Throughout history, homosexuality was seen as a feminine thing. This is a deeply ingrained stereotype originating from the very old idea that gay men have the brains of women. The idea of the feminine homosexual is the most persistent idea of the gay man; limp-wristed, high-voiced, and occasionally skirt-clad. The twink. The queen. The fairy, the sissy, the pansy. More recently, the fruity or the zesty. But there’s another side of the homosexual gender binary that is much less explored in the mainstream: the hypermasculine.
Think about the Village People for a second. While not all of the Village People were actually gay, their brand was saddled squarely upon gay shoulders. They used elements of queer culture in their schtick, so to speak, and the gay community adopted them as a symbol. Each of the members of the Village People has a costume. Despite the band having sort of a gay gimmick, these costumes are all based on traditionally hypermasculine characters, like the cowboy, the biker, the cop, and the soldier.
Hypermasculine archetypes like these tend to have gay associations. Cowboys are known for having homoerotic relationships with their open range companions, the navy is notorious for having a bunch of gay guys in it, and stereotypical gay dom BDSM gear looks strikingly similar to biker leathers. But… why are these masculine figures so entwined in stereotypically effeminate gay culture? And why are they all nomadic, travelling lifestyles? Let me explain.
Blazin’ Saddles
Cowboys are, historically, the first example of homosexuality in popular masculine American culture. The cowboy is a prolific, almost inescapable, symbol of “traditional” American masculinity. Modern country culture is built off of nationalism, conservatism, and cowboy iconography. Its men wear cowboy boots and Stetsons while hanging off the side of their lifted truck and touting their “true country” status, but they ignore, or just are not aware of, the fact that Jack Twist of Brokeback Mountain is a much better representation of historical cowboy culture than the Marlboro Man.
Male dominated nomadic communities like cowboys will, inherently, have a lot of homosexuality within them due to their isolation from women. In the time of the cowboy, homosexuality was seen as an act, not an identity. A man could have sex with another man and still call himself straight, because, well, he was hard and there were no women around. For centuries, the idea about gayness was this: bottoms are gay, tops are straight. So, many cowboys would maintain their straightness and, therefore, their masculine identity, even after a hot night in the tent.
But this argument poses nomadic homosexuality as completely physical, something done out of necessity, and it fails to address the genuine love that many cowboys had for each other. It almost erases gayness altogether in favor of pure, instinctive male sexuality. Penis gets hard, goes in nearest hole. Simple! But this isnt the whole (hole pun not intended) story.
Cowboys almost always worked, travelled, and existed in multiples. A cowboy needed a partner or crew for efficiency in cattle wranglin’ and to survive on the range. They relied on each other for everything: flanking herds of cows, tending to the cattle, help with injuries, and human connection. A cowboy’s companions were extremely valuable support, and also the only people he might see for months on end, so they got familiar. Cowboys rarely travelled in pairs alone, but they would often form close relationships with specific men in their crew and may have a specific “partner” (or pardner, I guess) with whom they would be closest with.
These relationships were very close and affectionate, due to isolation and the close bonding that working together in dangerous, harsh conditions provides, and they were often a little more than bestie friendship. “The Lost Pardner,” a lament written by famous cowboy poet Badger Clark about the death of his fellow cowboy Al, is perhaps one of the most famous and obvious evidences of these connections.
We loved each other in the way men do
And never spoke about it, Al and me,
But we both knowed, and knowin’ it so true
Was more than any woman’s kiss could be.
This is quite line blurring but clearly, almost blatantly, homosexual. They loved each other in the way men do; they never spoke about it, but they both knew, and that meant more than any woman’s kiss. These are the kinds of bonds that cowboys would form on the range.
These relationships that cowboys had with their lassoin’ partners are quite possibly why modern masc-americana culture is so attached to the idea of the “lone ranger,” a cowboy that travels completely by himself, and therefore cannot have a partner with whom he sleeps in the same tiny little tent. This is a nearly foolproof way that conservative culture can hold onto the cowboy as a symbol of rugged masculinity and erase his history as a symbol of tender homosexuality, almost a rewriting of history, but it wasn’t the first rewriting of gay cowboy history.
The modern sexual binary was largely created in the east, and, clearly, in the west everything was still a little fast and loose. When the US population expanded enough for the culture in the two sides of the country to combine, the rigidity of the east won, and the cowboy brand of socially acceptable homosexuality was put in the past. It was seen as deviant, and gay men were labelled “sexual inverts.” The cowboy was diluted, removed from his roots, and, newly straight-ified, adopted as a symbol of America. The cowboy could not both be gay and an American mascot, because that would mean that America is gay. Or, put a little bit more eloquently in this fantastic article by Hana Klempnauer Miller, “…if there is something national about the cowboy and if there is something homoerotic about the partnerships he forms in the wilderness, then there is something homoerotic about American national identity.” This was obviously unacceptable to the culture that has just exiled gay men as perverted deviants and inverts, so the cowboy was rewritten as wholly straight and solitary, and that he stayed in the cultural zeitgeist.
This is why people reacted so apprehensively to Brokeback Mountain. “The cowboy can’t be gay because the cowboy is America, and America can’t be gay because gay is bad!” But guess what, baby! The cowboy is gay. So… I don’t know. Go meditate on that.
In the Navy
(I really wish Substack had the option to autoplay music during parts of your article… sigh.)
Historically, openly gay men were not allowed to serve in the military. The navy famously ran a sort of gay-trapping project where they would hire young men to go to cruising spots to engage in sexual activity with navy sailors, and then report who engaged to the authorities so they could be discharged or arrested. This became known as the Newport Sex Scandal and was widely criticized due to its propagation of homosexual activity. To reduce the amount of people having gay sex, they hired men to go out and have gay sex. Pretty counteractive, huh? The New York Times described it like this: “enlisted men of the navy were used as participants in immoral practices for the purpose of obtaining evidence.”
The navy also poured an absurd amount of time and effort into finding a mysterious woman named Dorothy, thinking that she ran some sort of homosexual network, without knowing that “a friend of Dorothy” was just slang for “gay guy.”
But why did they focus on the Navy so much? Well, simple answer: Navy gay as fuck. Its notorious for its gayness. This sprouted from similar roots to the cowboy brand of homosexuality: isolation. Or, more accurately, it sprouted from similar roots to pirate homosexuality, but I didn’t write about pirates in this article because they’re not exactly seen as icons of masculinity. Just know that they were also pretty gay.
The start of modern-ish naval homosexuality can be traced back to sea queens, effeminate gay men who worked on merchant and passenger ships as entertainers and waiters. These men would act as “wives” for sailors when they were on ships. The boat acted as a sort of island for gay men where they could escape land-bound homophobia.
Men would even put on drag shows as morale-boosting entertainment, and though men performing as women is an extremely old and deep-rooted concept in theatre, these shows are just another sign of the gay culture that we already know was present in the Navy. Sea queens that would preform drag would also adopt names very similar to the drag names of today, and Polari, a sort of secret language used among gay men, was used widely onboard and was even influenced by sailor slang.
Leather Daddies— I Mean, Bikers
Now, most modernly, the biker. Homosexuality within biker culture is much less well known and stereotypical than with cowboys or sailors, but it is not irrelevant. The era of the biker gay was, in part, the era of gay men striving to change their image. Gays sought to look tough and masculine, to contrast the very effeminate idea of the gay man in the culture, and biker culture was perfect for this. Bikers were seen as tough and masculine, and they were also seen as outlaws and outcasts, just like gay men. At the time, gayness meant femininity, and femininity meant weakness… obviously, they didn’t like that. They formed sort of a rivalry with the more feminine side of the gay community. That certain side of the biker gay community could be equated to modern day “pick me gays,” who put other parts of the gay community down for straight approval. “Look guys, I’m cool and masculine like you, I would never be like those sissies!”
There’s also the obvious connection in the clothing. Bikers were big, masculine, tough, and clad in leather, buckles, and straps, with clear similarities to BDSM leather culture. Tom of Finland, one of the most famous gay artists, took very clear inspiration from biker culture and often drew bikers clad in tight leather clothing with almost comically large bulges.
The main difference between gay biker culture and gay cowboy or sailor culture is that bikers were actually largely homophobic. Most biker bars were straight-only, and Hell’s Angels, a huge biker club, were enraged when the 1961 film Scorpio Rising featured a gay biker orgy. Many bikers were also nazis or otherwise fascistic, due to the biker community having its peak right after World War ll, which clearly contrasts the general political stance of homosexuality. So the biker community was tied intrinsically to gayness, but it also hated it. Ironic, i’nt it?
On the Road
The Beat generation was a weird one. Almost undefinable, it sort of slipped by the examinations of modern pop culture and remains mostly as a faint memory of beatniks in sunglasses and turtlenecks. Beat lit floats awkwardly in between general knowledge and pretentious hippie-shit. Your average person probably knows who Jack Kerouac is, but the culture surrounding him is a little bit lost to time. This is tragic to me personally as somebody who had to tape their copy of On the Road together with scotch tape because they brought it everywhere with them when they were 16, but I am sort of a pretentious hippie-shitter.
Beats were experimenters, essentially, in their writing and in their lifestyles. Beat culture was non-conformist and rebellious, drinking and partying and hitch-hiking and sort of twisting and tangling various societal lines, including the ones that defined love and sex at the time. Here the seeds of the later hippie movement were sewn.
Allen Ginsberg, one of the most popular Beat writers, was openly gay, and his poem “Howl” caused its publisher to be arrested for it’s content about homosexuality. His entire circle was very closely bonded and allegedly (or explicitly, in the case of Ginsberg and Kerouac) romantically or sexually interested in each other. It’s messy shit and I found that I can’t really find much solid information about it, but the general idea is that they were all either having sex each other or, at the very least, writing books about each other. Like this article the Beatdom lit journal puts it: “Without Kerouac there would have been no ‘Howl’, without Neal there would have been no On the Road and without Ginsberg there would have been no Naked Lunch.”
While Allen was the most outwardly gay out of the beat circle, I want to focus on Jack Kerouac right now. Kerouac embodies the intersect between masculinity and homosexuality that I’ve been talking about this whole time, but also the confliction that it brings, a point that I’ve failed to mention up until now. Soz.
Kerouac is the author of On the Road, perhaps the quintessential Beat novel. The book is technically fictional, but essentially autobiographical, and it documents his experiences hitchhiking across America. The most distinct and famous character in On the Road is Dean Moriarty, the main character’s erratic, charismatic, sex-loving friend. Dean was mostly characterized by his kind of crazy sexual escapades with women, but he was (allegedly…) based on the real life Neal Cassady, who had frequent sexual relationships with men. One of these men was actually Allen Ginsberg, and Ginsberg’s extremely sexual poem “Please Master” is generally considered to be about him.
So Cassady and Ginsberg had explicit sexual relations, but Kerouac and Cassady are a little bit more complicated. Well, Kerouac’s sexuality in general is complicated. He uses negative language towards gay people (or, as he puts it, “queers”) in his writing, and he was also a Catholic, which obviously holds its own complications, but the biography Subterranean Kerouac by Kerouac’s editor Ellis Amburn reveals his sexual relationships with men. Amburn describes him as a “homophobic homoerotic,” and says “he denied having sex with men, but continued to have it.” He was said to have sexual relations with Ginsberg (Jesus Christ this guy gets around) and his friendship with Neal Cassady was very… gay-ish, but he stayed in denial and pretty homophobic to the very bitter end. Or as Amburn puts it, Kerouac, the high school football star and sparkling all-American boy raised in an unstable household with an alcoholic dad,
“…hated his homoerotic nature. He drank to anesthetize the pain of basically an unlived life.” and “remained convinced until his death that he was not bisexual, and that homosexuality was in fact immoral”
Kerouac eventually died by cirrhosis of the liver caused by his lifelong alcoholism.
Straight and gay simulacra
All of these historic communities, save for the Beats who have all but fallen into obscurity, essentially have three versions: the real version, the straight simulation, and the gay simulation. The straight simulation is the one that is adopted into the mainstream. The modern day cowboy is the conservative country boy, the modern day navy sailor is the manly navy enlister, and the modern day biker is the bearded homophobic Harley Davidson fanboy.
The gay simulation is the one that is present in gay spaces… obviously. The biker leathers-clad BDSM dom, the assless chaps cowboy clubber, and the currently more obscure sailor hat twink. To the homophobes, these are seen as bastardizations, appropriations of all-American masculinity, but who are the true appropriators here? Is it really the gays, or is it actually… the straights?
