Arts & Entertainment

Rodeo’s influence on the gay community and why it’s been erased from history

Published at 12:35 pm, November 15, 2025
Updated at 12:42 pm, November 15, 2025
EastIdahoNews.com Staff
Justin Mattson, EastIdahoNews.com



MOSCOW – As this season of Idaho Rodeo fades into history, Professor Rebecca Scofield at the University of Idaho is uncovering a page from the sport’s forgotten past. ... “When I was doing my master’s thesis on the acrylic nail industry in Tokyo, I ran across a store called “Rodeo Clowns,” Scofield said. “These rodeo performances became so important to different groups, whether that’s incarcerated people, or women, or black rodeo-ers, or gay rodeos.”

As Scofield began researching rodeo’s influence on society, she discovered Western ideas surrounding the “mythology of the cowboy” had been rewritten as part of a nationwide movement in the late 19th century. ... “All of a sudden, we have this massive cultural explosion around the US West in the 1890s,” she said. “We have Buffalo Bill Cody and we have the first rodeos and we have Frederick Remington, we have Theodore Roosevelt, and we have all of these people sort of rewriting the West and particularly cowboys.”

Scofield learned about Black rodeo, and women bronc riders in the prison system. She was also introduced to the International Gay Rodeo Association, an organization devoted to promoting the LGBTQ country western lifestyle in a “supportive amateur sportsmanship environment.” She eventually found out that the organization had recently donated all its archives to a museum in California. ... “I was able to get a research fellowship to go out and go through the archives, which are incredible,” she said. “It’s 90 boxes of material, which for a historian, is unheard of.” ... The material included a variety of programs and posters for specific events, as well as meeting minutes and letters from officials. As Scofield perused through all the documents, she felt one thing was missing: “the voices of the people.”



That’s when the Voices of Gay Rodeo was born, a project dedicated to recording the oral history from people inside the subculture. It’s an ongoing project to ensure the group is never forgotten. ... Through the process of recording oral histories, Scofield and her team of students at the University of Idaho have recorded stories from those who lived through the AIDS crisis and other periods of difficulty for the LGBTQ+ community.

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