John Wayne and the Queer Frontier: Deconstructions of the Classic Cowboy Narrative during the Vietnam War
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Wayne?! You're gonna tell me that John Wayne's a fag?!-Midnight Cowboy (1969)I gave my dead d--- for John Wayne.-Ron Kovic (1976)There ain't no queer in cowboy and don't care for anyone suggesting there is, snapped Wyoming cowboy Jim-Bob Zimmerschied in December 2005 (qtd. in Sherwell). The growing numbers of participants at regional and national gay rodeo finals, and the existence of the International Gay Rodeo Association (founded in 1981 and now with member associations across most states, the District of Columbia, and two Canadian provinces) might suggest otherwise. But, responding to questions about Ang Lee's critically acclaimed film Brokeback Mountain, Zimmerschied continued: I've been doing this job all my life and ain't never met no gay cowboy...John Wayne and Will Rogers, they made real cowboy movies. They portrayed us like we are (qtd. in Sherwell).Nearly thirty years after his death, Wayne's name has been continually invoked in interviews, reviews, and articles sparked by the release of Brokeback Mountain. Ubiquitous in Western genre films from the 1930s through the 1970s, and a cultural icon of titanic proportions, Wayne's tall stature, chiseled jaw, and broad shoulders made him the perfect celluloid cowboy. His performances set the standard by which all Hollywood cowboys - including Ang Lee's - were then judged. I think my career demonstrates that am no panty-waist, Wayne told a Playboy journalist in 1971 (92), and this decades-long career had made Wayne a poster-boy for strong, independent, American masculinity. Wayne's was also a heterosexual masculinity. His on and off screen personas were unambiguously straight: on screen he idealized a vision of virile straight men who waged battle by day and wooed women by night, and off-screen his personal demeanor and political values seemingly mirrored those of his cowboy characters. He espoused conservative causes, repeatedly expressed a personal distaste for homosexuality, particularly its pervasive presence in Hollywood, and proclaimed himself disgusted by Tennessee Williams' Suddenly Last Summer (1959). They've gone and killed John Wayne with this movie, concluded Zimmerschied of Brokeback Mountain (qtd. in Sherwell). But while Lee's portrayal of gay cowhands in Brokeback Mountain might be an affront to the John Wayne myth of an exclusively heterosexual frontier, it is by no means the first. Beginning in the late 1960s, this cultural myth has been under attack.John Schlesinger's Western, Vietnam, and aFrontier DystopiaIt was a brisk January day in 1974 and the citizens of Cambridge did not know what to make of the spectacle. A boisterous crowd of nearly 400 Harvard students was milling about a military armored personnel-carrier as it made its way down Mt. Auburn Street towards the Harvard Lampoon office. All eyes were fixed upon the 6'4 barrel-chested figure who stood atop the tank with an unloaded gun, smiling and waving casually as he dodged the occasional incoming snowball. Cambridge's celebrity visitor was none other than John Wayne, celluloid cowboy extraordinaire and the recent recipient of the Lampoon's Brass Balls Award, given in recognition of his machismo and his penchant for hitting people in the mouth (Kifner 41). An article in the New York Times noted that although Wayne was foraying into hostile territory, he managed to charm the liberal-leaning campus community. The Lampoon had invited him to take part in a political debate where he answered pointed questions on his conservative politics. A handful of Native American activists protested his appearance but, despite the obstacles, the Duke dominated the day's proceedings with his mix of rough bravado, folksy humor, and sincere disregard for the academy's liberal sensitivities. The New York Times even summed up the day's debate by painting Wayne as a modern-day Theodore Roosevelt - a symbol of American mythology: cowboy, soldier, agent of empire (Kifner 41). …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".