From: bocarsm@hotmail.com   
      
   Their are stories that Belle Starr was a homo!   
   "Gerald Clough"  wrote in message   
   news:4M6dnWn1gfMUgD_eRVn-uA@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)