Rodeo’s influence on the gay community and why it’s been erased from history

MOSCOW – As this season of Idaho Rodeo fades into history, Professor Rebecca Scofield at the University of Idaho is uncovering a page from the sport’s forgotten past. “When I was doing my master’s thesis on the acrylic nail industry in Tokyo, I ran across a store called “Rodeo Clowns,” Scofield said. “These rodeo performances became so important to different groups, whether that’s incarcerated people, or women, or black rodeo-ers, or gay rodeos.” As Scofield began researching rodeo’s influence on society, she discovered Western ideas surrounding the “mythology of the cowboy” had been rewritten as part of a nationwide movement in the late 19th century. “All of a sudden, we have this massive cultural explosion around the US West in the 1890s,” she said. “We have Buffalo Bill Cody and we have the first rodeos and we have Frederick Remington, we have Theodore Roosevelt, and we have all of these people sort of rewriting the West and particularly cowboys.” Scofield learned about Black rodeo, and women bronc riders in the prison system. She was also introduced to the International Gay Rodeo Association, an organization devoted to promoting the LGBTQ country western lifestyle in a “supportive amateur sportsmanship environment.” She eventually found out that the organization had recently donated all its archives to a museum in California. “I was able to get a research fellowship to go out and go through the archives, which are incredible,” she said. “It’s 90 boxes of material, which for a historian, is unheard of.” The material included a variety of programs and posters for specific events, as well as meeting minutes and letters from officials. As Scofield perused through all the documents, she felt one thing was missing: “the voices of the people.” That’s when the Voices of Gay Rodeo was born, a project dedicated to recording the oral history from people inside the subculture. It’s an ongoing project to ensure the group is never forgotten. Through the process of recording oral histories, Scofield and her team of students at the University of Idaho have recorded stories from those who lived through the AIDS crisis and other periods of difficulty for the LGBTQ+ community. According to Scofield, there were organized pushes to put gay rodeo participants “back into the closet” and erase them from the national mythology of the cowboy. “They got a barrage of horrific death (threats) that were just really stomach-turning in a lot of ways,” Scofield explains. “It was really painful to read about the assumption of pedophilia, the assumption that they weren’t good people, that they were going to abuse the animals.” Scofield says some of the records painted a detailed picture of society’s negative view of queerness. “Groups that we often associate with the far left were also articulating some really anti-LGBTQ sentiments that we would associate now with the far right. It really demonstrates the precarity of the line that gay rodeos have always walked,” Scofield said. Scofield says society’s push to say the gay community is not rural or urban enough to fit into either crowd is unacceptable. Their efforts to find their own culture and record their own history has helped flesh out the history of the United States. “It’s really important for us to understand the complexities of our history instead of just going all in on a plastic version of mythology,” Scofield said. The post Rodeo’s influence on the gay community and why it’s been erased from history appeared first on East Idaho News.
Source: eastidahonews.com