Professor Chris Packard, Author of Queer Cowboys, Is Available To Comment on the Film
New York University School of Continuing and Professional Studies (SCPS) professor Chris Packard, author of Queer Cowboys and Other Erotic Male Friendships in Nineteenth Century American Literature (2005), poses the question, “Was the American cowboy gay?” Packard argues that judging from the earliest representations of cowboys and other frontier figures in popular literature-who typically preferred a “buddy” over a wife-the answer is yes.
“A searching and original study. Chris Packard has managed to tease out evidence of same-sex attraction in places where one would not have expected to find it.”
-Larry McMurtry, co-writer of the Oscar nominated screenplay for Brokeback Mountain and author of Lonesome Dove
Packard culls evidence from books by 19th-century Western writers (from such legends as James Fenimore Cooper, Mark Twain, and Owen Wister, to more obscure novelists and diarists) to show how same-sex intimacy and homoerotic admiration were key aspects of Westerns well before the word “homosexual” and its synonyms were invented.
Packard introduces readers to the males-only clubs of journalists, cowboys, miners, Indians, and vaqueros who defined themselves by excluding women and the cloying ills of domesticity and recovers a forgotten culture of exclusively masculine, sometimes erotic, and often intimate camaraderie in the fiction, photographs, and theatrical performances of the 1800s Wild West.
To schedule an interview with professor Packard, please call Christopher James at 212.998.6876 or christopher.james@nyu.edu