Plain Intimacy

This canvas, attributed to the School of the Far West, subtly subverts the official iconography of the American frontier. Far from heroic rides and duels, it lingers on a suspended moment between two cowboys at rest, bare-chested, standing side by side. On the left, the horse completes the scene as a silent witness. The two men, body to body, are bound by a closeness that goes beyond mere camaraderie. The cowboy on the left places his hand on his companion’s shoulder, a protective gesture that affirms a tender and assured presence. In response, the cowboy on the right rests his own hand upon the other’s, creating a discreet yet explicit intertwining, a sign of deep affection. Their solemn, direct gazes intensify the tension of the scene: here, virility does not conceal intimacy but claims it.

Undoing the Frontier Myth

In the collective imagination, the cowboy was long a figure of solitary heroism, shaped by the brushes of Frederic Remington (1861–1909) and Charles Marion Russell (1864–1926), painters of the American frontier who immortalized riders, camps, and open plains, and frozen by Hollywood’s westerns — that genre of moral solitude and dust-filled duels where the lone man and his horse defined what courage was meant to look like. Yet recent scholarship invites us to read the lives of these men differently. The isolation of ranches, the closeness of camps, and the long rides in an exclusively male environment fostered the emergence of intimate, sometimes sexual, bonds. Historian Peter Boag has shown how the West was traversed by a fluidity of gender and sexuality, sustaining what were called bachelor societies¹. Sexologist Alfred Kinsey had already observed that in highly isolated environments—cowboys, lumbermen, prospectors—homosexual contacts were “considerable,” without undermining local codes of masculinity².

The Other Conquest

Literature itself bears witness to this hidden reality. As noted by Chris Packard, professor of American literature and specialist in queer representations of the West:
“Queer Cowboys recovers this forgotten culture of exclusively masculine, sometimes erotic, and often intimate camaraderie in fiction, photographs, illustrations…”³

Over the last decades, several voices have begun to reintroduce the homosexuality of cowboys into art and storytelling. The movement first appeared in literature, and among the works that carried this truth forward, Annie Proulx’s short story that inspired Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain later brought it into cinema, reminding audiences that intimacy between men was never foreign to the world of the frontier.

Beneath the heroic varnish of conquest, this painting reveals another kind of conquest — that of the space of desire, arising between two men in the light of the American plains. Historical research confirms that such bonds were not only imagined but lived: in the isolation of ranch life, cowboys often formed deep emotional partnerships, shared beds for warmth during long drives, and built chosen intimacies that blurred the line between camaraderie and affection. Far from the lone, hardened stereotype, the real frontier world allowed moments of tenderness that quietly unsettled its own myth.

Vaqueros in the Desert Wind

Far from the uniform image of the Far West, it is worth recalling that many of these cowboys were Spanish-speaking ⁴ — descendants of Mexican vaqueros or Californios, whose culture, language, and gestures deeply shaped the work of cattle herding in the West. The very words of their world — rodeo, lasso, bronco, mustang — come from Spanish and bear witness to this forgotten heritage. Their clothing, their saddles, their songs, and their way of inhabiting the vast plains gave the cowboy myth its form and its breath. This detail, often erased by Anglo-American imagery of the Far West, reminds us that the history of the cowboy was also one of cultural intermingling, where the boundaries of desire and language blended beneath the same sun.

The Marlboro Man 

In the 1950s, the Marlboro Man⁵ transformed the act of smoking into a performance of masculine control — a rugged, silent assertion of strength that shaped how men, and masculinity itself, were imagined. For many gay men, this image resonated on two levels: as an object of desire and as a code to be reclaimed in a society that often questioned their manhood. The cigarette thus became both a gesture of defiance and a form of belonging, especially in social spaces marked by marginalization. The fact that gay men continue to smoke at higher rates than heterosexual men points to a deeper social and psychological dynamic — one that deserves fuller exploration and will be developed in the Chronicles section.

Resting Under Western Suns

To attribute the work to an unknown painter of the School of the Far West is, in a sense, ironically apt: this school, emblematic of a heteronormative imagination, is here repurposed to testify to affective and erotic realities it never wished to represent, yet which were nonetheless part of cowboy life.

Curiosity Piqued?

1. Peter Boag, Re-Dressing America’s Frontier Past, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012.

2. Alfred C. Kinsey et al., Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, Philadelphia: W.B. Saunders, 1948, pp. 650–655.

3. Chris Packard, Queer Cowboys: And Other Erotic Male Friendships in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, p. 2.

4. Richard W. Slatta, Cowboys of the Americas, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990.

5. Cameron White, John L. Oliffe & Joan L. Bottorff, From Promotion to Cessation: Masculinity, Race, and Style in the Consumption of Cigarettes, 1962–1972, Health, 2013, vol. 17, pp. 762–771.