Happy Pride Month!

We celebrate to remember life is worth living, even when the haters try to bring us down.

It’s the start of Pride, and if there’s one thing the LGBTQ community knows how to do, it’s find the joy in the every day, even when the world wants you gone. I have some special posts queued up for the month of June (including a super secret project I’ve been working on), but I want to share an author’s note I wrote for my second novel, Bitter Springs.

While sex is not the important part of identifying as LGBTQ, it is a healthy part of any adult relationship. Being allowed to be yourself, to love whom you love… that’s the important part. And… you might be surprised, if you keep reading.

Happy Pride!

Photo by Danny Burke on Unsplash

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A year before I wrote [Bitter Springs], I took a road trip through the American Southwest, which is a second home to me. Even though I’ve lived there for years, there were a few places I hadn’t seen, so I made a point of stopping off in Tombstone, Arizona. And while, yes, it’s touristy and all of that, there’s a cemetery called Boothill Graveyard that’s fascinating. There’s the ornate (for the spot) final resting place of Quong Kee, who ran the Can Can and was listed as a “Friend to All,” and scores of others.

But in Row 4, there’s one grave—one single grave, mind you—that stuck with me.

Two men are buried in that one spot, Bobby Jackson and Frank Hart. There are plenty of graves here, plenty of men who died at the same time either by hanging or shootout, husbands and wives struck down with dysentery (1882 was a rough year in particular), and mothers and their children. Everyone has their own gravesite. What was it about these two “best friends” that led them to being buried together?

I fell into a wonderful research spiral of the West, aided by the meticulously organized research branch of LA’s Autry Museum as well as intensely researched books such as Gay Cowboys and Love Stories: Sex Between Men Before Homosexuality and many, many more. My mother’s people—both white and Choctaw—are from Texas, my father’s from Utah and Wyoming, so I know cowboys. I know the mythos: the ultimate image of masculinity they represent. At least I thought I did. Turns out that the straight, white cowboy whom Hollywood loves was pretty uncommon. About forty percent of cowboys were black, first of all.

And straight? Sure. Sometimes. Sometimes not.

We in our modern way of thinking often fall victim to the idea that we’re more advanced than our predecessors, that only now are LGBTQ citizens being welcomed with open arms, that we modern folks are the ones who are finally realizing how gender and sexuality don’t always line up in a rigid black and white definition, that all of this is new, particularly in post-twentieth century North America. That’s not accurate. (And anyone who thinks queer lives were never accepted until now never looked in a history book, quite frankly. We’re here, we’re queer, we’ve been here and queer for many a year, m’dear.)

And if you think about it, what on earth were all those fellas getting up to for months, if not years, at a time without ladies around to “satisfy urges” out there on the prairie, or while building railroads or mining for gold? Why, they were satisfying themselves with each other, and no one looked sideways at them. Oh, sure, you weren’t supposed to be blatant about it, but in the nineteenth century, no one was, straight or otherwise. They invented table skirts to hide the legs, for crying out loud.

I read a letter—and boy, I sure love museum curators who make research material available online—from a Civil War soldier who was writing home to his sweetheart about a dance the soldiers held to “keep up morale.”

In this letter he detailed how “boys” and “girls” were chosen out of the all-male group, and how his captain fell in love with his “girl,” and all the soldiers knew what they were getting up to in their private quarters. (Hint: sex.) This was 1864 in a letter to a proper young lady. To pretend that homosexuality (or bisexuality or transgender folks) didn’t exist or simply were incredibly rare cases diminishes those relationships that thrived. Where on earth do you think the term “Boston Wife” came from? Or “Oxford Rub”? Bunkhouses were often called “ram pastures,” and the term for two fellas owning up to wanting to get off with each other for a while—typically in a romantic relationship—was called “mutual solace”.

The commonality of those terms should underscore the fact that there were families who knew about their “confirmed bachelor” and his “best pal,” or their “old maid” and her “roommate.” There are wonderful photos and love letters of these couples, proof that they were able to have loving relationships, that their families knew about them, and as long as everyone—even the straight folks—kept any salaciousness under their hats, they could keep on keeping on.

Over half of all North American Native peoples believe in more than two genders, in “two-spirits,” as the term is commonly referred to today. And in some tribes, there were four and five. We’Wha, a Zuni ambassador to the US Government in the nineteenth century, was one such person and was welcomed as a man or as a woman, to use the (incorrect) Western binary terms of the time, when visiting Washington DC. In the 1800s! Welcomed by Congress!

These people existed, and more importantly, they were welcomed in certain societies. It’s important to honor them and it’s important to honor the people in their lives who supported them. Was it everywhere? No, of course not. There are always those controlling types, no matter where you go, right?

But they were there.

One thing that has always been important to me in writing LGBTQ stories is to honor the fact that there are families who love and accept one another, even if they can’t understand everything about their family members. They still love each other. We families exist. It’s important that people who may be questioning their sexuality or identity—questioning whether or not to come out, perhaps feeling trapped by the fear that their families might turn their backs on them—know that there are families who will love and embrace them.

There always have been these families and there always will be. It’s not always a sad story, and to honor me, my children, their partners and their loving relatives, I will always write those stories. They’re important, they’ve always been possible and they always will be.

(And if you’re in need, then you’re welcomed into my ever-expanding rainbow family.) <3

—Laura

(And don’t worry. I have pictures of Boothill and more to say later this week. It’s an amazing bit of history!)