I am a straight man and my girlfriend showed me the movie and I cried. It's one of my top 10 favorite movies now. However, anytime I recommend it to my male (or even female) friends they all snicker and make fun of me.
At first I was like "Alright, alright, I know it was funny back then when it came out because we were all in middle-school or whatever, but you all really should give it a try" and they flat out refused. I was frankly shocked by this.
Later on I recommended it to my best friend in text, because we are always recommending films back and fourth, and he straight up didn't reply when I brought up brokeback mountain.
Just now I searched "brokeback mountain" on reddit and like 90% of the posts were on LGBT subreddits like r/gaybros and other such subs.
Is this really that big of a deal?? I was genuinely recommending the film purely on it's cinematic and emotional quality, and advocating for LGBT isn't really my intent (not that that's a bad thing). To me it's just a great film that features gay men, but apparently a lot of people don't see it that way, even today?
Genuinely confused here.