Was the Old West a hot bed of homosexuality?

I’ve wondered this myself. For school once we had to research a time and place and find out how gay people fit in.

I chose the Civil War and there was almost nothing. There’s one story about a regiment that dressed the younger guys up as women and had a “dance.” I guess it became a little infamous since it’s about all you will find on the subject.

They didn’t talk about this stuff in those days. I’d love for a historian to walk me through the subject in early America.

Oh, yes. The Village People were historically accurate.

[quote] seems like it would’ve been. Have there been any books written on this subject?

Oh, yes... many written at the time and shortly after. It's a subject that's always been so open and readily accepted. Bisexuality as well.

Highly recommended: A novel, DAYS WITHOUT END, by Sebastian Barry. Two male lovers in the Old West and Civil War. Beautifully written.

MATT AND FESTUS , YOU DO THE MATH.

WW2 changed the masculine dynamic in America to Big Bad Hetero.

Prior to that, men had friendships that were more intimate, but not sexual, if you can wrap a brain around that.

Add into that situational homosexual acts with a preference for unavailable women, and you have a hotbed of ambiguous sexual activity.

It appears, whatever side of the debate you are on, that little was memorialized.

It's why Festus limped.

The Old West, where men were men and the sheep were scared.

R6 is correct - platonic friendships between men (and women) were far more intense, far more intimate prior to WWII. You can see it in many letters that have survived.

By our modern standards, they read like love letters, but they’re really not. It’s just a reflection of the platonic intimacy of the friendship. A good example are some of Lincoln’s letters with his one time roommate. Every few years there’s an article or book citing the letters to claim Lincoln was either gay or bi. Considering how reviled Lincoln was by 1/2 the country (Civil War and all) as well as his enemies in the congress, if there was even a whiff of this, it would have been used against him publicly and often.

Remember his immediate predecessor in the WH a lifelong bachelor with a “best friend” was openly referred to as “Aunt Fancy” (I believe the friend was called “Miss Nancy”).

I'm sure there was a lot of bestiality - not sure if it was gay bestiality?

Frankly, I believe there was a lot of homosexual behavior among western explorers, and in the various navies of the world. Why? Because societal pressure was intense for people to pair up and have children. If you were a man and had no desire to be with a woman, a natural solution would be to go to an all-male environment. No women, no pressure. Obviously, there would need to be some ways to indicate willingness to do this. But again, self-selection would guarantee that your odds would be higher of finding someone compatible this way than by being in an environment with equal numbers of women and men. I say homosexual behavior only because the idea of being only with same sex partners for an entire lifetime was practically inconceivable in most past centuries. Only in the 1880s did German scientists coin the word homosexual and mean by it people whose desires were solely for their own sex.

How else did Miss Kitty catch AIDS?

Not funny

I think R11 is correct, there must have been a fairly high proportion of gay/bi men in the Old West.

Because what else could a gay/bi man do in those days, if he wanted to avoid marriage to a woman? Head out west, and hope to meet a "pardner". Because it wasn't just the absence of women that was appealing, in a place where close same-sex friends were the only life partners available to many, it was very, very easy to hide a relationship that was more than friendship.

Oscar Wilde scored big with the silver miners (not minors) of Leadville, Colorado.

I remember a nonfiction book I read long ago (can't remember its identifying details) on this topic. In one chapter, it described how a young man (X) met another guy (Y) while traveling. Upon their arrival at X's home town, Y more or less invited himself to spend the night at X's home, and X agreed. Apparently, this was considered no more than standard hospitality at the time. Sharing X's bed, Y kept trying to take liberties with him. After the exasperated X finally made it clear he wasn't interested, Y asked him if he knew "any other likely girl or man" who might accommodate him. The next morning, X filed a complaint with the police. I forget how it played out, whether Y suffered any real consequences. But I recall being struck by two things in the extensively quoted official records. How naïve X was about sex, and yet how casual he was on the whole about being "pestered" by the aggressive and persistent Y.

Why yes, yes it was.

R16's comment reminds me that this goes back even to biblical times.

The whole "thou shalt not lay with" comment in the bible wasn't any specific comment against gays, but an admonition that basically, if someone gives you shelter for the evening, you should only rape his wife, sister or daughter, and not the dude himself....regardless of how hot his ass was.

No, seriously. Think about that.

It was common practice to share a bed. No homo!

The Old West was a hot bed of beastiality.

The men were men and the cows, sheep, pigs and goats were their girlfriends.

I was expecting... more, R15.

Many were cold beds of homosexuality.

R1 Where did you go to school that this was a research project, RuPaul University?

[quote] I’d love for a historian to walk me through the subject in early America.

Is that what they call it nowadays?

....

I'd hate the Wild West. All that grime and heat and bathing once a month. Can you imagine how foul their junk and holes must've been?

r26, did you ever visit a video arcade in the 70s?

Same smell.

Interesting read for you, OP. I think it may have been someone's PhD thesis that found a mass(ish) publisher after Brokeback Mountain raised the profile of this subject. On a personal note, I'm in a totally male dominated profession and I'm sure on some level, that was part of the attraction, and that a hundred years ago, when men and women led much more separate lives, it was even more the case.

R27 You mean stale poppers? I wasn't around but I'm sure the pre indoor plumbing 1880s were much worse than in the 70s.

The scent of butt sex, cigarettes, poppers, leather, crusted loads...

I sure am feelin' sorry for the pony

I'm sure stuff happened.

mining camps (where women were often few and far between) held regular dances at the local saloons. and men would "offer" to be the "lady" dance partner. ...later that same evening....

They look so unshowered and their clothes so unwashed.

[quote] I chose the Civil War and there was almost nothing.There’s one story about a regiment that dressed the younger guys up as women and had a “dance.” I guess it became a little infamous since it’s about all you will find on the subject.

This book appears to contain some more material:

I wish we had more eyewitness accounts about this. I think male friendship encompassed a lot more intimacy back then, but the particularities were never mentioned in polite company.

R35 Sexual Misbehavior. Judgmental aren't we.

The vast majority of homosexual history has been erased.

r37

If you're looking for documentary evidence of homosexuality in the pre-gay rights era, you're most likely to find it in court records.

r38, that is so true. It wasn't until the Internet that we have been able to write our own permanent history.

And gay kids are no longer alone. One search and they can connect wit many adolescent social and support services.

Queer Studies is only since the 1980s.

She ain't purdy but she do

DAYS WITHOUT END is a great book on this very subject. Read it!!

"Men In Eden" by William Benemann is not about cowboys per se but describes how explorers and men in the fur trade in the mid 19th century took advantage of the heavily all-male environment to escape from the confines of a heteronormative society. It follows the travels of a Scottish nobleman and is amazingly detailed concerning many of the cast of characters he meets along the way.

Why do you think they invented assless chaps?

Everyone knows: anal sex only really became a thing in the 1970s.

It was only fellatio or mutual masturbation before that.

Bullshit R46 Buttfucking rules in ancient Roman pottery and old Ottoman art.

Greeks invented buttsex

Child birth was a lady killer.

There were not as many gays back them. Gay guys started have sex with women more recently, therefore an explosion of gays in the last several decades.

I'll also recommend Days Without End. Sebastian Barry is a genius.

r50 what?

gays have existed from day one of humanity.

I think R14 and R36 have it right, it was a homosocial society where straight men didn't have women or families to fulfill their need for intimacy and caring, only other men. So friendships became much more important than they are in a society where marriage is common and expected, and it's a cliché of cowboy movies that men would pair up as "pardners" and travel from job to job together, or set up a homestead, a scratch mine, or a business together. A discrete gay couple could have passed absolutely unnoticed in such a society!

Mark Twain went out to the Wild West in the 1860s, and lived and traveled with male friends like everyone did, and wrote about it honestly. And to show how rare women were... he described an incident where he came to some mining camp or tiny excuse for a town, and a man offered him the chance to LOOK AT A WOMAN for more money than he had to spare. Twain paid his money and joined the line of men who were paying up to look through a hole in a tent wall, at a stout middle-aged woman who was working at a stove, and looked until they made him stop because he wanted his full share of looking at an actual woman.

[R45] Why do you think they invented assless chaps?

—Anonymous

So Trigger could have his way with Roy Rogers?

Let’s not forget how many of the cowboys were freed men of color.

You had Zero excuse for bigotry and endless inches of brotherly love out there and a closeted Christian probably fucked it up for everybody.

R55 is absolutely right.

It's true, some idiots like to believe the Old West was all white and all straight and all-American, and it's bullshit. Plenty of those cowboys who could go years without seeing a woman didn't want to see women, and others were freed slaves, or from Mexico or south of Mexico, and as immigration was barely restricted there were plenty of immigrants from the less favored parts of Europe and Asia making new lives for themselves.

Frankly, most of our ideas about the Old West have been formed by Hollywood, including the idea that everyone out there was white, straight, and native-born.

I think fellatio was uncommon due to hygiene issues. Cocks didn't get washed very well or often, so men were more inclined to take it up the ass.

Here you go OP.

Men have always taken care of their buddies, especially in homosocial society. You just didn't talk about it.

As mentioned by r44, r60.

R4 / r43 / r51 based on your recommendations, I picked up “Days Without End” today. I’m looking forward to reading it.. Thank you.

Um... there were female prostitutes then, so men didn't have to go too far to find a woman.

not necessarily r64 many times the men were the first settlers. women came later. and not many women were trappers aor early miners. men, men and more men.

The notion that your spouse should be your best, and in many cases, only, friend is unique to postwar America. Before that it was assumed that men and women had very intense intimate friendships with people of the same gender since (sorry DLers) taking the notion of sex and appearance out of the equation meant those friendships were more "pure" e.g., your male BFF didn't care if you were fat or bald or unkempt as he wasn't going to have sex with you and there was a much greater degree of bromance and its female equivalent.

As for sex and the Old West I am sure there is something to that, much in the way that gays and lesbians gravitated to being Catholic clergy because they did not need to marry, the theory espoused upthread that being pioneers freed them from expectations of marriage seems pretty logical.

Generally, I don't think it was as common as some here would like to believe. Just because you're separated from the gender you're attracted to doesn't mean you'll switch over to whatever's around when they're gone, just by default.

If the gays here had no access to other men for a year or two, would they start having sex with women?

I don't think so.

I need to find the link to the article, but yes - there existed "brothels" that were staffed by younger boys (not sure how young, but the majority were around 17/18/19/20 yoa). They used a "peg board" to assess how large of a penis the said young man could accommodate in his ass. The board basically had wooden anal plugs attached which would indicate how tight the male bottom prostitute was or was not - he slathered the pegs with lard and sat on it to prove his skills. The article was one in a magazine but the overall takeaway was that no women were available, and many attractive young men found that working as male prostitutes kept them FAR better paid than as a Wild West farmer/rancher/railroad/etc. guy. Even back then, this was a youth profession - but many young men did quite well which afforded them the ability to buy land, marry and start a family. Funny how the world has always been kinky - like it or not.

R68 find the link, that sounds fascinating.

I did extensive reading on the Old West in my 20s. Out of all the volumes I read, I found only one reference to homosex. In one of the volumes, it was noted that a man was court martialed because he was caught in a cot with another man. This was at an Army fort in the West. No details, and no reason for only one being court martialed. I have no link as this was preinternet . I think that it happened, but was never discussed. Now hat they players are long gone, it's true history is lost to time.

Has this been posted yet?

Here's the story that goes with the previously posted picture.

Another article at link.