From the issue dated January 13, 2006 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 two ranch hands. She was correct. At the time, however, I wasn't entirely sure what to do with the story, which follows the men's affair over 20 years as they marry and have children yet struggle to maintain their intimate attachment to one another. "Brokeback Mountain" is, after all, a product of Proulx's exquisite literary imagination, not to mention the late 20th century; as such its value as a "historical document" seemed negligible to me on first blush. Nine years later, with the release of Ang Lee's movie of Brokeback Mountain, my opinion has changed somewhat. Rural space may be queer America's final frontier, and Lee's film, which promises to do very well come Oscar time, will almost certainly be remembered as doing for queer country folk what Philadelphia did for the HIV positive. What that is, precisely, and whether it's an altogether good thing, remains somewhat unclear. What seems obvious, though, is that Brokeback Mountain and the phenomenal interest it has generated are magnificently suggestive pieces of evidence about the history of the present. What they demonstrate, I think, is a pressing desire on the part of lesbians and gay men today to see themselves in places that have felt conceptually off limits to many for several decades. Especially in the wake of Matthew Shepard's brutal murder in 1998 in Laramie, Wyo., but also in light of the poignant sadness at the core of other queer landscape films like My Own Private Idaho (1991) and Boys Don't Cry (1999), the kind of big-sky rural vistas that Lee captures quite superbly on screen have tended to engender feelings of exposure and vulnerability in lesbians and gay men more than freedom and openness, two symptoms of affective privilege that heterosexual Americans have traditionally felt in connection to the great outdoors though rarely regarded as privilege per se.