It’s 1883, Wild West, USA. It’s also 2025, Seymour Centre, Sydney. The world of this play straddles both these two times and places.

 

When Charlie Josephine binge-watched old cowboy movies as research for their play "Cowbois", they got a bit of a shock. “I found that they’re really racist, heteronormative and misogynistic,” says Josephine, the play’s writer, who uses he/they pronouns. “They’re also full of violence, and obviously I didn’t want to make anything like that.” Instead, Josephine seized the “clear, confident iconography” of the Western genre and decided to rewire it with queer energy. They describe "Cowbois", as a Trojan horse that weaves timely ideas about gender, sexuality and class into “a really great night out”.

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Josephine points out that real-life cowboys were “much more diverse in terms of class, race, gender and sexuality” than “the middle-aged white guy” Hollywood likes to portray. While writing "Cowbois", Josephine also consulted "Female Husbands: A Trans History", Jen Manion’s book about trans masculine people from previous generations, and "Before We Were Trans", Kit Heyam’s history of gender nonconformity around the world. “Those books felt really affirming – we’ve always been here; it’s just the language that’s changed and evolved,” Josephine says.

 

"Cowbois" begins with a “sexy trans masculine gender outlaw” called Jack Cannon (Jules Billington) arriving in an isolated Wild West town kept alive by its female inhabitants, since the men left to join the gold rush. Confident and charismatic, Jack inspires this tight-knit community to reckon with their gender identities and confront the patriarchy.

 

"Cowbois" may be a play about a muted community that blooms into a queer utopia, but Josephine says they were conscious of making it accessible to a non-LGBTQ+ audience.

 

Josephine says the “creative challenge for me was to marry my queer heart that wanted to do something rebellious and visceral and sweaty with a kind of ‘straight’ storytelling structure.”

 

The result is a play with the potential to bring people together while entertaining them in unexpected ways, “it feels exciting when a trans person is grateful to see trans representation on stage or a queer person is grateful to see two queer people falling in love. To achieve both those things in one show feels like a fucking huge achievement. I have to say, I’m really proud of that.”

 

Quotations from “Cowbois: A New Play Rewires the Western Genre With Queer Energy” AnOther