A wide-brimmed hat, high-heeled boots, shiny silver spurs — the cowboy’s aesthetic is quintessentially Texan. It’s also kinda gay.
OK. Really gay.
Yet for many people, the word “cowboy” still brings to mind a John Wayne type — a swaggering avatar for a conservative ideal of American manhood. Cowboys are more flexible than that, like all fictional characters responding to the culture that created them. Perhaps more than any other Texas symbol — save the armadillo, which is of course bisexual — queerness weaves through their mythology.
That pisses the right people off, I reckon. To that end, as we enter a turbulent time for the LGBTQIA+ community, always remember: Cowboys should kiss each other.
We’ve transmuted this icon into gay fantasy for generations, and it’s easy to see why. The ideal buckaroo is rugged and masculine. He lives a life of freedom, maybe lawlessness, among wide open spaces. He, uh, wears a lot of leather. Most importantly, he keeps particular company.
“The cowboy preferred his horse and male companions to women,” according to Marian J. Morton and William P. Conway’s article “Cowboy without a Cause: His Image in Today’s Popular Music,” published in The Antioch Review in 1977.
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. A six-shooter, meanwhile, doesn’t hang so close to the belt for nothin’.
The queer cowboy didn’t ride into town yesterday. On the 19th-century Western frontier, these men lived in a primarily homosocial society. Sometimes, men turned to each other for physical intimacy, according to historians. Or as Willie Nelson famously sang: “There’s many a cowboy who don’t understand the way that he feels for his brother.”
In the 1950s, artist George Quaintance looked at Wild West myth and distilled it into queer desire. Quaintance populated many of his illustrations with glistening beefcake on horseback. Sometimes, they only wore boots; other times, less.
Tom of Finland, one of Quaintance’s contemporaries, specialized in eroticizing masculine ideals. Right now, I’m staring at a print of one of his illustrations framed on my wall — a shirtless cowboy who’s beefier than a cattle drive. Each pec is the size of Enchanted Rock. And just a few feet away, I’ve hung up a more recent drawing by artist and writer John Paul Brammer. It’s a cartoonish fella in full outlaw garb, lassoed and hogtied. Chaps? Assless.
These might be niche artworks, but the gay cowboy also rides proudly through popular culture. When I think of tumbling among the tumbleweeds, I immediately hum the chorus to “Cowboys Are Frequently, Secretly Fond of Each Other,” the aforementioned song that Nelson famously covered in 2006.
Ned Sublette wrote the song in 1981. Like any good country ditty, it tells quite the tale: “Well, there’s many a strange impulse out on the plains of West Texas,” the first verse begins. “There’s many a young boy who feels things he can’t comprehend.”
The title lyric, sung in the chorus, reveals the truth of those feelings with a frankness that’s still pretty punk in 2025. Nelson recently released a new duet version with rising country singer Orville Peck, a masked desperado who openly sings about same-sex desire.
You want mainstream? In 2019, Lil Nas X rode country-hip-hop song “Old Town Road” to a record-breaking run atop the Billboard chart. The artist, who publicly came out as gay after the song’s release, incorporates both cowboy fashions and undulating male torsos into his performances.
This archetype’s queerness is expansive, accessible to all genders and sexualities. Pop supernova Chappell Roan champions the iconography of the lesbian cowgirl. The band MUNA got into cowboy drag for the video to 2022 song “Kind of Girl.” RuPaul, the queen of drag, dropped the boot-scooting song “Lady Cowboy” in 2017. Julien Baker and Torres, two queer indie-rock artists, styled themselves in Johnny Cash black in a promotional photo for “Send a Prayer My Way,” their upcoming country collaboration.
Is Beyoncé gay? No, but also, yes.
On the cover of her acclaimed 2024 album, “Cowboy Carter” — the title itself is a bit of genderfuckery — she proudly wears rodeo finery atop a white steed. Even Madonna had a hat-and-boots era in the 2000s.
And lest we forget: There was a cowboy in the Village People.
Film offers plenty of examples, as well. Tragic “Brokeback Mountain” is the “Casablanca” of gay cowboy movies. Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) are cut from the classic Western hero cloth. Their intermittent romance starts with the desperation of mutual isolation, like their real-life counterparts. Also born of necessity: saliva as a lubricant.
If you’re willing to dig through subtext, Hollywood has long been home to gay cowboys. “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” is a classic example, and we’d need a whole day to sift through the complicated sexuality depicted in “Midnight Cowboy.” Modern Western films like “The Power of the Dog” and “Strange Way of Life” are more explicit about their characters’ desires.
These symbols hold power. When pop culture cowboys are not-so-secretly fond of each other, it expands our collective imagination.
Texas, their natural habitat, is home to the nation’s second-largest LGBTQIA+ population — 1.8 million people, according to a 2024 analysis from the Public Policy Institute of California. And yet, homophobia and transphobia burble forth from the Texas Capitol (and megachurches) like chuckwagon chili. Lately, it’s come with an increasing and alarming lack of shame.
Texanhood doesn’t belong to one kind of person — as much some pretend otherwise — and neither does the cowboy.
As the song goes: “What did you think all them saddles and boots was about?”