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.