#close range

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the book is full of stories of people suffering the consequences of lacking the language and the capacity to make sense of themselves or to communicate, it's full of incredible loneliness and a real call to not allow ourselves to settle for that

okay maybe this is a subjective view of the stories, but Brokeback Mountain manages to say so much in just a few pages and so much of what it says is "if only they knew how to tell what they were feeling, and to tell each other" and we fear that the musical will be the exact opposite of that and eh, you know what, maybe it's fine that it'll be an entirely different story with superficial similarities if it moves people in positive ways, maybe it's okay

but that story broke us and also galvanised us to be more ourselves more out loud - we read it in the week before going to see the film and it's probably one of the things that helped break up our terrible abusive cishet marriage (since we were neither cis nor het but too afraid of being ourselves to do anything about it for a long time)