Subject:

I am interested in how the West constructs concepts of masculinity, especially in the mutability and maintenance of identifiers, and how those identifiers are constructed both by interior reserves and exterior forces. My interest also includes how popular culture mediates common ideas of masculinity, and how heterosexism complicates the liminal spaces between homosociality and homosexuality. There is little attempt to discuss these matters, and the discussions that have occurred have refused the ambiguities of texts, and made historical and contemporary discussions part of a histography that is too clean, and too well ordered.
The specific project I want help from the Leather Archives with is very much part of this culture. I want to test a thesis I have about the use of cowboy tropes among the gay fetish community, and it’s origins plus its current extensions/use. Gay Fetish Cowboys have emerged as a separate category set, which synthesizes two kinds of spectacled bodies, with one that is much more ordinary. Namely, Rodeo Cowboys, Film/Television Cowboys, and working class ranchers from the Canadian and American prairies.
Being straight, being gay, having sex with men, and having sex with women, knowing how to be a man, and knowing how to be butch are all encoded in these texts for people who raised cattle, the signals that popular culture gave them, that they learned from the traveling rodeos, and from their working class roots were transferred into a specific gay male discourse. There are questions that remain—when did this transfer occur, did it completely isolate other discourses, what are the differences between masculinity in a gay male context, in a context of men who have sex with men, and within a straight male context, how do these contexts problemtatize each other, and do they propose any problems that might be solved?

Scope:
The scope of the paper will be limited by three parameters: 1) chronology 2) gender 3) geography. It will not be limited by sexuality. In those parameters I hope to use a wide variety of sources, both officially and unofficially, including but not limited to personal records, letters, journals, fanzines, television shows, film, ephemera used to advertise both rural and urban events (i.e posters, programs, advertisements, flyers, and the like for tractor pulls, rodeos, bar nights, fetish events, and the like), oral histories, police reports, documents and records from the Pro Rodeo Association, and the like. I hope to use resources from the National Cowboy Hall of Fame and Archives in Oklahoma, the Calgary Stampede Archives, the Gay and Lesbian archives in Toronto, and the Leather Archives in Chicago.
The work will be a twinning between the gay world and the rodeo world, and will have then two originating points and two concluding points. The queer research will begin in 1955, with the homosexual panic found when three men were arrested in Boise for having sex with men, which broke nationally and suggested that there were queer lives outside the centers of New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco. The rodeo research will begin in 1958 with the founding of the National Finals Rodeo, which turned a local, barnstorming type series of rural events, into a larger and more cash heavy sports spectacle. The gay work will conclude with the charting of Macho Man by the Village People in 1978, a symbolic mainstreaming of gay fetish aesthetics, and of desexualizing those who were involved. The rodeo work will end with 1976, where the rider Chris LeDoux gave up on rodeo to become a country music singer, eventually giving birth to a new kind of Nashville sound, and distancing country music from it’s working class roots.
The eventual piece will be about men. Though there are interesting gendered components in straight fetish work around cowgirls, and cowgirls do have a component in Rodeo, and they did end up on both the big and small screens, the central goal of this paper is masculine spectacled bodies interacting with rural working class culture, and how those interactions intercept traditional ideas of presenting males. In this context, the presence of women is outside the prevue of this essay.
The big rodeo centers include Calgary, Cheyenne, Omaha, and Tulsa. With the exception of work intended for those markets, and the aforementioned Boise, the essay will be about the psycho-geographical spaces between those locations.

Sources:
At the National Leather Archives, I hope to use the Chapter records from Oklahoma City and Kansas City; the visual art of Chuck Arnett , Tom of Finland, and Charles Krebbs, any relevant images or articles in the periodicals, Bear, Bullsheets, Butch, Bunkhouse Cowboys and Country Men, Cowboys, Drummer, Honcho, In Uniform, Midwest Mattachine Society, Physique Pictorial, Ramrod and A Country Journal for Gay Men; the photographs of Kris Studios and Target Studios, Posters from the Barn and Blazing Saddles in Des Moines and the Heart of Texas in Houston; T Shirts from the Calgary Eagle, and a variety of books including