Popular Culture Review Vol. 19, No. 1, Winter 2008 | Page 35

From the Wilderness into the Closet 31 Whether Brokeback Mountain will have lasting impact on attitudes about gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people in America is impossible to know, of course. In an article published in USA Today, Scott Bowles writes: The film is the punch line of jokes, the subject of Internet parodies and the front-runner for the Oscars on March 5. Oprah plugged the gay-cowboy drama on her show. Howard Stern gave it a thumbs up. “Have you seen Brokeback?” has become a dinner-party Rorschach test of gay tolerance. In addition to Bowles’s suggestion that whether one does or does not see the film is a “test of gay tolerance,” the subhead of the article—entitled “Brokeback Mountain: Milestone or Movie of the Moment?”—is, “Film’s success signals shift in attitudes toward gays—or maybe it’s just marketing” (1). But the focus of this study is