There is a moment in the film Brokeback Mountain (2005, dir. Ang Lee) when the cowboy Ennis seeks out the smell, the scent, the presence – in sorrow – of his lover Jack, who was beaten to death by homophobe rednecks earlier in the film. Ennis finds a worn denim work shirt, stained with Jack’s blood on the cuff, hanging in the wardrobe at Jack’s parent’s home. The parents, waiting downstairs, silently acknowledge their son’s illicit love and the grief of his lover. The love caught here in the fabric of a denim shirt is indescribable in its poignancy, its sense of loss, its use of a simple shirt as a device for human suffering of immeasurable scale.

Death and desire couple on cloth, creating a lexicon of erotic intimacy and masculine mourning. This paper explores this lexicon through three cloths: Jack’s shirt, the shirt in which Irish Easter Rising patriot, James Connolly, was shot, and the homo-erotic symbolism of the non-shirt shit-impregnated blankets of Northern Irish Hunger Striker, Bobby Sands.