A decent, boilerplate, right-down-the-middle piece about the social legacy of Brokeback Mountain by USA Today‘s Scott Bowles (with help from Anthony Breznican). Many celebrity quotes, same old territory. But at the end of the piece along comes Judy Shepard, mother of the murdered gay martyr Matthew Shepard, telling Bowles that her son “gave her a copy” of the Annie Proulx short story that inspired the film. “She doubts the movie will have an immediate effect on gay rights ‘because some people are ashamed to go see it,'” Bowles writes, quoting Shepard. “‘Even some of my friends — my friends — say it’s just a gay cowboy movie and are afraid of something like that.’ But when people can rent it privately, ‘I think they’ll see it how I see it: as a story that’s trying to say that you can’t help who you fall in love with. If it opens just a few eyes to that, then it’s done a good thing.'”