Scholar reclaims hometown of Cody, Wyo., and gays' and lesbians' place in the West
Gregory Hinton's rental car eases along the main drag of this town established by William F. "Buffalo Bill" Cody. Hinton's a proud tour guide of his boyhood haunts in the place where his father was once top editor at the newspaper Cody founded.
Hinton drives streets wide enough for horse-drawn wagons to have made whip-driven turns, passing the white house where he lived until age 8. He gazes toward the window of his old bedroom with particular longing, a sense of something lost.
The gay scholar has come home again.
Through his novels, plays and scholarship, this native son of the Plains has tried to go beyond the hackneyed cowboys-and-Indians portrayal of the region and shed new light on the role gays and lesbians played — and continue to play — in the American West.
He's researched tribes that referred to cross-dressing members as "two spirits," lesbians who made no bones of their sexual orientation and frontier women who impersonated men as a measure of safety.
"We've been here since the beginning," he says. "We're stakeholders to our own story."
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http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-gay-wyoming-20151126-story.html
