18 years ago, a film about two cowboys and their steamy affair became a cult classic, despite, like quite a few other gay romances, starring two straight actors, Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal. The drama was proclaimed the “go-to gay movie”. Almost two decades on — and with a stage adaptation to boot — it can’t be denied; Brokeback Mountain brought LGBTQ+ cinema into the mainstream.
But since the film was released in 2005, things have been fairly quiet on the queer western frontier. Thankfully, this year film fans can buckle up for a major new entry into the canon, from the godfather of gay cinema himself, Pedro Almodóvar. His short film Strange Way of Life camps up the classic cowboy movie, seeing Ethan Hawke and Pedro Pascal engaged in a potentially lethal tryst — with plenty of brooding stares and melodramatic lines thrown in for good measure.
The director told audiences at Cannes that he took direct inspiration for his new movie from another recent queer western, Jane Campion’s Oscar winner The Power of the Dog, released in 2021. These filmmakers are not alone on the range though, with others like Brock Davy’s technicolored Innocent Boy (a 2020 short about a lusty group of desperado hustlers); the subversively surreal Black Knuckle and Deputy Maltese (another short, this time from 2018, which tells the story of a closeted deputy who falls in love with an outlaw); and the wistful, sapphic Vanessa Kirby-starring period drama from 2020, The World to Come, all representing.
“Cowboys carry a lot of homoerotic currency…. the sweat and swagger of a silent brooding stranger who looks great in a Stetson,” says Craig Boreham, director of the film Lonesome, set amidst the ranches of Queensland, Australia. Released in 2022, Lonesome introduces audiences to Josh, a rural teenager rejected by his father when he is outed as gay, and later forced to move to Sydney to escape.
Craig says he wanted to make a movie which brought to life the cowboy community in which he grew up. “It’s an intoxicating landscape but it’s a brutal place still for queer people who can be pretty isolated and alone. My hometown was one of the last places in Australia where gay men were charged with the crime of homosexuality and so there is this legacy of queers as outlaws that I have always wanted to explore in a film character.”
While Brokeback Mountain is most definitely the best-known queer western, it wasn’t the first of its kind, nor are these new releases. Rather, they’re part of a sprawling history. The earliest queer western, 1954’s Johnny Guitar, actually put two women (Joan Crawford and Mercedes McCambridge) in the stirrups, with sexual tension so palpable it could take a bullet. Then, Andy Warhol’s Lonesome Cowboys satirised the Hollywood western, solidifying a new sub-genre in the process. A fleet of other films followed — Buckeye and Pinto, Dead Man and American Cowboy.
Queer cowboy culture is hardly new – the fact that the International Gay Rodeo Association was founded in 1985 makes that pretty clear. The western was once the archetypal macho genre – and the cowboy the epitome of masculinity – and so it made complete sense that queers around the world would take this and subvert it. But why then, after Brokeback Mountain, have gay cowboys strayed for so long from our screens?
Anna Kerrigan, director of Cowboys, thinks the genre’s resurgence is down to a more stratified society. Released in 2020, her film sees a father (Steve Zahn) and his son ride on horseback off into the wilderness: the father struggles with his mental health, the son his trans identity. “In conservative America, this makes them both modern day outlaws,” says Anna. “You’ve really seen this backlash in conservative America to an explosion of queer representation. Queer people are the ultimate outlaws, especially right now.”
On an even simpler level, the very concept of masculinity has come into contention in recent years like never before. The figure of the cowboy is the perfect embodiment of toxic masculinity – irrepressibly violent, steely and unemotional, while also undeniably, sometimes deliciously, flawed. The western itself is testament to a truly horrific form of masculinity, the origin of the genre being white men enacting colonial violence. Brought into the modern day, with a character like Jane Campion’s vulnerable and brilliant but misanthropic Phil Burbank (Benedict Cumberbatch) there are acres of room to explore how disturbing gender ideals persist even among queer characters.
“A lot of these traits that have traditionally been seen as heroic and desirable are tied with problematic hetero power structures and are fertile grounds to dig into and explore,” says Craig. Lonesome draws on traits of the old genre but watches them unfurl in the present day. “It’s a contemporary take and exists in an urban world of hook up apps and fleeting connections but cinematically and thematically it draws from classic western roots. I wanted to use urban landscapes but frame them like wild empty spaces seen through the eyes of an outsider.”
It’s not just film which has become obsessed with the wild west of late. In music and in fashion, “yee-haw couture” is having a major moment. Think Lil Nas X’s neon pink Stetson, or Orville Peck’s glorious tassels and bandit mask, or Beyoncé’s bedazzling disco cowboy hat. The cowboy culture renaissance has become a key means of self-expression, of queering a once-oppressive tradition and making it your own.
There’s no arguing with the fact that the western is at its core a colonial genre – one which initially celebrated a history which never should have been celebrated. That the legacy of this genre is still felt today might seem strange, with no shortage of modern-day westerns out in cinemas.
As the queer western sub-genre returns, two other sub-genres are galloping alongside it: a gentler form, including Nomadland and First Cow, which sees individuals on the fringes of society attempting to carve out space for themselves, and the Black western, Concrete Cowboy and The Harder They Fall, which attempts to tell a part of history that has been for too long overlooked. All are part of a movement of bringing once-ignored stories to the fore – decolonizing a colonial genre.
“There have always been queer cowboys,” says Craig. “They have just often been ignored by the grand narrative of westerns. One of the best things about taking Lonesome out into the world has been connecting with country queers who see themselves in the story.
“It is about queers, people of colour and people who challenge the gender binary staking a claim for their place in a landscape that has for so long kept us invisible and celebrating that through our art.”