Lonesome Cowboys

...but I rate it as such because I saw this movie as it should be seen, in a suburban "art house" cinema in the Sacramento suburbs in 1969. An interesting audience; some older men wearing overcoats and a few "sophisticated" couples from the local colleges. And me. I was not exactly sophisticated myself at the time (being only 19), but I laughed out loud a lot, while the rest of the spare audience stared at their shoes. I enjoyed the audience even more than I enjoyed the movie. And I enjoyed the movie a lot.

P.S. Taylor Mead should be made a saint. I would like to see him made a saint not only because he deserves it but also because he might then cancel the insane 10 line rule here. There are movies that don't require 10 lines of commentary, this being one of them.

This movie is great. Joe Dallesandro is young and full-on hot and sexy. The dialogue is pure camp. The performances are funny, goofy, and stupid. Totally crazy bordering on dumb scenes. Similar in style and feel to a pre-Pink Flamingo John Waters low budget film. At times you'll wonder how in the hell they ever got it made, or why they bothered to spend time on the project. Ultimately, you appreciate the time piece that it represents. These artists and the works they produced were the "burning bush" to that era's counter-culture Moses. Irreverent and living out of bounds.

Leather chaps, stetsons and tassled jackets never did it for me, so I have always been avoiding western bars, western movies and western clothes. Too alien, too rural, too American. Every time I have been to America - only twice for more than one night's stay - it has been a disappointing and depressing experience: I've encountered far more snobbery and contempt for the way I looked, dressed or talked in the USA than at any time in so-called class-ridden, uptight and elitist Britain. And this was not in some forsaken prairie in Wyoming, but in "urbane bohemian" lower Manhattan and "the centre of the gay universe", the Castro. Wearing cameo gear and sporting a shaved head was not de rigueur there during the late 1980s - too subcultural, too fetishistic, whatever, it fitted in badly in those rigid beige compartments: the clone look, the western look, the preppy look. Unlike nowadays of course, when even women are starting to complain their men look gay: a Marine haircut, square-jawed and blockheaded. But despite all this invasion of gay looks, styles and sense (more queer eye - the Ivorean, Tongan or Uzbek editions, anyone?) into the cultural mainstream, radical gender or sex politics, as in wrestling with icons and meaning, is out, and "culture wars" and marriage aspirations are in.

Liberating male iconography from its perceived sexual orientation - as in all cowboys, soldiers, oil men and sports stars are straight and you mess with that at your own risk - has been Mark Simpson's major theme in his columns, books and commentary. So when he reviewed the latest Hollywood attempt to convince middle America there is a love that dares not speak its name on the prairie, I had to sit up and take notice. I don't think I will rush to my local cinema to watch Brokeback Mountain any time soon.

I think I will stick with that absolutely wonderfully funny Andy Warhol movie Lonesome Cowboys instead: after watching that one in my youth I have to admit I tried a tassled jacket on for size.

An outrageously funny spoof on the Western film, Lonesome Cowboys is a synthesis of Warhol's sorties into the New York underworld, but much more humorous and with closer adherence to a nonsensical plot. The film was photographed in Arizona, in a ghost town where (somehow) two of Warhol's superstars are discovered. The incongruous montebanks happen to be Viva, as chic and sarcastic as she was in Bike Boy and resembling a displaced model for Hound and Horn, and Taylor Mead. Mr. Mead is the zany of our time, and when five mysterious cowhands saunter into town, the hilarity commences. The cowboys are an odd assortment, a bit androgynous and city-wise, and they interact with the two in varying attitudes of lust and indifference in set-pieces of inspired film comedy. Often, Lonesome Cowboys reaches the ultimate in surrealist imagery: cowboy-deputy Mead performing the Lupe Velez Twist, his own choreographic distortion; or one of the cowboys performing ballet exercises at the hitching post. Viva's langorous seduction of the most innocent-looking among the cowboys is actually a satirical comment on sexual artifice. This erotic, sagebrush comedy has its cruel edge, and one feels that Andy Warhol attempts to make some statement about the nature of brotherly love and the impossibility of virtue rewarded in these times of fallen idols. Select just about any Warhol film from the mid-sixties and you'll find a scandal tucked away. Lonesome Cowboys's most notable run-in with the law was in Atlanta where it was seized after replacing Gone with the Wind in a mall theater. Lonesome Cowboys is filled with wildly comic setpieces, including a cowboy practising ballet moves at the hitching post and a peevish lecture on the misuse of mascara. These desperadoes are real trailblazers when it comes to libidinous appetites and it is here that Lonesome Cowboys distinguishes itself from the herd. Unflinchingly, Warhol shoots down the myth of the de-sexed cowhand.

I thought it was pretty funny, a little dirty, but funny. Taylor Mead's so giddy and girlish, he really makes the movie worth watching. Joe Dallesandro has a small role, but does a hilarious dance scene with Mead! The songs are good too! Who knew Eric Emerson could sing?