Asexual Representation in Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry (1985)
I’m hardly the first to say this, but if you read one Western novel in your life, make it Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry (1936–2021), winner of the 1986 Pulitzer Prize.
In the late 1870s, Captain Augustus “Gus” McCrae and Captain Woodrow F. Call, two famous former Texas Rangers, run a livery (a boarding stable for horses) in the small, dusty Texas border town of Lonesome Dove along the Rio Grande. Gus is an upbeat womanizer and twice a widower, and Call is a strict, stoic workaholic.
— Wikipedia
Alongside Remains of the Day (1989), which I also think centers an asexual middle-aged man as main character, Lonesome Dove is one of my favourite reads of all time. Augustus McCrae and Woodrow Call have spent their lives together on the plains of the American West, formerly working as Texas rangers. Now they’ve been semi-retired and doing not much at all near the Mexican border, until one day an old pal shows up and they all decide to move north to Montana for one last adventure.
These novels each ask readers to reflect on what it means to live a good, expansive life. Like the butler in Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, Lonesome Dove has Gus wondering if he spent his life on the right side of morality:
Does it ever occur to you that everything we done was probably a mistake? Just look at it from a nature standpoint.
Gus to Call, Chapter 42
And now the old cowboys have ‘saved’ the white families from the Indians, Gus now himself the villain. Time for a new adventure. There’s still time for one more: Drive cattle north to Montana, which by all accounts is an American utopia.
A four-part 1989 TV adaptation of Lonesome Dove stars Robert Duvall as Augustus McCrae (Gus), and Tommy Lee Jones as Woodrow Call (Call).
If you manage to track down the miniseries, you’ll notice CGI has come a long way since the 1980s (really only laughable during one spectacular “thunderstorm”), but otherwise I think this adaptation would appeal to modern audiences, if only it were more widely available.
Alternatively, Lonesome Dove is available as an audiobook, digitised from the cassette tapes and read by Lee Horsley. Running to 36 hours and 44 minutes, you’ll get your money’s worth.
But where are all McMurtry’s queers?
I’ve read a significant chunk of Larry McMurtry’s novels — and the thing that stands out reading them in the 21st century: There’s zero hint of gay sex or romance in any of them.
Guided only by the work itself, McMurtry was a manifestly straight writer. His masculine narrators enjoyed the sight of a woman in bare feet.
He was a writer of his time. After all, McMurtry did write and live across the 20th century, in which society became more visibly homophobic as the century wore on and gay people themselves became more visible. So on the plains of McMurtry’s Old West, there are no gays.
Larry McMurtry didn’t touch anything gay-cowboy related until he was contracted in the early 2000s as a screenwriter for Brokeback Mountain.
[McMurtry] told blogger Daniel A. Kusner that he first became familiar with the notion of a gay cowboy when he was eight years old — when he was introduced to his gay cousin’s boyfriend. “There might have been a little awkwardness, maybe. But my parents were never angry about my cousin. Everyone’s lives went on. And they went on for 20 years,” McMurtry told Kusner.
Alongside longtime collaborator Diana Ossana, Larry McMurtry co-wrote the screenplay adaptation of Annie Proulx’s short story Brokeback Mountain, for the film directed by Ang Lee. Often in articles about Brokeback Mountain, only Ang Lee is named. This irritates me, not least because it invisibilises the women who were strongly involved — it was a woman who came up with the whole thing!
Anyway, everyone involved in Brokeback Mountain did a great job. That film packs a punch every time I watch it, as does Proulx’s short story, each time I read it.
Would McMurtry’s 1985 Lonesome Dove have been awarded The Pulitzer if he’d written a gay plotline back then?
If you weren’t of age in 2005 when Brokeback Mountain was released, it may be difficult to imagine how pissed off certain sectors were, even after the turn of the century, to see a mainstreamed “cowboy” story with gays in it. To some it seemed an insult to America:
[T]he film was subject to scathing criticism at the time of its release. Detractors, largely spearheaded by right-wing and religious groups, quickly and fervently deemed the film’s depiction of a homosexual couple immoral, evidence of an attempt to feminize men, and even anti-American. In many cases, critics honed in on the two leads’ occupations as cowboys, challenging the existence of a “gay cowboy” in American history. One critic wrote that the film was a “mockery of the Western genre embodied in every movie cowboy from John Wayne to Gene Autry to Clint Eastwood.
Brokeback Mountain, the film, is marketed as a romance. But this is not a “gay love story” at all. Annie Proulx wrote a story of hate — of how anti-gay bigotry infects a community. Brokeback Mountain is about anti-gay bigotry and murder, and still the bigots couldn’t abide it.
Another point of clarification: Neither Annie Proulx nor Larry McMurtry ever wrote “Westerns” per se. More precisely, these authors have contributed Anti-Westerns to the corpus. Traditional Westerns glorify and romanticise white expansion. In contrast, anti-Westerns focus on the harsh landscapes, emphasising death and despair. The heyday of the Western genre was from about 1880 to 1960. The modern Western story is really a mixture of other genres with a setting in the latter half of the 19th Century in the American Old West, or a similarly desolate but modern American setting.
A lot of bad things happen in Lonesome Dove. And a lot of them are not nice. They are not civilized… The whole book is permeated with criticism of the Old West from start to finish.
— Larry McMurtry
Basically no one is making old-school Westerns these days. However, we are seeing neo-Westerns such as Westworld and No Country for Old Men. New takes on the old Western contain more scope for marginalised identities, who were always there, at the frontier of anything — if only because mainstream society rejected and Othered. The American frontier is the natural environment for queer characters.
Lonesome Dove’s Woodrow Call as Queer Aroace
Despite choosing to avoid it, I do believe Larry McMurtry (unintentionally) wrote queerness in his Lonesome Dove series. To me, because I tend to look for relatable characters, Call is aroace (asexual and aromantic).
Asexual surveys suggest that, compared to woman asexuals and genderqueer asexuals (mostly assigned female), cisgender aces are very rare.
I of course can’t counter that finding simply by giving you my own head-canoned fictional characters as evidence that asexual men are out there, but I can try to open minds to what cis male asexuality might look like, if only we knew where to look. If only those men themselves knew where to look.
First of all, The (real) West would have attracted such men. Out on the plains, a man is not expected to settle down with a woman and live the straight life, surrounded by children.
The homosociality of Lonesome Dove is widely recognised. It’s been said that Gus and Call are basically a married couple. These characters are very different people, and in fiction character differences tend to be a little exaggerated. Whereas Gus loves his women (and has outlived two wives), the running joke about Call revolves around him being wholly uninterested in romance and sex. Lonesome Dove was written in the mid 80s before asexuality had been defined, but the character of Call is described, on the page, as if describing an asexual:
Gus is the romantic — a reluctant ranger who fills his days with whisky and the sound of his own voice reminiscing about the old days. Call is devoted to hard work and silence — driven, demanding and obsessed with the dream of creating his own empire.
marketing copy of Lonesome Dove, in which readers are guided to regard Call’s disinterest in sex as an outworking of his ‘obsession’.
Throughout the story, it is implied (mainly by Gus) that Call is the father of the teenage boy of their posse who was abandoned as a baby by his sex worker mother. The story is written to encourage readers to think this, too, and that the sex worker who ran off is the one love of Call’s life, ruining him for all other women:
“I swear,” Jake said [freshly arrived in town]. “You mean you’ve had little Newt for nine years?”
There was a long silence, in which only Augustus felt comfortable. Deets felt so uncomfortable that he stepped in front of the Captain and went out of the door.
“Why, yes, Jake,” Gus said. “We’ve had him since Maggie died.”
“I swear,” Jake said again.
“It was only the Christian thing,” Augustus said. “Taking him in, I mean. After all, one of you boys is more than likely his pa.”
Call put on his hat, p73
Of course, even if Call is Newt’s father, this doesn’t preclude an asexuality character reading. (Aces have kids!)
But notice how Call walked out of the room, avoiding Gus’s assessment. What if the normally perspicacious Gus has things wrong, this time? What if Call can’t bear the thought of being a father because he never fully consented to sex with Maggie, and was instead pressured by his peers in his youth to lose his virginity for the sake of becoming A Real Man?
In the scene below, we are shown Call trying to deal with the constant pressure to be someone other than he is, by the irrepressible Gus who cannot understand Call’s way of being, and who believes Call’s (lack of) sexuality is the root of all his mental health problems, just as doubters might put it today:
“Call, you ought to have married and had five or six kids,” Augustus remarked. If he couldn’t get anywhere with one subject he like to move on to another. Call’s spirits hadn’t improved much. When he was low it was hard to get him to talk.
“I can’t imagine why you think so,” Call said. “I wonder what’s become of Jake?”
“Why, Jake’s moseying along — starved for a card game, probably,” Augustus said.
“He ought to leave that girl and throw in with us, “ Call said.
“You ain’t listening,” Augustus said. “I was trying to explain why you ought to marry. If you had a passel of six kids, then you’d always have a troop to boss when you felt like bossing. It would occupy your brain and you wouldn’t get gloomy as often.”
Lonesome Dove, p320
Sara Ahmed has interesting things to say about this duty to seem happy for the benefit of others in her book The Promise of Happiness:
The Promise of Happiness is a provocative cultural critique of the imperative to be happy. It asks what follows when we make our desires and even our own happiness conditional on the happiness of others: “I just want you to be happy”; “I’m happy if you’re happy.”
Combining philosophy and feminist cultural studies, Sara Ahmed reveals the affective and moral work performed by the “happiness duty,” the expectation that we will be made happy by taking part in that which is deemed good, and that by being happy ourselves, we will make others happy.
Ahmed maintains that happiness is a promise that directs us toward certain life choices and away from others. Happiness is promised to those willing to live their lives in the right way.
from the synopsis of The Promise of Happiness
Throughout the story of Lonesome Dove, whenever the men start to talk of sex and love and romance, Call makes himself absent, ostensibly because he has other business to attend to, namely, cleaning his gun. Call observes that the one time he slept with Maggie is the one thing he ever did which makes him ‘normal’. Since Gus is written as a comical figure, he also observes that he’s never met anyone more normal than himself. The accusation of abnormality will resonate with many from the queer community.
What do academics make of Call’s lack of a love life?
ERNESTINE SEWELL (1986)
The self-destructiveness of love negated is found in Call’s story. Except for the close like-marriage feeling he has for his horse, the Hell Bitch, he rejects relationships for they may lead to emotional involvement. Yet Call is not infallible. He had made a mistake once, a mistake that “seemed to undermine all that he was, or that people thought he was It made all his trying, his work and discipline, seem fraudulent, and caused him to wonder if his life made sense at all” (Lonesome Dove 360). The saloon girl Maggie, whose love for him had shone from frightened, despairing eyes, had borne his child, but Call had rejected her and her child, for he could not bring himself to admit that he had betrayed his tenets. Call is an empty shell, committed only to the image of himself as a Texas Ranger.
— Ernestine P. Sewell, McMurtry’s Cowboy-God in “Lonesome Dove”, Western American Literature, Vol. 21, №3 (FALL 1986), pp. 219–225
Sewell’s main point in the paper is that the cowboys comprise a Trinitarian God, which Sewell calls the ‘cowboy-god’:
In Lonesome Dove the Cowboy-God is a Freudian composite of the three old Rangers: Call is Super-ego; Gus, Ego; and Jake, Id. Taken as one, the three embody the idea of Cowboy, the man on horseback, full of the joy of life, accepting the tragedy of life, brave, daring, hard-working, loyal, reliable, proud, stoic, often ascetic, straightforward, restless, independent, and not without a sense of humor. Each of the Rangers is consistent within the Freudian concept. When Jake the Id dies, nothing seems to go right anymore. When Gus’s tempering Ego is gone, Call becomes a confused old man. He has adhered rigidly to the higher conscience and had achieved his goals. He had performed his duties, but he had failed to become ennobled by his acts, for he lacked the chastening of the Ego which would allow him to compromise his ideals and descend to Gus’s level of humanity where all men make mistakes and redeem themselves someway. To view the three as one is to realize the Cowboy-God.
— Ernestine P. Sewell, McMurtry’s Cowboy-God in “Lonesome Dove”, Western American Literature, Vol. 21, №3 (FALL 1986), pp. 219–225
By this assessment of the fictional Woodrow Call, Sewell illuminates how characters (and people) who don’t pursue sex are seen as:
- Full of ourselves
- Ascetic, hard-working, reliable, proud, stoic, idealistic, uncompromising
- Lacking humanity (a humanity evinced by the contrast character of Gus)
- Inevitably headed for a lonely old age.
Invisiblized Cis Male Aces
Do you know any men from your real life who are a bit like Call? In Lonesome Dove, Call’s ‘pragmatic realism’ extends to all aspects of his life, including his absent (or invisible) sexuality. Call does not have time for the romantic. He considers it frivolous. And if we did see him interact more with women, he would surely be misogynistic. Gus, by contrast, is a benevolent sexist.
Perhaps it’s difficult to think of Call from Lonesome Dove as a member of the queer community. He’s so… manly. He’s probably a father. Nothing suggests gay. Well, gay isn’t the only type of queer. (And plenty of gay men look like Call.)
Below is a young man writing about his very real (late) father, who he learned was asexual when talking to his mother. Context: The writer has just broken up. The mother is worried her son is asexual, and seeks reassurance that he’s not.
[T]here’s something comic about confronting the self-styled “culture warriors” out there — people hell-bent on stopping discussions of sexuality — with a grey-haired white guy from Essex with an Autosport subscription and a habit of tucking his T-shirt into his Y-fronts. A guy who demographically looks exactly like them, yet on the inside had a complexity that would take them 1,000 years to grapple with. This is what people who actively try to stifle any discussion of gender or sexuality forget: they think they’re talking in the abstract, without realising that their best mate might be asexual, their daughter might be a lesbian, their young cousin might be a “they”.
My dad was asexual. I wish he could have told me before he died by Oliver Keens
Note that the by-line to this story primes readers by saying Oliver’s asexual father had a “sad” secret, positioning asexuality as a sad way of living. Of course, there is reason for his widow to be sad. There’s also the sad hermeneutical injustice of not knowing who you are because you don’t have access to the words. But asexuality is, in itself, not “sad”.
Whereas the mother in Oliver Keen’s article may never feel positively about her late husband’s asexuality, or about asexuals in general — precisely because her husband’s unacknowledged asexuality so thoroughly precluded her own chance at a fulfilling sex life — the son, in writing, is able to frame his father’s unexpected queerness more fondly.
I put it to you that invisible cis asexual men look like Oliver’s dad. In the 1800s, they might’ve looked like Call.
Or they might have looked like Roscoe…
Alternative reading: Lonesome Dove’s Roscoe Brown as Asexual
If you still can’t get your head around Call as ace, probably aroace, consider another character, Roscoe Brown.
McMurtry’s extended gag about Roscoe: As a man of the frontier, he’s not had opportunity to become acquainted with women, and so remains baffled by them, as a different species. He is as bumbling at his job as deputy sheriff as he in potentially romantic relationships. Roscoe finds himself railroaded by women with strong personalities, and has chosen to live his life minding the jail in a sleepy town rather than building a family of his own and chasing women.
It is important to the story that Roscoe is a “safe” guy around women. By the time he rescues a human-trafficked girl by a disturbing elderly abuser, the reader trusts she won’t be subjected to the same abuse once in Roscoe’s hands.
In fact, Roscoe is himself sexually assaulted by a woman in his travels. He wakes up with the woman astride him. He has no say in the matter. In the 1980s, it’s unlikely many readers would have considered this an example of assault. Although not written to be disturbing (unlike, say, the notorious scene in Deliverance), we should know better now.
Unfortunately, when it comes to asexual representation in stories, audiences are presented with two archetypes of men: The stoic, unsmiling, humorless types such as Woodrow Call, or, as Julie Kliegman described Todd from BoJack Horseman back in 2018: yellow-hatted man children — kindhearted, aimless and adventure-prone to the extreme.
Larre Bildeston is the author of a contemporary (aromantic) asexual romance The Space Ace of Mangleby Flat (2023), set in Australia and New Zealand.
