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, shoulders touching, are held in a closeness that exceeds 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.

In the collective imagination, the cowboy was long a figure of solitary heroism, shaped by the brushes of Remington and Russell and frozen by Hollywood cinema. 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.

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.
Beneath the heroic varnish of conquest, this painting reveals another conquest: that of the space of desire, arising between two men in the light of the American plains.

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.

Notes

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.