Tails in the West

With Tails in the West, habu’s series of gay male “Tails” anthologies moves to the area encompassing what is thought of as the Old West of the United States. Although the traditional American West is broader than this, the twenty-one stories in this collection are set in a north-to-south band of U.S. states stretching down from Idaho and Wyoming (with an eastern jaunt into Nebraska), down through Utah and Colorado (with an eastern jaunt into Kansas), to Nevada, Arizona, and New Mexico. The characters in these stories predominantly are cowboys, or the modern equivalent, and the themes center on male-male relationships. Although the stories are presented in alphabetical order by title, they fall into two categories: The Old West of the traditional cowboy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the West of the modern day.

A theme running through many of the stories is the concept of the male brothel, often set at a ranch or a town saloon. The reader will find both Old West and current West stories including these settings. These arise from a phenomenon of the Old West that has continued to today. There weren’t many women in the Old West, particularly on the range where cowboys worked. It was a lonely life, though, and one where fit and sexually prime men found only other men around to satisfy their natural needs. Therefore the homosexual lifestyle, although always kept below the surface, was not unknown. Male brothel ranches can be found throughout this region even today if one knows where to look for them. Habu has conjured up some to entertain you with in his stories.