for erik and fridays

in progress work on rural queer cowboy culture

Once upon a time I rode horses to school and told everyone that my name was Sienna with two N’s. I rode horses with a trainer named Erik with a K and he was gay. A cowboy who owned a farm with goats and horses and donkeys, wore wranglers, and fucked other men. He liked to say funny things like ‘ride it like you stole it’ and ‘i’m the best goddamn golf cart driver on this side of the Mississippi” and he never once made you feel like you couldn’t one day also be just like him. My mom was the one who told me he was gay, he never told me himself I don’t think. I remember her telling it to me in the one diner in the town where his farm was. It was dimly lit with the booths that diners have and white and red checkered tablecloths that are always in diners, especially diners in Montana. They had the kind of french fries there that aren’t the nice crisp but still bendable ones, but the kind that are battered a little bit and kinda dissolve when you put them in your mouth. I hated their fries. But they had a grilled chicken sandwich and they always had extra ranch. So we would go there after I rode two horses in the morning, and then we’d go back to the farm, I’d help Erik wrestle some goats and then I’d ride another horse or two. I was like 12 or 13, I’m not so sure why I was so intense. But I’ve never done anything un-intensely in my life so it made sense, especially at that point when everyone was telling me I was smarter than most kids and I was going to be something greater than the sum of the place that I came from. I guess if you can call studying photography in a big city like New York being greater than the sum of a bunch of mountains and a population of about 1 million people then sure. But they called me that when I was good at math and everyone thought I was going to be a mathematician, so I maybe should be sorry to disappoint, I’m not really sure. But yeah Erik was gay and I found out in a diner full of corn farmers, the bar was half full at noon, and if my mom had spoken above a whisper we may have gotten in trouble. But I was 12, and I didn’t care. I loved Erik and he loved me and I learned how to ‘ride em like I stole em’ from him and that was the difference between a blue ribbon and getting your pants covered in dirt so I didn’t really think much of it.

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