Utah gay rodeo returns after 19 years, brings competition, belonging to queer country community

Ogden • Moments after contestants had raced to pull a pair of tighty-whities onto a goat that was tethered to a cinderblock where a drag queen sat, and shortly before competitors began riding bucking steers, Janelle Jennissen sat down on a silver metal riser facing the dirt arena at the Golden Spike Event Center.

Jennissen, 29, has been in the rodeo world most of her life. She competed as a barrel racer — a sport in which a horse and rider race around a series of barrels — for more than a decade, since she was a kid. Yet she’d never been to a rodeo like this.

“I grew up where calling something gay as a slur was just a normal thing,” she said, wearing a wide-brimmed hat and plaid shirt buttoned to her neck. “It was unheard of to see or hear anyone that was queer.”

It was even more unheard of for the entire rodeo to be queer. But this one, the first held in Utah in 19 years, was certifiably gay.

The Utah Gay Rodeo Association’s multiday “Crossroads of the West” regional rodeo in Ogden last weekend featured all the same trappings as a “traditional” rodeo. Similar competitions. Similar outfits — jeans, crisp button-up shirts, cowboy hats. The groomed dirt and manure gave off the same earthy, stinky-sweet scent.

But mixed with nostalgia for rodeo, a pastime many here lost or felt ostracized from after coming out, these competitors and spectators also felt a sense of belonging and relief to be among their people — folks who wouldn’t judge them for their boots or blue jeans, who knew the words to and could be brought to quiet tears by a Garth Brooks song, who grew up with more horses than neighbors. All either queer themselves, or welcoming if you were.

“It’s pretty cool. I never even thought this existed, and I had no idea what to expect coming into this,” Jennissen said. “It’s been a couple of times I’ve been near tears because this community just exists (where) you can be queer and be fully accepted.”

Though she grew up barrel racing, Jennissen said she stopped competing after coming out as LGBTQ to her parents, not because she wanted to but because she was forced out of her home, and forced to leave her horse and sport behind.

She came to the Ogden rodeo on June 17 to try to get that piece of herself back — and find community.

‘Everybody’s able to participate’

Finding community and giving LGBTQ folks with a “country and western background a safe space to compete in” is what gay rodeo is all about, said Kevin Hillman, Utah Gay Rodeo Association trustee.

The first gay rodeo took place in 1976 in Reno, Nevada. It was a competition — and later an entire international association — born out of stigma because, as Kathy Alday, president of the Nevada Gay Rodeo Association, put it, “Being gay in a professional rodeo doesn’t work. Especially back then, it did not [work] at all.”

As Hillman put it: “Gay and rodeo’s an oxymoron. People don’t look at gay men and women, especially gay men, as people who would get in the dirt and do this kind of stuff.”

The International Gay Rodeo Association began about a decade later in Colorado in 1985.

Three years after that first Nevada rodeo, Utah’s first gay rodeo association was founded. At the time, it was known as the Golden Spike Gay Rodeo Association, and later transformed into the Utah Gay Rodeo Association in 1989, Hillman said. There are now 15 similar associations across the United States.

The Utah group hosted several rodeos in the early 2000s, but those stopped and the group later disbanded in 2006. It got back together in 2016, and this year was the first when the organization was able to raise enough funds to host a rodeo. Hillman said even a small rodeo can cost around $60,000.

“We don’t care how you identify — straight, gay, bisexual, any of those areas out there,” Hillman said, joking that even if you’re straight, “the livestock’s all gay … we have that part covered.”

Not only can LGBTQ folks compete without fear or harassment at gay rodeos, but there’s also no gender divides for events. At the gay rodeo, women can ride bulls or broncs. Men can pole bend or barrel race.

“Everybody’s able to participate,” Alday said.

Competing outside the box

Bull riding champion Linda Sue Peterson, a Lehi native and this year’s rodeo grand marshal, is one example.

Peterson had wanted to ride bulls for as long as she can remember, despite being allergic to “almost everything” and having severe asthma — and being born a girl.

“It’s all I could think of. Every drawing I did was [of] bull riding. But they wouldn’t let you ride in high school because you’re a female and all that,” Peterson said. “So I finally came out and got friends and found out about gay rodeo.”

So much of bull riding happens in someone’s head, she said. If you think the bull will throw you, it will. If you think you can ride it, you’ve got a chance. And Peterson knew she could ride bulls.

She would have won a buckle in her first gay rodeo in Arizona if not for a technicality, according to her grand marshal bio, printed in the Ogden event’s pamphlet. Still not satisfied with her riding, she went to bull riding school after that loss.

“Fifty-two guys and me,” Peterson said, “and I’m the only one who stayed on every one of their head, and I won the jackpot the last day.”

That year, 1994, she placed second at the International Gay Rodeo Association bull riding finals.

But after that season, “work started harassing me,” she said. Peterson was working as an officer with the U.S. Forest Service at the time. Then one of her colleagues, one of her few supporters at work, died by suicide. She stopped rodeoing to stop the harassment, she said.

Peterson gave up retirement in 2000, when she heard the Utah association was putting on a rodeo again, saying to herself, “Nobody remembers No. 2. I want to be No. 1.” She took first place at that event and went on to the finals in New Mexico, where she drew a bull named Slow Poke, who’d never been ridden before.

“Well, he will today,” Peterson remembered saying. “And I’ll probably get in the 90s.”

And she did. Her score of 91 remains the highest ever achieved by a woman in the international gay rodeo circuit.

Peterson said being back at Utah gay rodeo this last weekend was special “to be able to celebrate just being you, and doing what you love and being around people that you love.”

She cried while driving up to the event center, seeing the rainbow and blue, white and pink pride flags waving along the entry road. And she was heartened to see more spectators and competitors than she ever remembered from years past, back when the LGBTQ community faced even more stigma than it does today.

At a traditional rodeo, she likely couldn’t have been a grand marshal — the honor normally goes to a straight couple, she said.

As Peterson dug through photos looking for ones that show her on the back of a bull, she lamented that not very many pictures exist because cameras were risky back then. No one wanted to out someone who wasn’t ready.

“It’s come a long ways,” she said later in a text message, “but still has more to go.”

‘Rodeo is cool,’ but gay rodeo is ‘sweet’

In addition to the standard rodeo events, gay rodeos host three uniquely queer events: steer decorating, goat dressing and the wild drag race.

At the grand entry, there’s also a riderless horse ceremony to honor community members who’ve died “either from AIDS, cancer” or anything else, an announcer said June 17, as a man led a saddled horse through the arena and attendees and audience members stood silently, hands or hats covering their hearts.

A pair of boots rode backward in the stirrups as Brooks’ “The Dance” played over the loudspeakers, hitting the last lines of the song’s chorus: “Our lives are better left to chance. I could have missed the pain. But I’d have had to miss the dance.”

The announcer continued, his voiced strained with emotion: “We’ve lost so many.”

Hillman said Tuesday it’s not clear if the organization will be able to hold another rodeo next year.

Organizers were hoping for better attendance over the weekend to recoup costs and have enough leftover to donate to other organizations. Despite a smattering of folks in the bleachers throughout the rodeo, Hillman said not enough people showed up.

“Which is heartbreaking, you know,” Hillman said, “but that’s life.”

Despite low turnout, the rodeo did bring joy to those who attended.

Scooter Peterson, Ivey Gramer and Edward Snow had been looking forward to the rodeo since learning about it at last year’s Ogden Pride.

Scooter Peterson and Gramer donned cowboy hats, while Snow wore a modified blue Dorothy dress from “The Wizard of Oz” — complete with rainbow-striped stockings and a straw bonnet — as they sat in the bleachers on June 17, just as steer riding began that afternoon.

The occasion was an excuse to dress up, Gramer said, and she loved seeing others’ outfits. For Snow, who grew up in central Utah and was strapped onto horses’ backs before he had any idea what he was doing up there, it felt nostalgic.

“I did it when I was growing up, but it just kind of felt like culturally I didn’t mesh with the people who were going to the regular rodeos,” Snow said.

Peterson said he appreciated “the spectacle of masculinity” — putting a “gay twist” on a sport with so much machismo.

“A rodeo is cool,” he said, “but a gay rodeo, it’s got to be sweet.”

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