Queer Cowboys: And Other Erotic Male Friendships In Nineteenth-century American Literature

Was the American Cowboy gay? Judging from the earliest representations of cowboys and other frontier figures in popular literature--who typically preferred a "buddy" over a wife--the answer seems to be yes. Evidence from books by nineteenth-century Western writers (from legends such as James Fenimore Cooper, Mark Twain, and Owen Wister, to more obscure novelists and diarists) shows how same-sex intimacy and homoerotic admiration were key aspects of Westerns well before the word "homosexual" and its synonyms were invented. American writers celebrated erotic frontier friendships as alternatives to the lawless violence that characterized stories about the early settlers' fabled lives. These males-only clubs of journalists, cowboys, miners, Indians, and "vaqueros" defined themselves by excluding femininity and the cloying ills of domesticity, while embracing what Roosevelt called "strenuous living" with other bachelors in the relative"purity" of wilderness conditions. "Queer Cowboys" recovers this forgotten culture of exclusively masculine, sometimes erotic, and often intimate camaraderie in fiction, photographs, illustrations, song lyrics, historicalephemera, and theatrical performances.


Was the American Cowboy gay? Judging from the earliest representations of cowboys and other frontier figures in popular literature--who typically preferred a "buddy" over a wife--the answer seems to be yes. Evidence from books by nineteenth-century Western writers (from legends such as James Fenimore Cooper, Mark Twain, and Owen Wister, to more obscure novelists and diarists) shows how same-sex intimacy and homoerotic admiration were key aspects of Westerns well before the word "homosexual" and its synonyms were invented. American writers celebrated erotic frontier friendships as alternatives to the lawless violence that characterized stories about the early settlers' fabled lives. These males-only clubs of journalists, cowboys, miners, Indians, and "vaqueros" defined themselves by excluding femininity and the cloying ills of domesticity, while embracing what Roosevelt called "strenuous living" with other bachelors in the relative"purity" of wilderness conditions. "Queer Cowboys" recovers this forgotten culture of exclusively masculine, sometimes erotic, and often intimate camaraderie in fiction, photographs, illustrations, song lyrics, historicalephemera, and theatrical performances.