Don't Fuck With Me, Fellas, Or I'll Call it a Rodeo

Cowboys are a peevish lot. I used the word "rodeo" at Madison Square Garden yesterday and you'd think I'd mentioned Kathy Ireland separates to Anna Wintour. Eyebrows rose. Lips tightened. I expected the word "Girlfriend" to be wielded like a baseball bat. This was professional bull riding, a sun-dried dude in a battered Stetson told me. Not a rodeo.

The difference? Rodeos are entertaining.

I threw on all the plaid in my closet before heading to the Versus Invitational Professional Bull Riding Championship. It started with a bang: loud music, fireworks, dancing green strobe lights. Exciting to you, maybe, but "Iron Chef" starts the same way and they eat their animals afterward. A mammoth American flag unfurled from the ceiling, along with a truckload of glitter, because even though it stands for freedom it still needs sparkle. It's like making Nelson Mandela hold a disco ball.

The announcer recited a prayer asking for God to protect the riders. Didn't make a lot of sense to me. It was like the guys on "Jackass" praying to God to protect them as they jumped into a refrigerator box with a hairdryer and a raccoon.

I went for the same reason I do anything: because I wanted to bring a cowboy home. Leave it to me to get seated next to the one other gay guy in the entire 50,000-seat arena, over-tweezed in designer clothes. "Game over!" he announced whenever a rider went airborne. "Thank you for playing!" Yeah, that's what bull riding needs: snappy comebacks. I refused to even look at him. Carrie Underwood's never going to sing about a dude who wears Prada scuffs.

I've always been suspicious of "sports" like wrestling and auto racing and bull riding. I assumed half the crowd showed up just to see blood. Here I realized I was mistaken: the entire crowd showed up to see blood. I had my fingers crossed too: I mean, the human brain can take just so much boredom before it starts hoping for the worst. Twenty minutes into a Nickelback concert, I'm pretty sure everybody's praying for the stage to collapse.

No bulls were injured, no riders were hurt. Boring, boring, boring. I expected uncontrollable mayhem and animal passion, and you see more at Bed Bath and Beyond. These bulls had obviously been irritated before, and they weren't falling for it. They'd trot maybe three feet out of the gate, then buck and spin in place. The rider would either fall off or climb off, and the bull would trot back to the gate like Puffin to his cat door, then patiently wait to be let back in. I've had scarier creatures lick me awake.

Anybody sensitive to red state hypocrisy would have exploded here. They hired a clown to entertain the crowd during the dull bits . . . and the announcer made fun of him for looking gay. Yeah, that makes sense. The cowboys are wearing motorcycle helmets and fringed, powder-blue chaps, but they're attacking the guy with makeup on. It's like hiring Liberace to play at your wedding then calling him a queer when the candlebra comes out.

"Where'd you learn to do that?" the announcer asked after the clown did a silly little dance.

"Watching cheerleaders," the clown replied.

The announcer snorted derisively. "I've watched a lot of cheerleaders and I can't do nothing like that."

Though the crowd was the rabidly patriotic type, they seemed clueless about one thing. As cowboy after cowboy was introduced with another unpronounceable name, they didn't seem to notice that bull-riding had been outsourced like every other American job. The winner gave his acceptance speech in Spanish, and everybody cheered. If the guy had run through their backyard, they'd be going for their guns right now.

For the finale, some cowboys drove around the ring tossing out Dickies "Dura-Bull" t-shirts. They looked mighty butch, but still couldn't fling them past the third row. I learned why they buy those big ole' trucks: when they hit a pole, they don't spill their beer.

The lights came up and I was desperate. Designer-Clothes Dude must have had something going for him to afford fifty-dollar tickets and eight-dollar beer. I smiled, and screwed up my courage. "That was sooo cool," I said.

He looked at my plaid shirt, plaid pants, plaid jacket. "Game over!" he announced.