Queer Cowboys: Desire in 19th Century Westerns Book

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. "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 DoveRead More