Ask one of the locals like Julie Greer how they feel in rural Wyoming about "Brokeback Mountain," the gay-cowboy movie, and you don't have to wait long to get a reaction.

"Yeah, we're offended!" she shoots back. "Because they called those sheepherders cowboys."

It doesn't get any worse than that. But a close second is to call a cowboy gay. Not that there's anything wrong with that (as Seinfeld says). Well, actually, they think there is, and they don't care if city slickers like it or not. If you want to see a cowboy get out of his saddle in a nanosecond, ask him if he is dating the guy on the next horse.

"People are offended that nothing is sacred anymore," says Greer, who works at the Hyattville post office. "People are talking about it. They won't go to the theater to see it."

You knew this movie wouldn't go over big in the Broken Back Mountain area of Wyoming, where the same families have worked the range for more than 100 years. "Almost everyone on the crick has been here for at least a couple of generations," says rancher Maurice Bush, whose grandfather arrived here in 1898.

They are salt-of-the-earth people. They live quietly. They see more cattle than people. They scratch out a living in hard-bitten country. They are blue collar and Republican, and they mind their own business.

So when "Brokeback Mountain" hit movie theaters around the United States, they wondered exactly how they got dragged into this thing.

"I didn't even know what the movie was about," says Bush. "When someone told me, I thought, 'Where the devil did they get an idea like that?' That's pretty much been the reaction of everyone up here."

If you haven't heard, "Brokeback Mountain" is about two gay cowboys. It's set in Wyoming, apparently near Brokeback Mountain, although the real place is called Broken Back Mountain, located in the Big Horn Mountains in north-central Wyoming. The nearest town is Ten Sleep (Pop. 340), which was settled in 1882 by cattle and sheep ranchers. Before that, it was a favorite destination of two Indian tribes that visited the place annually to make arrowheads. It took them 10 sleeps — or 10 nights — to get to the region.

This is home to cowboys. Not the kind who just wear the hats, like country-western singers but men who actually sit in a saddle. They are a long way from political correctness and gay politics out here.

"The story could be set in some fictional place, but it wasn't," says Ten Sleep native Bob Wood. "They made it personal. They plopped it down in a specific place. People in a small town take a lot of pride in who they are, and that's not who they are. This isn't New York. And then set it in 1963, right? In 1963, they'd make fun of a man if he wore shorts."