Cowboy classic ‘Red River’s’ gay subtext runs even deeper than that homoerotic pistol-comparing scene
Welcome back to our queer film retrospective, “A Gay Old Time.” In this week’s column, with cowboy romance A Strange Way Of Life now streaming on Netflix, we’re revisiting 1948’s queer-coded Western classic, Red River.Westerns have always had a complicated relationship with queerness.
It’s a genre that for centuries has embodied, and often outwardly expressed, a very traditional worldview around masculinity, gender roles, and the binary of good versus evil.
And even though that may sound diametrically opposed to the broader queer film canon, the two have long been in conversation.
Westerns are movies about men being men, surrounded only by other men, trying to best one another, and expressing their affection for each other in unclear and suppressed manners.
