| Today, one of the world’s largest pride marches will wind its way down New York City’s Fifth Avenue, passing through the West Village and in front of the historic Stonewall Inn. The procession comes at a moment of fraught reactionary politics, as a backlash to the progress of the Obama era plays out via “Don’t Say Gay” bills and incessant attacks against trans people. For those gathered in New York City, the relative haven of Manhattan will offer a powerful contrast to the world of “Brokeback Mountain,” the 1997 short story first published in The New Yorker. In Annie Proulx’s plainspoken tale, a pair of young cowboys meet in rural Wyoming and spend a summer herding sheep, forging a connection—sexual at first, and, they realize only later, profoundly emotional—that will persist for decades. Proulx’s protagonists, both “rough-mannered” “country boys,” defy expectations in almost every way, and so does the story—one reason that the screenplay adapted from “Brokeback Mountain” won an Academy Award, in 2006. Both men marry and become fathers, rarely seeing each other but lighting up when they do. Before a twist that permanently alters their relationship, the more expressive man pleads for additional time with his partner. “You just shot my airplane out a the sky,” he says. “This ain’t no little thing that’s happenin here.” | 
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