Cowboys and Lesbians - Behind The Story

Hear from Eleanor Birdsall-Smith - writer of Cowboys and Lesbians! Learn about their inspiration, their own story, and how this story came to the stage.

Cowboys and Lesbians is a highly personal story: autobiographical in both content and tone. I joke that I didn’t have to make any of it up, except the queer happy ending. I quite literally sat, for hours, on school coaches and at break and lunch time, making up a parody American coming-of-age universe with my best friend. It is no secret that Nina and Noa are literally just the two halves of my personality.

Consequently, the play is idiosyncratic to a point where I couldn’t tell if a broader audience would even get it, let alone relate to it. I thought it was maybe the kind of thing that would only be funny if you knew me – like my school diary or a weird sex dream.

So, it has been an extremely surreal experience to meet so many audience members who tell me they feel seen by it. I genuinely did not know that there would be hundreds of people of all ages and genders who would relate to two closeted teenage girls making up a sexy cowboy film as a way to express their love for each other.

I have never been quite sure what people mean when they call something a ‘universal’ narrative - and Cowboys and Lesbians certainly isn’t one of those. It isn’t even about a universal queer experience. It is a coming out story in which internalised (and external) homophobia don’t really exist, and that, as a result, isn’t really even about Coming Out.

Cowboys less about liberating yourself from prescribed narratives about your sexuality, and more about liberating yourself from prescribed narratives about romance in general. The story plays out in a fantasy space in which all the common ‘set-backs’ to young queer people are basically wiped off the map. Ironically, though, perhaps that has made it all the more relatable.

Our trip to the Fringe, on the other hand, was a broad spectrum of queer experience. Unlike Nina and Noa, we very much did have to contend with homophobia, in various forms and intensities, while we were promoting the play. We literally had to concoct special ways of saying the title as we flyered that would make the word ‘Lesbian’ seem less threatening and hyper-sexualised (because, we realised, people were hearing it like that). After being faced with dozens of dirty looks and lines like ‘Ugh, what will they think of next’, we gave up entirely on approaching anyone over the age of 60 who wasn’t obviously queer. Some of the interactions we all had were deeply hurtful and dispiriting.

This, however, made it all the sweeter when people we would never have flyered came to see – and laugh at – the play. Seeing people who aren’t our target audience warm to the characters, and become invested in the show, has been one of the biggest joys of the whole experience.  But then, there’s also nothing like having in an entirely queer, predominantly young audience who get all the meme in-jokes and can scream with laughter at all the bits most personal to me. So it’s a win-win!

Overall, the whole experience has been a crash-course in extreme, queer self-compassion. Basically because it has made my teenage self seem like less of a weirdo to me. All the stuff I thought was strange about me – turns out even octogenarian men can relate to. I feel like lonely seventeen-year-old Billie has gained hundreds of soul-friends.