Cowboy Wrangler: A Dozen Years after His Queer Hit the Wedding Banquet, Director Ang Lee Finds Comfort in Taking on Another Pioneering Gay Love Story, the Long-Awaited Brokeback Mountain

"A cowboy is always homoerotic for the gay community, right?" asks director Ang Lee asks rhetorically, with his characteristically naive inflection. "Like the Chinese martial arts heroes in the East. The thing about Westerns is that there's a lot of homo subtext."

The soft-featured Taiwanese-born filmmaker--who garnered the top prize at this year's Venice Film Festival for Brokeback Mountain, as he had 10 years earlier at Berlin for his immensely successful coming-out feature The Wedding Banquet (homo subjects serve him well)--is justifiably at ease chatting about gay issues in the vernacular. "People say I twisted the Western genre in Brokeback. I think I untwisted it."

Adapted by Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana from Annie Proulx's short story, first published in The New Yorker eight years ago, Brokeback Mountain chronicles the secret love affair between two handsome virile cowboys. [See the review on page 81.] Quietly seething Wyoming native Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) and extroverted Texan Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) begin the movie as cowpokes hired for the summer of 1963 to tend a herd of sheep in virtual …