( 4 reviews )
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( 0 of 1 found this review helpful ) Posted: Mar 20 2009
Packard, Chris. "Queer Cowboys: And Other Erotic Male Friendships in Nineteenth Century American Literature", Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Gay Men Are Everywhere? Amos Lassen Chris Packard gives us an original and intense study of gay men in places where one would not expect to find them. For the masses of America it was "Brokeback Mountain" that showed gay cowboys and Packard takes that even further by looking at literature of those who wrote with a western theme such as James Fennimore Cooper. Owen Wister and Mark Twain. We learn that same sex attraction and intimacy was around long before the word homosexual was. There were male only clubs as long ago as the 1800s.
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( 1 of 1 found this review helpful ) Posted: Sep 6 2007
An intersting little anthology of the queer and not so queer which suffers from too much hindsight on occasion. Sure there were male-to-male relationships between these types but they do not necessarily constitute 'gay' in our terms. Some individuals just want to have too much neatly in their corner and claim the past too. I read this with interest but was neither convinced or persuaded that all is what it seems according to this author. It is cashing in on the 'virility' factor assoicated with cowboys. I suggest you reading this book in tandem with "Sodomy and the Pirate Tradition: English Sea Rovers in the Seventeenth Century Caribbean"
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( 14 of 15 found this review helpful ) Posted: Oct 3 2006
Chris Packard puts together an entertaining, and intellectually stimulating tour of some "cowboy literature" of the 19th century, emphasizing everywhere its homosocial qualities, and finding the erotic under every set of chaps. Comical, sometimes suggestive period photographs dot the text, cowhands hugging each other, holding hands, or even standing "too close" to each other, dancing, or swimming nude. Packard begins his survey of American lit with the Leatherstocking Tales of James Fenimore Cooper (and his sea stories too, which share some of the same tropes of white man + "othered" man finding love where no woman dare go). Cooper's always good for a few laughs, but the intensity of same-sex feeling that Packard finds in these novels might make you momentarily confused--might he be writing about DENNIS Cooper's books? On a broad level, was homosexuality encouraged "on the trail" as a way of avoiding children of mixed race? So it seems. Owen Wister's THE VIRGINIAN was a famous novel written by a contemporary of Henry James who actually was a cowboy himself, briefly, in youth. Its narrator, an Eastern newcomer, is in love with the Virginian, that's pretty obvious from Packard's canny precis. This chapter is the highlight of Packard's discussion and the one that comes closest to furthering his thesis. Succeeding chapters descend into writing's netherworlds, of softcore porn, lockerroom ballads, and Mark Twain's obscene smoking room talks, to show that American men were not above appreciating same-sex love as a basis for comedy, though it is a pity Packard couldn't find any cowboys doing so. The book feels oddly foreshortened at the end, as though the publisher were punishing him for running overtime and stopped the argument, arbitrarily, at a certain number of pages. But I enjoyed myself thoroughly and could definitely see an expanded edition.
