Brokeback Mountain

In "Brokeback Mountain," Ennis del Mar and Jack Twist, two cowboys, come together when they're working as herder and camp tender one summer on a range above the tree line. "During the day Ennis looked across a great gulf and sometimes saw Jack, a small dot moving across a high meadow as an insect moves across a tablecloth; Jack, in his dark camp, saw Ennis as night fire, a red spark on the huge black mass of mountain." At first, sharing an isolated cabin, they just fall into sex as casually and inevitably as sheep. But something deeper catches them. Both men marry and have kids because that's what cowboys do. But over the course of many years and frequent separations this relationship becomes the most important thing in their lives, and they do anything they can to maintain it. Proulx's descriptions of their bond are gorgeous and haunting, and the ending is brutal, written not long after the fatal beating of Mathew Shepard in Laramee, Wyoming.