'Brokeback Mountain' shirt is this generation's Ruby Slippers, on display at Autry National Center

August 18, 12:38 PMBisexuality ExaminerMike Szymanski

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The shirt in this dramatic scene is preserved

You can quit them, but you can't quit their shirts.

The shirts worn by the late Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal in the bisexual movie "Brokeback Mountain" are being embraced by the Autry National Center, named after entrepreneur and cowboy movie star Gene Autry and his family.

(I've been to the Los Angeles museum a number of times and brought our young boys and it is a great museum that has Native American artifacts, movie memorabilia and cowboy stuff.)

The shirts (and other Hollywood memorabilia) are going to be part of fashion section of the exhibition that was installed this week at a dramatic moment with more than 70 film enthusiasts, International Gay Rodeo Association (IGRA) members, executives from the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) and press.

The shirts are intertwined and were worn in the film by the late Ledger and Gyllenhaal who played his lover. Both characters were successfully married in the movie, and they spent special times together up in the mountains once a year.

Noted film memorabilia collector Tom Gregory acquired the "Brokeback Mountain" shirts in a charity auction and loaned them for a year to the Autry museum. At the ceremony earlier this week, he made an eloquent speech:

Some might think these shirts are just a movie prop, but these are indeed the “ruby slippers of our time.” We no longer will settle for a life lived hiding over the rainbow and beyond the stars. Ours will not be a fanciful happiness in a land that only lives in a little girl’s dreams. We claim our stake with cotton shirts and the conviction that American values are here, represented in this institution.

These shirts are a visual representation of love. Two shirts intertwined, stained and soiled with mud and the life-blood of Brokeback Mountain, where exhilaration soared for two men who found a deep, passionate, and reverent love with one another, a love that they were never allowed to live. These shirts have become the only tangible reference point for millions who have been touched by Annie Proulx’s story and Ang Lee’s film, including the hundreds of men and women who sent me e-mails and letters emoting for their long lost same-sex love." 

 Author and filmmaker Gregory Hinton, who got the museum to put up the dispay, said: 

 I come from Wyoming, and what did Ang Lee know about gay ranchers in Wyoming? Besides, I’ve been burned before by straight Hollywood’s depiction of gay men and women. Seeing the curious and hopeful men waiting in line, I fought back tears. I hated that I loved Brokeback Mountain. And here we are.

The display of the Brokeback shirts and the inclusion of the Gay Rodeo archives at the Autry for me underscore the need for gay men and women who leave their rural communities to reclaim their country heritage. To know us is to love us. When we quit our rural communities, they lose too."

See more photos in the Slide Show below, and a clip of the film.

(I've interviewed Heath several times and always found him wonderful, and he is certainly missed.)

The display is at Griffith Park in Los Angeles, see more photos at the museum website: www.autrynationalcenter.org