A Queer History of the United States by Michael Bronski

male refuge. As cultural critic Chris Packard notes, “The cowboy is queer; he is odd; he doesn’t fit in; he resists community.” 2 The myth of the American West often locates civilizing forces in the teeming, conformist, urban East—the antithesis of the natural wilderness. The mythic, lone cowboy, sometimes coupled with a “pardner,” is emblematic of the revolt against not only social dictates and conformity, but also institutional heterosexuality.
    The cowboy is culturally positioned as a man outside of the law. Clark’s poem “The Outlaw” argues that the cowboy and the outlaw are the same. The internal struggle it conveys—metaphorically, a cowboy breaking a horse—is between the natural man, “the beast,” and the civilized man.
    When the devil at rest underneath my vest
    Gets up and begins to paw
    And my hot tongue strains at its bridle reins,
    Then I tackle the real outlaw.
    When I get plumb riled and my sense goes wild
    And my temper is fractious growed,
    If he’ll hump his neck just a triflin’ speck,
    Then it’s dollars to dimes I’m throwed.
    For a man is a man, but he’s partly a beast.
    He kin brag till he makes you deaf,
    But the one lone brute, from the west to the east,
    That he kain’t quite break is himse’f. 3
    “The Outlaw” is an example of the internal conflict between control and liberation, a struggle that also reflects the ambivalence of society at large. The relationship between the cowboy and his “pardner” is distinct from the idealized romantic friendship seen in the letters of Daniel Webster or Lafayette. The cowboy is an isolated man, and his intimate friendships have more to do with being away from civilization, as this excerpt from Owen Wister’s 1891 short story “Hank’s Woman” demonstrates. Here two intimate friends call off their futile attempts at fishing to go swimming:
    “Have yu’ studied much about marriage?” he now inquired. His serious eyes met mine as he lay stretched along the ground.
    “Not much,” I said; “not very much.”
    “Let’s swim,” he said. “They have changed their minds.”
    Forthwith we shook off our boots and dropped our few clothes, and heedless of what fish we might now drive away, we went into the cool, slow, deep breadth of backwater which the bend makes just there. As he came up near me, shaking his head of black hair, the cow-puncher was smiling a little.
    “Not that any number of baths,” he remarked, “would conceal a man’s objectionableness from an antelope—not even a she-one.” . . .
    We dried before the fire, without haste. To need no clothes is better than purple and fine linen. Then he tossed the flap-jacks, and I served the trout, and after this we lay on our backs upon a buffalo-hide to smoke and watch the Tetons grow more solemn, as the large stars opened out over the sky.
    “I don’t care if I never go home,” said I. 4
    This domestic scene, complete with making dinner, is “home”—literally “home on the range”—for the narrator, but a home removed from civilization and women. These men are outside of society’s control, but feeling at home with themselves.
    These sentiments in nineteenth-century American western literature increase in the later decades of the century, when the West was becoming more “civilized.” They offered imaginative alternative models to heterosexuality and some forms of same-sex friendship. Clark’s and Wister’s writings, published just after the time when the Old West was the frontier between nature and civilization, exemplify how the associations between same-sex desire and frontier life became all the more powerful as reverberations in memory. Whatever the sexual and affectional lives of the cowboys, the decidedly nonheterosexual myths that grew about them became deeply entrenched in mainstream culture. The actual conditions that bred these myths, however, were much more systemic than two “pardners” alone on the range.
    The Beginnings of