Gay Texas Cowboys Buck Anti-LGBTQ+ Trend
Even as the Republican-led Texas state legislature considers a reported 140 bills targeting LGBTQ+ citizens, the state's gay cowboys stick to their culture — including a rodeo featuring drag queens, according to AFP.
Even the name of a recent rodeo event in the town of Denton — the Texas Tradition Rodeo — underscores the fact that LGBTQ+ people in the Lone Star State are nothing new. The weekend event showcased "around 50 cowboys competing in classic events such as barrel-racing, calf-lassoing and bull-riding," the news service relayed.
Among them was an old hand and longtime witness of gay cowboy culture, 73-year-old John Beck, who was, the article noted, "dressed in jeans, boots and a cowboy hat adorned with an enormous blue feather."
Beck, a professional rodeo performer, recalled that for much of his life "I had to hide. For every little thing I did, I had to hide."
Beck lived to see brighter times, but the future is now in doubt as Republican lawmakers in red states across the country push a record number of legal measures that would curtail the rights of LGBTQ+ people, snatching medically appropriate health care away from transgender youth, marginalizing gay students, lumping the venerable art of drag together with sexually explicit "adult" entertainment, outlawing the presence of literature with LGBTQ+ themes in public libraries, and even putting the long-term status of marriage equality in all 50 states into doubt despite the limited protections afforded by the federal Respect for Marriage Act.
"Despite the looming threat, the small crowd in the metal bleachers in Denton, near Dallas, is enthusiastic," AFP said. "They laugh and cheer even when the drag queens tumble off their precarious perches on the bulls' backs — here, unlike in the real world outside, the danger is all part of the fun."
The Texas Tradition Rodeo and similar events have become tradition in their own right; for three decades, such events, many of them benefiting charity, have been organized by the Texas Gay Rodeo Association (TGRA), AFP detailed.
And even though the sport might be seen as macho, that doesn't mean that its straight and gay practitioners don't get along.
"I rode broncs in the straight world and gay world both for 17 years," Beck told AFP. "I rode bulls for eight years." He and his heterosexual counterparts "learned to get along together. And that's the bottom line."
In spite of Texas' elected officials attacking the LGBTQ+ community — including claims from Dan Patrick, a Trump supporter who has taken up the baseless right-wing claim that drag performers seek to "sexualize and indoctrinate" children — the rodeo's entertainers are determined to do their jobs.
AFP relayed that "50-year-old drag performer Delilah DeVasquez, who joined other drag queens dancing between tables filled with adult attendees to collect money for charity," found "such concerns are irrelevant at the rodeo."
"We know our audience," DeVasquez told the news service. "So if we're entertaining children, we obviously are going to entertain appropriately, versus if we are going to entertain adults."
"It's two different things," DeVasquez pointed out.
And, added Sean Moroz, 35, one of the rodeo's drag-attired performers, the centuries-old theatrical tradition is hardly "dangerous" to children or to anyone else.
"It's people dressing up in a dress and having some fun," Moroz said.