Calamity Jane and Billy the Kid are two of the best-known ( and least-known ) icons of the Western frontier. Calamity, who was either a drunken whore or the "Angel of Deadwood," was every dyke's dream. Even Doris Day decked out in wimpy buckskins in 1953 singing "Once I had a Secret Love" couldn't destroy the image. More recently she cussed her way onto cable screens and back into lesbian hearts.
Billy the Kid had more legend than charisma if the only existing photo of him is accurate. He was either a wronged youth or an homicidal maniac. But spurred on by "Dime Novels" in the days of the waning West, he caught the public's fancy and endeared himself to adolescent outsiders forever. The young outlaw ( who may have been William Bonney or Henry McCarty ) , was born before the Civil War, killed his first man as a teenager, and either was dead at 21—shot by Sheriff Pat Garrett in 1881 ( maybe 1882 ) —or, as in some fiction, rode off into an anonymous future in Mexico.
Invitation to the dance
Chicago newspaperman Walter Noble Burns solidified the myths in his 1926 book, "The Saga of Billy the Kid." Now here's where the queers come in. Novelist Glenway Wescott and his lover publisher Monroe Wheeler met at the University of Chicago. Among their incestuous circle of friends was photographer George Platt Lynes, and Lincoln Kirstein founder—with George Balanchine—of the School of the American Ballet. Kirstein thought Burns' Billy the Kid would be a perfect subject for a butch ballet for male dancers in his newly formed offshoot the Ballet Caravan, created to showcase a more robust American style than the Russian-influenced classics. ( After all, a shortage of male dancers for their non-athletic parts had led to women dancing "trouser roles" in the parent company. ) Kirstein wrote the libretto drawing from Burns' book; gay composer Aaron Copeland was commissioned to do the score with choreography by Eugene Loring ( who would also dance the lead with Richard Reed as Sheriff Garrett ) and publicity photography fell to Lynes. The ballet premiered at Chicago's Civic Opera House Oct. 16, 1938, and has been a repertory staple ever since.
Copeland, who had incorporated cowboy folk songs into his score, also arranged it into a popular concert suite that was recorded by Leonard Bernstein with the New York Philharmonic. Loring would go on to choreograph a number of Hollywood films, notably Fred Astaire vehicles Silk Stockings with Cyd Charisse and Funny Face with Audrey Hepburn. Lynes created a gay esthetic with his photography, amassed hundreds of sex partners—including sometime Chicagoan Sam Steward ( check him out at the Leather Museum ) —and was dead at 48. Kirstein the impresario would go on to receive the distinguished service award from the National Institute of Arts and Letters and the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom for his contribution to the arts in America. The original Kirstein/Balanchine company would become the world renowned New York City Ballet. Monroe Wheeler would be a guiding force for the Museum of Modern Art and a renowned cocksman into his 80s.
Onscreen: Small and large
Dozens of film versions of the Billy the Kid myth have been offered to moviegoers and TV viewers; from the Three Stooges to "One-Eyed Jacks" with Marlon Brando, they were all more fiction than fact. The only one that came close to censorship, however, had more flak raised by Jane Russell's cleavage than its homosexual subtext. In "The Outlaw" Howard Hughes starred his look-a-like Jack Beutel as Billy, and Russell as Rio. a fictional romantic interest ( if you find rape romantic ) . The film opened to a limited engagement without a production code rating in 1943 and, after a censorship battle with the Hays Office, went into general release in 1946. Alternative Reel lists it as one of the Top Ten Banned Films of the 20th century. Walter Huston starred as Doc Holliday ( no evidence that Billy and Doc were even acquainted ) , posited as the older man Billy admires in a homoerotic subtext that also gave the censors the willies.
Billy actually did have a male mentor that several sources refer to as his "surrogate father." John Tunstall, an Englishman, like so many younger sons, came to America to seek his fortune. He followed the money to the burgeoning opportunities in New Mexico and Arizona. Coming from a mercantile family he opened a business, allied himself with the cattle baron John Chisum and set himself up in direct competition to J. J. Dolan and Company. Billy, the "surrogate" son was with him when the Dolan's shot and killed Tunstall, sparking the infamous Lincoln County Wars. Interesting to consider the possibilities of a wayward, orphan boy coming under the sway of the handsome man shown in his cabinet card photo: good-looking, self-assured, well tailored, in a pensive pose—hardly a frontier type. Vengeance for Tunstall casts Billy in with a vigilante group, murders and a death sentence.
Yes, the "Chisum" cited above would be played in an even more outlandish fictional version ( 1970 ) by John Wayne in the title role with Geoffrey Deuel as Billy. Other notable efforts included the Arthur Penn film originally intended as a vehicle for James Dean ( another brother ) ; "Left-Handed Gun" ( 1957 ) went to Paul Newman upon Dean's premature death. In "The Last Movie" Dennis Hopper's 1971 film-within-a-film, Dean Stockwell plays Billy.
Enter Gore Vidal
Gore Vidal is a many-faceted man of the arts, however, known perhaps mainly to the young as a relative of a recently separated, former vice-president and environmentalist. In my generation he was the articulate young man who loved America, was keen on politics, saw homosexuality as a personal choice and wrote frankly about all three. He only shuddered briefly at an embalmed Mae West's appearance in the film version of his "Myra Breckenridge."
But in the 1950s, the nascent small screen was eating up teleplays faster than they could be written. Vidal wrote over two-dozen scripts and adaptations for TV between 1954-56 including the 1955 play "Billy the Kid" replete with psychosexual undertones. In 1989 he reworked his material into "Gore Vidal's Billy the Kid" for Turner's cable network; his take: Billy was less a homicidal moron than a misunderstood kid. The blurb for the premier read: "Pursued by his enemies, betrayed by his friends, ruled by his passions." In an Hitchcockian vein, Vidal had a bit part in the production as a preacher.
Vidal as a writer is well known for his friendships with many creative gays, including Tennessee Williams whose "Suddenly Last Summer" he adapted for film. He was also well-known as a master of subtext. As screenwriter on "Ben-Hur" ( adapted from the novel by Civil War General Lew Wallace, who as Territorial Governor of New Mexico reneged on a promise to pardon Billy the Kid ) he added the sub rosa motivation for the antipathy between Ben-Hur and Messala. In a piece for the New York Review of Books in 1976 Vidal wrote that the boys had been lovers, and that Messala wanted to rekindle the affair, but "Ben-Hur rejects him. Messala is furious, Chagrin d'amour the classic motivation for murder." Director William Wyler accepted the premise but advised not to tell the star Charlton Heston ( "or he'll fall apart." ) . Vidal said ( as retold by Vito Russo in The Celluloid Closet ) that Steven Boyd as Messala knew and "every time he looked at Ben-Hur it was like a starving man getting a glimpse of dinner through a pane of glass."
Vidal said it would all make sense to those "tuned in" and in a world of macho and myth where same sex love didn't exist, I tuned in to a subtext of Billy the Kid riding to homicidal vengeance for the loss of his mentor/love. In the homo-single sex-world of cowboys, miners, sailors, prisoners in the real frontier West, where men were men ( and many women like Calamity were, too ) is my take on Billy so far-fetched?
Copyright 2010 by Marie J. Kuda
