Rural Space: Queer America's Final Frontier

By COLIN R. JOHNSON

Almost 10 years ago, during my second year in graduate school, someone passed along a copy of a curious short story, entitled "Brokeback Mountain," that had recently appeared in The New Yorker. Because this person knew that I planned to write a dissertation about the history of nonmetropolitan sexualities in the United States, she understandably assumed that I would be interested in Annie Proulx's elegantly worded narrative about an emotionally and erotically passionate relationship between