Longhorns

Gay pulp veteran Banis's pseudonymous soft core novels of the '60s are hailed as ""foundational"" to gay literature in Michael Bronski's fulsome introduction to this new novel, Banis's ""re-emergence."" Bronski goes on to call this Western a ""response"" to Brokeback Mountain, and a ""queer meditation"" on the cowboy as American icon. Forty-year-old Les, the trail boss of the Double H Ranch, works for its beloved chatelaine, the elderly widow Miz Cameron, ""a little dumpling of a woman, dressed in black."" Les rides herd over a crew of rowdy cowboys, roping steer and sleeping around prairie campfires. Young drifter Buck, part Nasoni Indian, catches up to them on a roundup. After proving himself an expert sharpshooter, rider and roper, Buck celebrates his initiation to the group by luring one of their number, Red, into his bedroll. But Buck is really after Les, sandy-haired and significantly endowed. Banis provides a well-researched, detailed panorama of wrangling steer and the narrowing of the American Southwest, but his characters fail to convince and his sex scenes are pallid. Buck unleashes a stream of single-entendre wherever he goes (it feels good to be ""rode hard""), and after the first 10 pages, it becomes tiresome.