Brokeback Mountain: Our Community's Common Bond > Brokeback Mountain Open Forum
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:
--- Quote from: BBMGrandma on March 10, 2006, 05:23:30 pm ---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!!
--- End quote ---
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:
--- Quote ---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.
--- End quote ---
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"
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