Continuing our growing line-up of LGBTQ+ country music superstars, Justin Green earns his first crowning as Dazzler of the Day thanks to some incredible songs like ‘Coyote’ and ‘Reno’ and ‘Front Page News.’ His style of country music is rooted in the tradition of storytelling that strikes the most emotional and powerful chord of the many genres his music encompasses. A self-taught musician, Green’s authenticity is what sets him apart from other artists, compellingly driving some of his greatest work. Check out his website here for merchandise, performance dates, and booking information.
The guy almost dropped his brand new cup of iced coffee as his mother (I’m assuming it was his mother, based on age and interaction) watched with a weary/wary eye. He wasn’t a young kid – he was in his twenties at least – and after he caught it he turned to his mother, or whomever the older woman with him was, and remarked, “That was close!”
And the awful, judgmental, nit-picky and easily-annoyed part of me (a very large part of me, let’s be frank – larger than I’d like and yes I’m working on it) thought that this is the sort of banal moronic talk that always makes me question whether some people just want to fill silence, no matter how stupid and pointless the words are.
“That was close!”
Are you kidding me? Like, why? Why bother even saying such a ridiculous thing?
Before you come for me and attack me for not being open-minded to whatever challenges or circumstances he might have, he was talking in a very adult and intelligent way before and after the whole ‘That was close!’ comment – and really, it’s probably just one of those things that people simply say without even realizing they’re saying it. Like ‘Whoopsie Daisy!’
A Southern Spectacle in just about every way, singer-songwriter Adam Mac completes The Cowgays triumvirate (see also Brooke Eden and Chris Housman) and deservedly is crowned Dazzler of the Day thanks to a musical prowess and a powerful queer voice that is beautifully pushing the boundaries of what some of us think of as country music. That challenge is apparent both in who is singing the songs and how his brand of country-funk-pop defies the categorization too many want to place on our musical artists. Check out his website here for further evidence of his sparkle and spectacle.
This will very likely be the final clematis flower of the season – it caught my eye as I returned home on a Sunday morning. Andy was mowing the lawn, and I saw this piece of purple, royally resplendent in the sunlight so I pulled the car into the garage and quickly grabbed this shot. It was the only one I got, as a friendly neighbor stopped to chat just at that moment. We had a nice talk, then I headed inside and forgot to get another pic. Happily, this one is enough – one last gasp of the prettiness that happens when the sun conspires to grant us a little more warmth. We’ll take it for as long as she gives it.
This post should have a meatier bit of prose to it, but I can’t provide that at the moment. Work and other obligations have me behind the eight ball, and I do not do well when I find myself behind an eight ball. Bear with me – this cowboy is spent, but he only needs a little recharge. He’ll be riding back, and riding high, in just a bit…
Born in Japan and raised in Oklahoma, singer-songwriter Zach Bryan has released several country music albums and EPs, including his most recent #1 smash ‘With Heaven On Top’, which he is currently performing on tour. For his voice, his music, and his courage to never stand down, Bryan easily earns this Dazzler of the Day crowning. Check out his website here for upcoming tour dates, music and merchandise.
Our cowboy fall gallops full-speed and forward into October. Whatever happened to September is anyone’s guess, but a brief bit of its back-end glory may be found in our weekly blog recap, so read and click on…
The dusty porch of Levi’s Feed Store wound around the front and sides of the rickety wooden structure that formed the nexus of all transactions in the little town where I grew up. Named after my great grandfather Levi, on my mother’s side, who opened the store back when there wasn’t even a main road, it was more of a general store now, providing supplies for all the neighbors, not only the farmers and ranchers. Much more than that, and in all its iterations, it was the central location where people gathered to talk and gossip about the town news, which in those days rarely amounted to more than weather warnings and health issues for the regulars. Occasionally a transiting cowboy would ruffle some feathers and they’d have that to occupy their interest – cowboys being the most exciting thing about our town – but for the most part it was just a place to pass a few minutes of each day socializing. Small towns accustomed to solitude sometimes forget how much humans enjoy interacting with one another until they have a place to gather. My great grandfather Levi, the man after whom I was named and christened, a man who was dead long before I was born, never intended it to be such a space – a joke that my mother loved to tell people who were barely interested.
It was strange to see my name emblazoned in faded paint above the front door of the store once I learned how to read. No one else had such notoriety, and while everyone knew I wasn’t the Levi to which it referred, there it was – the same spelling, the same sound, the same family. To avoid any lingering or future confusion, my parents would call me ‘Leve’ – trading the last ‘I’ for an ‘E’, and pronouncing it like the word ‘leave’. Over the years it would come to be a wish, a command, and a promise, while in my mind it sometimes sounded like no one wanted me around. Leve. Just Leve.
Parents rarely mean to fuck up their children like that, and even more rarely manage to escape it.
It was on this dusty porch where I sat in a rickety old rocking chair on one of the first warm days of spring when I saw The Cowboy for the first time. I didn’t see him approach – he simply was there, walked by, and then was gone. Did he nod or smile? I couldn’t tell you; I honestly don’t remember. Locals would later expand their tales and claim that he walked into town with a swagger, a certain spring in his step that set some immediately at ease and others instantly on guard. He never would be able to reconcile the two; we never gave him that chance.
There was dust in his beard and hat, the way dust was everywhere that summer, and every summer. That’s what I thought I would remember about this spring and summer – the heat and the dust – the way they followed everyone everywhere, the way they got into the ground, into the air, into all the crevices and spaces might think could be spared – and the way they held there, stubbornly lodging and adamantly refusing to go. What I would remember instead was the middle-aged man who changed my life, striding into town for those all-too-brief seasons, and whose absence would never be filled for as long as we both lived. I remember the way his jaw moved with the steadied practice of a long-time tobacco chewer. That scent of menthol still prickles my skin, the strange phenomenon of smell triggering a physical response like no other I’ve experienced since. It makes me tear up as much as it raises my cock, and I’m powerless against both. Lately, it’s actively brought bile into my mouth – strange and awful the way memories morph over the years, turning the stomach and churning the mind until you forget what joy you ever felt in someone, or what thrill they ever brought into your existence.
He didn’t have a name – none that he revealed. The town came to know him as the Beasley Boy – the Beasleys were the childless couple who rented him a small room kitty-corner to their old unused outhouse – even if the lines of his face told all of us how far he was from boyhood. (I would come to discover he was ancient for what he was – all of forty – precisely twice my twenty years on earth, making me precisely half of him.) To me, he would always and only be The Cowboy.
On that first day he walked into town, he turned to survey the porch but I honestly can’t remember what he did first. A nod? A smile? I didn’t think to remember, but I was instantly transfixed on his countenance, and the strange feeling it gave rise to somewhere in my body. He had the look of certainty to him, like he knew exactly who he was and nothing would sway him otherwise. I aspired to have a small amount of such surety, but even all these years later I’m not sure of anything.
He couldn’t know it then, not consciously, but a few weeks after this he would tell me his senses were on alert as he walked by me on that first day, the way a dog pricks up its ears when the trouble or danger isn’t fully known, only felt. He would say his heart stirred a little but attributed it to the beans from breakfast, and then he laughed it off, and I’d never know what was real and what wasn’t.
Once he passed the porch my head turned to follow his; he turned around and gave a me a slightly grim smile. Too grim to make me smile back, so I looked down instead. When I lifted my eyes to find him again, he was no longer looking.
The ocotillo patch down the road from the store was barren of all but its spikes. Soon the leaves would appear for their brief season, and the scent of creosote would rise from the earth, perfuming the air like some enchanting fog. For now, there was still just dust, lifting from the porch as The Cowboy walked into the distance, into the sun.
Never in the bulk of my half-century of life did I envision embracing any sort of cowboy or Country-Western motif – be it style, music, decor or anything. For so long it just didn’t catch my fancy, aside from the occasional ‘Don’t Tell Me’ moment or a Beyonce foray into a funky little ‘Texas Hold Em’ song. Even Tom Ford’s Texas background and proclivity for cowboy boots wasn’t enough to persuade my feet into similar attire. Time, however, works its mysterious ways with us, and as a wise woman once noted, that which you resist is that which you eventually become. Up until now I’d never quite squared how that worked, but after years of avoiding and not being interested in or enamored of the country cowboy atmosphere, I’m fully immersed and loving every minute of it.
Granted, this is largely still a pose, but most of my lasting transformations began with just a pose, so I’m not sure this one won’t last. And it’s a refreshing switch-up from the razzle dazzle extra-excess in which I typically dwell.
In some ways, I’ve always been a cowboy at heart – or a disguised cowboy as my nephew would more accurately put it. There’s a rebelliousness and defiance of mainstream societal limits and boundaries that aligns with similar vibes in a cowboy’s life. The older I get, the more compliant I get in some ways (out of sheer laziness and apathy), but in others I seem to be growing more defiant and stubborn, embracing all that goes against the traditional grain of society, questioning our silly social rules and regulations. One must keep oneself entertained, and the mind sharp, even if cowboys don’t often live anywhere near forever.
In these parts, a gay cowboy is really just a cowboy. Cowboys have historically never much taken to identifying themselves as gay or straight or anything other than a cowboy. It’s a modern-day defiance of labels that runs back to a time long before being gay was commonly named. Here, we celebrate gayness and queerdom and all the diversity of the world, especially when it comes to cowboy living – because at his heart, a cowboy is all about living to let live.
To that end, this celebratory post features a favorite song by The Cowgays (see also Chris Housman in his Dazzler of the Day crowning here). It’s a hand-clapping exercise in self-acceptance and self-love for all us gay kids who grow up wondering if we were worthy of it.
Wish I wasn’t gay, wish I wasn’t gay I don’t wish I wasn’t gay no more Clap your hands for Jesus, hallelujah, praise the Lord I don’t wish I wasn’t gay no more
Used to lay in bed at night and cry myself to sleep Tossing and a-turning, wondering why Thought that damned old devil had a hold on me ‘Til the day I finally saw the light
When I think back to how absolutely lost I felt as a gay kid, with no internet, no gay visibility, and no idea that everything I was feeling wasn’t wrong or twisted or sinful, I marvel at how relatively well-adjusted I turned out in spite of that (while simultaneously marveling at how genuinely fucked-up I was in terms of how ill-equipped and unloved I felt when I dared to step into my queerness). Things cut every which way back then, and there are still repercussions to having grown up like that.
Wish I wasn’t gay, wish I wasn’t gay I don’t wish I wasn’t gay no more Clap your hands for Jesus, I done shut that closet door And I don’t wish I wasn’t gay no more
Without guides or support or the basic recognizance of seeing myself in just about anyone else, I made my way mostly alone, and at the worst time of one’s life to be alone. Those formative years, while difficult tin many ways, served to fortify and build a strength in me that most of my friends didn’t need to have at such an age, and that some lucky people don’t really need at any age. I’m grateful for having built myself up then, and glad, in retrospect, to have done it all by myself, because it taught me I could survive just about anything, even when left entirely to my own devices. That’s a striking sense of independence that I wouldn’t trade for any years of youthful ease; it prepared me better than most to deal with an awful and often unfair and unjust world. Gay people of a certain age are simply built stronger, because we had to be. It was that or die, sometimes quite literally, and I had my fair share of close calls. It’s hard to feel like you belong somewhere when you never felt you belonged anywhere, and if you don’t feel like you belong at at early age you do wonder at what value you have on this earth.
Preacher used to tell me I was headed straight to Hell For something that I tried but couldn’t change Had to walk through fire ’til I found myself Holy revelation, I’ve been saved
Wish I wasn’t gay, wish I wasn’t gay I don’t wish I wasn’t gay no more Clap your hands for Jesus, hallelujah, I’m reborn I don’t wish I wasn’t gay no more
Strangely enough, and it came from somewhere deep within me, some vain sliver of a belief in myself, I never once wished I wasn’t gay. It would have been easier in those days, it would have made things fit comfortably into place, it would have solved any number of issues that came from being closeted and repressed and forced into a life that wasn’t natural for me – but for some reason I never crossed into that particular realm of self-hatred. Oh I hated myself for many reasons, but my queerness wasn’t ever really one of them. (There was so much more to hate than the fact that I found men attractive!) Still, I understood soon and well enough that being gay would indeed be more than ample reason for others to hate me, so I wouldn’t admit it until the age of 18.
Thought that I was lost with no end in sight ‘Til I found my chosen family tree Any friend of Dorothy’s is a friend of mine So cheers to the queers like you and me
Once I did, however, there was no going back, and forging a way for my gay self at a time when not everyone did was forging an existence brazenly fired in the heat of defiance and courage. In some ways, it made everything that followed a bit of a cake walk – something I need to remind myself when I recoil from simpler challenges. It made me into the man you see before you – and in a lot of ways it made me the cowboy I’ve only recently discovered in myself.
Wish I wasn’t gay, wish I wasn’t gay I don’t wish I wasn’t gay no more Clap your hands for Jesus, hallelujah, praise the Lord I don’t wish I wasn’t gay no more!
Before Chris arrived for our weekend together, I had a night alone – which is always a welcome and favored sort of night at a time when I’m just exasperated by people. The odd irony, or immaturity, of the scenario is that as soon as I find solitude and begin to savor it, I find myself seeking out people from afar – hence a little look-see out into the world from the safe vantage point of being behind curtains and one floor above the ground.
You see all sorts of things when you take the time to look, and little glimpse into the nighttime activities of others is a voyeur’s dream. I assume that most people are like myself and if they don’t want to be seen they’ll simply draw a curtain or close a blind. It’s usually the half-closed windows that give the most tantalizing peeks of real life carrying on without thought or concern of being watched; my windows are usually half-closed.
And sometimes I forget that windows work both ways. For every moment I might be peering out, someone else might be peering in. There is something vaguely unsettling and also inspiring about that. The truth is you’ll probablydefinitely see more here on this blog than looking into any of my windows, no matter where I might be, or what I might not be wearing.
Like the animals, flowers seem to sense an impending storm, putting on a last-ditch effort to bloom and show-off right before the Nor’easter arrived. Of course, this is all anthropomorphic nonsense that just feels more fun to entertain than existing in any very real or scientific realm. I’ll stop speaking now. You are so very welcome. Enjoy the show.
