Oh, landowners, prospectors, railroad tycoons, and fur trappers went out west to make their fortunes, and sometimes planned to bring it back home, but cowboys didn't make any money! Cowboys were poorly paid ranchhands, who didn't make enough money to marry a woman and have a family, and who lived in bunkhouses with other fit young men, and who might travel from job to job with a male "pardner"!
Seriously, there were a lot of reasons people left civilization and went out on the frontier, and why the hell wouldn't the gay young men of the day want to go live someplace where they wouldn't constantly be pressured to marry a woman. The reality of the Old West was nothing like the movie mythos, the real Old West was full of real human beings of every stripe, and a real cowboy might be wanted by the law back home or an immigrant from the less fashionable parts of Europe, or a freed/escaped slave, or a Mexican who remembered how things were before all the white people arrived, and who knows. Maybe some of the "pardners" who did everything together were more than friends. Same-sex orientation has always existed, and it existed on the American frontier.
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[deleted]
3 years ago
In that time period butt fuckers weren't as accepted as they are today. If you were out there looking to be singing the YMCA song you would quickly be tarred and feathered or worse.
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Otter (24464)
3 years ago
That may not be true. In prison, the military, and other all-male environments, a certain amount of quiet homosex is accepted as normal, because a man's got to have some relief, you know, and there aren't any women around. Who knows, maybe the coyboy bunkhouses were like that, and some of the pardners who stuck together through thick and thin weren't just honely heterosexuals.
We don't know, because literacy wasn't a requirement for a real-life Old West cowboy, and if any real cowboys had ever written an honest account of how the men of the day really dealt with the absence of women... nobody would have published or even archived it. And that's how gay history has been lost, nobody was allowed to record it.
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