History of Gay Cowboys

[rightstar]

Check out this very informative essay by the author of The Front Runner. There are also links in the article to other fascinating articles about the issues Brokeback raises so beautifully.

http://www.outsports.com/history/gaycowboys.htm

[BBMGrandma]

thanks for this article....Rightstar.  It's a real eye-opener and SO very interesting. 
I'm forwarding this to a few of my "John Wayne as the symbol of the American Cowboy" friends!! 
This should open their eyes....big time!! 

And btw...I wonder if the tales are true...that John Wayne was the most bigoted of the many
stars of that era?   

Nancy 

[Phillip Dampier]

thanks for this article....Rightstar.  It's a real eye-opener and SO very interesting. 
I'm forwarding this to a few of my "John Wayne as the symbol of the American Cowboy" friends!! 

It's another example of Hollywood defining Americana and getting it wrong.  The cowboy myth is a Hollywood invention anyway.  Most cowboys were dirt poor black and Latino people who got the lousy and lonely job of being one.  People were bound to be upset by it.  I'm sure if it was Brokeback Construction, we'd be getting the same thing. 

[iristarr]

What a fascinating article -- I learned so much here -- thanks for posting this.

[DecaturTxCowboy]

Most cowboys were dirt poor black and Latino people who got the lousy and lonely job of being one.  People were bound to be upset by it.

Cowboys hate sheep and sheep herders, especially in Wyoming.

Sheep destroy the grazing lands. In Wyoming in particular in the later part of the 1800s, in just one year the sheep population under 10,000 to over a million and a half. The impact on cattle raising was devastating. Eventually, sheep herding proved to be more profitable as sheep wool was a renewable resources, beef cattle wasn't.

In Zane Grey's novel "The Last Man" he wrote about about the sheep and cattle war in Arizona and how the sheep over grazed the land.

  Presently his keen nostrils were assailed by a smell of sheep, and soon he rode into a broad sheep trail.
  From the tracks Jean calculated that the sheep had passed there the day before.

  An unreasonable antipathy seemed born in him. To be sure he had been prepared to dislike sheep, and
  that was why he was unreasonable. But on the other hand this band of sheep had left a broad bare swath,
  weedless, grassless, flowerless, in their wake.

  Where sheep grazed they destroyed.

  That was what  Jean had against them.


From a report from Western Range Association last year, "In the list of jobs immigrants perform that no U.S. citizen wants, sheep herding must rank near the top. The 825 or so sheepherders who work the nation's sheep farms -- mostly in California, Texas and Wyoming -- are immigrants here on H-2A visas from Peru, Chile, Bolivia and Mexico"

My take on it is....
Both jobs, sheep herding and cattle ranching aren't easy (Porta-Potty companies don't use 4WD trucks), but at least with sheep...you don't need a John Deere tractor, leather straps and ropes to help with the birthing of a ewe.

Wyoming..."Where the cowboys are men and the sheep are scared"

[TJ]

This is a copy of what one of my groups' members posted yesterday. It is a gay men only group.

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/WildWestHistory_GayMen The title of the group is "Gays in The N. AMERICAN Wilderness."

Howdy y'all--

I wanted to bring the group's attention to a most interesting book I
purchased recently, whose topic is most germane to our group's
concerns. The book, written by Chris Packard, is called 'Queer
Cowboys: And Other Erotic Male Friendships in Nineteenth-Century
American Literature' (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).

The author (who obtained a 2001 fellowship at The University of
Texas at Austin, conducting a significant portion of research at the
Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center there) is particularly
interested in how cowboys were portrayed in late nineteenth-century
literature, noting that cowboy stories were by far the most popular
Western-themed publications of the era, and looks to these written
artifacts for important clues in how male-male relations on the
frontier were developed and sustained. There is no question that
close emotional bonds between these men were very common, and in
fact were often the primary relationships in many of these men's
lives. And physical intimacy between males definitely existed at
this time, one of the author's most salient documents being a 1901
memoir penned by a rural Missouri lad who made his adult home in St.
Louis (still considered at that time as the 'Gateway to the West'),
who in his passionately infused but never vulgar prose, leaves
little to the imagination.

One of the most delightful features of Packard's book is the
generous selection of apposite illustrations, such as one evocative
image of a group of Kansas cowboys taking a dip in a local
waterhole. Another curious photograph features an all-male band
providing music for two men (one wearing an apron) dancing together
in the middle of a room, while a woman holding a baby stands to the
side and watches. And two lovely photos each depict two gently
weathered Western fellows posing together, one duo standing before a
rural tavern with their horses beside them, while another sit with
ease on a grassy field, a horse to either side of them.

An intriguing, rewarding glimpse into an aspect of the cowboy story
that has been too long neglected and willfully overlooked. Well
worth seeking out.

Happy trails (and reading) to you all,
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