Brokeback Mountain was lauded as a landmark in LGBT cinema and credited for influencing several films and television shows featuring LGBT themes and characters.[143][144] In Out at the Movies, Steven Paul Davies explains that as a result of the film's success, "most major film studios have been clamouring to get behind new, gay-themed projects... thanks to Brokeback, film financiers will continue to back scripts that don't simply rely on gay stereotypes...and that will certainly be progress." Davies cites Milk, Transamerica, and I Love You Phillip Morris as examples of such films.[145] In 2018, Brokeback Mountain was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".[146]
The pair of shirts worn by Ledger's and Gyllenhaal's characters were sold on eBay on February 20, 2006, for US$101,100.51. The shirts were sold to benefit children's charity Variety.[147] The buyer, Tom Gregory, film historian and collector, described the shirts as "the ruby slippers of our time", referring to an artifact from The Wizard of Oz film.[148] In 2009, Gregory loaned the shirts to the Autry National Center in Los Angeles for its series, Out West, which explored the history of homosexual, bisexual and transgender people in the Old West. The series included a gallery tour, panel discussions, lectures and performances, with events held in four installments over the course of 12 months. According to the Autry, the series was the "first of its kind" for a western heritage museum.[149]
A book, Beyond Brokeback: The Impact of a Film (2007) is a collection of personal stories of how people were influenced by the story and film, compiled from members of the Ultimate Brokeback Forum website. In an associated Out West series program, the Autry screened Brokeback Mountain in December 2010 to commemorate the film's fifth anniversary and held a staged reading of Beyond Brokeback by historian and Out West organizer Gregory Hinton. Beyond Brokeback has been presented as a staged reading at other venues, such as Roosevelt University in Chicago, on November 13, 2011, together with a panel discussion and screening of the film.[150] An American opera, Brokeback Mountain, was composed by Charles Wuorinen with a libretto by Annie Proulx. Written in English, it premiered at the Teatro Real in Madrid on January 28, 2014. It was championed by impresario Gerard Mortier, who had commissioned it.[151][152] A play, based on Annie Proulx's short story, written by Ashley Robinson with songs by Dan Gillespie Sells, will open on 10 May 2023 at @sohoplace in London's West End.[153]
Several years after the film's release, Proulx said she regrets writing the story. She said that people have sent her too much fan fiction presenting alternative plots.[154] Some authors, mostly men claiming to "understand men better than I do", often send their works.[154][155] She said:
[The film] is the source of constant irritation in my private life. There are countless people out there who think the story is open range to explore their fantasies and to correct what they see as an unbearably disappointing story [...] They constantly send ghastly manuscripts and pornish rewrites of the story to me, expecting me to reply with praise and applause for "fixing" the story. They certainly don't get the message that if you can't fix it you've got to stand it. Most of these "fix-it" tales have the character Ennis finding a husky boyfriend and living happily ever after, or discovering the character Jack is not really dead after all, or having the two men's children meet and marry, etc., etc.[155]
