I don't think the film is about queerness. I think it's about the distance between same-sex attraction and same-sex love (is that queerness?) as a way of life, or as Foucault would say, a mode of filiation. On a larger scale, it seems to me to be about fidelity, and what that means.
And Jack isn't in agony because he's gay--or desires to be gay. He's tortured because he's in love with Ennis, who doesn't know what he wants.
> Also, in my article I point out a key moment -- the transition from the
> two shepherds having sex to the sheep killed by a coyote -- a consequence
> where queer sex leads to gory death -- as if nature itself were in
> revulsion of what had happened in that tent.
Actually, I read this in the opposite way. The film casts that moment not as a judgement from nature, but as a judgement from the petty capitalist, who separated the boys as he separated the sheep from the coyotes and the wolves. The coyote killing the sheep is an emblem of nature taking it's course, which the farmer wants to prevent as much as he wants to prevent Ennis and Jack from being together. If anything, the film represents Ennis and Jack as fully natural, in that sense.
> As for the hermetically sealed world -- there were gay bars in that part
> of the country in the '60's. And Jack knows enough to go to Mexico to get
> laid (note how he and his trick walk into inky blackness -- another
> imagistic clue pointing to homosexuality's unnaturalness).
I confess I don't get how inky blackness is a sign of unnaturalness. I also didn't get that the film had anything to say about what's natural or not, really.
As for the hermetically sealed world, I guess I have two responses. First, when I lived in Alabama just 6 years ago--a far cry from Wyoming in the 60s-- I met dozens of young "straight" boys and married men who knew of depraved places like Birmingham and Altanta that had gay bars, but who were as afraid as Ennis of traversing the social space to become "gay." The hermetic seal on Wyoming in the film seemed utterly plausible, in that sense.
Second, I'm not sure what political or aesthetic imperative is served by suggesting that Lee has to have some character that knows how to be properly (or evidently properly) gay at the historical moment represented by the film for the film to be good.
Christian