USA. Pine Bluffs, WY. 2016. Matt Hockersmith, a farmer in Pine Bluffs, feeding milk to a sick calf on his family farm. whose parents were raised on Wyoming homesteads, said realizing as a child that he was gay sent him into a crisis. “I had a gun, and at one point I felt I would rather have died than have someone find out. But that’s when the Internet was coming around, and I started researching and meeting people online, and realized, ‘okay I’m not alone, I’m just in a small town,’ and that’s when I started thinking, ‘I just have to go, I just have to leave.’” So he went to New York and lived for a while. “I was so afraid I was going to come back here and just fall over, it’s so vast and empty,” he said. “Then I went to the bluffs one afternoon, and overlooking the farm I was like, holy shit, I live here! New York was good for me like that, to remind me how mystical this place is, you know, my ancestors’ energy is here.” Now being out in Wyoming is fine as long as he’s single. “I met someone 12 miles away, and we hit it off, but I said, ‘look, I’m totally out,’ and he couldn’t handle that. He’s still very much in the closet, so it’s tricky.”