Reagan's Rainbow Rodeos: Queer Challenges to the Cowboy Dreams of Eighties America
Bibliographic record
Abstract
During the 1980s, both Hollywood and the Reagan administration attempted to resurrect frontier masculinity by rewriting the Vietnam War and rehabilitating its defeated hero: the straight-shooting cowboy. But a quarter-century before Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain (2005) collided in the space of myth-making with America's latest cowboy president, individuals opened a counter-hegemonic space that challenged social marginalization in the public sphere. Picking up where subversive westerns from the late 1960s had left off, the little-known artist Delmas Howe and the founders of the International Gay Rodeo Association (IGRA) resisted the imposition of a rigidly heterosexual cowboy mythology and met the Reagan-era cowboy revival on a queer frontier. Examining John Schlesinger's Midnight Cowboy (1969), Andy Warhol's Lonesome Cowboys (1969), Howe's series of paintings entitled Rodeo Pantheon (1977–91), and the founding and rise of the IGRA (accompanied by interviews with IGRA participants), this article uncovers a rainbow rodeo that has challenged America's cowboy dreams.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".