Daniel Mendelsohn's review of Brokeback Mountain is the best I've read so far. It cuts through an awful lot of baloney about the movie. The review in full is here.
If you've not seen the movie, be aware that Mendelsohn's review has several spoilers; so, consider bookmarking it or printing it out now and reading it after you've seen the movie.
From the review (no serious spoilers below) -
Because I am as admiring as almost everyone else of the film's many excellences, it seems to me necessary to counter this special emphasis in the way the film is being promoted and received.
. . . . .
The tragedy of heterosexual lovers from different religious or ethnic groups is, essentially, a social tragedy [in which] lovers, however star-crossed, never despise themselves. As Brokeback makes so eloquently clear, the tragedy of gay lovers like Ennis and Jack is only secondarily a social tragedy. Their tragedy, which starts well before the lovers ever meet, is primarily a psychological tragedy, a tragedy of psyches scarred from the very first stirrings of an erotic desire which the world around them . . . represents as unhealthy, hateful, and deadly.Romeo and Juliet (and we) may hate the outside world, the Capulets and Montagues, may hate Verona; but because they learn to hate homosexuality so early on, young people with homosexual impulses more often than not grow up hating themselves: they believe that there's something wrong with themselves long before they can understand that there's something wrong with society.
