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“It’s important to know the history of homosexuality,” notes History Department Chairman Peter Boag from the University of Colorado at Boulder.
“Society didn’t really designate people as homosexual or heterosexual through most of the 19th century; it was not really until the 20th century that those identities crystallized.”
Boag, who wrote the 2003 book Same Sex Affairs, explained to True West: “In all-men societies, it was not unusual for same sex relationships, and it was just an acceptable thing to do. People engaged in same sex activities weren’t seen as homosexuals.”
That point is strongly supported in the article, “Paradise of Bachelors: The Social World of Men in Nineteenth-Century America.”
It notes: “Without the presence of women, the always unstable line dividing the homosocial from the homosexual—that is, dividing non-sexual male bonding activities from sexual contact between men—became even more blurred
. As traditional notions of ‘normal’ gender roles were challenged and unsettled, men could display both subtly and openly the erotic connections they felt for other men.
When the miners at Angel Camp in southern California held dances, half of the men danced the part of women, wearing patches over the crotches of their pants to signal their ‘feminine’ role.”
But nobody would have called them gay or even homosexual—a word that wasn’t even used until 1868. (Heterosexual is an even newer word, which first appeared in print in 1924.)
They may have been called punk, notes Patricia Nell Warren in a 1997 article in Quest magazine. “Punk—used today in men’s prisons to denote a young male sexual partner, was common in old-time ranch lingo because of sexual relationships among cowboys,” she writes.
There was even a name for same-sex “marriages.” As “Paradise of Bachelors” notes: “Cowboys and miners settled into partnerships that other men recognized (and sometimes referred to) as ‘bachelor marriages.’”
American Indians, meanwhile, openly recognized and had a name for men and women of an “alternative gender”—those who preferred to dress and work as the opposite sex. Anthropologists now use the term berdache.
Such a background breeds the attitude that sex is sex, irrespective of the nature of the partner with whom the relation is had.
Sexual relations are had with women when they are available, or with other men when the outdoor routines bring men together in exclusively male groups.”
G.I.T.C
The most surprising thing about homosexuality in the Old West is not that it was rare in the rugged, macho world of the cowboy, but that it was so common and so not a big deal.
That’s a complete reversal of the popular notion that the West was populated by virile, heroic men who could live for months on the open range with little more than their rope, their horse and, of course, the ultimate phallic symbol, their gun.
Thinking of these symbols of manhood as uniting sexually with other men is like finding out one of the Marlboro men died of lung cancer—it’s a disconnect that many will find uncomfortable.
In fact, History professor Clifford P. Westermeier noted any examination of sexual activity by cowboys—homosexual or not—was such a cautious topic, his article in the 1975 Red River Valley Historical Review was titled “Cowboy Sexuality: A Historical No-No?”
“To tamper with the image of a folk hero, a historic formula, a legend, and most of all, that of the American cowboy heritage is probably more dangerous than the proverbial where ‘fools rush in,’” Westermeier writes. He notes the traditional cowboy had four failings: drinking, gambling, lechery and violence. “Of these … lechery is often alluded to but is the least detailed activity of his frenetic pleasures.”
While most would expect the cowboy’s lechery was pointed towards women, that wasn’t always true, but it also didn’t mean what it would mean today
“Zunis believed that men skilled at women’s crafts (and women skilled in male activities) combined the two sexes,” writes Will Roscoe in The Zuni Man-Woman, published in 1991.
“This made them extraordinary in every respect.” He found male and female berdaches documented in over 130 North American tribes, in every region of the continent.
“In traditional native societies berdaches were not anomalous,” he notes. “They were integral, productive and valued members of their communities.
But the European culture transplanted to America lacked any comparable roles, and the Europeans who saw berdaches were unable to describe them accurately or comprehend their place in Indian society.”
His book focuses on “Zuni maiden” We’wha, whom he calls “perhaps the most famous berdache in American Indian history.”
None of this is news to those who have paid attention to such things. As early as 1948, Alfred C. Kinsey in Sexual Behavior in the Human Male shocked many when he found “the highest frequencies of the homosexual
we have ever secured anywhere have been in particular rural communities in some of the remote sections of the country.”
He goes on to explain: “There is a fair amount of sexual contact among the older males in Western rural areas.
It is a type of homosexuality which was probably among pioneers and outdoor men in general. Today it is found among ranchmen, cattle men, prospectors, lumbermen, and farming groups in general—among groups that are virile, physically active.
These are men who have faced the rigors of nature in the wild. They live on realities and on a minimum of theory.
