Windy city rodeo 2007 - gay rodeo

Rodeo is one of our most American sports, with roots as deep as baseball’s. As an action-packed extreme sport, rodeo lends itself easily to TV and is now routinely covered on ESPN. The sport reached exhibition status at the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake Municipality and even had its own TV reality show—Cowboy U–which aired for four years on State Music Television.

The production Brokeback Mountain, based on the fleeting story by Annie Proulx, became an overnight cultural icon—and the film also kicked up a political dust storm. After all, right-wingers view the cowpoke as a core symbol who embodies the purest in heterosexual family principles. One Christian blogger screamed, “Now they’re out to wreck the American legend of the cowboy. God help us, and John Wayne forgive us!” In Congress, Senators from sagebrush states pushed a resolution to declare the fourth Saturday of each July the “National Day of the American Cowboy.”

Meanwhile, some contestants on the rodeo scene assured the media that, in all their years around the arenas, they’d never met a real-life Jack Twist.

I had to smile at all this denial. I grew up on a historic Montana cattle ranch that was steeped in cowboy trad