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After reading an article last September that mentioned the story's final scene where Ennis has Jack's shirt tucked inside his own, Dave couldn't wait any longer to read the story. (He hadn't wanted to ruin the movie by reading the story first.) “It broke my heart,” he says of the story's effect on him. “And that was when I realized it might actually be a work of art.” He emailed friends about the movie and started posting all the news about the movie he could find.

Even at that early stage, more than a month before the movie's release, he suspected it might become a cultural phenomenon. “I was secretly hoping it might make a $100 million dollars and win a bunch of Oscars. That was the high end of my expectations, but I truly thought it was possible. I even thought it might be the biggest thing to happen to the gay movement since Ellen.”

Dave knew the first time he saw the trailer online that his hunch about the movie's potential impact was going to come true. “I had eight friends stop by one night before we were going out and I told them they had to see the trailer. And they were like ‘What? Why?' Then as soon as they saw it, they just gaped like little children. They were stunned and had to know when the movie was coming out.”

There was one line in the trailer that particularly stuck with Dave: “There are lies we have to tell.” He recounts how it struck him as something very true for gay men who spend so much of their lives telling lies one way or the other, whether by staying closeted or just being afraid to hold a boyfriend's hand.

Shortly after the trailer's release, he decided to do a little site about the movie. “I wanted to do something to help the movie. I wanted to get people interested,” he says. He eventually added a comments thread to his blog posts that allowed for 150 comments. “It took about a week to fill up the first one,” says Dave. Not long after, they were up to 56 threads and new ones had to be started five or six times a day. Some folks finally volunteered to moderate the threads and soon they were pushing Dave to set up a full-fledged discussion board.

What does he think of the movie itself? “I love it,” he says. “I thought it was amazing what Ang, Larry, Diana, and the actors managed to do.”

With the help of volunteers, Dave's site—The Ultimate Brokeback Guide —went live on Christmas Eve. By New Year's Day, the site had 230,000 cumulative hits and the Brokeaholics were born. The site now numbers 900 registered users, and the average day yields 70,000+ page views, 5,000 visitors, and 850 posts. “Impressive growth for three weeks and little more than Internet word of mouth,” says Greg Smith, one of Dave 's chief helpers. “And we're still trending upward.” The most active member has nearly 1000 posts, while Dave himself is nearing 700.

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