"Ride him cowboy!!

[Gob]

Luke Gilford was at a Pride event in northern California in 2016 when he was drawn to a stand by the sound of Dolly Parton singing 9 to 5.



What he found there would change his life. Members of the local chapter of the Golden State Gay Rodeo Association were promoting what they do, and how they live. Gilford looked on in astonishment. “I grew up around this world,” he says. “I had no idea this existed. I really didn’t think it was real.”

A sought-after film-maker and photographer, to whom Barbara Kruger is a mentor and Pamela Anderson and Jane Fonda muses, Gilford cuts a striking figure. A New York Times profile that same year recounted how you could often catch a glimpse of him downtown, in a hand-me-down cowboy hat, football-style shoulder pads over his bare torso.



The headwear belonged to his father, a rodeo champion and subsequent judge in the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association. Gilford was born in Colorado, and grew up watching his dad ride in snakeskin boots, a giant silver buckle gleaming at his waist. He gradually realised that he didn’t fit into this world, though. “The mainstream rodeo world is, you know, obviously, very homophobic and conservative. There’s so much machismo. It’s racist.”

So this chance encounter with a bunch of people who’d managed to do what seemed impossible to him was as exciting as it was discombobulating. “We all know what a rodeo is,” he says, “and we all know what queer is. We don’t think of them going together.” He set about exploring how they might.

The result is National Anthem, Gilford’s first photographic monograph – and, to his mind, a timely musing on the state of America. “We’re taught in school to recite the national anthem every morning. It has this aura of promise. But as we grow older, we realise this promise is kind of a myth. What I think is really beautiful, and so inspiring, about the queer rodeo community is that it brings back that aura of promise. It embraces both ends of the American cultural spectrum: people living on the land, but who are also queer.

“To begin with, it was very personal, a way to reconnect with a side of myself I had suppressed. But I started the project around the time Trump was elected. So it has felt really urgent to work on a wider scale beyond that personal level, to focus on what we all should be talking about and working towards.”

Continues here...

ETA;

Just for Scooter...

[MajGenl.Meade]

[TPFKA@W]

So much for the traditional gay sensitivity. Rodeos are senselessly cruel and they are assholes for participating.

[Joe Guy]

[rubato]

So much for the traditional gay sensitivity. Rodeos are senselessly cruel and they are assholes for participating.

rodeos are pure american. Piss off whiny loser go watch a game of cricket..


yrs,
rubato

[ex-khobar Andy]

Time for your meds, rube.

And BTW what's wrong with cricket?

[TPFKA@W]

Piss off whiny loser

Is that all you got? I am insulted by your lack of effort.

[liberty]

So much for the traditional gay sensitivity. Rodeos are senselessly cruel and they are assholes for participating.

How do you figure American rodeo is all that cruel? It might be that it is cruel to the bull and bronco riders, but I don’t see it being all that cruel to the animals. I haven’t heard of bulls being busted up by rampaging cowboys.

If you want to see cruelty check out a Latin rodeo; I believe the goal of one of the events is to snatch a calf off the ground by the tail while riding a horse at full gallop. Sometimes they break a tail off.

[BoSoxGal]

American rodeo is notoriously cruel and the public and animal advocacy groups have been complaining about it for at least 150 years.

Educate yourself:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_ ... t_in_rodeo

[liberty]

American rodeo is notoriously cruel and the public and animal advocacy groups have been complaining about it for at least 150 years.

Educate yourself:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_ ... t_in_rodeo

I did the reading and it appears that I was wrong; there are devices that are used in rodeo that do to cause the animals pain and discomfort. I don’t trust PETA so I got my info from an alternate source. PETA is the same group that wants to outlaw hunting and the eating of meat.

[Bicycle Bill]

American rodeo is notoriously cruel and the public and animal advocacy groups have been complaining about it for at least 150 years.

Educate yourself:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_ ... t_in_rodeo

I did the reading and it appears that I was wrong; there are devices that are used in rodeo that do to cause the animals pain and discomfort. I don’t trust PETA so I got my info from an alternate source. PETA is the same group that wants to outlaw hunting and the eating of meat.

I still don't trust PETA.  In my opinion, animals have their place — and it's on the plate next to the mashed potatoes and gravy.
The fact that they might be right on this one merely proves the old adage that even a broken clock is correct twice a day.

-"BB"-

[Econoline]

I don’t trust PETA so I got my info from an alternate source. PETA is the same group that wants to outlaw hunting and the eating of meat.

Good for you. I like the sentiment expressed in the group's name—"Ethical Treatment of Animals" (really, everything we do can and should have an ethical component)—but their messaging and activities often simultaneously go far beyond and fall far short of this ideal.

[ex-khobar Andy]

I did the reading and it appears that I was wrong

I'm not being snarky lib* - I often am when responding to a post of yours - but that statement is so rare on this board, from anyone of whatever political persuasion, that it deserves a round of applause.



* I reserve the right to be snarky again in the future.

[ex-khobar Andy]

PETA has successfully campaigned to stop EPA testing chemicals on mammals. From the link:

One year ago today, [published on 10 September 2020] the nation cheered when the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced its historic decision to stop funding and requesting toxicity tests on mammals by 2035.

There is a lot that can be done, and is done, on cell lines in a petri dish. This is true whether you are developing cancer cures or new pesticides and fertilizers. But unfortunately, the only way to determine whether your product will not kill antelopes, small children, honeybees or rattlesnakes while ridding the world of Colorado beetles is to test it on antelopes, small children, honeybees and rattlesnakes or reliable surrogates. I've spent some of my professional life as an ecotoxicologist, and while we do not use antelopes, small children or rattlesnakes these days, we do use honeybees, daphnia, baby trout, worms and mice, among many others.

The procedure is simple enough. If you have no clue how toxic the stuff is, start with a range finding test. Expose test groups of your organism to a dose of your product at (say) zero, 10, 100, 1000 and 10,000 parts per billion. This can be by inspiration, by injection, in their food or in the water of a fish tank. See how many die. If the 0 10 and 100 are all alive and kicking after 48 hours and the 1000 and 10,000 are all belly up, you've found your range. Do it again but with much more detail in the range: say zero (control), 50, 100, 200, 400, 800, 1600 and 3200.

48 hours later and with some help from statistical software, you can calculate an LD50. What is the Lethal Dose for 50% of the population? If you look at the Material Safety Data Sheet (MSDS, nowadays just SDS) for any chemical product, you will see LD50 (or some variant thereof) for multiple animals. There are plenty of products that never made it to market because although the scientists who developed it found that it was very efficacious in killing cotton boll weevil, scientists like me found that it also did a number on honeybees and mice (and hence, by extension) probably on small children. Because the companies wanted to sell their product worldwide, our work was overseen by USEPA, DEFRA, EC, the Chinese Ministry of Environmental Protection, and an alphabet soup of agencies.

One question we always asked in interviews was - do you have any moral objection to exposing animals - fish, worms etc. - to chemicals knowing that they will die? If someone said yes (and I don't think anyone ever did in interviews I was part of) the stock answer was yes, thank you for your time, we fully understand (but don't necessarily share) your position, but you probably are not suited to this line of work.

In addition to agencies looking over our shoulders to make sure that our testing was valid for their circumstances (marine or freshwater fish? cold weather or tropical organisms? arid or monsoon climate?) there were state and federal agencies whose job was to monitor how well we treated the test animals. AAALAC was one - can't remember the rest.

The reason I have gone on far longer than I intended here is that groups like PETA do not live in the real world. Certainly there are gross cruelties in farming and in laboratory testing and these have to be stamped out. In my view the world has enough mascara and there is no need for further testing on rabbit eyelids, and PETA and similar animal cruelty organizations (ASPCA, RSPCA, BUAV etc) have done a great job in curbing some of the more nauseating excesses. But it makes me see red when I walk into a cosmetics shop and see 'Never tested on animals!' I look at the ingredients list. Oh yes it fucking has been tested on animals. Maybe that specific formulation has not been. But every one of those components has been, and I've read the MSDS on some of them.

Sorry, we're a long way from gay rodeos.

Edited to correct a typo.

[Big RR]

Andy--good post; when I was in college I was part of a research team working on extending the circulating life of antibodies in humans; it had a lot of applications in human diseases, and one of the drugs still used in leukemia treatments today (many years later) benefited from this research. Part of that research involved the use of mammals, namely mice, rats and rabbits (and occasionally sheep). While I will admit that we sacrificed many animals and did things which caused some degree of discomfort to them, I also will say that we had an animal health department that had to approve the use of any animals in research and closely monitored it. Everything that could be done was done to minimize that discomfort, and people who performed the procedures (like me) took this very seriously (indeed, I recall one guy who was dismissed from the graduate program because he did not follow procedures; I recall him and he was a pretty sick guy who should not have been let near animals--that quickly became apparent and he was dismissed).

Unfortunately, as much as PETA and other groups would like you to believe otherwise, there are many areas of scientific inquiry where animals are required to be used, and mostly this use is closely monitored. I'm sure there are times where this does not apply, those are the exception rather than the rule.