Why the first gay Western came from a straight Easterner more interested in ideas than romance

The noble failure of Rex Stout’s Forest Fire

The first-edition cover of the rare 1933 novel “Forest Fire” (via John Atkinson books)

Sixty years before “Brokeback Mountain,” a New York intellectual tried to write the first gay western novel. He failed spectacularly — but not in the way you’d expect.

When I first heard about the 1933 book Forest Fire, I decided I had to read it. I was motivated mainly by some other exploits of its author, Rex Stout (more on that later). But I discovered that others sought the book for the passions that his protagonist wrestled with.

Forest Fire is incredibly hard to find today. It’s not one of the 40 million volumes that Google has digitized. When I first looked seven or eight years ago, the only used copy available on amazon.com cost $895, plus $3.99 shipping and handling. (More recently the price at another website had gone down to $250, but S&H was up to $7.50). The nearest library copy was 643 miles away, restricted to in-library use only. I could read about the book: its issue by a major publisher and reviews in leading outlets. But at the height of the Depression, it had sold disastrously, and the unsold copies were presumably destroyed.

Finally, via interlibrary loan, I obtained a battered copy from a small college in west Texas. And when I read it, I found Forest Fire a fascinating historical artifact. Its setting on Montana’s Middle Fork of the Flathead River provides a rich account of an incredibly remote valley before it was set aside as an official wilderness area. Its characters don’t fondle six-guns or fetishize honor; instead the action centers around an unusual love triangle.

Stan Durham, a married 44-year-old forest ranger, is revered for his professional competence, especially in fighting forest fires. Handsome Harry Fallen, a glib 19-year-old college student who’s hard for anyone to take seriously, is working as a summer fire lookout. And Dot Fuller, a single 29-year-old “dudine” (tourist) from Chicago, has come to the mountains to vary the drab routine of her middle-class vacations.

What’s unusual about the love triangle is that both Stan and Dot fall for Harry. Stout wrote the book because he wanted to explore the idea of homosexuality, making Forest Fire an early gay novel. Which, given the setting, makes it arguably the first gay western.

“The Zane Grey public… will be sorely disappointed,” said a New York Times review. But it didn’t explicitly discuss Stan’s “abnormality” — after all, nobody talked about this stuff back then. Instead, the reviewer’s point was that despite the setting in the wilds of Montana, this wasn’t an entertaining fable of gunplay. It was more interested in ideas.

Stan’s crisis comes when he starts feeling an emotional connection to his young employee Harry. There’s no homoeroticism. Instead there’s a great deal of interior monologue, as Stan logically works through his confusion. Stan wonders if this is a form of friendship. Then he wonders if he’s substituting Harry for his son. “Or maybe… but no, not for him. He was no cross-eyed bull. He shied away from that, but pulled himself back to it again, for it was a respectable conjecture and he was scrutinizing.”

Rex Stout was to all appearances straight. Maybe that’s why he didn’t depict any sexuality in his novel of sexuality — thus turning it into a novel of overthinking. (It must be said, however, that overthinking was also a problem with the straight characters in his previous novels.)

Stout himself was an overthinker, an intensely logical man who worked through every sentence of a book in his head before writing it down, such that he never edited his written work. One of the ideas that Stout wanted to explore in the novel was the potential connection between homosexuality and misogyny. He claimed to find misogyny baffling, and indeed to all appearances he liked and respected women. To try to understand this strange condition, he’d written previous novels in which the main character was a misogynist. Now he wanted to try one where that man was also gay.

If this strikes you as a strange reason to write a novel, I’d like to suggest that it’s an even worse reason to read one. I called the book a fascinating historical artifact, but it’s not a good novel. Stout himself may have also reached that conclusion. Forest Fire was his last novel of ideas. Maybe he realized that literary novels were a bad form for such explorations — he would later downplay this entire phase of his career.

Nevertheless, I remain fascinated by Forest Fire for what it says about that moment in the history of the West, or at least Eastern perceptions of the West. What does it mean that the most prominent early attempt at a gay Western came from a man who was neither gay nor Western? What does that tell us about whose stories get told?

Forest Fire does portray everyday rural Western life as far more rewardingly complicated than Zane Grey’s fables would lead us to expect. Meet the real-life chain-smoking firefighters in 1930s Montana! And dudines! And lonely middle-aged men who sink too much of their worth into their professional competence! And oh yes hints of diverse approaches to sexuality. Forest Fire’s weaknesses were in its storytelling, not in its West.

In Stories from Montana’s Enduring Frontier, I wrote about the ways that Montana emerged from its myth-shrouded past, and Forest Fire rekindles my interest in those conflicts. How did the myths inspire or constrict the choices people made? When was it worthwhile to replicate Eastern society, and when was it better to print the legend?

In fact, as flawed as Forest Fire is, simply saying that it was an early, failed attempt at a gay Western sells it short. Beneath the ideas and the melodrama, Stout was articulating a bold critique of emerging Western culture. Next week: why he may have actually been correct.

End notes:

• This is part 1 of a trilogy. Part 2: “The Forest Fire at the end of Western individualism.” Part 3: “The detective novel as failed Western.” When I say that I’ll talk more later about Rex Stout’s other exploits, I mean that that’s the story of Part 3. Stay tuned!

• By “trilogy,” I mean three linked essays, like the wilderness solitude trilogy from a year ago. I aspire to great works of art, like The Naked Gun, that come in trilogies.

• This essay contains affiliate links for Bookshop.org, an online bookseller that supports local bookstores. As an affiliate of Bookshop, I earn a small commission, at no cost to you, when you click through and make a purchase there. But I’m just as happy if you support your local independent bookseller!

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