Exploring the Queer History of the Old West... Yeehaw

howdy partner why don't you rest your bones here with me by the fire for a while roast some marshmallows all i have are the mini ones sorry i want to tell you a story that's been forgotten by most for a long long time you see not many out here in the wild wild west think of our history as queer but the truth is the west was always queer much more so than you'd think from radical unapologetic lesbians paving their own path to the brave trans folks looking for freedom to the gay cowboys just searching for love beneath the sands and dry earth lay the stories of lgbtq folks out here waiting to be remembered but while that history is full of love and power for some it's also a legacy of pain struggle and the ramifications of settler colonialism for others well what's new history is and always will be complex and you've got to take all of the nuance to get the full story and do justice by everyone involved and i'd like you to hear it because it's wilder than a bucking bronco come learn with me side note we won't discuss gay cowboy movies in this video but i promise it'll be a near future one but before i take you on this journey let's hear a word from today's sponsor sundance now by the way guys don't worry tutter's here and he's got his little cowboy hat on i've been really searching for new shows lately especially thrillers that combine period drama elements with mystery fantasy and romance you know all the best stuff so i'm so excited that today's sponsor is sundance now because boy have they got some awesome stuff in their library sundance now is an ad-free streaming service filled with loads of amazing shows including prestige dramas international thrillers documentaries and true crime i've been watching the british drama a discovery of witches based on the all souls trilogy by deborah harkness and if you like shows with an interesting mystery fantasy and immaculate dark academia vibes you should definitely check this show out sundance now has a huge number of shows that release weekly from around the world and i wouldn't be able to find anywhere else but they've also got some of my longtime favorites like loving vincent and bombshell i also started watching new gold mountain because it totally fits the video topic and it's great to see a show about the australian gold rush with a diverse cast pulled from the perspective of the chinese miners of course featuring a thrilling murder mystery you can stream sundance now on all your favorite devices for as low as 4.99 a month just download the app via apple and android devices amazon fire tv google chromecast and roku or watch online and discover exclusive shows from around the world instantly to start streaming your next obsession try sundance now for free for 30 days by going to sundancenow.com and using the promo code casro thank you so much to sundance now for sponsoring this video and now let's get back to learning about the queer history of the wild wild west westward expansion in the united states was driven by a very very large number of co-existing forces there were the government-driven acts of manifest destiny aka the belief that the united states was owed all this land from east coast to west coast that it was this country's destiny to take over and tame the wild and savage lands with civilized force yeah a whole hock of [ __ ] part of manifest destiny came in the form of encouraged settlement decades and decades of settlement saw the strategic removal and murder of thousands and thousands of native americans if you go further west out here to what is now the state of california the spanish had already done that work ahead of time the native people of turtle island are not gone despite the best efforts of colonialism and genocide they are very much still alive and trying to preserve their culture i'll be linking resources below where you can learn more and give your support but also this video's adsense revenue from the first week of the video being live will be donated to the first nations development institute which does awesome work in supporting tribal institutions doing native youth outreach supporting native financial empowerment facilitating the preservation of native lands and foods and much much more so as you can imagine long before the cowboy ever became an american icon movement westward was being romanticized and promoted to people on the east coast in a wide variety of ways but some of the time the people going west weren't necessarily going because of family they were going because they had no options left and the massive mining cattle and railroad industries flourishing in the west were the only places they had left to go most cowboys weren't these romantic cis-head white men living a life of horseback freedom which is exactly the image most east coast folks grew to believe even at the height of the old west era in reality they were laborers often black brown and indigenous people formerly incarcerated people gay people they usually had some kind of past that they were running from maybe they were a former enslaved person or had been on the run from the law or had been completely disowned by their community for their sexuality and most of all these laborers were deeply deeply poor the people flourishing in the west more often than not were the livestock kings and railroad owners and mining barons the livestock industry in particular exploded in size and power after the civil war as native people were killed were forcibly removed from their lands to make way for new settlements and cattle lands by the time the 1880s rolled around beef ruled the country and it needed many many more hands to handle it this is where the professional cowboys became an american establishment otherwise called cow punchers drovers buckaroos wranglers or vaqueros these working men were in the same working class category as coal miners or factory workers it's a complicated situation how much freedom is there in a job that pays so little and burns you out but is still better than what you came from because you were running from something as patricia nell warren observed nobody asked questions all that mattered was whether he could be trusted with a horse and a lariat a cow puncher was usually poor he owned his clothes horse gear rope and bed roll maybe a harmonica or a colt 45 but he did have pride in his person his clothes boots and gear were good quality his hat varied in shape a wide spanish brim in sun-fried texas a narrow brim and the windy northern plains but the horses he rode usually belonged to the boss well into the 20th century his wage was 40 dollars a month and bored less if he was black or mexican exceedingly different from the romanticized movie version of the life as free on industrial masculine life promoted at the turn of the century when the old west was on its way into only memory safe to say cowboys did not have an easy job often times it meant wrangling horses or cattle an extremely dangerous task that could get you killed sometimes a horse could be tamed sometimes they continued to be a bucker and only a few talented buckaroos could stay on their backs from this emerged rodeo as a sport and entertainment from the spanish word for roundup it was wildly popular especially after the excitement of buffalo bill cody's shows in the 1880s and provided a way for cowboys to make more money than they ever would at their regular jobs but it was also deadly for both the animals and the writers was that enough to deter people from the sport of course not because for one thing rodeo was a place where marginalized communities were able to come together and form extremely tight bonds and it still is rebecca schofield writes an outrider's rodeo at the fringes of the american west in many ways early rodeo actually reflected to a closer degree the diversity of rural working class life in the west women could bronc ride the rare african-american performer could headline a show and a native american cowboy could be crowned champion to say that these old west societies were not all straight and white is an unbelievable understatement up to 40 percent of cattle workers were black and an incalculable percentage of the rest were mexican i literally cannot overstate enough just how prominent of a population formerly enslaved black people were among cowboys in fact these black cowboys were so good at their jobs that many people grew to believe that they must have some sort of spiritual connection to the line of work the largest population of black cow pokes was in texas where enslaved and free black people were nearly 30 percent of the population in 1860 but though they were good at their jobs it was not made easy on them in fact some of the hardest or most dangerous tasks often got put onto the black cow hands on the team frequently this was because the cattlemen who owned these ranching operations were former enslavers themselves and carried over their antebellum beliefs and habits into the post-civil war era even so black cowboys continued to make powerful reputations west of the mississippi safik women in general had a lot of reasons for wanting to move out west for one thing a sort of staple of the sapphic imagination is the nature-filled escapist rural utopia where women loving women can live in female dominant societies free from men this idea has very long histories and stretches all the way up to the cottage core dream of today of course there's still issues here especially in the american context safic rural settler idealization is still settler idealization but you can see where this whole idea came from for single women right because if there's one thing men have it's the audacity and by god do lesbians sometimes just want to [ __ ] run away and live undisturbed in the woods like baba yaga or like madame zeroni this was even more stark for victorian women who grew up in a world being told that their only place was in the home following certain rules getting married and having children and then being a mother to both your kids and your husband until you die an ambitious woman living eastward could easily see an opportunity for the first time to define her own destiny out west yes it's hard to build from scratch but at least you are building it i need to make it very clear first off that the height of the old west days was before modern sexuality labels existed the way people thought about sexuality was very different from how we think of it today you can check out my videos in my lgbtq history playlist to learn more but essentially sexuality wasn't yet considered to be who you were it was what you did so very frequently people would engage in queer relationships and still consider themselves normal as long as they fit into certain other social expectations most importantly gender presentation and marriage this is part of why the term confirmed bachelor is a queer code phrase for a man to deliberately go his whole life refusing to marry was absolutely considered queer and well due to the circumstances many cowboys ended up becoming confirmed bachelors long-term job commitments far away from any nearby towns for up to several months meant that most male cowboys were going that long without seeing a woman at all there usually weren't women working on ranches in order to prevent conflict and not only that but visiting a brothel in town could land you with an incurable std remember penicillin wasn't a thing yet as a result cowboys frequently linked up with each other to let out sexual frustrations whether they considered themselves queer or not and many cowboys were never in one place for too long they moved from ranch to ranch from mountains to fields constant movement that made it easy for gay cowboys to avoid speculation but at the same time many cowboys ended up forming extremely close partnerships literally akin to marriages spending their lives together starting businesses moving from ranch to ranch in tandem regardless of sexuality this was a fiscally useful thing to do when you only make 40 or less a month you don't make nearly enough to support a wife and children but with another male partner you can stay together on the job and pull both of your incomes maybe enough over the years to buy and operate your own ranch together as the article paradise of bachelors the social world of men in 19th century america states without the presence of women the always unstable line dividing the homosocial from the homosexual that is dividing non-sexual male bonding activities from sexual contact between men became even more blurred as traditional notions of normal gender roles were challenged and unsettled men could display both subtly and openly the erotic connections they felt for other men when the miners at angel camp in southern california held dances half of the men danced the part of women wearing patches over the crotches of their pants to signal their feminine role and in this marginally more accepting environment it was easier for men with gay preferences to make it known bringing up anything related to gay poet walt whitman for instance was an easy coded way to say i'm gay when it comes to sapphic women as usual it's a lot harder to trace that history though part of this is because in general society was more tolerant to savage relationships than it was towards gay male ones because in an incredibly patronizing way they weren't seen as valid because there was no male present the only time people were getting into legal trouble for being in a lesbian relationship was if one or both people in the couple were imitating a man in some way either sexually or in what they wore and i'll get into this in a future video more but this is where the term romantic friendship comes into play it was encouraged and seen as normal for women to be in romantic partnerships as long as you get straight married eventually lesbian relationships saw an incredibly conditional type of acceptance it was only tolerated to certain degrees past which it was a huge problem some lesbians were fairly open about their lifestyles though like in lake city iowa a woman named shirley martin who liked to dress in somewhat masculine attire was absolutely picking up chicks left and right treating them on dates to picture shows and ice cream in a 1912 news article she said that though she was never proposed to i might have won a wife if i had tried very hard though but other stories were not so sweet content warning the story i'm about to tell describes suicide so skip to this time if you'd like to avoid it so one story we do have about sapphic couples out west is the story of jessie elizabeth wrigley and portia doyle porsha was married to a man before she met jessie and they became incredibly close very very very close so close that porsha divorced her husband saying she didn't love him anymore jessie and portia went to live together and sometime later after events that we'll never know the two women's bodies were discovered together by a corral fence they had planned the whole thing out walking down to the fence with pre-written notes tucked into their dresses and hung their hats on the fence jessie then shot porsha through the heart and then herself the letters they had in their dresses talked of their deep love for each other and asked that they'd be buried in the same coffin jesse wrote from my youth upwards my spirits walked not with the souls of men nor looked upon the earth with human eyes the things of their ambition were not mine my joys my griefs my passions and my powers made me a stranger but despite the pain still there you can imagine worthy considerably more unstructured societies of the early old west would not only be a ripe environment for gay men and lesbians but for trans and gender non-conforming folks as well because so many people in these societies had a past that they were on the run from it was easier though not easy to get away with living as a trans person because people just didn't ask too many questions some people who lived as a different gender were yes women dressing as men for job purposes or to avoid harassment it wasn't unheard of for women to disguise themselves as men while traveling in the west because in this time period it was so unbelievably dangerous for women to travel alone other women dressed in masculine attire so they could have the privilege of simply wandering exploring the outdoors alone and still others were lesbians who dressed in masculine clothes in order to become the protectors and friends and partners of the town sex workers or because they just preferred it and of course there were the women who dressed in men's clothes so they could commit crimes come on this is the wild west we're talking about after all but others were literally trans men and i make the distinction where it is very clear what the person's preferences were many historical trans men were very outspoken and adamant that their gender be recognized and were firm in their declaration that they wanted to live as men often times they were highly respected by their western communities and even after their secret was revealed people still respected their manhood on the other hand often women simply trying to pass as men for a specific purpose later on went on to say so or would return to living as women later on in life when looking for answers on how to regard historical people who surpassed conventional gender in some way we must try our best to defer to their own actions lives and statements if someone lived as a certain gender and died as a certain gender what other proof is it going to take for you to accept them as such regardless of the circumstances that's the choices they made and they need to be respected in death regardless of if their true sex was discovered post-mortem or whatever i'm dead serious about this alright if you're a transphobe or a person who is adamant about denying trans history this is not the channel for you and you're not welcome roasting marshmallowers at my campfire anyways here's some stories of real old west trans folks one was alan hart born in 1890 allen was assigned female at birth but openly stated during treatment under the physician j alan gilbert that he had never felt right about womanhood he only cared for boyish pursuits and demanded to be treated as the man of the family he also continually fell in love with women taking care to specify that he loved them as a man in medical school hart learned about his condition gilbert agreed that the only way for hart to treat his condition was to accept it and pursue his life as he wanted to live it gilbert performed a hysterectomy on heart and he cut his hair and took on wearing masculine clothes full-time heart went on to marry women twice and lived as a man until his death in the 60s hart said in a 1918 interview i had to do it for years i had been unhappy with all the inclinations and desires of the boy i had to restrain myself to the more conventional ways of the other sex i have been happier since i made this change than i ever have in my life and i will continue to live this way as long as i live another was a guy named harry allen who was well known to be a real scallywag he liked to brawl in saloons and drink and pick up women and just kind of raise hell in general of course all that was par for the course in the wild wild west but then the newspapers caught wind that harry was assigned female at birth and it turned to a media sensation when interviewed by the sunday times in 1908 harry said i did not like to be a girl did not feel like a girl never did look like a girl so it seemed impossible to make myself a girl and sick at heart over the thought that i would be an outcast of the feminine gender i conceived the idea of making myself a man this resulted in harry becoming a target for overzealous cops and prosecutors who were constantly going after him with weird charges resulting in him getting arrested in 1912 for white slavery because he brought a sex worker named isabel maxwell over state lines claiming she was his wife tragically harry allen died at the young age of 40. there's also the story of old nash a laundress who married a number of soldiers as recalled by general custer's wife elizabeth she recalled that old nash had tried living as a man but became weary of it and transitioned to living life as a woman she became highly respected in the fort lincoln community and was married to her last husband john noonan for five years old nash was also the local midwife known for her kindness towards pregnant women baking pies and always asking are you comf no one knew she was trans until her death and on her deathbed she asked to be buried as she was with her clothes untouched unfortunately her wishes were not respected and word got out that old nash had been born a man her husband received widespread ridicule for which he sadly ended his life elizabeth custer thought no different of her friend old nash after finding out the news she said poor dear i hope she is finally comf sorry to say the most clear cases we have of trans people in this time period usually come from sad cases like this and the same can be said about gay people too because unfortunately the happy endings in times like these are the ones that no one knew enough about for them to become reported on for centuries the most clear accounts we had of queer folks were the tragedies the court cases sometimes it's the hidden diaries and letters that miraculously escaped being burned by family members or destroyed by the wearing of time some cases were deliberately reinterpreted by historians to seem straight or cisgender others written off because our modern idea of what makes someone queer doesn't mesh with historical queerness this is why i say that when we are looking for queer history there's two types of queer history that we're looking for the queerness that is queer because it is to us and holds queer historical value to us today and the queerness as it was considered queer in its historical context to historical people though these are two different things and most of the time they overlap they are equally valuable and it's not a crime to find queer history in ways that may be considered anachronistic all history is like this it's funny how queer history as well as history that centers non-white people is the only place where this is scrutinized laura doan states that history is always in the service of the present this is not a problem of history it is a condition of history and though so much historical queerness is not overt there is so much beauty in what is there when you're open-minded enough to find it hiding in plain sight i'd like to read you part of a poem if you don't mind this is the lost partner by badger clark published in 1919 i ride alone and hate the boys i meet today some way they're laughing hurts me so i hate the steady sun that glares and glares the bird songs make me sore i seem the only thing on earth that cares because al ain't here no more and him so strong and yet so quick he died and after year on year when we had always trailed it side by side he went and left me here we loved each other in the way men do and never spoke about it al and me but we both knowed and knowing it so true was more than any woman's kiss could be what is there out there beyond the last divide seems like that country must be cold and dim he'd miss this sunny rain he used to ride and he'd miss me the same as i do him it's no use thinking all i'd think or say could ever make it clear out that dim trail that only leads one way he's gone and left me here the range is empty and the trails are blind and i don't seem but half myself today i wait to hear him right enough behind and feel his knee rub mine the good old way around the turn of the century when many former cowboys were being interviewed in national papers and magazines many would recount their memories of just how homosocial these cattle communities were the way the cowboys would as a group talk about their struggles and relationships with women and swear to live only dedicated to their male partnerships until death in so much victorian western literature the tale follows two men traveling the frontier together some of them even having mock weddings others unspoken only begging for one last kiss from their partners before they die still others hid the queerness in innuendo or code or were extremely obvious like walt whitman did in his poems in leaves of grass if you're wondering why this book was so pivotal to victorian gay men to the point where just mentioning you're into whitman's poems was coded for saying that you're gay just listen to this passage from the very gay calamus section in the poem of the terrible doubt of appearances when he whom i love travels with me or sits along while holding me by the hand when the subtle air the impalpable the sense that words and reason hold not surround us and pervade us when i am charged with untold and untenable wisdom i am silent i require nothing further i cannot answer the question of appearances or that of identity beyond the grave but i walk or sit indifferent i am satisfied he a hold of my hand has completely satisfied me and later in what thank you i take my pen in hand but merely of two simple men i saw today on the pier in the midst of the crowd parting the parting of dear friends the one to remain hung on the other's neck and passionately kissed him while the one to depart tightly pressed the one to remain in his arms i have some issues with whitman like as a person but it's undeniable that his gay poetry is beautiful and was extremely poignant at the time and held a lot of significance to the cowboys who could identify with these words sapphic women though in the old west had so much less to see themselves reflected in because as i said before sapphic love has historically been considered oxymoronic in every aspect kim emery writes it is a truism for example that lesbian experience is inflicted and afflicted by apparently incompatible social stereotypes lesbians are assumed to be both men and women's bodies and women marked as masculine by physical anomaly lesbians are accused of hating men and of wanting to be men of being both sexually predatory and essentially asexual of committing unspeakable sexual acts and of lacking the endowments necessary to perform any act that could conceivably be considered to constitute sex this isn't just a historical reality it's true of lesbians today too suffix had to create their own hidden ways to be seen or not be seen at all to protect their safety they didn't have the accepted excuses brotherhood culture or widespread group settings the cowboys did that afforded them easy and somewhat normalized access to gay partnerships but it was still there hidden in plain sight same as so much sapphic love from elsewhere at the time period and though it wasn't overt many static women saw themselves reflected in popularized stories both fictional and not of rowdy outlaw women of the west like calamity jane mary fields sally skull bell star and pearl heart in a way many suffolk women in the old west saw themselves as outlaws of a kind though they may have lived quietly never slung a pistol maybe just flew under the radar or their relationships with women were fleeting before the pressures of society took their toll women loving women and people who eschewed the boundaries of gender were always there in the margins [Music] later on especially after world war ii the romantic fantasy of the old west and its mythos would rise and therefore give more cultural validity to cowboy and rodeo culture this means that as spaces like rodeo became more populated and controlled by cis-head white men openly gay writers and people of color were disallowed in the spaces and forced to reconstruct their own spaces once again this is particularly poignant when it comes to the mid-century when the imaginary fantasy of the wild wild west became a cultural keystone thousands of american men had just returned from war utterly traumatized and beaten down coming home to a society that was now obsessed with perfect domesticity what the old west symbolized to them was heroism vigilante justice freedom and grungy masculinity ignoring the complicated truths of what the old west actually was and for rural americans who were and still are typically economically disempowered the old west myths provided a sense of pride a great history that they could project themselves into and feel empowered by a glorious identity rebecca schofield continues within the first several decades of the 20th century the cowboy had transcended his status as an occupational folk hero to represent a profound belief in american exceptionalism just as theodore roosevelt's rough riders used military conquest in the spanish-american war to secure anglo-america's dominance over populations in puerto rico guam and the philippines so they used the image of the cowboy to communicate a global message about america's ability to civilize the world the seeds of the old western transformation into the great american mythos were planted long before the old west was even really a thing but the way the life of a cowboy and the old west began to be symbolized after world war ii was so off course from the reality of cowboy life it's nearly fantastical as we'll discuss in a future video western films and novels would have you believe that cowboys were gunslinging vigilante heroes taking the west by capturing savage native people rescuing damsels and looking for redemption astride a big buff horse but real cowboys as we've learned were much more akin to working class tradesmen because being a cowboy wasn't an identity it was a job they typically didn't interact with native americans too much unless they were paying a toll or they themselves were native american and many cowboys weren't permitted to carry guns on the job due to safety issues and a lot of the time they weren't even riding a big horse but rather a smaller more agile one and a lot of the best cowboys weren't even that tall because it was a job more easily done by short people but people outside the west weren't seeing that reality what they saw was the fictionalized or sensationalized stories in newspapers or books the beautiful romantic art some cowboys recounted the way that east coasters would travel west as tourists just to see the cowboys and the real cowboys would put on an act pretending to be that romanticized fake image that the easterners wanted to see but it makes complete sense that if the cowboy has been transformed into the american representative he will therefore adopt the traits that american nationalism and masculinity need from him in the rise of the western genre the cowboy became that violent lone wolf he is american individualism and righteous conquest personified and in that transformation therefore the cowboy must shed himself of anything that doesn't fall in line with that goal he can't be soft gay emotional except when one of his partners dies that can never change modern hyper masculinity completely by accident always manages to be homoerotic this use of the cowboy image as a tool has become a huge political tool in the last 70 years from ronald reagan's i'm just like you presidential ranch photo shoots all the way up to the post 911 era when george w bush utilized old western cowboy language and metaphors to describe the imminent american invasion into iraq so with this as the plight of the american cowboy it's no wonder that he has become a sort of litmus test for the state of american society itself now the cowboy is an iconographic battleground torn in all directions by various groups on one hand the cowboy is an icon of rough and tough rural cis-head white men with a horse a pistol and hell to pay often times the cowboy here is used to further american imperialist and capitalistic beliefs like the way that gary cooper and john wayne were the universal image of the cowboy in the mid-century and for cooper his whole life and were closely connected with anti-communism and stark conservatism similar to [ __ ] boy ronald reagan this is part of why most people associate country music today with like old jimmy joe howlin about picking up broads in the billiard room while chugging beer and thinking about banging his truck or whatever and of course we know how much worse that got in the post 911 era we'll put a boot in your ass this is the usa poetry because of the mid-century association of cowboys as the representation of america they are therefore used as a tool to further the greater american cultural agenda but that doesn't mean that all western american culture looks like this i mean just look at johnny cash who also exemplified the cowboy but also was staunchly anti-war pro-native and pro-gay and rocked these iconic thigh-high boots so there's really no contest here and around the same time the cowboy took on another meaning entirely to gay people gay men in particular he replaced the sailor as the quintessential gay icon now before world war ii sailors were heavily associated with homosexuality by both the gay community and everyone else george chauncey writes in gay new york the sailor seen as young and manly unattached and unconstrained by conventional morality epitomized the bachelor subculture and the gay cultural imagination he served for generations as the central masculine icon in gay pornography as the paintings of charleston and paul cadmus from the early decades of the century and the photographs produced by gay pornographers and its middle decades a test but as the records of anti-vice investigators show his role in the gay subculture was not simply as an object of fantasy he was a central figure in the subculture and his haunts became the haunts of gay men as well so you can see how world war ii might change this the war cemented the us's idea of itself in the cultural imagination in such a way that it was impossible for sailors in the navy to continue being associated with homosexuality mainstream culture just couldn't bear to imagine that sailors could be heroes and gay ironically the war sort of made people more gay than ever though it offered an opportunity for people of all genders questioning their sexuality to experiment in the homosocial environments that the war brought as men were taken away from their families and surrounded by mostly other men and women were not only left at home surrounded by mostly other women but also for the first time found themselves independent and exploring the workforce the war disrupted that heteronormative nuclear family structure and when the war ended the u.s was desperate to get it back the post-war era saw not only the extreme idolification of the military but a dramatic reuptake in homophobia during the cold war as people struggled anxiously to fit in again something now so much harder to do after so many people had experienced the alternative so the sailor is no longer a gay icon for the most part but popular culture provided a perfect replacement the cowboy the cowboy shares a lot of the key factors here with the sailor he's typically a bachelor he's on the fringes of society maybe he feels like he doesn't fit in he struggles with his relationships to women or isn't exposed to them at all he also symbolizes idealized rough and sexy masculinity perfect it was similar with lesbians and cowgirls many lesbians became attached to the image of the tough cowgirl as the fantasy of the old west represented a place where wild women were not expected to be in the confines of the home usually nor marriage way out west as it once wasn't just a fantasy women could be rough writers too cowgirls felt too many sapphic women like a glorified representation of powerful female masculinity and independence and gay people weren't about to just let themselves be excluded from western culture so they forged their own spaces gay people organized their own rodeo groups as did other marginalized communities and earned horrible and honestly ironic backlash in response rebecca schofield again because this book was full of amazing points for much of the 20th century indian halloween costumes and hawaiian luaus were aspects of everyday american life available for easy consumption and disposal yet the rage expressed towards gay people women incarcerated people and people of color who dared to tread foot on the soil of the rodeo arena reveals the uneven flow of cultural symbols between the margins and the center knowing full well that the post-war greater american idea of the cowboy is more of a disney-fied cosplay of who they originally were why is it so narrow who gets to partake in that celebration knowing just how diverse rodeo and cow pokes were why is there so much rage when marginalized people put on the costume and get in the ring too it's here at this junction where the icon of the cowboy is pulled in many different directions and as people on the marginalized end of that tug of war we need to be extremely careful how we engage with that struggle so as not to celebrate this world by uplifting its role as a tool of american imperialism and native erasure at the same time the push to further queer and racialize as in make less white the popular image of the cowboy is in and of itself a challenge to the american white supremacist construct binash joffrey writes in desire settler colonialism and the racialized cowboy if the figure of the cowboy is an icon for an idealized form of american masculine subject hood then the figure of the racialized cowboy is articulating something about the relationship between non-whiteness and american masculinity the racialized cowboy disrupts on the one hand the presumed whiteness of the cowboy throwing the racialization of settler authority into question this is part of why lil nos x drew so much ire during his old town road era long before he started making openly gay content the fact that he as a black man was so unapologetically staking claim on the popular image of the cowboy really really pissed off the people who are invested in maintaining the myth of the old western white fantasy when in reality lone sex managed to represent a huge population of true history who have long been forgotten black cowboys gay cowboys and of course black gay cowboys today rodeo circles as they did in the past offer rural marginalized folks a family structure they otherwise wouldn't have had access to the first rainbow rodeo was held in nevada in 1976 to fundraise for the muscular dystrophy association which set off a gay rodeo movement gay rodeo set itself apart in many ways by offsetting hyper masculinity with fun and campiness like the very existence of marginalized cowpokes it challenged the mainstream ideas of what it really means to be a part of this world scofield again to men like ralph lauren and ronald reagan playing cowboy was a masculine birthright gay rodeo which invited cowboys to play feminine as well as hyper masculine disturbed notions of american masculinity not only because it threatened to overthrow serious cowboy tradition with frivolous gay fun but also because it threatened to demonstrate publicly the constructed nature of gender and sexuality in general americans could play cowboy in the political arena and fashion world yet gay cowboys who at times wore dresses threatened to expose all cowboyness as a gendered performance and out of that broader structure comes the roots of what has in recent years evolved into more open and unashamed gay reclamation of the cowboy image music for instance is one of the biggest avenues for gay cowpoke visibility in the past it was through comedic and insulting songs such as the lavender cowboy [Music] later on we would see somewhat more serious ones willie nelson's cowboys are frequently secretly fond of each other frankie and johnny by lonnie donegan and his skiffle group bruce springsteen's my lover man crying these [ __ ] tears by lavender country limp wrist and a steady hand by mikey banjo and in my opinion jolene by dolly parton and in more recent years you've seen the rise of gay or gay supporting country singers like orville peck casey musgraves brandy carlisle amethyst kaya golden child little bandit orville peck himself really digs into both the glamour of cowboy gayness and also his melancholia with his bittersweet crooning doom pop music against romantic dark but glimmering rhinestone visuals but even outside of media the cowboy holds a very strong grip on the queer imagination in part stemming from the melancholy of the loss of the ranching system after world war ii when so many cowboys came back from war to find their jobs displaced by new agricultural machinery with little access left to the system that had allowed them such easy covert access to gay partnerships rural gay communities developed a bittersweet attachment to the symbol of the cowboy from the mid-century onwards saw the growth of western-themed gay and lesbian bars and square dancing groups and cowpokes have always had a strong place in queer art too i mean just go look at all the tom of finland gay cowboy art most of which is way too raunchy for me to show here and you can see where this causes a lot of tension with the population of street people who want to pretend the west was never queer because like most things marginalized their very presence upends their fantasy of a perfect old west right out of a john wayne film as leslie feidler wrote almost 60 years ago the existence of overt homosexuality threatens to compromise an essential aspect of american sentimental life the camaraderie of the locker room and ballpark the good fellowship of the poker game and fishing trip a kind of passionless passion at once gross and delicate homoerotic in the boys sense possessing an innocence above suspicion it also evidences the still prevalent anxieties that many straight white americans have about these savage wilds that they civilized where before colonization many native communities had their own unique forms of queerness not queer to them but queer to the settlers who witnessed it and saw it as strange and disgusting indigenous peoples have always had their own gender systems that accommodated all sorts of people two spirit people for instance or the ware giron of the yurok people or the mojave aliha and huamei same-sex attraction and relationships were also incredibly normal in many tribes and those who we would consider to be transgender were often believed to be more spiritual and were frequently made shamans to many colonist settlers it was abhorrent to think of people of their own race as operating outside of white gender binaries too the way that native folks did when that carries over today into people's anxieties about queer cow pokes what it translates to is queerness has no place in our idealized world you don't belong here even though you've always been here the problem though is that a lot of the time in an attempt to gain acceptance and validity from the mainstream queer spaces in turn uphold white supremacist ideals and recreate the very same power structures inside the community this manifests most often in the deeply ingrained racism and misogyny that plagues a lot of white gay communities the gay male fixation on the icon of the cowboy was partially due to internal turmoil in the rise of the reagan era which pushed and popularized rugged soulless masculinity gay men and particularly white gay men struggled to feel validated in their own masculinity this era saw the rise in gay subcultures of motorcycle gangs and a return to the turn of century fixation on outdoorsy muscle men empowering new emphasis on straight acting as gay men railed against assumed effeminacy which in turn alienated feminine or less macho gay men from many spaces in order for white gay men to try and cater to mainstream masculine ideals and prove their place in cowboy culture everyone else needed to be pushed out and so some gay rodeo spaces began to disallow women and most people of color while this has improved quite a lot in the new millennium there is no question that we still have far to go so friends when you engage with the symbol of the gay cowboy or cowgirl or cow poke or create characters or write western stories what do they look like to you how diverse is that image and what exactly does that buckaroo stand for come on partner you've gotta stand for something [Music] at the end of the day what's most important of all is to keep in mind the perspectives of the native american community when discussing the old west and its legacies in the past a lot of non-native marginalized groups i think have made the mistake of approaching the issue with the mindset of like it wasn't just cis at white people on the frontier we colonized the us too like it's nothing to be proud of to be a participant in the displacement of native peoples from their lands or their genocide i think it's a mistake to take that approach because all it does is continue to feed into this mythos that this land was savage and wild and empty and needed to be claimed and tamed it didn't at the same time it's also true that the old west did serve as a place where many other groups of people marginalized people too did manage to create new lives for themselves outside of the social constraints of the more traditional cities and painful paths they left behind but acknowledging that cannot come at the cost of continuing to erase native significance and perspectives from old western history this isn't to tell you that you can't love cowboy media or ye old yeehaw [ __ ] i mean look at me i'd be a goddamn hypocrite if i did i lived in texas way too many years for this [ __ ] to ever fully leave me you can take the lesbian out of texas but you can't take the texas out of the lesbian as with every video i make i think that coming to these topics ready to unlearn what's a problem in it can make it more clear what there actually is to love about it so there you have it the west was always queer as hell and don't let anyone tell you otherwise there is always a place for gay and trans people out here both in history and in the present but don't just take it from me i'm just one lonesome cow poke out here in the night go out and see for yourself partner so until we meet again in late march wash your hands wear your mask be rooting and by god be tootin [Music] do [Music] you

Channel: Kaz Rowe

Views: 633,297

Keywords: trans history, cowboys, wild west, rodeo, orville peck, lil nas x, lgbt, gay and lesbian, bisexual

Id: T0AOwdODmMA

Length: 47min 42sec (2862 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 17 2022