Los Angeles 09.03.2009

The Hill Becomes A Mountain

Cherished memorabilia finds a home at a hillside museum

September is no longer known in L.GAY as the patron “Month of Recovering from Labor Day Weekend at the Mayan.” Nope, it’s official – the City of Los Angeles has rechristened September the “Month of Revisiting Celebrated Gay Pop Culture Memes from the Early-to-Mid-00’s.” It’s a mouthful, but hey, we like those.

As you know, there are three quarters of Will & Grace taking to our city’s various stages (which we mentioned earlier this week) begging us to party like it’s 2005 all over again, and then there’s the addition of two shirts from Brokeback Mountain into the Autry’s Contemporary Westerns exhibit.

The shirts, one denim, one cowboy, each worn by Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger in the film, are layered together, intertwined in symbolic reverence for the trailblazing which Brokeback accomplished. While the film’s more literal forms of intertwining blazed the area below our happy trails, the Western shirts donned and grieved upon by its characters have become “the ruby slippers of our time,” as noted by memorabilia collector Tom Gregory.

Now that straw hats and shit-kickers have rested in our closets next to our gag balls and spandex singlets for years, our fetish for cowboys has been solidified. Thankfully, we won’t have blue balls from this small but meaningful sliver of gay cowboy life; to keep us lassoed through fall, the museum is arranging a paneled discussion in October on what it means to be gay in the West.

Until then, marvel at the only place in Southern California you can find gays not uttering a single bitchy criticism about a faded denim shirt and a dusty, wrinkled plaid.

Brokeback Mountain wardrobe on display at Autry National Center through August 2010
4700 Western Heritage Way, LA (near the LA Zoo)
www.autrynationalcenter.org

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