The cowboy from Colorado is not hard to spot. John Beck wears a hat with pink and blue feathers dangling down the back, his signature look at International Gay Rodeo Association events since the 1990s. Mounted on his thoroughbred, Paris, Beck circles the grass behind the grand entry of this Denton, Texas, rodeo. He’s dressed to code: A sign at the North Texas Fairgrounds reads, “Preserve Our Western Heritage Dress Code: Western Hat & Long Sleeves.” Beck’s striped Wrangler shirt, in shades of faded pastel pink, blue, black, and white, matches the plumage on his hat.
“People call me a lot of things,” he says later while we’re sitting under a canopy in the contestant stands. “Mean,” jokes Ashley Baker from Colorado, who met Beck while riding at local contests. Someone below us turns around. He calls Beck “a legend.”
Beck, who’s 76, is a mentor to a lot of younger contestants. He tells me he’s the oldest continuous participant in the Texas Tradition Rodeo, taking place here this April weekend, and he estimates he’s trained hundreds of younger contestants over the years in events like steer riding and chute dogging.
Texas Tradition is one of the gay rodeo circuit’s larger events. This year, over two days, it will draw more than 100 contestants and hundreds of spectators. On the first day of the rodeo, under a cloudless blue sky, a dozen or so contestants are lined up behind the arena, about to start pole bending, a timed event in which riders weave their horses among a series of plastic stakes. The fans, meanwhile, scatter throughout the silver stands to sit with partners, in groups, or alone. Once the rodeo starts, it all goes by fast. “It’s like gathering kittens,” says Mary Honeycutt, the rodeo director. “With a leaf blower.”
This article appears in Issue 33 of Alta Journal.
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Association leaders tell me they are focused on making the event as inclusive as possible: In gay rodeo, contestants of all genders participate in bronc riding, a category that is traditionally male. Audience members are roped into the fun, too: During community goat dressing, teams of two, pulled from the stands, work to catch a goat and dress it in underwear. (I’m asked to participate, but I politely decline.) During wild drag racing, trios, including a rider in drag, try to get a steer to the finish line. One group is dressed like the Addams Family, another like Alice in Wonderland.
I spot a Pride rainbow horse halter. A burly man with a tiara perched on a black cowboy hat. A rider who custom-bejeweled her Stetson. A 26-year-old animal rescue officer named Moss from central New Jersey with a patch on their jet-black jacket that warns, “Queer Steer.” Moss uses Dandy-Lion as a stage name and wears bright yellow nail polish. This is their first year on the rodeo circuit. “I grew up in a kind of farming area,” Moss says. “To see people who work with cattle, who work in the farming industry, and things like that who are also queer is really reaffirming. It might be that little push to come out as themselves, too.”
“We’re going to Reno, Nevada,” shouts the arena announcer in between events. “Where it all started. Make your reservations today. Rooms are selling out.” The International Gay Rodeo Association, known as IGRA, is on the road back to its hometown for the first time in 19 years. This October, the organization will host its finals and celebrate its 50th anniversary there.
Beck tells me he plans to go to Reno. For him and so many others gathered in Texas, the gay rodeo is a place of second chances; it’s a home for many who lost the ones they were born into.
Beck knew he was gay a couple of years before his dad first put him on a horse at age 10. After he graduated from college in 1972, he married—what he likened to a ritual in rural Clarks, Nebraska. He and his wife divorced a couple of years later; it was amicable. “She understood,” Beck says. “We didn’t fight. Got out of court and went to have dinner together. Wrote her a check for $68,000.”
But when his ex-wife’s family came to pick up her stuff, he was outed by her sister. “I went to town that night to eat, and they wouldn’t serve me,” he says. Beck moved to a trailer home. The machine shed he built caught on fire; he believes the KKK was behind it.
In the fall of 1981, Beck packed his belongings into his stock truck and flipped a coin between Colorado and Florida. He landed in Denver, where he started going to Charlie’s, a gay bar. The bar’s owner, Wayne, introduced Beck to gay rodeo, a tradition with roots in a 1970s fundraiser in Reno—a town that has long straddled the divide of the rural and urban West.
At the Denton fairgrounds, Beck confesses to having mixed feelings about going to Reno.
“Let me put it this way: Just saying the name brings back memories,” he says.
Before there was Harvey Milk, there was José Julio Sarria, a drag performer known as the Grand Mere who was a cocktail server at the Black Cat Cafe in San Francisco. In 1961, Sarria ran for the Board of Supervisors, making history as the first openly gay person to run for office in the United States. He lost but became a fierce advocate for gay rights in San Francisco.
In the early 1960s, when San Francisco police were raiding queer bars, Sarria encouraged owners to form the Tavern Guild as a way to share information, fundraise, and organize against harassment by cops. A few years later, through the guild, Sarria founded the Imperial Court of San Francisco to host drag events and raise funds for local charities. The court expanded across North America, including to Reno, where the local chapter conceived a rodeo as a fundraiser for LGBTQ senior citizens.
The first rodeo, in 1976, brought about 40 contestants and more than 100 spectators to the Washoe County Fairgrounds. Organizers struggled to find a contractor who would rent stock, but they were able to herd together a mix of range cows, calves, a pig, and a Shetland pony. The next year, about 1,000 people showed up for the event, and it only grew from there. “Thanks to Anita Bryant, even rodeo performers are coming out of the closet,” a Fresno contestant told a reporter in 1977.
The California-based gay magazine the Advocate described the 1978 rodeo as “Hot Time at the Oh Gay Corral.” Gay Line Tours bused in scores of people from San Francisco. “With hundreds of out-of-towners, the popular gay watering holes in Reno were filled with new faces, most sporting their best Western drag,” wrote Robert McQueen, the Advocate’s editor. Over the years, drag queens wore wigs with yellow curls and billowing gray waves; a golden-caped Roman emperor rode in straddling two horses; shirtless men in aviators and boot-cut jeans filled the stands.
The nation’s first gay rodeo event soon hit its stride. In 1982, roughly 22,000 visitors passed through the fairgrounds’ gates. The event program, which announced the theme as Western Gay Pride, featured ads for queer bars—Paul’s Lounge and B-Jay Motor Lodge—next to a photocopied letter of support from the mayor of Reno. Joan Rivers, queen of barbed one-liners, greeted visitors as the grand marshal, and Rose Maddox, queen of hillbilly swing, came to perform.
Fueled by Reno’s success, gay rodeo was expanding across the United States to places like Denver, Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Oklahoma City. In 1985, chapters in Arizona, California, Colorado, Oklahoma, and Texas established IGRA as the sanctioning association for gay rodeo events. But as it grew, the rodeo faced backlash in the very place it began.
Groups like the Patriots to Normalize Reno, bolstered by the religious right and the Reagan administration’s amplification of AIDS misinformation, went on the attack. They seized on Cold War rhetoric, invoking doomsday scenarios. Daniel Hansen, who founded Nevada’s Independent American Party, said, “Homosexuality, like all parasites, survives by preying upon the healthy. If left unchecked, like cancer, it will destroy the body politic.”
By 1985, the Reno gay rodeo had ended its initial run amid discrimination and loss as the AIDS epidemic spread and internal financial issues led to conflict with the Nevada State Fair. Three years later, when IGRA tried to host its finals in Fallon, a rural farming-and-ranching hub in western Nevada, a district attorney filed an injunction to halt it.
Beck and two other contestants made the 15-hour journey from Colorado to Fallon. “We drove all night to get there, and we were tired,” Beck says. They reached the fairgrounds’ two red gates as the sun was rising and saw a sign that said “Rodeo Canceled.” Cops pulled up alongside the truck and said they didn’t allow “queers” in the county. Beck spent the night in jail.
The Reno where gay rodeo was born has changed dramatically since 1976. The population has boomed from less than 200,000 people to about 500,000. Five years ago, the state passed a constitutional provision protecting marriage regardless of gender.
Despite shifting attitudes throughout the West that would suggest a more liberal environment, though, gay rodeo’s growth has not been linear. Between 2013 and 2018, membership in IGRA dropped by roughly 26 percent; audience attendance plummeted as well. Gay rodeo’s viability was under threat: For years, an old guard of longtime contestants had been keeping things afloat, but no one was quite sure who would take their place when they retired. The COVID-19 pandemic brought on financial challenges as well.
But post-pandemic, says Elyssa Ford, a coauthor of Slapping Leather: Queer Cowfolx at the Gay Rodeo, interest has picked up. “You have laws that are being passed across states and things that are happening nationally that make queer spaces, like actual queer spaces where you can see each other and interact, more important than they have been in decades,” Ford says. At the gay rodeo, the stands are slowly filling up with Gen Z spectators. They’re curious.
On the circuit, Tequila Mockingbird, a 33-year-old drag queen who grew up in Las Vegas, wears a red Miss IGRA sash, which she won in the 2024 Nevada royalty competition (each state gay rodeo association runs a pageant). Mockingbird, who serves as an ambassador for IGRA and helps rodeo officials time events, is looking forward to Reno—especially at a moment when country has taken center stage. You don’t have to look far to see it: Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter, Chappell Roan’s “The Giver.” “Back in its heyday, rodeo used to have dance halls packed with cowboys and cowgirls two-stepping with each other,” Mockingbird says. “I think people are really ready. Country is cool again.”
The Denton fairgrounds swell with first-timers and rodeo enthusiasts. Compared with gay rodeo events in Phoenix and Denver, which can attract between 4,000 and 5,000 people, the scene is small. For Tommy Channel, however, it’s less about how many people are there than who is there. Like Beck and other longtime riders, he’s reassured to see younger contestants in the ring.
Channel, who’s 69, grew up in Cushing, Texas, a roughly three-hour drive from Dallas, not far from the Louisiana border. After college, he moved to Houston, where he came out and learned of the gay rodeo: “I went, Huh? What? What the hell is that?” At his first event, Channel saw cowboys holding hands and cowgirls embracing. “Oh my God, I am finally home,” he says. Within a few years, Channel, who now lives in Denver, started participating in speed events—barrel, poles, and flags—and he serves as IGRA’s executive director. “I found this group and just fell in love,” he says. “Fell in love with the group as well as with a guy.”
I talk to 34-year-old Colton Moore-Edwards and 29-year-old Clay Moore-Edwards from Oklahoma. They started competing a few years ago. Though they participate in other rodeos, the gay circuit stands out. “You feel safe,” Colton says. “And there’s people, too, that can come out and rodeo if they feel like they’re safe in the community, too.”
While there have been few gay rodeo protests in the past decade, a couple of weeks after I leave Texas, the Southern Baptist Convention will convene in Dallas, 40 miles south of Denton, and call for the end of same-sex marriage. Thirteen states, including Texas, are considering laws to roll back the legalization of gay marriage.
Outside the ring, I meet Jake Stewart as we watch the setting sun cast long shadows on the dirt around the fairgrounds. Stewart has been a contestant for the past year, though his partner has been riding for longer. He shows me a photo of himself in drag at the Mr. and Miss Silver Spurs pageant, a benefit for the Texas rodeo chapter. “It’s never too late to be yourself,” he tells me. Suddenly, everyone is moving back toward the arena. We hear a voice boom over the loudspeaker: “We are their rodeo family and always will be. Without that love, today would be far less joyous.” Stewart and I join the shuffling crowd.
We get a spot along the fence and look over. Two contestants, Jason Todd Wilkerson and Eric Nichols, are seated on horses, side by side, in front of the entry. They wear matching blue shirts, silver vests, and flowers pinned to their chests. They are about to be wed. The crowd grows quiet in anticipation.
The voice coming through the loudspeaker continues: “We are here also to make sure—and I hold you all accountable—to make sure that if they ever need anyone, anybody to talk to, to just hold their hand or give a hug, we’re there for you and always will be.”
In the center of the ring, surrounded by their rodeo family, Wilkerson and Nichols proceed to exchange vows.•
Daniel Rothberg is a writer based in Davis, California. His nonfiction work looks at how people relate to place and the environment, particularly in the American West. He lived in Reno for six years, where he worked as a journalist.
