Outlaws of Love on the Open Range

A lone cowboy draped in dusk rides across the plains, silhouette etched against a violet sky. For generations, popular lore painted this horseman as the ultimate straight-shooting symbol of American masculinity. But history, like the horizon, isn’t a straight line.

On the open range of the Wild West, queer pioneers found freedom in wide-open spaces – forging relationships and identities far from Victorian prying eyes. These untamed lands allowed individuals to abandon old lives and reinvent themselves. What’s queerer than leaving behind society’s confines for the freedom to finally be who you are?

The very act of frontier life – cutting ties and blazing new trails – was an act of self-definition. Yet the true stories of these LGBTQ+ trailblazers have long been suppressed or forgotten, deemed unworthy of record and left to crumble like old wagon wheels.

Today, historians and storytellers are riding back into that past, armed with fresh research and a determination to illuminate the rainbow hues that have always colored the Old West. Importantly, this isn’t speculative lore. While much queer history was erased, enough traces remain – in letters, poems, folk songs, court records, and news clippings – to prove that the American frontier was never as straight nor as white as legend would have it.

In the West’s isolated boomtowns and cattle trails, men made do without women, women lived as men to seize freedom, and conventions around gender and sexuality took on a frontier looseness. This comprehensive journey combines academic rigor and poetic storytelling to revive those stories.

We’ll delve into the daily life of 19th-century cowboys, uncover evidence of same-sex romances on the range, meet transgender pioneers who defied the law, and expose how mythmakers later tried to whitewash and hetero-wash the West. Every claim is backed by historical record – and where mystery remains, we acknowledge the ambiguity.

The Wild West was, in a word, wild: untamed not just in landscape but in its refusal to be fenced in by Eastern norms. It’s time to saddle up and ride into a past long buried, where outlaws of love lived boldly under the same sunsets, crafting a queer history of the American frontier that’s only now being unearthed.

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Historical Context: Unspoken Norms of the Wild West

To understand queer lives in the Old West, we first need to grasp the world these frontier folk inhabited. The late 19th-century American West was a rugged, mostly rural expanse teeming with possibilities and perils. Society’s rules were looser beyond the reach of Eastern churches and courthouses, creating what one scholar calls a “world saturated with masculinity.”

Frontier life was hardscrabble and improvisational. Frontier men – cowboys, miners, loggers, ranchers – often lived for months in all-male camps or trail crews, forging intense bonds out of necessity. Women were few, distances vast, and survival a collective effort. In this environment, Victorian sexual mores took a back seat to the daily grind of dust and leather.

Homosocial vs. Homosexual

It’s critical to note that people in the 1800s did not categorize sexuality in the same way we do today. Close same-sex relationships were commonplace in the homosocial world of cowboys without necessarily attracting the labels or stigma later eras would apply. Men slept under the stars rolled in blankets next to other men; they shared tents, travails, and sometimes tenderness.

As some historians observe, the line between homosocial (same-sex friendship) and homosexual (same-sex romance) could blur on the range. Men might form partnerships for domestic convenience that occasionally blossomed into physical intimacy – all without anyone in that time necessarily calling it “gay.” This fluidity doesn’t mean the frontier was a paradise of tolerance, but it does mean that certain behaviors we’d consider queer today were often met with a shrug or quiet acceptance, so long as outward harmony was kept.

“Strange Way of Life”: Tough, Resilient, Dependent but Roaming ‘Free’

The cowboy way of life was strange to outsiders – tough, rootless, yet reliant on camaraderie. A typical cowboy worked long days herding cattle across remote landscapes, facing rattlesnakes and river crossings rather than drawing-room etiquette.

Cattle drives lasted for months, with crews of unruly young men sleeping under open skies and rolling into rowdy trail towns for rare bouts of whiskey-fueled recreation. Victorian Americans might have been scandalized by the facts of cowboy life: sparse hygiene, earthy humor, and intimate bunking arrangements. But for the cowboys themselves, this was simply survival. Privacy was a luxury they couldn’t afford; modesty yielded to pragmatism.

Isolation and Companionship

The isolation of the frontier meant that cowboys depended on each other for everything – from medical help for a snakebite to emotional support on lonely nights. They formed tightly knit “all-male families” of a sort.

As one period account notes, single men in the West often shared homes, chores, and even beds, entering into arrangements contemporaries casually called “bachelor marriages.” These weren’t official marriages, of course, but the term suggests folks recognized and accepted two men setting up house together. Unlike in the more rigid East, such partnerships were not discouraged in many frontier communities. They were seen as pragmatic – two people pooling labor and resources – and if emotional or physical intimacy was part of the package, most kept a live-and-let-live attitude.

Threats and Secrecy

None of this is to say the frontier was a queer utopia. Dangers abounded – from stampedes and shootouts to the constant risk of exposure for those living a secret. There were always bigoted eyes keen to enforce gender norms, especially as towns grew and Eastern law caught up. Cross-dressing (wearing clothes of the “opposite” gender) became explicitly outlawed in dozens of cities starting in 1848.

Even without formal laws, social disapproval could turn violent. Many who transgressed norms survived by staying mobile or undercover, moving on when suspicions grew. As we’ll see, a transgender cowboy like Harry Allen found the wide frontier somewhat safer than big cities, yet ultimately nowhere was fully safe when the law – or a vigilante’s noose – could be tipped by prejudice.

In short, frontier life created conditions ripe for same-sex intimacy and gender subversion while keeping such behavior largely out of official scrutiny. It was a world of rough riders and “confirmed bachelors,” of pseudonyms and aliases, of passions expressed in campfire songs and unspoken bonds. To truly see the Queer West, we must read between the lines of traditional history – and sometimes, read between the ranches, looking to diaries, poems, and whispered legends for the truth.

Reading Between the Ranches: Glimpses of a Queer Frontier

Little Hard Evidence, Plenty to Ponder

Given the clandestine nature of queer life back then, explicit evidence is rare. But tantalizing clues survive. Historian Clifford Westermeier, for instance, unearthed an old cowboy limerick that alludes to homosexual intimacy on the trail. Its lewd humor suggests cowboys themselves knew same-sex encounters were a real, if quietly acknowledged, aspect of frontier life.

The very existence of a bawdy joke about two cowpokes sharing more than just a campfire implies a “greater culture of sexual ambiguity” in cowboy camps. Travelers and observers occasionally made oblique remarks: During Gold Rush–era California, where men vastly outnumbered women, local lingo referred to a man’s partner as his “pard” with an understanding that the bond went beyond simple friendship.

When frontier men organized dances in the absence of ladies, half the men would jokingly dress as women so that couples could waltz – a practical solution that also reflects how gender roles could bend for fun or comfort. The line between a lark and love could be thin: who’s to say some of those dancing pairs didn’t continue their partnership back in the privacy of a cabin?

Contemporary newspapers occasionally printed hints as well. In 1890s Denver, a professor casually noted the city’s homosexual subculture spanned many professions – including ministers, teachers, even a judge – and that at his university “the usual percentage of homosexuals can be found.” Such remarks indicate that even in the frontier’s twilight, same-sex love was an open secret in some communities.

One anonymous San Francisco gay man in 1911 wrote that life could be hard but “extremely interesting,” saying he was glad to have had the opportunity to live it – a rare first-person testament to queer life in the West at the turn of the century. The affectionate heart of the cowboy reveals itself in the language of male friendship, belying the stoic marble image crafted later by Hollywood.

Bachelor Marriages and Same-Sex Unions

One of the most striking phenomena was the widespread occurrence of quasi-marital relationships between frontier men. In mining towns and cattle ranges alike, men formed domestic partnerships. They cooked and cared for each other, jointly invested in property, and in at least a few cases, even referred to each other as “my man” or “my partner” in the same way a married couple might.

Frontier lore has numerous accounts of two cowboys who rode together, lived together, and were essentially inseparable. Historians note that “miners and cowboys often settled into convenient partnerships called ‘bachelor marriages,’” which could be intimate in all senses. Notably, these arrangements “were not discouraged” in the community, as long as a pair of cowboys pulled their weight.

We have instances where the veil slips. One report from 19th-century Montana described two bachelors who had lived together for years; when one died, the other openly grieved like a widow, discomfiting the town. In New Mexico Territory in 1873, a U.S. Army post trader was formally charged with a “most unnatural” relationship, while in 1896 Texas, a man named Marcelo Alviar faced a sodomy charge with bond set equal to murder. These cases demonstrate that while quiet same-sex relations often flew under the radar, those unlucky enough to be exposed were subject to harsh legal and social repercussions.

Love and Ambiguity: Cowboy Poetry and Song

The scarcity of explicit records means we often have to interpret subtle clues. One such clue comes from cowboy poetry. The late 1800s saw a flourishing of cowboy poets – rough riders by day, soulful balladeers by night. Among them was Charles Badger Clark Jr., a cowboy poet who penned “The Lost Pardner” in 1895.

This poem mourns a cowboy’s beloved partner killed in a fall, describing a depth of grief and love that’s hard to read as purely platonic. Clark’s poem stands as a quiet anthem of queer grief on the range, assuring us that even in 1895, a cowboy could love another cowboy so deeply that losing him made the whole world feel empty.

Clark himself never publicly identified any orientation, and modern labels didn’t apply then. But that he could publish his poem without scandal suggests readers allowed themselves to dismiss it as just about a comrade. It exemplifies the careful ambiguity queer people often lived with.

Beyond Cowboys – Saloons, Sailors, and the City

While our focus is cowboys, similar dynamics prevailed in other male-dominated frontier arenas – logging camps, railroad crews, sailing ships, and army outposts. Wherever men were isolated together, bachelor bonds formed.

In some California mining camps, half the men might don women’s dresses during social gatherings for lack of actual women. Frontier cities like Denver, San Francisco, and Seattle developed underground queer scenes by the 1890s. Sex researcher Alfred Kinsey’s 1948 report noted the highest frequencies of homosexual intimacy in certain rural farming communities, indicating that a “make do” attitude persisted in areas where women were scarce.

The cowboy of yesteryear and the farmhand of the Great Depression may have shared similar secrets. It all supports the notion that the frontier environment fostered a natural closeness among men who lived and worked side by side.

Queer Pioneers and Outlaw Tales from the Old West

To truly humanize this history, let’s meet some of the notable figures – individuals whose stories, though fragmentary, give us windows into the Queer West. These range from poets and lawmen to outlaws and aristocrats, painting a picture as diverse as the West itself.

The Cowboy Poet and His “Lost Pardner”

A key figure we’ve touched on is Charles Badger Clark Jr., the South Dakota cowboy poet who immortalized a lost love in verse. “The Lost Pardner” remains one of his most famous works and arguably one of the earliest American literary pieces to voice same-sex love so openly. While Clark’s other poems celebrated the free, wandering life of a cowboy, none match The Lost Pardner for its emotional punch.

Literary historians read it as a eulogy not just for a friend, but for a beloved. It suggests that even in 1895, a cowboy’s grief for his fallen partner could echo like a lament for a spouse. At a time when the word “homosexual” was barely known, Clark’s poem stands as a haunting, beautiful indicator that queer love did exist and left its quiet mark on Western literature.

Sir William Drummond Stewart’s Wild Adventures

Decades before Clark, another queer tale unfolded in the Rocky Mountains. Sir William Drummond Stewart was a Scottish noble who, amid rumors of scandal at home, traveled to the American West in 1833. He spent years among fur traders and mountain men, reveling in annual all-male gatherings that mixed business, leisure, and apparently a good deal of liberty for homosexual engagements.

Stewart befriended a young French-Cree hunter named Antoine Clement, widely believed to be his lover. In 1843, Stewart financed a lavish private rendezvous on Fremont Lake in Wyoming—an extravagant medieval-themed gala in the wilderness. Described as camp in both senses of the word, it was possibly one of the West’s first queer costume parties. When he returned to Scotland, Stewart brought Clement and had paintings done that included his handsome comrade, subtext clear to those with eyes to see.

Stewart’s life shows that the frontier offered a rare freedom for men of certain persuasions. The aristocrat could drop his mask, don a costume, and love whom he pleased—at least for a summer or two in Eden.

Outlaw of Love: “Two-Gun Lil” and the Bisexual Bandit

Queerness in the West also took outlaw form. One sensational example was Bill Miner, alias “The Gray Fox,” a stagecoach and train robber. A Pinkerton poster warned he was a sodomist who might have a boy with him, possibly the first public disclosure of a cowboy’s bisexuality. The press found it titillating, though it scandalized Victorian moralists.

Another dimension: in Arizona Territory, 1880s lawman William Breakenridge was teased by colleagues about avoiding the dance-hall women. The jokes hinted he might be gay or even trans. Meanwhile, female-presenting outlaws like “Two-Gun Lil” defied gender norms, suggesting the West had space for women who wore men’s clothes and engaged in relationships that mainstream society dismissed or feared.

Gender Non-Conformists of the Frontier: Trans Cowboys and Cross-Dressing Outlaws

The Wild West also served as a stage for those who dared to live as another gender. Sometimes it was for survival or economic opportunity, sometimes for love – often a mix of all three.

Charley Parkhurst

Charley Parkhurst was assigned female at birth but became a renowned stagecoach driver in Gold Rush–era California. He chewed tobacco, gambled, and could handle a four-horse stage with legendary skill. In fact, Parkhurst even voted in 1868, making him likely the first known female-born voter in California history. Only on his deathbed was the secret discovered.

Many historians see Parkhurst as a trans man by modern definitions. For decades, he lived as male in a dangerous and highly masculine job, thrived at it, and took that secret to his grave. His example underscores how thoroughly someone could pass and integrate into frontier society.

Sammy Williams

Another such figure was Sammy Williams, who lived in Montana as a male lumberjack for 20 years. Only at death, around age 80, did friends learn he was assigned female at birth. A hard-drinking, tobacco-chewing old timer, Sammy’s story shows how the frontier could mask such truths indefinitely, so long as one was tough enough to keep up.

Harry Allen

Harry Allen, born Nell Pickerell in 1882, was the Northwest’s most documented transgender man of the period. He wore men’s clothes, brawled with the law, courted women, and worked myriad male-coded jobs like bronco-busting and bartending. Allen openly declared he did not like being a girl and insisted on being recognized as a man.

Seattle and Spokane police repeatedly arrested him, but he was never truly charged for “cross-dressing” because no statute existed. Instead, authorities pinned charges like vagrancy, drunkenness, or disorderly conduct on him. Harry Allen’s defiance and persistent presence in the press make him one of the earliest known trans masculine figures in American history. His very life shatters any notion that transgender identities are recent inventions.

The Myth of the Straight, White Cowboy – and the Erasure of a Diverse West

If queer cowboys and non-white cowboys were so common, why do popular images still default to the straight, white Marlboro Man? The answer lies in how the West was later mythologized—in dime novels, Wild West shows, and especially Hollywood. 20th-century storytellers deliberately created a mythic cowboy archetype to serve American ideals, excluding inconvenient truths about diversity.

The “Lone” Cowboy

Thus emerged the trope of the lone cowboy hero, epitomized by the Lone Ranger and countless John Wayne roles—riding off alone into the sunset, no intimate male friendships or attachments. By isolating the cowboy, storytellers neatly avoided questions about closeness with other men.

Whitewashing the Range

Popular media also erased Black, Latinx, and Indigenous cowboys. In reality, historians estimate that about one in four cowboys were Black, especially post–Civil War. A sizable number were of Mexican descent. But for decades, the cinematic West remained lily-white. By omitting everyone but Anglo-American straight men from the cowboy myth, mythmakers reinforced the idea that only such men could be the nation’s rugged individualists.

African-American Cowboys

African Americans were integral to the Old West. After the Civil War, many formerly enslaved people found new freedom on the open range. Thousands of Black cowboys rode the trails, earning reputations as top ropers and wranglers. Figures like Nat “Deadwood Dick” Love and Bill Pickett became legends in their own right. Love’s 1907 autobiography describes a West where he was judged by skill, not skin color.

On the range, a Black man could be “just another cowboy” in ways unthinkable under Jim Crow. Bill Pickett pioneered bulldogging in rodeo—biting a steer’s lip to wrestle it down—and became the first African American in the National Rodeo Hall of Fame. Yet their contributions were largely written out of popular history. Only now are we correcting that omission.

Indigenous Cowboys: The Two-Spirit Horsemen

Native Americans also adopted cowboy practices. Plains tribes like the Comanche were already renowned horsemen. Many Indigenous people worked on ranches or served as scouts and herders.

At the same time, numerous tribes had traditions acknowledging individuals we might now call Two-Spirit—people blending masculine and feminine roles. These traditions offered more flexible views on gender and sexuality. Interactions between Native and cowboy communities may have further relaxed frontier attitudes. Though details are scarce, it’s plausible that Indigenous concepts of gender fluidity influenced the West’s general live-and-let-live ethos, at least in the earlier, more lawless stages of frontier life.

Beyond Brokeback: Reclaiming the Cowboy in Modern Times

The 20th and 21st centuries have witnessed a renaissance of interest in queer cowboy culture, a movement to reclaim history and make new history. Nothing exemplifies this cultural clash more clearly than the reaction to Annie Proulx’s short story “Brokeback Mountain” and its 2005 film adaptation.

Many embraced the film as a nuanced love story between two men, but critics raged. They saw it as defiling the sacred image of the cowboy. Yet the film’s incongruity with the old myth only highlighted that the “straight cowboy” legend had excluded a wealth of real experiences.

The International Gay Rodeo Association: A New Frontier

Even before Brokeback, real gay cowboys were forming their own traditions. By the 1970s, the Urban Cowboy aesthetic and the birth of gay rodeos transformed the Western scene. Events like the National Reno Gay Rodeo started raising funds for charities while providing safe spaces for queer competitors and spectators.

In 1985, various regional gay rodeos united under the International Gay Rodeo Association (IGRA), formalizing a circuit that spans multiple states. These events feature the usual bull riding and barrel racing, alongside playful twists like “goat dressing.” Men and women compete in each other’s events, drag queens ride in costume, and it’s all underpinned by a spirit of inclusion.

Cowboys as Icons in LGBTQ Culture

Meanwhile, the cowboy aesthetic became central in gay pop culture. It’s a potent symbol of rugged masculinity that gay men have repurposed, from leather bars to the Village People’s cowboy persona. This reversal challenges stereotypes of gay men as weak or effete, flipping hetero machismo on its head. Artists like Tom of Finland drew homoerotic cowboys, linking the West to desires that mainstream myth tried to deny.

Lesbian culture has embraced the Western motif, too—tough ranch women and country music stars forging their own subversive spin on the cowboy/cowgirl image.

A More Inclusive Western Mythos

Today, as academics and artists revisit cowboy history, they’re constructing a richer narrative. One where the cowboy hero can be Black or brown, queer or trans, male or female or in-between, without losing any grit or authenticity.

Rural queer youth can now look to historical role models who bridged country life and LGBTQ identity, discovering that “people like you always have been here.” The Western myth is evolving, especially in film and literature. Modern works like The Power of the Dog explore the psyche of a closeted rancher. Documentaries and photo exhibitions celebrate queer rodeo stars. Novelists pen queer Western romances.

This revisionist wave is about inclusion, fulfilling a need for a more expansive fantasy of the American West—one that better represents the vast diversity of people who actually lived on the frontier. Crucially, it’s not invention but restoration of what was always there, now reclaimed.

Riding Proud into the Sunset

The tale of the Queer Wild West is both scholarly and deeply human. On one level, it’s about accuracy—digging through archives and diaries to show that gay cowboys, trans ranchers, and queer outlaws really did exist in the frontier era. It’s about recognizing that the classic Western narrative distorted reality by leaving them out.

On another level, it’s about resilience and freedom. The individuals we met—Badger Clark, William Drummond Stewart, Harry Allen—lived boldly, forging identities that redefined what a “real cowboy” could be. Their existence alone challenged the notion that “cowboy” meant straight, white masculinity.

For LGBTQ+ folks today, claiming the cowboy is an act of empowerment. It says: we have always been here, roping and riding and helping build this country. It broadens the meaning of an American icon in a way that is both rebellious and deeply patriotic.

As we continue telling these stories—through scholarship, films like Brokeback, and gay rodeos—we shape a culture that acknowledges its full past. The cowboy now rides for everyone. By peeling away the myth’s narrow veneer, we see a frontier as diverse and unpredictable as the human spirit.

Queer people can look at a cowboy and see a kindred soul, someone who might have shared a blanket under the same stars. The West was never just straight. It was as queer, untamed, and surprising as human hearts. That is a truth as grand as the frontier itself.

Reading List

Berger, Knute. Meet Nell Pickerell, Transgender At-Risk Youth of Yesteryear

Benemann, William. Men in Eden: William Drummond Stewart and Same-Sex Desire in the Rocky Mountain Fur Trade

Billington, Monroe Lee, and Roger D. Hardaway, eds. African Americans on the Western Frontier

Black Hills Visitor Magazine. Biography: Charles Badger Clark

Boag, Peter. Redressing ‘Cross-Dressers’ and Removing ‘Berdache'

Brown, Benjamin. Black Cowboys Played Major Role in Shaping the American West

Capozzi, Nicco. The Myth of the American Cowboy

Clark, Badger. Sun and Saddle Leather

Collins, Jan MacKell. Untold Tales of Gender-Nonconforming Men and Women of the Wild West

Cooper, James Fenimore. The Leatherstocking Tales

Durham, Philip, and Everett L. Jones. The Negro Cowboys

Garceau, Dee. “Nomads, Bunkies, Cross-Dressers, and Family Men: Cowboy Identity and the Gendering of Ranch Work.” — Across the Great Divide: Cultures of Manhood in the American West

Hardaway, Roger D. African American Cowboys on the Western Frontier

Hobsbawm, Eric. “The Myth of the Cowboy

Jessie Y. Sundstrom. Badger Clark, Cowboy Poet with Universal Appeal

The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education. Deadwood Dick and the Black Cowboys

Kinsey, Alfred C. Sexual Behavior in the Human Male

Lawrence, D. H. Studies in Classic American Literature

Miller, Hana Klempnauer. Out West: The Queer Sexuality of the American Cowboy and His Cultural Significance

Osborne, Russell. Journal of a Trapper; In the Rocky Mountains Between 1834 and 1843

Packard, Chris. Queer Cowboys: And Other Erotic Male Friendships in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

Patterson, Eric. On Brokeback Mountain: Meditations about Masculinity, Fear, and Love in the Story and the Film

Remington, Frederic. Late 19th-century cowboy articles; see Hobsbawm, “Myth of the Cowboy.”

Roosevelt, Theodore. Ranch Life and the Hunting-Trail

Slotkin, Richard. Myth and the Production of History. - Ideology and Classic American Literature

Turner, Frederick Jackson. The Frontier in American History

Vestal, Stanley. Jim Bridger; Mountain Man