Over the twentieth century many marginalized communities, including incarcerated people, Black communities, and LGBTQ+ people, used rodeo and the performance of the cowboy as a powerful tool of resistance against their erasure from the imagined American West. In this conversation Dr. Rebecca Scofield explores how the International Gay Rodeo Association (IGRA), whose institutional archive resides at the Autry, navigated tense debates about the meaning of the cowboy from 1975 through today. She will discuss IGRA's history with Josh Garrett-Davis, the Gamble Associate Curator of Western History, Popular Culture, and Firearms at the Autry.
 

Scofield is the author of Outriders: Rodeo at the Fringes of the American West, Principal Investigator of the Gay Rodeo Oral History Project, and co-creator of the web exhibition Voices of Gay Rodeo.