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"...
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A study of popular pritn and visual materials produced between 1865 and 1910 representing homoerotic and homosocial behavior among men of all ethnicities in the American West.
Ch. 1All-male queer interracial families in the wilderness : James Fenimore Cooper solves his progeny problem19Ch. 2Rehearsing and ridiculing marriage in The Virginian and other adventure tales41Ch. 3American satyriasis in Whitman, Harris, and Hartland71Ch. 4"Queer secrets" in men's clubs : humor, violence, and homoerotic elision in works by Mark Twain, Beret Harte, and Eugene Field95
\ From the Publisher"A searching and original study. Chris Packard has managed to tease out evidence of same-sex attraction in places where one would not have expected to find it."—Larry McMurtry, co-writer of the award-winning screenplay for Brokeback Mountain and author of Lonesome Dove\ "Thanks, Chris Packard, for searching out eros between men in the texts that created the iconic image of the Western American hero. So 'Come back to the Raft Ag'in, Huck Honey!' and see what this scholar has found."—Jonathan Ned Katz, author, Love Stories: Sex between Men before Homosexuality\ \ \
