From: firstinitiallastname@texas.net   
      
   Arrow Catcher wrote:   
      
   > Actual historical accounts are probably difficult, if not impossible,   
   > to find.  For one thing, the rural isolated population was mostly   
   > illiterate, which would make accounts rare.  Many were persons   
   > comfortable living outside established rules and without women.  There   
   > was no authority checking up on them.  Hard to believe these people   
   > are going to be asexual celibates for months until they take a cowtown   
   > prostitute in a semiannual payday fling.   
      
   About the only thing that comes right to mind, other than pulpit rants,   
   is an illustration from one of the illustrated news magazines of the   
   time depicting gay men dancing in the street in New Orleans. New   
   Orleans, of course, doesn't really count, since it was taken for granted   
   that shocking things went on there.   
      
   I'm not sure what the literacy rate might have been among working   
   cowboys. A number were quite, even stunningly, literate. (Siringo,   
   James, Cook, Adams and a host of old trail drivers who contributed to   
   the collection of memoirs of the Association.) More than one   
   contemporary recollection describes isolated cowboys pitching in to   
   subscribe to a periodical, even if the popular vote often went to the   
   Police Gazzete. And one finds a number of writers mentioning an influx   
   of eastern, university educated young men going west to become cowboys   
   at about the time operating a cattle ranch became fashionable for the   
   more adventurous moneyed easterners.   
      
   In considering the gay caballero, it may be well to think about 19th   
   century (and all other centuries) seafaring where homosexual contact is   
   widely mentioned, perhaps because the close quarters made discovery more   
   likely, and strict regulations made punishment and its attendant   
   recording an official matter. The jobs weren't all that different. Low   
   pay, long terms of isolation in all-male companies.   
      
   It may be proper to distinguish between gays of the old West and men who   
   resorted to homosexual activity in the absence of women, the later   
   certainly more common than the romantics of Brokeback Mtn.   
   --   
                          Gerald Clough   
       "Nothing has any value, unless you know you can give it up."   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)