It's a bit silly to mourn someone you never met, but it happens sometimes. I was deeply saddened by the news of Heath Ledger's passing. After I have spent an hour reading obituaries, I realize I'm not alone feeling this way. Joey DiGuglielmo of Washington Blade expresses it well when he writes about the special affection many gay men have for Ledger after his outstanding performance in "Brokeback Mountain". To many of us, the film meant something more. Even though there are quite a few of us around, no films are made with main characters in same-sex relationships. This is, of course, a result of religious hatred towards homosexuals and the Hollywood producers' fear of scaring off the wider audience. If there is a gay guy in a mainstream film, he's most often an odd and effeminate man lacking all heroic qualities.

However, not only gay men remember Ledger for "Brokeback Mountain". From the New York Times:

The defining performance of Heath Ledger's tragically foreshortened career—more or less equivalent to what Jim Stark in "Rebel Without a Cause" was for James Dean—will surely be the role of Ennis Del Mar in "Brokeback Mountain."

A portrait of inarticulate love and thwarted desire, Ennis is a rich, complicated character succinctly sketched in Annie Proulx's original short story and brought to heartbreaking life by the film's screenwriters, Diana Ossana and Larry McMurtry, by its director, Ang Lee, and above all by Mr. Ledger himself.

Outwardly, Ennis presents a familiar image of rough-hewn western masculinity, and the longing that surges under his taciturn demeanor does not so much contradict this image as help to explain it. Ennis's love for Jack Twist, whom he meets tending sheep on a Wyoming mountaintop in the early 1960s, takes Ennis by surprise and throws him permanently off balance. His lifelong silence, the film suggests, is less a sign of strength than of cowardice, a crippling inability to acknowledge or communicate the truth of his own feelings.

What made the performance so remarkable was that Mr. Ledger, without betraying Ennis's dignity or his reserve, was nonetheless able to convey that truth to the audience. This kind of sensitivity—the ability to signal an inner emotional state without overtly showing it—is what distinguishes great screen acting from movie-star posing. And while Mr. Ledger was handsome enough, and famous enough, to be called a movie star, he was serious enough, and smart enough, to be suspicious of deploying his charisma too easily or cheaply.

I second every word.

If you are in the mood for it, British newspapers The Times and the Telegraph has moving obituaries.