That's exactly the reaction Packard seeks.
"Everybody should appreciate shock," he said. "Basically, what happens after the shock, after the recoiling, I hope, is some reflection, some wonder, `Why am I shocked?' Inquiring minds don't linger on shock then leap to rejection. And those people who do leap to rejection after the shock? That's just their limitation."
Packard's analysis of frontier literature could be slanted by modern perspective. The word "homosexual" wasn't coined until the late 19th century and "queer" simply meant something odd. Perhaps the vaguely erotic prose and images cited in Queer Cowboys are products of a naive society that hadn't yet passed judgment on gay intimacy. Packard acknowledged that possibility.
"But what else can we do except use our culture and knowledge to look backward in time?" he said. "We can't escape the knowledge that has accumulated in the last 25 years regarding gay and lesbian rights and the emergence of gay culture. You can't do away with that. You can't `not know' that. You look back in time, take current knowledge and apply it. Culture continues to accumulate meaning.
"You wonder if people back then would even know what to call this, if there was even a word for it. But there was a different set of rules about sexuality, that's for sure."
Rules changed over the decades from anything goes to nothing revealed. Attempts by Sigmund Freud and Alfred Kinsey to illuminate homosexual urges repulsed some people, while homophobic undertones of the McCarthy hearings lumped gays with criminals and communists in terms of undermining the American way.
The subsequent rise of gay rights and a bolder sense of artistic freedom refreshed the issue. Packard senses a change in grudging acceptance of his ideas, recalling an exchange with a former rodeo bull rider at a panel discussion of the gay West topic.
"He hadn't seen any actual sexuality on the rodeo circuit," Packard said. "But he didn't deny that friendships in that very macho community were stronger than other bonds. He questioned the validity of my research but he couldn't deny that eroticism."
Which begs the question: What would someone like Twain think about Packard's take on his writings?
"I would love to talk to Twain and find out what he would say," Packard said. "I think he would have a real fun twinkle in his eye, then deny it forever."
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