Orville Peck’s Mask and the Myth of the Gay Cowboy
We sometimes think of the word “story” as being something full of words. A story is something we read. Maybe we watch it, but a script is involved - words that we can read or hear or see being performed. Words are stories we can hear and listen to. But there are other stories we tell. In our previous video, we talked about how fashion, for example, tells the story of ourselves to the people viewing us. Clothes and fashion choices communicate who we are, what are communities are like, and even things like our morality through choices like modest fashion. A tattoo brands our skin with our stories. Jewellery like wedding rings tell the story of our personal lives, or rings like the black asexual ring communicates our identities and our community groups.
Image, then, tells a story. A presentation of self tells a story just as much and as any book. Today, I want to talk about image, and how the presentation of a particular person’s self is a magical amazing mythology: the image of Orville Peck.
Orville Peck is a country musician who came on the scene in 2019 with his debut album Pony. He’s South African born, currently based in Canada, and openly gay. Orville Peck is a new kind of country, while also drawing entirely on old country. His voice, and his music, recalls sonorous country greats, like Roy Orbison, Dolly Parton and Johnny Cash. Less bro-country, more old-country. But Orville Peck is also a look. Always dressed in typical cowboy attire, but never without the fringe mask.
Country music is all about authenticity, telling the authentic story of the self. It may seem antithetical to country music, then, for Orville Peck to always wear a mask and to hide his non-Orville identity. However, when we study the mask a bit more in depth, and in particular the story that Orville is telling, we may see just how authentic that mask truly is.
Masks have been a part of storytelling and particularly mythic storytelling for a long time. Myths have always been performed, and in some performances, people donned masks of the figures in the stories. While wearing the mask, the performers were temporarily seen as those characters themselves, and they danced or acted out the narratives rather than simply telling them. Orville’s mask is an important part of the story he’s singing, it helps to illustrate the story through performance of look and dance as much as it is in the words he’s singing. For Orville, his whole performance - the look, the songs, the style he’s singing - is all about telling the myth of the gay cowboy.
Now, when I use the word “myth” here, I don’t mean myth in the way the word is sometimes used as a “falsehood”. The myth of the gay cowboy is not a myth because it didn’t exist - gay cowboys did exist and continue to exist. I use the word myth more in the shorthand for mythology - an important cultural narrative that means something substantially important to the identity of people who tell the story and listen to the story.
In order to tell the story of the gay cowboy, we have to first look at the way cowboy mythology has been told for at least the last hundred years or so. Cowboys and cowboy mythology came to represent the story of the hetero white American, able to subjugate cows and Natives alike. The cowboy represented the rugged man, and by nature of heter-normative culture, that ruggedness necessitated straightness. Of course, this also necessitates the cowboy to be a man.
The point of this essay is not to delve into the history vs mythology of the cowboy, but I do want to take a moment here to mention that part of why this mythology is able to exist in the way it does in popular culture is due to the lack of extensive knowledge we have on the history of the time. But we do have some history of the time, and the historical cowboy is rather different than this mythical assertation. Cowboys did fight on the edges of society, but typically not for the white-hetero American mythology. The cowboys were not always hetero-white rugged men. There were black cowboys, gay cowboys, and, of course, women cowboys.
Myths as they are present help to define and guide a culture, and the cowboy myth came to be through its need to help to present and define what the United States culture meant. The cowboy became the American version of the old English knight - a figure which fights for the freedom of the country, against those who risk the destruction of the culture they represent. In this case, the fight against Natives came to demonstrate the dominion of the white man, and the chivalry which cowboys came to be understood as having as a way that white men should be behaving throughout the country. It was a way of preserving and sharing elements of the ethos and culture of white America. It was about freedom and guns. The cowboy represented defenders of a specific type of society - one born through hard work in isolation, pushing the frontiers of where this culture belongs.
Actor Gene Autry explained once the “cowboy code” as the cowboy came to be represented in American pop culture. The cowboy code described the cowboy as someone who “never takes unfair advantage even of an enemy”, someone who is “kind to small children, to old folks, and to animals”. A cowboy is a “good worker” and is “clean about his person, and in thought, word and deed. A cowboy respects womanhood, his parents, and the laws of his country. A cowboy is a patriot.”
The figure of the cowboy came to represent a certain type of American so strongly, that John Wayne once tried to attack a native woman for speaking about racism in the cowboy myth. The urge was because the story of the cowboy was the story of white hetero-America, and that comes with a strong sense of social preservation. We still see how strong some people fight for this particular view of the United States, not caring about those whose mere presence demonstrates how faulty this social view is.
The myth of Orville Peck is derived in part from this white-hetero cowboy mythology, but it is slightly transformed. Orville sees the cowboy as someone who is on the outskirts of society, not fighting to preserve a society but rather fighting simply to survive another day. While it does rely partly on the hetero-white myth, it transforms the original consideration to make it also fit easily into the LGBT+ experience.
Mythic transformation happens often for many reasons. Alteration in mythology and story was once chalked up to the difficulty to remember elements of story orally when writing was not present. But this isn’t actually accurate. Storytellers change myths for many reasons, but most often it is because the story needs to change to fit the changes to the social order. If myths are present to help to define and communicate a society or culture, than when aspects of that society or culture changes over time, then the stories also need to change to reflect this. The old stories would no longer represent what the story needs. Sometimes, the change in the story precedes the social change - demonstrating that storytellers were leveraging their social influence in order to try and make the changes they wished to see in the culture.
We still have myths, like the cowboy myth. And because of that, we also still have mythic transformations. Orville Peck tells a different version of the cowboy myth, transforming the narrative in order to also demonstrate changes in the social experience. The cowboy is so central to the experience of the white-United States culture, that altering it to give space to South African/Canadian gay men demonstrates a longing for a shift in the culture - one open to immigration and the LGBT+ community.
Orville takes on the cowboy myth in a few different ways. The style of old-school country music also harkens to folkloric conceptions of a “true” patriotic America. His classic “look” plays directly with the visual nature of the cowboy myth. He dresses as a cowboy, from the style of shirt, to the types of jeans and boots he wears. But they always have a slight different edge to them. They’re a little more bedazzled than a John Wayne version may have been. And, of course, he’s got the long fringed mask, both covering his identity and yet also making him so unmistakably Orville Peck.
But it is not just his look that transforms the cowboy mythology. As a musician, Orville Peck tells a story. That story also touches his appearance, but it is so much more than that. His debut album Pony, released in 2019, laid out his intentions for the cowboy and country mythology. While singing with a smooth voice echoing the likes of Roy Orbison and Johnny Cash, Orville sang the pain and experience of many gay men throughout the world.
In “Dead of Night”, Orville plays with the cowboy/gay boundary by purposefully writing lyrics which could be horse riding or could be sexual.
“You wake me up, you say it’s time to ride / In the dead of night / Strange canyon road, strange look in your eyes / You shut them as we fly”
Here, Orville purposefully blurs the typically imagery of cowboys into one that can be read through different experiences of a gay relationship, with the “strange canyon road” alluding to the experience of the homosexual relationship as still somewhat new to the singer.
“Nothing Fades Like the Light”, the album closer for Pony, plays with the depression, pressure, and fear that feeds into being closeted, espcially when you see someone else who is also clearly closeted as well.
“April showers, June is the same in your eyes / Something tells me, you know why I lie”
This line, in particular, explores the understanding of seeing someone else. June being the same, referring to the experience of Pride month, while having an unspoken understanding of why lying about your sexuality is very important, and sometimes a matter of safety.
The frank authenticity of country music plays into the raw experience of the LGBT community in a way that works so beautifully together. A transformed myth that works, and reflects a different kind of society - one that is of the queer experience. Despite his mask, Orville often writes and sings of some of the most personal experiences. For Pony, it was directly about his experience as a gay man. For Bronco, his follow up album in 2022, it was a mixture of the gay experience with the suffering of depression. It’s hard to see him sing “Let Me Drown” without feeling every single piece of that song personally.
Orville works to purposefully blur the boundaries that once stood as start contrasts to one another. The movie Brokeback Mountain once attempted to blur these boundaries as well, but Orville’s lyrics bring the spirit of the gay cowboy to the country stage. And all the while, he’s doing it while fully embodying the authenticity of country music, and the transformation of the cowboy mythology.
His fringe mask helps to illustrate this point. Unlike the masked performances I discussed earlier, Orville’s mask is not a cowboy mask that he dons when he pretends to - temporarily - be the mythic cowboy figure. For Orville, the gay experience is the cowboy experience - living on the fringes of society and fighting for your mere survival. Orville’s fringed mask is not the identity of a different figure, but rather the identity of Orville Peck - the true experience of who he is as the myth of a different kind of cowboy - the myth of the gay cowboy.
John Emigh understands the mask as laying on the boundary between self and other. The presence of the mask marks a type of play that exists between self and other - a type of ambiguous play that can be both serious and fun at the same time. In theatre, as that is what Emigh was studying, the mask is a type of otherness that the actor both should overcome and also be aiming for. A good performance for an actor is full belief in the existence of the other brought to life, and so the otherness of the mask is what the actor is aiming for.
For Orville, his mask is himself, but also comes to represent the sense of the other. Orville Peck is not the man’s birth and legal name. The figure of Orville Peck is, himself, a type of identity performance, where the once punk-musician enacts the story of the gay country star. But I think Orville Peck comes to show us just how real mythic narratives and mythic figures can be. Orville does not stop when his guitar gets put down and the mask comes off. The mask of Orville is the demonstration of the life of the gay experience being recognised. It’s a story and mythic figure that exists just as much as the mythology of the hetero-white cowboy.
Masks make the mythology more convincing, sure, but it has a double function. The mask helps to illustrate how the boundaries between categories are broken down. In the literal experience of the mask, it’s the boundary between object and person. For the performance of the mask, it’s the boundary between figure being embodied and the performer.
For Orville, the mask is how the other - here meaning the mythic figure of the gay cowboy - and the performance of self - meaning the figure behind the mask putting it on to become Orville Peck - is a simultaneous performance. This is also not a performance limited to the tattooed South African Canadian, but is one that everyone listening to the music, experiencing the same experiences, and connecting to the mythology of the songs can also grab onto and perform.
Orville’s fringed mask does not hide his identity, it provides a cultural identity that everyone can see even in silhouette. In many ways, the mask of Orville Peck is one of the most authentic pieces to the mythology of Orville peck and the establishment of the myth of the gay cowboy. Like other myths, it allows for a replication of story, and an embodiment of the mythic narrative. It allows the myth to be performed and re-performed as a furtherance of the mythological narrative. It provides us with a mythic figure to tell the story about. It’s not just that gay cowboys potentially existed in the past, but it is a figure of a true contemporary gay cowboy that we can grab onto and paint our own experiences on to. We can share this new mythology, this LGBT inclusive understanding of the gay cowboy, as the mythology of our new social world.