Slapping Leather

Elyssa Ford and Rebecca Scofield una P ologeti C ally brings gay rodeo out of the C loset

Campy and competitive, gay rodeo offers a community of refuge that straddles the urban and rural. Since the mid-1970s, gay rodeos have provided space to both embrace and challenge the idealized masculinity associated with the iconic cowboy of the US West. Slapping Leather traces the history and growth of gay rodeo over the decades, demonstrating how queer cowfolx have fought to build a community where lgbtq+ people can escape discrimination in both mainstream rodeos and broader society.

Yet not all lgbtq + groups have found full acceptance in gay rodeo. Originally formed by gay men for gay men, the rodeo has at times perpetuated historically problematic ideas about the US West, the iconic cowboy, and the meaning of masculinity. Despite the gay rodeo’s credo of acceptance, its history reveals complicated relationships with straight rodeo, gender stereotypes, and women competitors. Drawing from multiple archives and over seventy oral history interviews, historians Elyssa Ford and Rebecca Scofield demonstrate how amid these tensions, participants, volunteers, and spectators continue to redefine the performance of the cowboy and national belonging.

“Through a range of sources, including myriad personal stories, Ford and Scofield chart an alternately triumphal and agonizing history of the gay rodeo from its rise in the 1970s, to its peak of popularity in the 1990s, to its slow decline in the new millennium. Along the way they consider the effects of the aids epidemic, culture wars, shifting gender norms and questions of inclusion, generational change, and the enduring myths of the Old West. This long-overdue study solidifies the authors’ reputations as the leading historians of the American rodeo scene’s marginalized members.” —Peter Boag, author of Pioneering Death: The Violence of Boyhood in Turn-of-the-Century Oregon november

Elyssa Ford is associate professor of history at Northwest Missouri State University and author of Rodeo as Refuge, Rodeo as Rebellion: Gender, Race, and Identity in the American Rodeo. Rebecca Scofield is associate professor of American history at the University of Idaho and author of Outriders: Rodeo at the Fringes of the American West.

272 pp., 25 b&w illus., 1 map, 1 table, 6 × 9 in.

$105.00x / £84.00 hC / 9780295752129

$29.95 / £22.99 Pb / 9780295752136

$29.95 / £22.99 eb / 9780295752143

Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies / Western History / Sports november

200 pp., 2 b&w illus., 6 × 9 in.

$105.00x / £84.00 hC / 9780295751931

$30.00s / £22.99 Pb / 9780295751948

$30.00s / £22.99 eb / 9780295751955

Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies / Science and Technology Studies / Anthropology feminist technosciences