Shannon Pufahl: Queering the Western

Everyone knows the signifiers of our national American myth, the western: Dusty boots, horses and cowboys, saloons and gamblers, manifest destinies. But those well-worn iconographies—and the heroic fictional figures who bring the myth to life—obscure the ordinary people who helped create the real history, particularly those living at the margins.

Shannon Pufahl is a lover of westerns, but not always all parts of them. A Midwesterner who was weaned on Gunsmoke and Cormac McCarthy, who accompanied her grandmother on trips to Las Vegas, and who ultimately went west to California herself, Pufahl wanted to write into the form by telling the stories of those who’d been othered: namely, queer people. People who didn’t necessarily have a place in the new western world of the mid-twentieth century and had to find small, offbeat spaces for themselves in a time when there were no words for what they sought.

Pufahl’s debut novel, On Swift Horses, follows three of those people across post-war California, Las Vegas, and Tijuana: Muriel, a woman who somewhat reluctantly married her Kansas hometown sweetheart and followed him west; her now-husband Lee, ploddingly supportive, simple, and sweet, whose one dream is to build a house in the hills above San Diego; and Julius, Lee’s magnetic brother, who Muriel feels drawn to from the first time they meet—when she discovers him laying calmly, bare-chested in the rain, on the ground outside the window of the bedroom where she and Lee have just made love.

Over cigarettes, Muriel and Julius share a moment, and from then on the recently orphaned Muriel feels an attraction to him she doesn’t fully understand. Julius made her feel that “the world was bigger than she had imagined,” and she agrees to marry Lee in part because “in loving his brother, he became both more interesting and more bracing.” The three plan to start a life together in San Diego but when Julius never shows, Muriel becomes unmoored. She begins to play the Del Mar racetracks in secret and wins a fortune, beginning an awakening that can’t be undone. Meanwhile