountain does is allow audiences to experience, on an intensely emotional level, how ignorance and intolerance can force people to deny their love and deny who they are."

However, conservative Robert Knight, director of Concerned Women for America's Culture and Family Institute, said he hated the film.

"I can't think of a more effective way to annoy and alienate most moviegoing Americans than to show two cowboys lusting after each other," Knight ranted on his group's website. "It's a mockery of the Western genre embodied by every movie cowboy from John Wayne to Gene Autry to Kevin Costner."

Knight said he believed CS Lewis adaptation The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe would make "zillions" whilst Brokeback Mountain will "impress the critics and some fringe audiences in urban centers, but that's about it."

The drama has impressed critics, but even the gay-oriented media have wondered how Brokeback Mountain will fare in the US 'Bible Belt'. Matt Hennie of Atlanta-based gay weekly Southern Voice wrote: "America isn't ready and willing to flock to theaters to watch a two-hour film about two gay cowboys. ...a movie that will put faces on issues that silently make them shudder."

However, Ryan James Kim of Advocate.com disagreed: "Most viewers will remember Brokeback not as a movie in which cowboys kissed but as a love story they cannot forget - straight guys included, if they're mature enough, or at least smart enough, to follow the lead of the women they love."

Susanne Salkind of the Human Rights campaign said the film could shatter stereotypes. Filmmaker Michael Culpepper agreed, explaining that rural audiences will appreciate "the honesty of it." However, he conceded that "it's definitely a struggle for some of them to understand what a gay relationship is like."

The film faces an uphill struggle against homophobes, however, as Christian organisations such as 'ex-homosexual' group Exodus and Focus on the Family have promoted their belief that the film propogates "boring neo-Marxist homosexual propaganda" and will repel potential audiences.