Before Brokeback Mountain, there was Making Love.

The 1982 feature film was the very first studio movie to present a positive take on being gay. Starring former Charlie's Angel Kate Jackson, LA Law's Harry Hamlin, and a breathtakingly handsome actor named Michael Ontkean, it is the story of a young doctor finally coming to terms with his homosexuality. According to one poster for the movie:

“After eight years of marriage, Claire had everything, a loving husband and an exciting career. Suddenly, Claire's whole world is threatened when she learns that her husband is involved in a love affair, but not with another woman."

The popular and critical response to the film was mixed (though it was nowhere near the bomb it has sometimes been made it out to be). But I happened to catch a late-night showing a few months ago, and I was struck by how thoughtful and accessible the movie is. If there was ever a movie released before its time, this is it--a fact that may be rectified by the film's release on DVD this month.

I decided to contact Barry Sandler, the openly gay screenwriter of the film, to get his take on Brokeback Mountain, and on how the world has changed since the release of his film twenty-four years ago. He turned out to be as thoughtful and accessible as the movie he wrote.

AfterElton.com: So everyone must want to know what you think of Brokeback Mountain.
Barry Sandler: Well, I'd been getting calls from people who wanted to know my take on it, but it hadn't opened here yet. So I asked Focus Features for a copy, and I saw it by myself at the screening room here on campus [where I teach]. And I was just a wreck.

AE: It stays with you, doesn't it?
BS: Yes! And the ending is so haunting. I know some have said it's a retro view of gays. I'm the first one to be sensitive about gay images on film. The whole point of The Celluloid Closet [a documentary in which Sander provided commentary] is that we've come far from that. We had a hundred years of negative stereotyping, where gay people were the butt of jokes, or suicidal, or desperate, or killers, or victims. It had such a deleterious effect on gay people. With Making Love, we tried to counteract that. Since then, I've been very conscious, probably overly conscious, of how gay people are portrayed in film.

So along comes Brokeback Mountain. And okay, neither of the characters ends up happy. But my feeling is that the movie transcends that.

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