Howdy, partner 12 queer cowboy movies that prove Westerns have always been gay AF
They’re at film festivals, they’re on the radio, they’re on Netflix—and there’s even more on the way. These days, it feels like queer cowboys (cow-folks?) are everywhere.
Now, you may ask, “What in tarnation is going on here?” What’s in the water that, suddenly, it feels like the zeitgeist is chock-full of gay Westerns?
Well, the thing is, the genre has pretty much always been gay. Traditionally, the Western is thought of as the realm of male bravado—hyper-masculine, tough-talkin’, pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps type of guys—but all that “yeehaw’ posturing is exactly why so many cowboys, gunslingers, and outlaws in films lend themselves to queer readings. It’s all such a put-on that it’s easy to sense something gay just beneath the surface.
Yes, the frontier has long felt like a conduit for repressed homosexuality. Every quiet night around a campfire on the open plain, every tense stare-down between stand-off rivals can feel charged with unspoken sexual tension.
Over the decades, many filmmakers have leaned into the Western’s latent queer appeal—whether intentionally or not—dating all the way back to the genre’s first golden era in Hollywood.
With that in mind. we’ve decided to follow down that dusty old run through cinema history and call attention to 12 notable Westerns—from 1948 to today—that showcase the genre at its gayest. The Good, the bad, and the ugly the erotic, and the strange, this dirty dozen movies shows how the West was won by the queers.
Red River (1948)
It’s impossible to talk about the cinematic history of Westerns without mentioning John Wayne, the silver-screen icon whose gruff demeanor cemented culture’s understanding of the masculine cowboy ideal. Wayne’s true grit may be the star of this Howard Hawks classic, but Red River maintains its place in the queer canon for its charged homosocial relationship between gunslingers Garth (Montgomery Clift in his film debut) and Valance (John Ireland), particularly the infamous scene where they compare pistol sizes.
The barely veiled subtext is right there, making it one of the gayest moments to come out of Hollywood’s Hays Code era.
Johnny Guitar (1954)
Another classic that’s all about the subtext, the oddball Johnny Guitar isn’t remembered as one of the legendary Joan Crawford’s greatest roles, but it’s certainly one of her gayest. Frequently dressed in butch Western threads, Crawford’s Vienna is a surly saloon owner who inspires one character to remark, “Never seen a woman who was more of a man.”
Vienna’s got big-time beef with cattle baron Emma (Mercedes McCambridge), and their rivalry is one of the genre’s rare instances where women got to be tough and talk a big game—the sapphic undertones making it an early lesbian favorite.
Lonesome Cowboys (1968)
Okay, enough of the subtext (for now), let’s get really gay. Art world provocateur Andy Warhol played dress-up with American cowboy iconography in this experimental, bisexual reimagining of Romeo And Juliet. Originally titled F*ck and then The Glory Of F*ck, Lonesome Cowboys is the kind of in-your-face, unabashed queer art film you might expect from Warhol, one that was labeled “absolute filth” by critics at the time.
Featuring plenty of sex and cross-dressing, the X-rated feature isn’t what you’d call a “coherent narrative” by any stretch of the imagination, but it offers plenty to admire—and ogle.
Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid (1969)
We’ve previously unpacked the homoerotic tension coursing through George Roy Hill’s gold-standard Western, Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid, but we couldn’t not include it on this list. After all, the Academy Award-winner features two of the handsomest actors of all time—Robert Redford and Paul Newman—getting all buddy-buddy out on the open plains, their bromance always teetering on the edge of becoming something more,
culminating in a climactic shootout that gets a special shot-out in The Celluloid Closet for its obvious gay metaphor.