Cowboys Are Frequently Secretly Fond of Each Other— Willie Nelson

#365Songs: June 13th

What did you think all them saddles and boots was about?

Male country musicians are fascinating creatures, the way they exude raw masculinity and posture toughness even as they poeticize lost love and nostalgia.

The film Brokeback Mountain was released in 2005, much to the dismay of these poor emo cowboy fellas. Just like earlier this year when Beyoncé scuffed up those sad boys’ leather boots when she reclaimed Black culture’s influence on country music through the release of Cowboy Carter.

Well, there’s many a strange impulse out on the plains of West Texas
There’s many a young boy who feels things he can’t comprehend
And a small town don’t like it when somebody falls between sexes
No, a small town don’t like it when a cowboy has feelings for men

Toxic masculinity is everywhere these days. It’s front and center on the Maga Right, where the Good Ole’ Boys Last Stand is working to gut the progress we’ve made over the past several decades. It’s on sports fields, where boys get to be boys at the expense of everyone. Social media, too, where anonymous posting brings out the most toxic of behaviors and the most toxic influencers educate a new generation.

And I believe to my soul that inside every man there’s the feminine
And inside every lady there’s a deep manly voice loud and clear
Well, a cowboy may brag about things that he’s done with his women
But the ones who brag loudest are the ones that are most likely queer

Queer sex podcaster and columnist, Dan Savage, has a running gag on Twitter where he posts this line every time a preacher is arrested: “If kids got raped by clowns as often as they get raped by preachers it would be against the law to take your kids to the circus.”

But it’s all too common. Anti-queer hatred is most prolific within repressed masculine-heavy spaces and institutions: churches, the military, locker rooms, small towns, cowboy culture, Florida. Books don’t make us gay, but it sure does seem like the ones who ban them are doing their best to not address their own sexuality. Relocating a pedophilic Priest from one Church to another doesn’t erase innate urges, it just shifts whose kids are on the wrong end of their repression.

I’ve spent a lifetime surrounded by the sort of men who talk too loud and too graphically about their purported sexual exploits. The over-compensators hide loudest, and are often the same ones who hear “yes” when the only word spoken is “no” over and over.

Cowboys Are Frequently, Secretly Fond of Each Other was written by Ned Sublette in 1981 and dubbed as a “gay cowboy song.” But it wasn’t until shortly after Brokeback Mountain made a few too many repressed cowboys mad that the song found a real audience, when lifelong ally Willie Nelson used Valentine’s Day 2006 to release a cover. About the release, he said, “The song’s been in the closet for 20 years. The timing’s right for it to come out. I’m just opening the door.”

Cowboys are frequently secretly fond of each other
Say, what do you think all them saddles and boots was about?
And there’s many a cowboy who don’t understand the way that he feels for his brother
And inside every cowboy there’s a lady that’d love to slip out

And there’s always somebody who says what the others just whisper
And mostly that someone’s the first one to get shot down dead
So when you talk to a cowboy don’t treat him like he was a sister
You can’t fuck with a lady that’s sleepin’ in each cowboy’s head

The song was just re-released a few weeks ago as a duet between Willie and Orville Peck, a self-proclaimed gay cowboy who performs in a mask that he rarely removes.

In a recent interview, Peck said, “There are Black, queer, Latin people, you name it country artists that have contributed to the genre in huge ways, instrumentally, vocally lyrically. It is a very diverse genre. There’s this entire world that we thought was supposed to be for like straight white men in lifted trucks. But the reality is it’s for everyone and there’s a million different country artists and each of them have their own story.”

Cowboys are frequently secretly fond of each other
What did you think all them saddles and boots was about?
And there’s many a cowboy who don’t understand the way that he feels for his brother
And inside every lady there’s a cowboy who wants to come out
And inside every cowboy there’s a lady that’d love to slip out

I think, talk, and write a lot about masculinity — how we’re raised, what society expects from us, what’s valued and what’s not. It’s fascinating to contrast my boyhood to my 13-year-old son’s, who’s growing up during a different time in a place polar opposite to where I grew up. And yet… I see so many of the same behaviors and challenges, all these years later even in a far more progressive city. It’s so fucking complex in a way I’ve struggled to identify or articulate.

I’ve been reading Ruth Whippman’s brilliant new book, BoyMom: Reimagining Boyhood in the Age of Impossible Masculinity. She said in a recent interview, “We’ve been doing all this great work breaking down stereotypes for girls and talking about gender fluidity, trans kids, changing gender identity. But the one category that is just so resistant to change is cis boys, and the norms and expectations for them.”

My father didn’t feed me toxic masculinity, but it was persistent everywhere else: in song lyrics, on television, in the films and books fed to boys, within our competitive sports teams, and then when together in groups of friends we mirrored back to one another what we saw, heard, and learned. Now, boys learn these same behaviors in online games, through Discord, within the infinite YouTube rabbit hole of screeching incels and talking heads like Andrew Tate and the rest of his fragile patriarchal clones.

Boys are experiencing a terrifying loneliness epidemic because still, after all these years, even as we’ve progressed in so many ways, it’s not okay to cry. Or show vulnerability. Or be a little bit different. But no matter how hard they try to repress those feelings, regardless of how much they “cowboy up,” the pain is still there, the desires remain, the repression mounts.

Praying the gay away doesn’t make the gay go away just like banning books doesn’t stop stories from being told. There’s no easy solution to the toxic masculinity crisis, but I do know that representation matters. Seeing oneself in another’s story is how we discover ourselves, how we see there’s a different path forward. Repressing urges doesn’t remove the urge, it just misplaces it. And all too often that urge comes out in all the wrong ways.

What did you think all them saddles and boots was about?

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