In the 1950s, George Quaintance rose to underground fame for his eroticized paintings of queer cowboys in the desert.
Quaintance may not be a household name. But, according to writer Miles Griffis, Quaintance did as much to establish the sex appeal of denim as Marlon Brando or James Dean.
Griffis profiled Quaintance for a recent piece in High Country News, and joined The Show to discuss how Quaintance’s cowboys were part of a utopian vision of the West.
Interview highlights
MILES GRIFFIS: They were always sort of on this like fantasy land ranch. You know, big saguaro cactuses, in the distance, beautiful sunsets and sunrise. And they always seem to be shirtless and in jeans or, you know, just putting jeans on or just taking them off. And it really gave jeans this sort of erotic fetishization that might have been there before, but was really picked up in his art.
Just to give folks an image to hold in their minds. There two works that you talk about in the piece that I wonder if you could give us a little description of. One is "Red Dust and the other is "Lake Apache."
GRIFFIS: Yeah, so "Red Dust," it depicts a cowboy. The model was one of Quaintance's lovers, Eduardo. And it depicts him in the foreground. He's holding a rope lasso about to lasso, maybe a cow, maybe a horse. There's like a stampede of horses sort of running around him, and it really accentuates his jeans. He's shirtless, he has a cowboy hat on, looking off into the distance. His jeans are pretty tight.
Without being too graphic on public radio, in "Red Dust" in particular, he's he's wearing pants, but there's a way in which you might as well not be, perhaps we could say.
GRIFFIS: Yes, yes, well said.
And how about "Lake Apache?"
GRIFFIS: Yeah, "Lake Apache," it has two cowboys. They kind of appears like they just rode their horses to a little swimming hole. They're both nude. It looks like they're about to go skinny dipping. And then one of the cowboys is undressing, and his jeans are laid over the horse's back.
What's interesting to me about these works in particular is this sense that he's explicitly associating jean with this fantasy life that these queer men are able to live. Which I have to imagine at the time was quite revolutionary. This was a time when acknowledgment of queer life was essentially verboten in American society. And here we have these images, not just of men being intimate and erotic with each other, but also doing so clad in the iconography of like the ultimate American male archetype.
GRIFFIS: Totally, yeah. I mean it kind of turned that on its head. And a lot of people — like he had a very successful mail order system. His biographers say he had almost 10,000 subscribers around the world. So I described it as like ... a modern-day like OnlyFans today. But he would sort of just send out these postcards and posters, or these different things of his prints. It sort of just gave like this fantasy to a lot of queer men at the time — who, you know, literally weren't allowed to have lovers in public — ... it was super, super homophobic time. This was happening like during the "lavender" scare when the government was outing queer employees of the federal government and firing them. So it was a very intense time, and I think this kind of gave this fantasy of what it would like to be intimate and have, you know, queer love and camaraderie at a time when it was very disjointed.
Accentuating the fantastical element of all of this, you also talk about how during what you refer to as his "golden era," Quaintance moved here to Phoenix and lived at a house that he called Rancho Siesta, which comes off in the images that he created as this I think of it as like a Dionysian fantasia almost. Tell us about the world that he presented in the in the images of Rancho Siesta, and then if you could, about the reality of Rancho Siesta.
GRIFFIS: Yeah, so he — with this like mailing list that he had, he described Rancho Siesta as Paradise Valley. So it gave this very like grandeur, just fantasy-land aspect. And I think, you know, people might have expected that it was this large sprawling ranch, full of saguaros, maybe at the foothills of the mountains. But in reality it was a suburban home in east Phoenix, two stories and not a sprawling ranch. ... It didn't fully capture that, but I think he was very smart in sort of selling the fantasy.
The phrase you use in the piece that I love is "his beefcake paintings gave queer men access to a heavily romanticized cowboy utopia."
GRIFFIS: Yeah, I mean, he just really put together this sort of story.
Well, this is a fascinating thing about the way Quaintance comes across in your piece that he was knowingly creating this fantasy. And part of that I found entertaining — but maybe there's even something deeper there — is the fact that Quaintance himself apparently didn't even wear jeans.
GRIFFIS: That was my favorite fact to find out while looking more into this. Yeah, his biographer Ken Furtado found, I think by speaking with one of his ex-lovers, that he hated wearing jeans and would never wear them. But his art very much, yeah, it's they're the center of so much of them.
