Queens and Cowboys: A Straight Year on the Gay Rodeo

Every so often, you see a movie with a perfect title. Some perfect titles are perfect because they give away nothing about the movie, leaving its pleasures open to discovery. (Some examples? "Bottle Rocket," "The Stranger," "Magnolia.") Other times, titles are perfect because they tell you everything you need to know about the movie you're going to watch in a single moment. There's a movie traveling around the festival system right now with that particular type of perfect title. It's called "Queens and Cowboys: A Straight Year on the Gay Rodeo."

Let's deal with the "straight" part first. The documentary film tracks the journey of the heterosexual (and deeply bourgeois) filmmaker Matt Livadary. He went down South on an impassioned whim to follow his dream of playing (or being) a cowboy, only to find that he didn't fit in that well, what with his khaki shorts and suburban attitudes. He did find open-minded personalities with cowboy hats elsewhere, though: At the International Gay Rodeo Association, which has been running events featuring performers of various orientations and identities for almost 30 years now.

"In the regular rodeo, they have rodeo queens," one representative of the gay rodeo tells Livadary, tongue firmly in cheek. "We just took it a step further." Livadary's skill lies in his ability to dive deep into the aesthetic presentation of these events (we'll get to that in a minute,), but he also talks to some of the self-proclaimed cowboys, queens, and cowboy queens. His subjects run the gamut, identification wise: From the beefed-up macho Wade Earp (indeed a descendant of Wyatt) to cowgirl Ty Teigen. The film's quality is that these interviews and studies never feel entirely biographical: Livadary is trying to present a texture, a tapestry; more than he's trying to present a handful of life stories. He's after a sort of flavor.

As such, at the end of the film it's not the characters (not even Earp), who catch our eye, nor is it the filmmaking. (Livadary has an eye for pleasing compositions, but he's not doing anything of note with his camera, either.) It's this milieu, so lived-in and established, yet so new to our eyes. There's an almost vaudevillian aspect to the rodeos: Dance troupes parade around in matching uniforms; attendees take part in carnival games; the atmosphere of candy-colored western festival coloring it all. It all starts to feel like a country-western-set MGM musical. Who wouldn't want to spend some time there?