Slapping Leather

"Through a range of sources, including myriad personal stories, Ford and Scofield chart an alternately triumphal and agonizing history of the gay rodeo from its rise in the 1970s, to its peak of popularity in the 1990s, to its slow decline in the new millennium. Along the way they consider the effects of the AIDS epidemic, culture wars, shifting gender norms and questions of inclusion, generational change, and the enduring myths of the Old West. This long-overdue study solidifies the authors' reputations as the leading historians of the American rodeo scene's marginalized members."—Peter Boag, author of Pioneering Death: The Violence of Boyhood in Turn-of-the-Century Oregon

"In Slapping Leather, Elyssa Ford and Rebecca Scofield, established scholars of rodeo on the margins of mainstream culture, have produced a fine history of gay rodeo in the U.S. and Canada. Gay rodeo is a vexed subject for folks who care about exclusion in queer communities. Gay rodeoers embrace, even as they queer, a white masculinity embodied in a myopic memory of old-time cowboys, a memory that elides histories of dispossession, racial violence, and gender hierarchy in the North American West, not to mention the real variety of humans who've worked livestock there. Ford and Scofield understand all this, and they do a terrific job explaining it."—Susan Lee Johnson, Harry Reid Endowed Chair for the History of the Intermountain West, UNLV

"For almost fifty years, gay rodeo has advanced the cause of a more inclusive rodeo, reimagining the West as a place of even wider horizons. Weaving personal testimonies of participants with closely-researched history in clear and often witty prose, Slapping Leather shows how transformative and empowering this process has been, and at the same time, how many of its limitations remain."—Louis Warren, author of Buffalo Bill's America: William Cody and the Wild West Show