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Palgrave Macmillan

Queer Cowboys

And Other Erotic Male Friendships in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

  • Book
  • © 2005

Overview

Authors:
  1. Chris Packard
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Table of contents (5 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-ix
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  2. Introduction

    • Chris Packard
    Pages 1-18

  3. All-Male Queer Interracial Families in the Wilderness

    • Chris Packard
    Pages 19-40

  4. Rehearsing and Ridiculing Marriage in The Virginian and Other Adventure Tales

    • Chris Packard
    Pages 41-69

  5. American Satyriasis in Whitman, Harris, and Hartland

    • Chris Packard
    Pages 71-93

  6. “Queer Secrets” in Men’s Clubs

    • Chris Packard
    Pages 95-117

  7. Back Matter

    Pages 119-144
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Keywords

About this book

Why do the earliest representations of cowboy-figures symbolizing the highest ideals of manhood in American culture exclude male-female desire while promoting homosocial and homoerotic bonds? Evidence from the best-known Western writers and artists of the post-Civil War period - Owen Wister, Mark Twain, Frederic Remington, George Catlin - as well as now-forgotten writers, illustrators, and photographers, suggest that in the period before the word 'homosexual' and its synonyms were invented, same-sex intimacy and erotic admiration were key aspects of a masculine code. These males-only clubs of journalists, cowboys, miners, Indian vaqueros defined themselves by excluding femininity and the cloying ills of domesticity, while embracing what Roosevelt called 'strenuous living' with other bachelors in the relative 'purity' of wilderness conditions. Queer Cowboys recovers this forgotten culture of exclusively masculine, sometimes erotic, and often intimate camaraderie in fiction, photographs, illustrations, song lyrics, historical ephemera, and theatrical performances.

Reviews

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

Thought provoking, and the author has courage.....worth reading. - Amazon customer review

About the author

CHRIS PACKARD teaches Literature and Writing at New York University and New School University, USA.

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