For many people, rodeo is a quintessential American sport — or at least, a version of America.
Rodeo conjures a very specific image: cowboys in the South and the West, on the farm or the prairie or the frontier, riding horses and hurling lassos. But for many others, rodeo is also a place to explore their gender identity and a source of community for queer people who can’t find it anywhere else.
It’s that latter story of rodeo that Nicholas Villanueva tells in his new book, “Rainbow Cattle Co.: Liberation, Inclusion, and the History of Gay Rodeo.” Villanueva is professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado — but he is also a rodeo athlete.
Villanueva joined The Show to discuss what it means to compete.
Full conversation
SAM DINGMAN: Nicholas, for those of us who have only a kind of vague sense of rodeo as a series of horse-related events, tell us what it means to compete as a rodeo athlete.
NICHOLAS VILLANUEVA: So rodeo, there are horse events. There’s barrel racing or pole bending, which is zipping around all these different poles. Flag racing, where you grab a flag out of a bucket and then you go around the arena and you stab the flag back in this other bucket. So those are the speed events.
Then you’ve got what we call the roughstock events, and that’s bull riding, steer riding, steer wrestling, which is also called chute dogging. And then you have roping events where you’re trying to rope an animal.
DINGMAN: If you’re comfortable saying, when you were a kid and you were getting into horse related sports and stuff like that, were you out at the time?
VILLANUEVA: No. Actually, I always knew myself and my identity, but I actually used rodeo as a way to try and deflect — if you want to say that — homo criticism. And instead I found that the sport itself deflected my interest or concerns about my identity as a gay man because it was more about just the sport and having fun.
DINGMAN: Right. I mean, you can either rope a horse or you can’t rope a horse, right?
VILLANUEVA: Right. I guess I had two rodeo experiences. One, when I was closeted and trying to use rodeo to strengthen my masculine capital, this masculine identity.
And then gay rodeo, you don’t have to do that. I mean, we have drag performers. There’s this lack of concern about having to demonstrate some type of masculinity. Everything is accepted in the gay rodeo.
DINGMAN: I have to imagine that must be extremely affirming to be able to do this extremely challenging physical activity that rodeo already is and also feel like you can bring your full self and identity to it.
VILLANUEVA: Right, and also the first official gay rodeo was 1976. The person who founded it, Phil Ragsdale, wanted this to be a safe place for someone to compete, and maybe celebrate with their partner, jump up on the rails of the arena and hug and kiss the person who’s there to support them without concerns of any homophobia or backlash or violence.
DINGMAN: So as you started to get more into this, in addition to the personal experience that you were having, if I’m not mistaken, you also started to understand the connections between the gay rodeo world and the gay liberation movement more broadly.
VILLANUEVA: Yes, gay liberation in places you didn’t really expect to see it. Many participants in gay rodeo grew up in Christian conservative small towns, and they have Christian conservative values, I mean, so much so that even politically they vote most likely Republican.
DINGMAN: This is really interesting to me because I think so often in conversations about the gay rights movement there is this assumption that, as you were alluding to, it was consolidated in these places where “alternative culture” was already well established or that are more associated with underground forms of expression, that sort of thing.
VILLANUEVA: Yes,
DINGMAN: But no less relevant, of course to your point, is that there have always been gay people in places where those outlets don’t exist.
VILLANUEVA: Yes. Many of the people that I know in gay rodeo, it was all about rodeo, not being gay, and then finding the Gay Rodeo Association was just more of a social environment — meeting someone like you who had the same interest as you, who grew up with the same values, the same interests.
DINGMAN: Yeah, I mean this is one of the things that it seems like was really important to you to write about in the book is the way that rodeo became this vessel for gay culture and gay community to reach people who might not otherwise have been able to find it.
VILLANUEVA: Yes, and there’s a chapter in the book, I think it’s Chapter 3, it’s on the rodeo programs. I went through 30 years of rodeo programs, 12 programs a year. Some of these programs were 20 to 30 pages in length.
There’s a lot of research involved, but for a historian, we love the archives. That’s what we do.
DINGMAN: It’s a goldmine.
VILLANUEVA: And what I realized and what I argue in that chapter of the book is that this was more of the how-to manual. How to be gay. Where do you go? Everything from bars to the bathhouses.
They even had advertisements for magazines like the Advocate, and someone from a rural town may have never heard of that magazine. But then they could subscribe and learn more about LGBTQ+ culture. Isn’t that amazing?
DINGMAN: You’re a gay person at this time, you take the leap to get involved in the gay rodeo and then it ends up opening these doors to all these other elements of this community that you’re a part of that you maybe didn’t even know existed.
VILLANUEVA: One of the most interesting parts about my research, the primary source that I used — and it’s a little embarrassing to say — gay men’s pornographic magazines. That is where you actually had people write true stories about rodeo.
If you went to the newspapers in the early ’80s, there was always a tongue-in-cheek kind of like make fun of or mock the rodeo, like, “Oh look at this. These gay men actually can ride a horse.” .... Trivial stuff like that.
But then these articles, these pornographic magazines, they actually had the stories. And so when I went to my research library and I said, “I need you to find these editions of Honcho and Blue Boy and all these different names. Playgirl, all these different magazines,” and she looked at me like I was crazy. And I said, “Really, I am just reading the articles.”
Yeah, this is research. And it really was, because those were the only journalists or authors that were taking gay rodeo seriously at the time.
DINGMAN: Well, I have been speaking with Dr. Nicholas Villanueva, a professor of ethnic studies and critical sports studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, who is also a rodeo athlete in his own right and the author of the book “Rainbow Cattle Co.”, a book which takes gay rodeo very seriously and where you can read about the stories he’s been telling today and a whole lot more.
Dr. Villanueva, thank you so much.
VILLANUEVA: Thank you for having me. I really appreciate this.
