Queer as a cowboy

Heath Ledger, left, and Jake Gyllenhaal Twist, play cowboys from different backgrounds who meet and fall in love while working together in Brokeback Mountain. The film led contenders on Thursday for the Screen Actors Guild Awards with four nominations, including honors for lead actor Heath Ledger. PHOTO: AP

Brokeback Mountain isn't the first popular fiction featuring cowboys with more than roping and wrangling on their minds.

Our eros has always been cowboys, according to Chris Packard, author of Queer Cowboys, an analysis of 19th century frontier writings about erotic male relationships that may have been sexual in nature.

"I use those words `erotic' and `sexual' very carefully," Packard said. "Sexuality is different from eroticism. My book tries to point out these are homoerotic friendships, whether they're sexual is not part of the literature. Unless you have evidence, you really have to err on the side of eroticism."

Queer Cowboys uses excerpts from authors such as Mark Twain, Owen Wister and James Fenimore Cooper to make Packard's case that homoerotic bonds in the Old West were common and socially accepted. Vintage photographs depict men romantically touching or dancing together while women stand aside. Frederic Remington's sketches of cowboys sharing a haircut and exiting a tent are suggestively posed.

Chris Packard's Queer Cowboys. PHOTO COURTESY OF AMAZON

Reading the lines is necessary in some cases, such as this portion of Badger Clark's 1917 poem, The Lost Pardner, which could pass as a plot outline of Brokeback Mountain:

"We loved each other in the way men do
And never spoke about it, Al and me,
But we both knowed, and knowin' it so true
Was more than any woman's kiss could be.
We knowed -- and if the way was smooth or rough,
The weather shine or pour,

"But there was a different set of rules about sexuality, that's for sure."

Chris Packard, talking about cowboys in the Old West

While I had him the rest seemed good enough

But he ain't here no more!"

Queer Cowboys joins Ang Lee's film as elements of a budding revision of Western archetypes, especially the ruggedly heterosexual American cowboy, the myth of self-reliant men with checkered pasts seeking fresh starts on the lawless range. Dime novels of the era romanticized gunfights and campfire confessions but seldom addressed frontier sexuality except in code phrases such as a cowboy's "sex hunger," crude nicknames for genitalia and "mastering passion" lessons passed down to greenhorns. Wister's The Virginian had two cowboys practicing a wedding ceremony. In these books, settling down with a traditional family is considered the end of the adventure.

Until Mountain, Western movies also mostly coded homoerotic themes. Looking back we wonder about the closeness of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and detect flirting among gunslingers in The Wild Bunch. Billy the Kid's murder in The Left Handed Gun plays like a crime of gay passion. Val Kilmer's Doc Holliday in Tombstone promising to be "your huckleberry" to an adversary was fey on first impression. Reading Packard's take on the homoerotic subtext of Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn turns Doc's "huckleberry" threat into a come-on.

The most notable example of Hollywood's subversion of straight cowboy images is Howard Hawks' 1948 classic Red River, featuring John Ireland as a tough guy with the effeminate name Cherry Valance.

Cherry a veiled pass at a cowboy played by Montgomery Clift, whose real-life homosexuality was barely concealed by the studio system, by admiring his gun and comparing women to Swiss watches. "You ever had a (suggestive pause) Swiss watch?" Cherry asks with a lascivious smile.

Clift's debut also includes a mocking dance with the ultimate cowboy icon, John Wayne, that is slightly flirtatious in hindsight. Any suggestion the Duke would have anything to do with expressing homosexual themes makes some people gasp.

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 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 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 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."