The first competition of what eventually became the International Gay Rodeo Association was held in Reno, Nevada, in 1976. Within a few years, the one-off event had evolved into a gay-rodeo circuit, with subchapters scattered throughout the West.

newyorker.com
The Renewed Importance of the Texas Gay Rodeo
As conservative politicians try to control expressions of gender and sexuality, a rural haven from hostility offers competition and comfort.

Letter from the Southwest

The Renewed Importance of the Texas Gay Rodeo

As conservative politicians try to control expressions of gender and sexuality, a rural haven from hostility offers competition and comfort.

By Rachel Monroe
April 30, 2023

Photographs by September Dawn Bottoms for The New Yorker

Early on the first day of the Texas Tradition Rodeo, in Denton, Texas, workers at a concession stand handed out free cinnamon buns and Styrofoam cups of coffee as a pair of goats grazed under the bleachers. The parking lot slowly filled with trucks bearing bumper stickers that said things like “Been doing cowboy shit all day.” A tractor circled the arena, raking the dirt. After everyone stood for the national anthem, an announcer came over the crackly P.A. system and offered a prayer, asking God to bless that day’s competitors, “the cowboys, cowgirls, and those in between.”



“When this all started,” Sarah Nickels, a queer competitor in the Gay Rodeo, noted, “you didn’t use your real name, you didn’t take photographs, it was very hush-hush. If you knew, you knew.”

Sarah Nickels and her partner, Aurielle Dickerson, had arrived the night before from their home in San Angelo, four hours away. They spent the night in a tent in the back of Sarah’s Ford F-350 and, in the morning, Aurielle made breakfast tacos on a camp stove while Sarah practiced her roping. Sarah, who is twenty-three, has cropped hair, a forward-canted stride, and an air of low-key competence. She grew up in Houston and started riding horses when she was eight. More recently, she became interested in roughstock, the bucking-bronco- and bull-riding competitions that are rodeo’s most dangerous, and most high-profile, events. “It’s the adrenaline,” she told me. “There’s no better feeling than the second they jump out of that chute. Oh, man. You know you’re in for a ride, and you don’t know what’s going to happen.”

Many rodeo associations limit roughstock competitions to men, but online research led Sarah to a circuit that didn’t have any such restrictions. It was appealing to her for other reasons, too. The first competition of what eventually became the International Gay Rodeo Association was held in Reno, Nevada, in 1976. Within a few years, the one-off event had evolved into a gay-rodeo circuit, with subchapters scattered throughout the West; the Texas Gay Rodeo Association was established in 1983. This year, there are a dozen I.G.R.A. events, in places like Salt Lake City and Las Vegas and Santa Fe, culminating in the World Gay Rodeo Finals in El Reno, Oklahoma, in October.

I.G.R.A. competitions supplement standard rodeo offerings—barrel racing, calf roping, bull riding—with what are known as “camp events,” including goat dressing (which involves putting underwear on a goat) and wild drag race (which involves a team helping a person in drag mount a steer and ride it across the finish line). Last year, Sarah and Aurielle road-tripped to the I.G.R.A. finals in Las Vegas, where they sat in the stands with rodeo veterans and heard stories about the old days. “When this all started, you didn’t use your real name, you didn’t take photographs, it was very hush-hush. If you knew, you knew,” Sarah said. In Denton, Sarah planned to enter a bronc-riding event and also attempt bull riding for the first time. She’d brought her lucky penny and her special chaps, cut from caramel-colored leather and hand-stitched with rainbow thread.

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These days, the number of competitors and spectators is a fraction of what it once was. “A lot of your population is in your big metropolitan areas, and kids just don’t want to do this anymore,” Mac said. He also theorized that, as gay culture has gone mainstream, there is less of a need for separate spaces: “Now you go to Round-Up”—a country-and-Western L.G.B.T.Q. dance club in Dallas—“and there are as many straight people as there are gays.”

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