Warning! SPOILERS for The Power of the Dog
Phil Burbank (Benedict Cumberbatch). According to Phil, he and his brother and fellow ranch owner, George Burbank (Jesse Plemons), learned everything they know from Bronco Henry, who was apparently one of the greatest ranchers of all time.
The Power of the Dog later reveals that Bronco wasn’t just a mentor and best friend to Phil – Bronco was also Phil’s lover. Apart from these crucial facts from his life, not much else is revealed about the beloved cowboy. Was Bronco Henry a real person?
The Power of the Dog’s Bronco Henry is a fictionalized version of Bronco Henry Williams, a real person who worked as a ranch hand at a property owned by Thomas Savage’s maternal grandparents. There is no historical record of Williams being queer. However, his fictionalization as a queer cowboy is a key factor in why The Power of the Dog might be Netflix’s most important neo-western movie yet. In a nutshell, Bronco Henry represents the fact that for as long as there have been cowboys, there have been queer cowboys, a part of American history that’s been notably missing in the vast majority of hyper-masculine western cinema – at least until recently. While popular culture is only catching up to queer history in the wild west, historians and other academics have long known that homosexuality was common in the frontier. As noted sexologist Alfred C. Kinsey wrote in the 1948 book Sexual Behavior in the Human Male:
“...there is a fair amount of sexual among the older males in Western rural areas … Today it is found among ranchmen, cattle men, prospectors, lumbermen, and farming groups in general — among groups that are virile, physically active. These are men who have faced the rigors of nature in the wild … Such a background breeds the attitude that sex is sex, irrespective of the nature of the partner with whom the relation is had.”
That being said, as The Power of the Dog reveals, not all ranches on the frontier share the same progressive views. As a closeted rancher mourning the death of his lover, Phil Burbank hides his true nature through homophobia and abusive, performative masculinity, which led to Phil’s complex relationship Power of the Dog's the queer-coded Peter Gordon (Kodi Smit-Mhee), whom Phil mentors on the ranch just like Bronco did for Phil. Whether or not Peter was aware that he killed Phil with the anthrax-infested cowhide leather, both Bronco and Phil’s deaths represent the fall of closeted homophobia and masculine theatrics, giving way to Peter’s unapologetic queerness, confidence, and self-determination – reflective of Thomas Savage’s own experiences as a gay man who came of age in the early 1900s.
The Power of the Dog was published nearly 40 years ago. However, the way it tackles the erasure of queer history in the wild west remains highly relevant today, in an era when sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expression are openly discussed. Although Bronco Henry and the other cast of The Power of the Dog are fictional, they are based on real people from history, and their stories shine a much-needed light on the realities of being queer in the American frontier.
