Gay West

6:00am this morning on String Lake, Tetons National Park

If you wish you were in the West this week, read Thomas Savage's novel of a gay and straight brother on a Montana ranch in the 1920s, The Power of the Dog. The brutish, repressed Phil isn't happy when George marries a woman. Then her "sissy" teen son comes to visit from his Eastern prep school. An unsentimental story in the spirit of Annie Proulx, who wrote the afterword to the rereleased edition.

A newish nonfiction book about the gay frontier of the 1840s is Men in Eden: William Drummond Stewart and Same-Sex Desire in the Rocky Mountain Fur Trade [Kindle]. Previously the author won a Stonewall award for Male-Male Intimacy in Early America: Beyond Romantic Friendships covering roughly one hundred years from the 1770s to the 1870s.

Decades before Stewart, Lewis & Clark penetrated unknown areas. Brian Hall's novel I Should Be Extremely Happy in Your Company recreates Merriweather Lewis's struggle as a gay man exploring.

A terrific straight book about the West is Ron Carlson's short novel Five Skies. I don't know any reader who has disliked it.