Luke Gilford's National Anthem is a queer cowboy love story without tragedy or trauma

Luke Gilford was born in a little Colorado mountain town to a father who was in the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association. Like many boys in the rural community he grew up in, he loved everything to do with cowboy culture, including nature, animals and wide open spaces.

"All my earliest memories are rodeos," Gilford tells Q's Tom Power in an interview. "The sunsets and adrenaline and rhinestones and hairspray and blood and dirt — all of that was just so indelible as an experience. And then as I grew older, I realized just how homophobic and misogynistic and racist that world can be."

From an early age, Gilford knew he was queer. He says he remembers being in awe of the rodeo clowns as a child, until at some point he realized that they were "mocking queer people" in their performances.

"There's this moment in time where you just realize, 'Oh, this world is against me, actually,'" he says.

It wasn't until 2016 that Gilford discovered the thriving subculture of queer rodeo — a community of authentic cowboys and cowgirls who were also gay. As a photographer, he started traveling the American southwest to document the scene. He eventually published those photos in a book, titled National Anthem.

While working on that photo project, Gilford began writing a script based on the stories he heard on the queer rodeo circuit, as well as his own personal experiences. Now, he's released his feature directorial debut of the same name.

His film National Anthem is a fictional coming-of-age story about a young construction worker named Dylan (Charlie Plummer) who accepts a job with a vibrant group of queer rodeo performers.

Gilford says audiences are conditioned to expect queer love stories to involve tragedy and trauma, so he made an intentional choice to write about resilience and beauty instead.

"I haven't seen anything that is hopeful set in that world," he tells Power. "We need this in our community."

He also wanted to show that cowboy culture and queer culture are not two disparate worlds. One of the hallmarks of the Western tradition is the freedom of wide open spaces.

"There's no literal markers of who or what to be," Gilford explains. "This really is the heart and soul of what America is supposed to be, like be yourself and let other people be themselves. So there is this kind of reclaiming of that for the people that are typically excluded from that narrative."

Gilford says now is the time to rethink the old archetype of the cowboy as being all about virility, dominance and toxic masculinity.

"I really wanted to represent a cowboy that represents some of that masculinity but also embraces the femininity within himself," he says. "I think that's more modern and that's where I hope we're headed culturally."

The full interview with Luke Gilford is available on our podcast, Q with Tom Power. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

Interview with Luke Gilford produced by Vanessa Greco.