Gay rodeo finals in Nevada celebrate 50 years of drawing queer cowboys together

The battle to build gay rodeo

In 1975, Phil Ragsdale, the founder of what would become known as the International Gay Rodeo Association a decade later, came up with the idea to hold a gay rodeo in Reno to raise money for the local senior citizens’ annual Thanksgiving Day feed. However, Ragsdale struggled to find a venue and ranchers who were open to providing livestock for a gay rodeo, and, as a result, he didn’t successfully hold the first event until the following year.

Ragsdale’s rodeo had all the usual competitions, including team roping and bull riding, and what are now known as “camp events,” like goat dressing, in which a team of two tries to put underwear on a goat as fast as possible, and wild drag, in which one person in a three-person team dresses in drag and mounts a steer and the two others lead the steer across a finish line.

Ragsdale also drew inspiration from a national network of LGBTQ charities called the Imperial Court and started hosting “royalty competitions,” where contestants are judged on their Western attire and how well they represent the rodeo. The royalty and camp events, Ragsdale had long said, were what separated gay rodeo from traditional rodeo.

Despite ongoing struggles in those early years with homophobia from venue owners and ranchers, the gay rodeo circuit continued to grow. In 1983, the signature annual event in Reno drew 12,000 attendees, and in 1994, IGRA and its member associations held 21 gay rodeos across the United States.

But then, HIV and AIDS spread across the country, affecting hundreds of thousands of gay men, including Ragsdale, who died from AIDS-related illness in 1992.

“The HIV pandemic had a tremendous impact, obviously, on gay rodeo, because we lost so many of our members, which has been very hard to recover from,” IGRA President Brian Helander said. “We’re just now starting to recover from that, with the younger generation joining, and the older generation, we’re still sort of war-torn from that experience.”