Where Have all the Gay Cowboys Gone?

With all the talk over Brokeback Mountain, it leads me to think that movie critics have no memories anymore. I know they're all saying that it's not a gay cowboy movie, but it is a gay cowboy movie. In fact, if you look at almost all cowboy movies, there seems to always be a somewhat homoerotic connection between the characters. Well, maybe not in those John Wayne pieces of crap, but there has been talk that Randolph Scott and Cary Grant were more than roommates if you know what I mean (wink-wink, nudge, nudge, say no more.)
A few filmmakers knew there's something going on with the cowpoles. Take the 1994 Eugene Levy movie, Sodbusters, in which a blacksmith and a farmer fall in love, much to the confusion of lead actor Kris Kristofferson, who wonders why the farmer has naked male statuettes all over his house.
Or what about Wagons East, which had John C. McGinley, as a fey gunslinger. Or how about Tombstone, in which deputy Jason Priestley admired Billy Zane's acting a little too much.
But three of the greatest Westerns ever made all had cowboys who were a little too close than they should have been.
In Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch, William Holden's Pike and Ernest Borgnine's Dutch seem to have a relationship that is more like a marriage. They fight and then they make up. Why doesn't Dutch go see a prostitute at the end like the rest of the bunch? Also, Robert Ryan's Deke Thornton has a past with Pike that is more than revenge. Thornton still has feelings for Pike after all the betrayal, which is why he doesn't go off with the bounty hunters at the end. Let's not forget, the bunch risking their lives to save the life of their friend, Angel. If that isn't love, I don't know what is.
Flash forward about twenty years and you have Lonesome Dove. The 1989 miniseries based on the book by Larry McMurty, who co-wrote the screenplay for Brokeback Mountain, has two aging Texas Rangers Gus McCrae (Robert Duvall) and Woodrow Call (Tommy Lee Jones), who live together and have been friends for years. Call is an emotionless man who is forced to hang one of his old friends, and watch two more friends die as he travels from Texas to Montana. He also tiptoes around the fact that he is Newt's son. In the end, Gus dies of an infection and Call takes him hundreds of miles to his burial. Why does Call do this? Because he's made a promise to his friend. From the grave, Gus made Call prove that he could be a man of compassion and love.
Okay, so maybe the reason they are making a big deal out of Brokeback Mountain is that it has pretty boys Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal. If given the choice between watching a sex scene between Ledger andGyllenhall and Duvall and Jones, I'd take neither, but I would settle for the former.
So, in comes pretty boy Kevin Costner, at one time, before he got chubby and balding, in Dances With Wolves. There's the infamous butt scene of Costner's character after he first encounters Graham Greene's Kicking Bird. The extended edition has Kicking Bird making referene to the sex. But there is something between Rodney A. Grant's Wind in his Hair and Costner's character. At first, they are rivals. Then, they become close friends. Wind in his Hair kills for Dances with Wolves and in the end confesses that they are good friends. It's a little corny, but it's obvious that there is platonic love between Dances with Wolves and Wind in his Hair, two men who are cautious of each other to begin with.
If you are interested in any more gay cowboy stuff, I suggest you try to find the King of the Hill episode in which Dale confronts his gay cowboy rodeo star father, voiced nonetheless by Charles Nelson Reilly. The scene in which Dale's father has to rope a cow and put panties on it is priceless.