Life & Wisdom Quote by Larry McMurtry

Americans don't want cowboys to be gay is McMurtry at his most scalpel-clean: a plainspoken diagnosis of how national myths police desire. He isn't making a claim about cowboys; he's indicting an audience. The line frames "American" taste as a kind of cultural border control, guarding the cowboy not as a historical worker but as an icon engineered to carry straightness the way it carries a saddle.

The subtext is about ownership. The cowboy, in U.S. storytelling, functions like a portable definition of masculinity: solitary, stoic, physically competent, morally legible at a distance. Make him gay and the whole machine starts throwing sparks, because it exposes how much of the cowboy's appeal depends on a narrow script of manhood. McMurtry, who spent a career writing the West as lived experience rather than theme-park pageantry, knows that the "real" frontier was messy, social, and full of contradictions. The myth is what needs protecting, not the facts.

Context matters: McMurtry's work consistently wrestles with the commercialization of the West and the public's appetite for clean symbols over complicated people. Read against Brokeback Mountain, the line lands as both lament and provocation. It's not merely predicting backlash; it's explaining why the backlash arrives so quickly. If the cowboy can be gay and still be a cowboy, then straightness was never essential. It was just branding.