"I'm a conservative Christian and this film changed my mind"

"Brokeback Mountain" makes at least one straight guy less narrow.

Published January 18, 2006 1:00PM (EST)

Broadsheet crush of the day: a fella with the whimsical handle "thebeesucksass," whose recent IMDB post (reg. req'd) about "Brokeback Mountain" was unearthed at Daily Kos.

"If the film we wanted to see hadn't been sold out, I don't think I'd ever have seen it," he writes. "It's been four days ... and progressively, day after day, I have been forced to admit that I am ashamed of the way I felt about homosexuals. I literally had no concept of what life is truly like for these individuals, and must continue to be. In my heart I know that good, wholesome, long-standing friends of mine -- true-believing Christians -- have made life horrible for these people when they go out of their way to bad mouth them behind their backs ... tell their children homosexuals are going to Hell, etc.

"I can't explain what I'm feeling, but I haven't had this kind of doubt (about the church I go to) since I made the decision a long, long time ago to leave the family business against my father's wishes ... In a way, I guess, my own personal history and my relationship with a disapproving (and uneducated) father somehow made me 'get' what Heath Ledger's character goes through ... The God I believe in, that I teach my kids to trust, would never wish the kind of pain that I went through on anyone, which really I now know for real is the same kind of pain homosexuals must go through just to live what for them is an honest life, and the choice they must make. I'd never had my eyes opened to this before, not ONE IOTA.

"Tonight, winding down, I said a little prayer. It was more or less the same thing that's been going round and round inside my head since I saw this movie ... who am I to judge? I honestly was trembling at one point during the credits before we got up to leave, and I had to struggle to re-gain my composure. Now that I am remembering that, it reminds me of the way I trembled when I first asked God to forgive me of my sins and accept me as I am.

"'Brokeback Mountain' humbled me."

He has a follow-up post here. ("My wife's youngest brother said something about the movie as a joke and everybody else chuckled along like you'd expect. I'd already decided what I was going to do if anybody mentioned it, and I said, 'I saw it when I was in Texas. And you know, it was damn good.' They all shut up, and it was pretty quiet for a while.)

I believe I speak for many when I say I hope that Mr. Bee speaks for many.


By Lynn Harris

Award-winning journalist Lynn Harris is author of the comic novel "Death by Chick Lit" and co-creator of BreakupGirl.net. She also writes for the New York Times, Glamour, and many others.

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