love letter 12: gay cowboys
Please forgive me! This is so late. School hasn't even started yet and I have already become so busy. That and I spent so long going over and changing this love note and you'll see, coming to terms that I just don't have the words for it yet!
I'm going to actually change this newsletter to a monthly one. The real world has come crashing at my door. School starts in two weeks and then there will be the flood of activity and creativity which is both exciting and terrifying.
Lately my only creativity has been through journaling
love note 12: gay cowboys
Howdy, 2021
I was going to write about why queer culture loves cowboys but there’s just so much there. I’ve realized it’s a longer form project and won’t fit compactly into a short newsletter.
So instead I present to you: my favorite gay cowboy art. I will let you, dear reader, consider, as you look through these images: what is the allure of the cowboy especially to the queer artists and audiences?
Alexander Jace Kelly, insta: @sweetcowboyblues
Portrait of Orville Peck
Midnight Cowboy, dir. John Schlesinger, 1969
National Anthem: America’s Queer Rodeo, Luke Gilford
AL, insta: @rejka
Rodeo Partners Gene Hubert and Rick Ferreira, Sun Valley, California, 1991, Blake Little
Lil Nas X at the 2020 Grammy's
Brokeback Mountain, dir. Ang Lee, 2005
readings
poetry nook
Backdrop addresses cowboy by Margaret Atwood
Starspangled cowboy
sauntering out of the almost-
silly West, on your face
a porcelain grin,
tugging a papier-mâché cactus
on wheels behind you with a string,
you are innocent as a bathtub
full of bullets.
Your righteous eyes, your laconic
trigger-fingers
people the streets with villains:
as you move, the air in front of you
blossoms with targets
and you leave behind you a heroic
trail of desolation:
beer bottles
slaughtered by the side
of the road, bird-
skulls bleaching in the sunset.
I ought to be watching
from behind a cliff or a cardboard storefront
when the shooting starts, hands clasped
in admiration,
but I am elsewhere.
Then what about me
what about the I
confronting you on that border,
you are always trying to cross?
I am the horizon
you ride towards, the thing you can never lasso
I am also what surrounds you:
my brain
scattered with your
tincans, bones, empty shells,
the litter of your invasions.
I am the space you desecrate
as you pass through.
Currently Reading
Outlawed by Anna North
More cowboy content! This time with a woman who joins up with a band of nonbinary and women outlaws after being hunted down in her town where being barren can get you hung as a witch. The nonbinary leader of the gang is giving! me! life!
Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up with Me written by Mariko Tamaki and illustrated by Rosemary Valero-O'Connell.
I really really loved this graphic novel. It's beautifully illustrated and really shows the chaos that is teenage love and obsession and bad decisions.
That's it for now, folks! Once school starts, I'll either have so much to write about, obsessing over everything I'm learning or I'll be swamped! Either way, I'll see you in September. I'll probably be posting some school adventures over on Instagram
lots of love,
k