Queer Cowboys: And Other Erotic Male Friendships in Nineteenth-Century American Literature [Paperback]

This author examines (mostly) 19th century fictional stories about cowboys and tries to make the case that the relationships between the cowboys described in the stories are in fact homosexual sexual relationships. That the (mostly) Victorian sentiments in the stories which describe the love, admiration, attachments, and living arrangments between the cowboys are, in reality, describing cowboys who are homosexual and who can't keep their eyes or hands off each other. That the reason all these cowboys sleep in their bedrolls in pairs, live together in wilderness cabins just like married straight couples, and find children who are orphans to raise as their own, is that all these cowboys are gay. That the hundreds of novels and short stories about cowboys published in books and in pulp magazines and read by millions of straight boys and men for the last 200 years and who thought that they were simply adventure stories about cowboys, were really gay love stories drenched in erotic language and imagery. I'd really love to believe this is true, that cowboy stories are really gay romances. But this book Queer Cowboys doesn't convince me. Characters in fiction don't have real lives the way people who are subjects of biographies have real lives. The cowboy stories NEVER say that the cowboys have sex with each other. I think the author of Queer Cowboys is misinterpreting the over-the-top Victorian sentiments about admiration and platonic love in these stories. I don't believe that the stories are revealing that cowboys were all gay. But the book is thought provoking, and the author has courage, and I think it's worth reading since there isn't a lot else on the subject.

Chris Packard puts together an entertaining, and intellectually stimulating tour of some "cowboy literature" of the 19th century, emphasizing everywhere its homosocial qualities, and finding the erotic under every set of chaps. Comical, sometimes suggestive period photographs dot the text, cowhands hugging each other, holding hands, or even standing "too close" to each other, dancing, or swimming nude. Packard begins his survey of American lit with the Leatherstocking Tales of James Fenimore Cooper (and his sea stories too, which share some of the same tropes of white man + "othered" man finding love where no woman dare go). Cooper's always good for a few laughs, but the intensity of same-sex feeling that Packard finds in these novels might make you momentarily confused--might he be writing about DENNIS Cooper's books? On a broad level, was homosexuality encouraged "on the trail" as a way of avoiding children of mixed race? So it seems.

Owen Wister's THE VIRGINIAN was a famous novel written by a contemporary of Henry James who actually was a cowboy himself, briefly, in youth. Its narrator, an Eastern newcomer, is in love with the Virginian, that's pretty obvious from Packard's canny precis. This chapter is the highlight of Packard's discussion and the one that comes closest to furthering his thesis. Succeeding chapters descend into writing's netherworlds, of softcore porn, lockerroom ballads, and Mark Twain's obscene smoking room talks, to show that American men were not above appreciating same-sex love as a basis for comedy, though it is a pity Packard couldn't find any cowboys doing so.

The book feels oddly foreshortened at the end, as though the publisher were punishing him for running overtime and stopped the argument, arbitrarily, at a certain number of pages. But I enjoyed myself thoroughly and could definitely see an expanded edition.

Despite the general movement towards social equality for queer men and women, homosexuality and homosexual behavior (they aren't the same thing) remain controversial and poorly understood. For example, most people think that because a man engages in homosexual behavior, he is necessarily homosexual. (Jack Twist and Ennis del Mar are bisexual, not homosexual.) The recent "shenanigans" among Wackenhut employees in Afghanistan are described as "deviant", when they are actually a normal component of male sexual behavior.

Gay readers tend to reflexively enthuse over books that present "queer history" in a positive light, while straight readers too-often bring a sackful of prejudices. The latter, in particular, are obvious in these reviews. (See the reviews of "Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe".)

The "Queer Cowboys" title is intentionally provocative. The subtitle tells us what the book is actually about -- the way 19th-century American writers and literature presented close male friendships. (In this usage, "erotic" means emotional, not necessarily sexual.)

Does it bother you that Mark Twain was very much aware of what men did with each other when women weren't around? Or that he apparently wrote a sketch about a man who'd lost his girlfriend asking his best friend to submit to penetrative sex as an act of consolation? Does it bother you that cowboys engaged in mutual masturbation (and other activities) to relieve their sexual stress -- and probably to "take pleasure in" their masculinity? Does it bother you that "The Virginian" has bluntly homoerotic elements, * that Owen Wister was probably in love with the man the title character is modeled on? Does it bother you that several of Bret Harte's stories ("Tennesee's Partner", "In the Tules", "Uncle Jim and Uncle Billy") are barely disguised narratives about two men's physical and/or emotional attraction to each other? **

If so, you won't like this book.

It's disappointing to see reviewers mis-reading what (to me) is plain in Packard's analysis. Given that cowboys, ranchers, miners, mountain men, et al, present an image of rough masculinity, stories about them are implicitly homoerotic. But Packard focuses on the "coded" -- and sometimes not-so-coded -- elements. Nowhere does he suggest that all cowboys had sexual feelings for each other, or that if Pea-Eye Parker and Dish Boggett just happened to wander into the bushes to masturbate, that made them "homosexuals". ***

What he is showing is what is plainly there, if you don't willfully blind yourself to it. Amos Lassen's naive review reveals that he has little knowledge or understanding of human sexuality. Human males have been messing around with each other as long as there have been human males, regardless of how you choose to label such behavior.

Someone might profitably study Westerns for coded homoeroticism. For example, in two of the Mann/Stewart films, Jimmy Stewart's character and his sidekick briefly reminisce over what they friendship has meant to them, and how much they care about each other. This might not have been intentionally homoerotic, but it /is/ there, and is worth noting, as American films of any genre do not generally have such scenes.

My only quibble with "Queer Cowboys" is that Packard occasionally over-interprets and exaggerates his case. But not too often.

Recommended, unless you're afraid of alternative points of view.

* I have recently read all the novels and short stories referred to in this review.

** In "Uncle Jim and Uncle Billy", Harte notes that Jim and Billy, a "married" couple in a mining camp, sleep in separate beds. This was probably a conscious attempt to avoid any suggestion of deviant sex. Such an interpretation would probably not have occurred to a strictly hetero writer.

*** I interpret Larry McMurtry's refusal to acknowledge sexual behavior among cowboys, etc, as simple cowardice.