if you can’t fix it you’ve gotta stand it

Eli Clare’s dilemma of queer identity existing in rural spaces is a topic that Annie Proulx’s Brokeback Mountain addresses. Although Jack and Ennis both deny the label of “queer” as well as any other word that encompasses an identity other than heterosexual, they both undoubtedly are – queer, that is. Their rejection of the word comes from their fear of naming what’s between them. As Jack says, “Nobody’s business but ours” (Proulx 15). Clare’s statement that he couldn’t “live easily and happily that isolated from queer community” (Clare 34) doesn’t apply to Jack and Ennis because they aren’t aware that such a community exists. They never mention outright what they talk about when they talk about it (which is not often), but they do eventually acknowledge that there is something between them: “‘Shit. I been lookin at people on the street. This happen a other people? What the hell do they do?’ ‘It don’t happen in Wyomin and if it does I don’t know what they do, maybe go to Denver,’ said Jack…This ain’t no little thing that’s happenin here’” (Proulx 30). Even if they have an inkling that things might be easier somewhere else, they both won’t consider the thought of moving together. At least Ennis doesn’t, because even as he is admitting his attachment to Jack in the only way he can, he accepts it as a fact of rural life: “I goddamn hate it that you’re goin a drive away in the mornin and I’m going back to work. But if you can’t fix it you got a stand it” (Proulx 30). This sentiment is echoed at the end of the story when Ennis is reflecting on their relationship after dreaming about Jack. He says there’s “open space between what he knew and what he tried to believe” (Proulx 55). I think Ennis’s use of the term “open space” refers to both his internal understanding of what they had and also to the open space of Brokeback mountain. They never go back to the mountain, and part of their belief is that they can only exist together in peace on that mountain. Jack wants to build a life with Ennis even if he doesn’t understand how it could work, while Ennis doesn’t see how they can “fix” what’s between them or how other people may react to it, so he just “stands” it. So instead of the rural and the metropolitan identities of queer people mixing, it’s the rurality of Jack and Ennis’s relationship that allows them the freedom to be together but also is made dangerous by other people.