Can cowboy fever ride the next UFC?

The last event, the Team Challenge, gives the process a drama. The New York Mavericks and Florida Freedom are evenly matched, and it depends on crimbers, then number one in the world to save his father’s team from defeat.

Crimber hits his baby cheeks before climbing Whiskey Trip. When she last competed against each other a month ago, Crimber had a 91 -point score, the tip of his round.

Today there is a whiskey trip. After four and a half seconds, Crimber’s small frame is launched in the air.

He ends up gracefully, cleanly on his stand. I am relieved – the teenager has avoided concussion – but crimbers pour out of the arena. “It is not torn down from which you are afraid,” Richardson had told me. “It does a bad performance. It jumps from this bull. All coaches, all teams, see that. You could be dropped.”

Arizonas Luciano de Castro and Paulo Eduardo Rossetto from Missouri.

A few weeks Later I go to a queer line dance course in Lower Manhattan. It is one of many of its kind that attract the amount of creative directors and art world in San Francisco, Nashville, Los Angeles and New York. It is the kind of things that I had systematically avoided when the western style rose because it was too healthy and trendy.

But things change quickly. The male individualism of the cowboy no longer feels nervous by the end of January. It is just the dominant culture. Elon Musk carried a cowboy hat on his way to the White House – which is why Queer Line Dancing feels fresh and urgently underground.

In a ballroom hidden behind a restaurant, more than a hundred people in Waxahatchee and Lainey Wilson are hidden under blue chandeliers. The uniform includes the popular Cowboy boots and Gunne Sax dresses, but also stranger, ironic income against Westernwear. At least three people have adapted their adidas track shorts so that the triple stripes cancel in fringe.

Nobody drinks and nobody is on their phone, which seems really contractual. There is a small but real danger of looking stupid and awkward, but I stand in line and am quickly absorbed by this activity, which is both lonely and municipal. What do we want from the American West? Here it doesn’t seem as if we are nostalgic for the brutality of the border – only the forgotten promise of something new.

Anika Jade Levy Is the author of the upcoming novel Flat earth.

A version of this story originally appeared in April 2025 edition of GQ entitled “The Real Cowboys of New York City”