Interesting response and background, TJ. I can understand and/or accept most of what U wrote except that Mrs. Twist could not know that her son Jack was Gay -- and he was and she knew it -- and then consider his boyfriend as "not Gay". 
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Will
In the strictest sense of the word and what I know from my own experiences and from real people from the country and rural areas in the Central states of the USA and the gays whom I have met since I left the closet more than 22 years ago (I did live in the North Hollywood section of Los Angeles for almost 8 years - 1984--1992), I would say that Jack's parents would have only thought that Ennis had been Jack's best friend but not his boyfriend. As remote and isolated as the Twist ranch was at Lightning Flat in Crook County in the
extreme NE corner of Wyoming, they might not have even known if any of their acquaintances or neighbors were even homosexual when they actually were.
In January 1992, before I moved back to Tulsa, I stayed with my friend, Richard, in Panorama City in the San Fernando Valley for 3 weeks. During one of those weeks, Richard's mother came for a visit from Amery, MA. While she knew that Richard was openly gay, she never knew that I was. While I slept in Richard's bedroom, I did not sleep in his bed. Richard had not lied about me when he had told his mother, his sister and his brother back in his home town about me to them. He just did not tell them things which they did no have a need to know. He told them in around April 1991 that he had become friends with a born-again Christian and he attended morning worship services with him on Sundays at the First Assembly of God in North Hollywood. I lived half a mile from the church and Richard rode the bus to there.
Because I was involved in a sort of "bar ministry" while being a member of the Spiritual Advisory Committee of AIDS Project Los Angeles (APLA) as an independent Pentecostal evangelist, Richard's mother only assumed that I had not gone to the same club that Richard had on the Friday night she was visiting and when she guessed that we just both happened to be on the same bus going home, Richard and I just let her believe that part to be true. I did not have to lie about my ministry; because I did visit with guys whom I knew had HIV/AIDS at the club (even though some of them did not even know I was a volunteer with APLA where they were clients - but, they knew my late partner, Ed, got services from APLA before he died on March 2, 1991).
The last time that I talked to Richard's sister on the phone was about 4 years ago. From what I could tell by the way she talked, she still did not have a clue about my sexual orientation. Their mother, who was also Pentecostal, had gone on to be with the Lord. But, before I left Richard's in January 1992, she had asked me to inquire about Richard's relationship with the Christ. I did visit with him where he just volunteered information and he did assure me that he was saved and prayed, too. Richard took a day off from work to spend a special day with me and we went to a local park to enjoy the warm sunshine. I talked to her before I left town and told her how I knew he was also born-again.
