The Remote Island by Bryan Christian Please, Drew Barrymore, don't do a dating reality show! Plus: Christmas at 30 Rock, another Gossip Girl couple, and since when is Elisha Cuthbert 'sloppy seconds'?
When I was growing up, my Dad liked to brag that he had won the award for Best Actor in his graduating class at Russell High School in Russell, Kansas "and the guy I beat went to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in London, and he was on the soaps." Dad made different choices and became a large-animal veterinarian in a town without a stoplight in central Illinois. He spent most nights on the sofa watching TV. Reruns of old Westerns were his favorite, but he rarely got to watch a whole movie without being interrupted by a phone call from a farmer who needed him to pull a calf or suture a wound on a steer. He would change into his Wranglers and boots and head out, cursing, for the white Chevy Impala, light a Marlboro and drive into the dark.
He's lived in the same house since the 1960s, but for a long time he kept up his California veterinary license. "In the Army, they almost stationed me in southern California once," he said, "and you never know what could have happened. Kim Novak married a veterinarian." I often wondered if he fantasized that someday he still might heed the call of Hollywood.
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The night before last year's Cowtown Rodeo in Fort Worth, Texas, I went to The Round-Up Saloon, a gay country-western bar in Dallas, with a lantern-jawed rough-stock rider named Sonny. The crowd was packed so tight that every Stetson in the room had gone crooked: you couldn't turn your head without bumping somebody's brim. We stood next to a man so big we called him "Lubbock" (not to his face); like a lot of guys in the room, he wore a Western shirt with the sleeves ripped off and had hairy triceps the size of summer squash.
Late in the evening, the music abruptly stopped. In the middle of the dance floor, a white screen descended from the ceiling and played clips from Designing Women. In Yankee gay bars, I'd seen similar montages from Mommie Dearest ("Don't fuck with me fellas. This ain't my first time at the rodeo"), but never Dixie Carter and Delta Burke.
Sonny was embarrassed that the club's vibe had suddenly gone camp. "It's stupid," he grumbled. "It will be over in a minute." He was also incredulous: "You've never seen this episode?" In one scene, Julia Sugarbaker
Some of the butchest cowboys in the room began to recite Dixie Carter's lines.
(Carter) defends her sister Suzanne (Burke), a former beauty queen, from a gossip's insults (which raise Julia's hackles all the more, for sounding so like her own habitual put-downs of Suzanne).
The bar, engrossed, fell silent, and a few arch voices chimed in with the dialogue. Sonny looked impassive. As Dixie Carter barreled on, more men, including some of the butchest cowboys in the room, began to recite her lines, laughing and turning Julia's story — of Suzanne's baton routine in the Miss Georgia talent competition — into a kind of liturgy:
Suzanne was not just any Miss Georgia, she was the Miss Georgia. She didn't twirl just a baton, that baton was on fire! And when she threw that baton into the air, it flew higher, further, faster than any baton has ever flown before, hitting a transformer and showering the darkened arena with sparks! And when it finally did come down . . . my sister caught that baton, and twelve thousand people jumped to their feet for sixteen-and-one-half minutes of uninterrupted thunderous ovation, as flames illuminated her tear-stained face! And that . . . just so you will know — and your children will someday know — is the night the lights went out in Georgia.
I turned to Sonny, who by the end was performing those lines along with everybody else. I raised an eyebrow; he winked and shrugged. The screen disappeared into the ceiling and we took to the dance floor, two-stepping to Rascal Flatts' "I'm Movin' On."
Before Brokeback Mountain, the idea of a gay cowboy struck most people as an oxymoron. Even riders on the gay rodeo circuit — Cowtown in Fort Worth is one of about twenty annual events sponsored by the International Gay Rodeo Association, the world's third largest rodeo organization — once felt that way about themselves.
"For a lot of gay country people, gay rural people, what we did is, we ran away. I was like, 'I'm getting out of this
At an early age, I became a conscientious objector to my Dad's embarrassing enthusiasm for cowboy kitsch.
shit,'" explained a champion bronc rider, a pre-op female-to-male transsexual who, as a teenager, fled her hometown in rural Washington for the bright lights of Seattle. After a few years of gay urban life, she realized she had made a false choice: "I was like, 'This is bullshit. These things can go together.' Then I found the rodeo."
Most gay cowboys and cowgirls I met in Ft. Worth told similar stories, about how dressing in "cowboy drag" and competing helped them reconcile disparate aspects of character and enabled all sorts of social evolution. A personable pharmacist from Minneapolis confessed that, before the rodeo, he hated mainstream gay nightlife, but "once I learned the structure of two-stepping then I could finally feel comfortable dancing in a regular club. Otherwise I just felt like an idiot out there, wiggling for no reason."
I had never been a Western enthusiast. At an early age, I became a conscientious objector to my Dad's embarrassing enthusiasm for cowboy kitsch. He hung an 11x14 color print of Jane Russell in The Outlaw in our front hallway, to my mother's silent consternation; a reproduction of Charles Marion Russell's "Waiting for a Chinook" loomed over the piano while I played the theme from Chariots of Fire. When he dragged the family to the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City, I wouldn't budge from the back seat of our car. I listened, for the umpteenth time that day, to the original cast recording of Sweeney Todd on my bright yellow plastic Sony Sport Walkman, lip syncing every part.
Twenty years later, I went to Cowtown out of curiosity about alternatives to urban gay culture — and because I thought men who could pin nine-hundred-pound farm animals to the ground would probably be hot.
, featuring curious yet marvelous infusions of cucumber and rose petal.
