ABSTRACT
The unrelenting evidence of gay shame in the 2010 Clementi case establishes a crucial link to the tragic trajectory of Ennis del Mar, one of the main characters in Annie Proulx's now famous short story, Brokeback Mountain. Ennis is also a figure who is paradoxically hemmed in by a vast expanse of space, in this case the ranges of the Rocky Mountain West, a space that mirrors the open range of the protagonist's epistemological closet. The Clementi case dramatizes the internal and external power of a persistent ideology to control and even eliminate the nonconformists, a power that finds its engine in the peculiar ability of the queer minority. The closet gains its strength through a paradoxical combination of denial of sexual practice and a fabrication of the dire consequences of publicity literally and figuratively. The Lawrence case, which held the Texas sodomy law unconstitutional, overturned ages of legal and religious precedent that subjected gays and lesbians to castration.
