"You know the tune so the words don't matter": Queer Country and Masculine Pageantry

Richard Dyer famously described John Wayne as an example of "straight camp." But the hypermasculine persona of the cowboy is and has been ripe for the queering. Very recent depictions of the queer cowboy build on the spectacular masculinity of singing cowboys like Gene Autry and employ visual and aural genre hybridity to telegraph meaning through popular culture references that push beyond the borders of country music. This video essay offers close readings of three music videos released in 2020—Orville Peck's "Queen of the Rodeo," Trixie Mattel's "Video Games," and Lil Nas X's "Rodeo"—that present queer masculinity as deeply wedded to cowboy performance.

The queerness and the country-ness of these music videos similarly depend on the interplay of both aural and visual elements. Orville Peck's indie pop-inflected "Queen of the Rodeo" puts minor queer celebrities in a rodeo setting to foreground the artifice of the cowboy's gender performance (here juxtaposed with that of beauty queens). Drag queen and country singer-songwriter Trixie Mattel reverses Peck's strategy by recasting Lana Del Rey's "Video Games" as a queer country love ballad inside a video game diegesis. In contrast to the other artists' white/white-passing performances, Lil Nas X inscribes black queer cowboy identity in "Rodeo" by layering science fiction and horror visual references over a hip hop country track. Together, these three music videos present 2020 queer cowboy performance as grounded in the masculine pageantry of the cowboy and mediated through popular culture sound and image.

Lisa Pollock Mumme studies gender and sexuality in film and popular music. She earned her masters degree from the University of Iowa in 2019 and is now in her second year of PhD work at Washington University in St. Louis. Lisa has published her work on Mexican soprano Ángela Peralta (1845-1883) in The Opera Journal and has presented at the National Opera Association Annual Conference, the American Musicological Society Midwest chapter meeting, and graduate conferences.