Brokeback Mountain was not the first Wyoming story about homophobia in that state.
I read
Native by William Haywood Henderson.
http://www.williamhaywoodhenderson.com/contentNovels.html Native Blue Parker is a twenty-three-year-old ranch foreman in a Wyoming mountain town, high in a valley between the Wind River Range and the Absarokas. He treasures the immense solitude on the mountains, yet he begins to yearn for the love of a kindred spirit. When he hires a new ranch hand, Sam, his longing seems about to be fulfilled. But then Gilbert, a Native American from the nearby reservation, passes through town and dances his way among the men, drawing Blue and Sam into his struggles to reclaim ancient customs that have been subverted or destroyed. With a sure sense of place and a keen sensitivity to the unspoken yet unbearable tensions that shape its characters, this superb debut novel offers a subtle portrait of three men caught between past and present, in a majestic landscape that transcends both loneliness and love.
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?z=y&isbn=0452271398&itm=2 ANNOTATION
Set in the contemporary West of ranchhands and drifters, this startlingly original novel tells the story of a man trapped between his own deepest desires and the demands of a strict society where love between men is the ultimate transsgression. "Finely wrought."--The Village Voice.
FROM THE PUBLISHER
Only once in a great while does an author create a story so startlingly distinctive that the readers perceptions are forever changed. In Native, through fluent narration and honest emotion, William Haywood Henderson brings vivid life to the contemporary West of ranchhands and drifters. In a Wyoming mountain valley between the Wind River Range and the Absarokas, pickup trucks crowd the curb outside the only bar in town, couples dance the two-step, and cowboys ride up through the badlands to check on the herd in its high-country grazing. In this isolated, tightly knit community, which is often barren and violent, comradeship among men is vital to survival, but love between men is the ultimate transgression. Blue Parker, a twenty-three-year-old ranch foreman, has spent most of his life in this town. He is a classic cowboy, careful and reserved, living deep within the myth of the Old West. He treasures the immense solitude of the mountains, yet he begins to yearn for the love of a kindred spirit. When he hires a new ranchhand, Sam, his longing seems about to be fulfilled. But then Gilbert, a Native American from the nearby reservation, passes through town and dances his way among the men. Gilbert fancies himself a modern-day berdache, a man neither male nor female, who traditionally would have held a place of honor in his tribe. An ambiguous and painful figure, he draws Blue and Sam into his struggles to reclaim ancient customs that have been subverted or destroyed. With a sure sense of place and a keen sensitivity to the unspoken yet unbearable tensions that shape its characters, this superb debut offers a subtle portrait of three men caught between past and present, in a majestic landscape that transcends both loneliness and love.
FROM THE CRITICS
Publishers Weekly
Although it draws impressively from the rugged power of its contemporary Wyoming setting, short story writer Henderson's first novel, a gay coming-out and coming-of-age tale, is a bit too studied to succeed completely. At the center of the book stands narrator Blue Parker, a promising 23-year-old ranch foreman who finds himself torn by the conflicting demands of professional duty, his attraction for a subordinate and his respect for a mysterious Native American. Gilbert is a berdache , a relic of an Indian tradition of cross-dressing men who possess magical powers; he functions in the novel primarily as a catalyst and symbol rather than as a fully drawn character. Gilbert's presence alerts Blue to his true feelings toward Sam, the third person in the triangle, and the Indian's return in the novel's final movement draws together all the plot threads in an uneasy climax. Henderson ambitiously blends present, flashback and fantasy in his narrative; he displays a sure feeling for the stark, often dangerous beauty of the American West, and astutely depicts the tensions in a masculine society that fears men who love each other. But as Blue's life unravels in the book's final third, the narrative drive gets lost in a welter of fantasies and memories. ( Mar. )
Library Journal
Set in the mountainous and remote Wind River country of Wyoming, this contemporary coming-of-age novel explores gay sexual mores in the conservative, small-town American West. Although women find him attractive, narrator and ranch foreman Blue Parker leads a lonely, sexually unfulfilled life. His need for the love of another man triggers Blue's attempt to enter the forbidden world of his true feelings. Two men are central to Blue's growing awareness: Sam, a boyishly handsome hired hand, and Gilbert, a Native American berdache (a man who takes on the dress and roles of a woman) possessed of magical powers. Barroom brawls, mental anguish, and confused childhood memories all play a crucial role in a narrative distinguished by excellent place descriptions and good character development. A fine first novel.-- James B. Hemesath, Adams State Coll. Lib., Alamosa, Col.
Native was published in 1994.
Annie Proulx did make a comment about one of Henderson's novels and you can find it on his web site link below.
http://www.williamhaywoodhenderson.com/contentNovels.html Quote:
Novelist William Haywood Henderson has won acclaim for his remarkable depictions of land and nature and his ability to bring the American West to vivid life. Of his most recent novel, The Rest of the Earth,Annie Proulx remarked Quote:
“William Henderson writes some of the most evocative and transcendently beautiful prose in contemporary American literature. The Rest of the Earth is a work of art more like a series of paintings than the traditional novel. The high and remote Wyoming landscape—obdurate, dangerous, violently beautiful—is the great presence in it. Against slant rock and the long view we catch sight of a drift of characters whose lives brush against each other, blow away like smoke.”
