Similes Are Boring, Replace All Your Likes With Love Press

No time no time, I'm hitting up two readings tonight if all goes well.

Upon request of Ana B-B, the google image search idiom of the day is "Come hell or high water" And you know how I like to please the ladies, so:








I like the first one best. But that's just because I completely buy into the romantic, masculine loner cowboy motif of the American West.

Although you should check out this book, Queer Cowboy, about gay cowboys in American literature and culture of the 1800s so that you realize how wrong wrong wrongly I cling to this motif. Go read:



Brokeback Mountain exploded the myth of the American cowboy as a tough, gruff, and grizzled loner. Queer Cowboys exposes, through books by legendary Western writers such as Mark Twain, James Fenimore Cooper, and Owen Wister, how same-sex intimacy and homoerotic admiration were key aspects of Westerns well before Brokeback's 1960's West, and well before the word "homosexual" was even invented. Chris Packard introduces readers to the males-only clubs of journalists, cowboys, miners, Indians, and vaqueros who defined themselves by excluding women and the cloying ills of domesticity and recovers a forgotten culture of exclusively masculine, sometimes erotic, and often intimate camaraderie in the fiction, photographs, and theatrical performances of the 1800's Wild West.

Author Bio
Chris Packard teaches literature and writing at New York University and New School University. His essays have appeared in Arizona Quarterly, Common-Place, and Concerns; his fiction and poetry have appeared in literary quarterlies, exhibitions, and the popular press.

Praise for Queer Cowboys
"A searching and original study. Chris Packard has managed to tease out evidence of same-sex attraction in places where one would not have expected to find it."--Larry McMurtry, co-writer of the award-winning screenplay for Brokeback Mountain and author of Lonesome Dove

"Thanks, Chris Packard, for searching out eros between men in the texts that created the iconic image of the Western American hero. So 'Come back to the Raft Ag'in, Huck Honey!' and see what this scholar has found."--Jonathan Ned Katz, author, Love Stories: Sex between Men before Homosexuality

Table of contents
Introduction * Decoding the Encrypted Erotics of Nineteenth-Century Westerns * Intersections of Race and Homosexuality in the Wilderness * Scandal in the Boom Towns: Print Cultures and Sexual Prohibitions * Cowboy Poses: The Queer Eye in Early Photographs * Singing from the Saddle: The "Wild" West Goes Vaudeville * Conclusion

buy the paperback at www.palgrave-usa.com