Queer Cowboys: And Other Erotic Male Friendships in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Paperback)
Description
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.
About the Author
Chris Packard teaches literature and writing at New York University and New School University. His essays have appeared in Arizona Quarterly, Common-Place, and Concerns; his fiction and poetry have appeared in literary quarterlies, exhibitions, and the popular press.
Praise for Queer Cowboys: And Other Erotic Male Friendships in Nineteenth-Century American Literature…
"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
