“We loved each other in the way men do
And never spoke about it, Al and me,
But we both knowed, and knowin' it so true
Was more than any woman’s kiss could be…
I wait to hear him ridin' up behind
And feel his knee rub mine the good old way."
by Badger C. Clark originally published in 1915 in the collection Sun and Saddle Leather
Integral to the self-made, democratic, and unpretentious identity of the American mythos is the image of the rugged cowboy and his habit of the old west. His endeavors, chronicled in every facet of American media of the past two centuries, depict the unparalleled playground of unchecked masculinity that was the “Wild West”. However, the narrative crafted around the West and the omission of the queer subtext of working class male life in this space offers a deeper commentary on contemporary American society than it does the lives of the cattle handlers it claims to chronicle.
The idea of queerness was first introduced into the cowboy narrative in 1997 in a short story entitled “Brokeback Mountain” by American author Annie Proulx and its accompanying 2005 feature film, but the reality of sexually and socially intimate relationships between ranch hands was much more ingrained in the working-class male dominated cultures of the western United States than previously highlighted by historians.
To truly understand the cowboy, one must instead view his version of masculinity as a product of his class. On ranches, cowboys were frequently reminded of their distinction from property-owning cattlemen, who employed cattle hands and profited directly and almost exclusively from the trade of the cattle the cared for. Consequently, ranch hands were denied full “manhood”, thus seeking it out through feats of strength in their ability to perform their work and in their relationships with other men of their socioeconomic class. The disparate masculine expressions of the ranch owners and ranch hands manifested primarily in fundamental roles and expectations, as cattlemen and other capitalists of the frontier had a brand of manhood that emphasized restraint, responsibility, and family legacy, thusly relying on the presence of a female counterpart to develop the familial sphere. Cowboys contrasted this with a preference for fraternity and loyalty, forming lifelong relationships with their trail companion; their “pard’ner” or “compadre”. Trail companions have been documented to frequently have shared bedroll and camps and even move from ranch to ranch seeking work together as a unit. It was not uncommon for trail partners to seek out priests for ritual blessings of their connection to one another in civil union. This practice was commonplace in the cowboy culture with their close relationships additionally being largely normalized in the public eye. Boys who had developed these partnerships were free to express their affections if they continued to work as a hired hand or alternatively develop with adulthood and settle into a heterosexual marriage. Many men stayed in the line of work and maintained their devout and affectionate relationships akin to improvised marriages that involved a well-documented progressive flexibility within gendered relationship roles.
Aside from class, the environment of the cowboy contributed to the normalization of social and sexual homosexual intimacy and gender non-conformity. The population of California alone, prior to the 1849 Gold Rush was 90% male, with western industry requiring working class populations for occupations like mining, cattle herding, ranching, hunting and trapping, or military service, all of which excluded women entirely. The loose societies in which the men of the early west lived in were almost entirely made up of these male workers, thus it was not unusual for same sex relationships and homoerotic behavior to occur. Without the presence of women to fulfill traditional roles, the lines between homosocial from homosexual were increasingly blurred and men could display openly the erotic connections they had with other men. Across the west, there are well documented accounts of community dances in which half of the men danced the part of the ‘woman’, sometimes with patches sewn to the crotches of their pants, wearing aprons, arm bandannas, or even in drag to denote the feminine role. An old Western limerick recounts the overt and common place homoerotic behavior displayed at these socials:
Young cowboys had a great fear
That old studs
once filled with beer
Completely addle’
They’d throw on the saddle
And ride them on the rear.
These events became so ubiquitous that they were known as “ladies fairs” and men were referred to using female pronouns for the duration of the event. This bonding was even more prevalent in the home, where groups of men could be found forming homes together, dividing housework normally left to women. Many men would form partnerships referred to as “bachelor marriages”, sharing beds and homes like traditional heterosexual couples their contemporary.
This being said, it is necessary to complicate accounts of these relationships and communities with cultural understandings in the context of the period. “It’s important to know the history of homosexuality,” notes History Department Chairman Peter Boag from the University of Colorado at Boulder. “Society didn’t really designate people as homosexual or heterosexual through most of the 19th century; it was not really until the 20th century that those identities crystallized.” While the self-identifying vocabulary and broader cultural understanding is not present in this context, partnerships and homosexual intimacy was integral to combating the hardships and loneliness of an incredibly difficult life in the American west.
The queer nature of the west and the subversion of gender roles extends far beyond the boarders of working towns and cowboy culture. Indigenous communities that cattle hands lived in proximity to commonly denoted identities such as two-spirit individuals and had specific roles and rituals for masculine lesbian women who desired not to marry. Many who may have identified as transgender or gender-queer also found refuge in the west, where they could live their lives “un-clocked” until the day they died. Charley Parkhurst of the California Stage Co. is probably the most famous gender-divergent trailblazer in the west. His transition was only discovered after his death, but this remained only a small part of his legacy as he was better known by the community for his taste for good liquor and an itchy trigger finger.
Cowboys were unskilled vagabond workers that often lacked the skills to read and write and their lives were rugged and difficult with few belongings surviving their legacies. While some amount of cowboy poetry and journaling is preserved as primary evidence of cowboy culture, much of their lives were left to be recorded by outsiders like Owen Wister, who crafted the beginnings of the cowboy image that East-coast readers ate up readily. The accounts that followed undermined, if mentioned at all, the relationships and loving bonds shared between men and thus were buried by historians and the homophobic bias.
One of the main factors of homosexual erasure is the way that it “taints” the image of the American folk hero. Queerness presents a dangerous complication to the story Americans tell themselves about their identity as a nation, as the prevalence of “gay cowboys” dismantles ideas of homosexuality and its relationship to masculinity and power. The acceptance of the gay cowboy negates his association with the traditional, with the narrow definition of true American manhood, and with the heteronormative.
The acceptance of the queer cowboy as an icon has acted as a symbol of defiance to the system, adopted by gay subcultures, re-appropriating this image of masculinity and evoking the forgotten homosexual subtext of the cowboy. Today, queer strippers humorously impersonate cowboys and entire rodeo associations have built communities of true queer cowboys. The image and aesthetics of the cowboy has become a masculine trope used for gender expression and bonding in queer communities, explored in Hal Fischer's Gay Semiotics and famed Tom of Finland renderings. In Hollywood and its Italian counterpart, western movies contain a subtext of homoeroticism influenced by the filmmakers, who were often queer identifying themselves, coding their narratives with tales of male bonding, male beauty, and phallic imagery that acted as a covert expression of homosexuality.
So the west endures as a playground of masculinity, but not in the way that history has remembered it. The erasure of the queer cowboy says more about America’s shared masculine insecurities as he redefines the identity of the rugged, hard-working western man.
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