Bucking in the blood: For these, gay rodeo is an all-around lifestyle

“It’s not if you get hurt, it’s when, and how bad. My brothers call me their crazy sister, and my mother blames me for every gray hair on her head.”

Still, Duran said, her family supports her and comes to the rodeos to cheer her along. The fear of injury, be it the pain or sheer mortal terror under the hooves of a 2,000-pound animal, is lost in the rush: “In some of the dangerous situations – I’ve been hung up on a bull – you just feel adrenaline. There are things you learn to do to prevent injury.”

That’s not to say there’s no downside to injury – it comes with a bill. “If you get hurt and can’t compete anymore, you end up in the hole” financially, Duran said. There’s a fee to compete in each event, in addition to travel and lodging costs and medical expenses, and very few gay rodeo enthusiasts win often enough to break even.

“Most of the time you’re lucky to even get your entry fees back,” said John Beck, 63, of Broomfield, who has been involved in the gay rodeo since its conception in the early 1980s and has been riding horses all his life.

“Everybody had a second job,” said Beck, who once took part in as many as 23 to 24 gay rodeos in a year – a time when gay scenes in American cities were abuzz with interest in the “urban cowboy” and there were more gay rodeos to go around. Colorado was then host to three each year, in Denver and Colorado Springs plus the International Gay Rodeo Association’s main rodeo, sometimes held at the National Western Complex. Beck said he will likely participate in 15 rodeos this year – a few mainstream “straight” rodeos included.

Those costs add up, and for years, Beck, who now owns his own business dealing doors and windows, spent “70 percent” of his life touring rodeos while he supported himself working at Bally Health Clubs full-time.

“I had some sponsors throughout the year – some of the bars would kick in a couple hundred dollars,” Beck said.

Denver’s gay bars that once frequently sponsored gay rodeo competitors – namely, Charlie’s and The Wrangler – were some help. But most committed cowgirls and cowboys on the gay rodeo circuit often put in long hours during the work week to afford each weekend trip on the rodeo circuit. Hauling your own horse, if you did that, could amount to $1,500 per rodeo when added to entry fees, gay rodeo veterans say.

Yet for Beck, there was no other way to live. “I’m off the ranch in Nebraska,” Beck said of his upbringing in Central City, “dead center in the middle of the state. “When I moved to Denver, the ranch stayed with me.”

Beck left his hometown and moved into an apartment in Aurora, and “Without the horses,” Beck said, “I couldn’t take it very long. After around eight or nine months I called my dad and told him to bring me a horse.”

Beck found about the gay rodeo at Charlie’s in 1981 – the year Denver’s famous cowboy gay bar was founded – when the Colorado’s Rocky Mountain Regional Rodeo was still just a thought. “The first one, to my knowledge, was just a horse show,” Beck said. There were already gay rodeos held annually in Reno, where the newly-founded Colorado Gay Rodeo Association members would trek for the annual big event.