Someone recommended this item from Chron Higher Ed. Don't have online access but I wish I did!
This is a topic that touches close to home for me. I didn't live in Montana, though. It was a college town. Plenty of gay people in the 70s who were out and about or, at least, living in homes together, everyone knew, no one discussed it much. For the younger people, there were gay bars (for the older people to). In fact, when my dad second mortgaged the house to buy a beat up old farmer's bar on the outskirts of town along the railroad tracks, his bar became one of the lesbian bar in town. They hung out there with frat boys who knew my dad, farmers, and guys heading up the hill to a golf course. (It was a college town with a college known for its phys ed dept, so it ws already used to having a large minority of lesbian and bisexual women b/c of the campus). The bars for gay men were much more underground, though.
Didn't seem weird to my kid brain at all. My dad's boss was gay: one of those everyone knows but doesn't say anything. He was head of the advertising dept which was in control of the circulation department of the small town newspaper. Dad made sure the paperboys did their jobs -- or did it for them when they skipped a route.
I'm not saying their wasn't heterosexism and gay bashing or anything but it certainly wasn't that there was nothing available at all. But that was small town upstate NY, not Montana. It's hard to say about Montana.
Anyway, I've long been fascinated with the way "gay community" is synonymous with everything but flyover country -- as if gays only live in cities or something.
This theme was addressed slightly on the second episode of the L Word. And that second episode made me want to hurl. They had to be the snootiest brats I've ever seen. They treated Daniela Sea's character, Moira, like some kind of hick from the sticks, implying that she just didn't understand because she was so inbred backward. Obviously, growing up in flyover country meant that she just didn't know how to be a lesbian and wore the butch shitkickers and butch clothes because, you know, she's really supposed to be a man, not a lesbian!
I'm predicting that the show is going to be The L Word does the C word Working Butch style! (ref to _Working Girl) only without Mike Nichols mocking you at the end for believing in upward mobility.
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.
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v52/i19/19b01501.htm
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