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TITLE Queer West
SUBTITLE How the West Was Fabulous
AUTHOR Brenna Farrell
NARRATOR Niecy Nash-Betts
LANGUAGE English
RELEASE DATE 05-30-2024
PUBLISHER Audible Originals
CATEGORIES America, Art, History, LGBTQ+, LGBTQ+ Study, United States of America
SUMMARY
Stories of the American West often rely on tired tropes of tough cowboys, but real history is much less straight and narrow and way more interesting. Join host Niecy Nash-Betts for a wild round-up of LGBTQ+ lives that got buried in the dust of popular culture and history and take a look at how queer people continue to shape the West today–from gay rodeos to two-spirit identity to trans truckers.
Episode 1: "Welcome, Y'all!"
Saddle up and get ready to make some lifestyle choices! Host Niecy Nash-Betts introduces herself and the series–explaining how folks like her, a Black Hollywood star who’s married to a woman, find power in sorting out their place in the American West by bucking the typical stereotypes. From John Wayne to Lil Nas X, dressing the part has always been part of the package in coming to terms with a complicated history.
Episode 2: "Oklahomos!"
The musical Oklahoma! is a saga of the plains often performed as a high school musical and presented as an American Classic. But the man behind its creation–a gay Cherokee playwright named Lynn Riggs–is barely known today. We get to know Lynn Riggs, who mined the yearning in old cowboy songs to express himself, and ended up revealing the spiritual connections between the West, musicals, and queer identity.
Episode 3: "The Man in Lavender"
Country cred is a confusing mix of cheesy marketing and hard-to-put-your-finger-on-it authenticity. And that leaves a lot of room for country music to speak to tons of queerdos and fans from all walks of life. Back in 1973, a real-deal outlaw musician named Patrick Haggerty gave the finger to all the rules in Nashville and made the first gay country album–breaking a mold that, decades later, still needs remaking.
Episode 4: "Calamity Jane"
Calamity Jane–whose name became shorthand for gender-bendy nonconformity in the old West–was a legend in her own time, and remains a puzzle in ours. But in 1953, when homosexuality was illegal in every state, Doris Day brought her to life in a very queer film with a hit song that echoed off the walls of gay bars for decades.
Episode 5: "A Gay Utopia in Alpine County"
In 1970, an earnest vision to create a gay utopia took on a life of its own—by turns a prank, a punchline, a valid plan, and a source of panic for right-wing pundits. We’ll look at how a proposal to take over a small town in the Sierra Nevadas became a national story that forever changed how the media covered gay and lesbian people.
Episode 6: "Deborah’s Mission"
Mission-style has come to be part of California’s vibe...from architecture to burritos. But two-spirit writer Deborah Miranda is flipping the picture of California’s missions, and helping us to see California’s real history. As a California Indian whose sexuality is deeply tied to her understanding of herself and her community, Deborah’s story about finding her ancestors and finding her truth is the work of a lifetime.
Episode 7: "Old Mrs. Nash"
This is a story about how queer stories get erased from the history of the West, and why. At the very moment that new ideas about sexuality (and the words hetero and homosexual) were gaining ground in America, there was a huge freak-out happening about “the death of the frontier”.
