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Paperback
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Brokeback Mountain exploded the myth of the American cowboy as a tough, gruff, and grizzled loner. Queer Cowboys exposes, through books by legendary Western writers such as Mark Twain, James Fenimore Cooper, and Owen Wister, how same-sex intimacy and homoerotic admiration were key aspects of Westerns well before Brokeback's 1960's West, and well before the word "homosexual" was even invented. Chris Packard introduces readers to the males-only clubs of journalists, cowboys, miners, Indians, and vaqueros who defined themselves by excluding women and the cloying ills of domesticity and recovers a forgotten culture of exclusively masculine, sometimes erotic, and often intimate camaraderie in the fiction, photographs, and theatrical performances of the 1800's Wild West.
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| food for thought |
| Customer Rating: 3 out of 5 |
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I found this work interesting and thought provoking. The information provided opened a window on a little explored area of frontier life.
Now while I do not believe all frontiersman were what we would not term Gay, the author does do alot to explore the homosocial sub-culture of their world and the ethos that supported it.
To the extant that it focused on some bits of information too much and others to little;I think it falls within the usual range of error that all books written for a niche audience.
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| Homos on the range (couldn't resist that) |
| Customer Rating: 5 out of 5 |
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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 and Ennis are bisexual, not homosexual, and they are ranch hands, not cowboys.) 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 also the reviews of "Same-Sex Unions in Pre-Modern 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 asking his best friend for penetrative sex? 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") are barely disguised narratives about two men's physical and 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 is he suggesting that all cowboys had sexual feelings for each other, or that if Pea-Eye Parker and Dish Boggett wandered 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 these missteps are uncommon.
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. It 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.
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| Gay Men are Everywhere? |
| Customer Rating: 3 out of 5 |
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Packard, Chris. "Queer Cowboys: And Other Erotic Male Friendships in Nineteenth Century American Literature", Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.
Gay Men Are Everywhere?
Amos Lassen
Chris Packard gives us an original and intense study of gay men in places where one would not expect to find them. For the masses of America it was "Brokeback Mountain" that showed gay cowboys and Packard takes that even further by looking at literature of those who wrote with a western theme such as James Fennimore Cooper. Owen Wister and Mark Twain. We learn that same sex attraction and intimacy was around long before the word homosexual was. There were male only clubs as long ago as the 1800s.
Packard looks at the "homosocial" qualities of the literature and finds a great deal of eroticism. Starting with James Fennimore Cooper's "Leatherstocking Tales" he shows how and where men found love with each other and we see that in some cases that homosexuality was encouraged as a way of not having children of mixed race. In" The Virginian" by Owen Wister is about a narrator who is in love with the main character. Mark Twain used obscenity in his stories and he used male/male attraction as a basis for jokes.
Packard tries very hard to show that in early American fiction about cowboys that they were involved in homosexual relationships and that the authors hide this through the language they use. It's an interesting theory but I am not convinced. We don't read that cowboys have sex with each other but we also don't read that they don't. I am not sure that this is a strong enough idea to suppose that they might engage in same sex relations. Nevertheless it is an interesting thought and not all same sex relations can be called homosexual.
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| Not quite the ticket |
| Customer Rating: 3 out of 5 |
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An intersting little anthology of the queer and not so queer which suffers from too much hindsight on occasion. Sure there were male-to-male relationships between these types but they do not necessarily constitute 'gay' in our terms. Some individuals just want to have too much neatly in their corner and claim the past too. I read this with interest but was neither convinced or persuaded that all is what it seems according to this author.
It is cashing in on the 'virility' factor assoicated with cowboys.
I suggest you reading this book in tandem with "Sodomy and the Pirate Tradition: English Sea Rovers in the Seventeenth Century Caribbean"
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| Lonesome Cowboys |
| Customer Rating: 5 out of 5 |
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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.
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