In the 1950s, if you turned on the television, you'd most likely see a
western. The television shows with the most episodes are still mostly
westerns that originated in the 1950s. These westerns were often about how men
lived with other men. They became a set of social codes, working out the limits
of intimacy, and the implications of this intimacy. The westerns aimed at male children
taught and reinforced specific elements of masculinity, namely that the
act of being a boy would lead to the proper ways of being a man.
Watching work like Cheyenne
or Gunsmoke or Bonazanna, through this lens, the viewer could wonder why the
teaching of masculinity seemed so vital. There are a number of ideas, but
thinking about the violence of World War II, and that many of these westerns
came from Radio in the 1940s, might provide a solution. It seems that in the
1950s, being a man had stricter criteria. Perhaps, the closeness of men in the
barracks, trenches, and on ships suggested that two things—that there should be
work that reflected this closeness, but that this closeness could not be
mistaken for other kinds of intimacy.
This tension between portraying male intimacy, but precluding other
kinds of intimacy seems to be the key to other tensions, and other ways of
processing desire. The children who were told about the “cowboy” or
western way of life in the 1950s, who were taught to work through the values of
the west, ended up being part of the liberation of the 1970s. In the 1970s, in
depictions of men who have sex with men, there was a glut of films, pulp
novels, magazines, periodicals, comics, and social groups that attempted to reconcile
the almost celibate lessons of masculinity in the cultures that were taught
them in the 1950s, with the sexuality that they wished to participate in. The
homosocial core of soldier or western life would become homosexual. This is not
a direct correlation--one did not automatically lead to another. But the
tensions between sexuality and sociality, between male worlds of the west, and
male worlds of sexual culture, have a delicate webbing of wish fulfillment,
cultural memory, the personal archive, and the social world.
This is not only about how men interact with men though. The
stories of the west were attempts to determine geography as well. The westerns
of the 1950s were set in Laramie or Cheyenne or Dodge City, Kansas. In the 1950s,
the shows indicated a desire for a kind of purity of place. The queer
reclaiming occurring in the 1970s, often explicitly featured tension between
people from New York or Los Angeles, versus people from the Midwest. The
geographical authenticity that marked the policing of masculinity earlier
became part of the unstable processing of erotic desire, 20 years later.
This problem of the liminal space between the homosocial and the
homoerotic in the west is not solved, and has several more ironic turns.
Thinking about the politicians who have worked out the cowboy motif, in the
1980s and 1990s--there is the refusal of the homoerotic, but the return of the
homosocial, a well guarded place where the impossibility of any kind of
ambiguous desire reigns. Thinking about Reagan, who starred in a number of
B-Westerns in the 1940s and 1950s, both on film and television--it could be
said that his use of masculinized rhetoric was another way of approaching the
social memory of the earlier texts. There was not needed a question of sexuality,
but there were questions or problems of geography.
Finally, George W. Bush, who used Reagan as a political and
social example, became an abstraction of an abstraction. Moving from the
Eastern elite, to Texas; from a wasted life, to the presidency, could only be
done in a kind of Cowboy drag. This again, works through the problems of
homosocial contact, without being homoerotic at all--which refuses the
homoerotic conflation of the homosocial. It also reinforces the obsessive
seeking of purity in the American West.
In
conclusion, and to make these questions explicitly academic: 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.
