The Queerer they are — The Harder they Fall — in Love.
Jeymes Samuel’s The Harder They Fall (2021) emerges from a broader revision of the Black Western begun by Mario Van Peebles Posse (1993), continued in Tarantino’s spaghetti inspired Django Unchained (2012), and more recently explored in Jordan Peele’s documentary High Horse: The Black Cowboy (2025). These works reimagine a Black West long marginalized within the genre. Although the frontier West contained a significant Black population of ex-slaves and freedmen and women, the dominant frontier mythology left no space for people who were not chivalrous white conquerors or barbaric Indians (1). This erasure is particularly striking given that around one quarter of nineteenth-century cowboys were Black. The latter were quietly removed to stabilise the frontier as a producer of a national White identity, but their stories survive in memoir. Two influential accounts were those of James Beckwourth and Nat Love – figures brought to life in Samuel’s film.
Samuel’s film begins with the claim - “While the events of this story are fictional…These. People. Existed.” The tone is ironic (layered irony being the film’s chief medium), for what is meant by “these people” is under scrutiny: it applies to the historical figures themselves but also to broader communities – the Black and even queer cowboys whose existence has often been treated as problematic within the genre. Samuel includes three historical cross-dressing women - Stagecoach Mary Field, Cathay Williams, and Gertrude “Treacherous” Trudy Smith – whose presence challenges conventional Western and gender codes. For unlike White gender-bending figures who can be absorbed into frontier mythology – Calamity Jane, Annie Oakley - women of colour disrupt both the patriarchy and the racial structures through which gender is constructed.
Samuel’s Stagecoach Mary is based on a formidable historical figure described as “six feet tall and a match for any two men in the Montana Territory” (2). His Mary ((Zazie Beets) is lighter skinned, more conventionally glamorous, has an affair with a transgender cowboy but is ultimately heterosexual. These changes invite criticism for deploying queer dalliance for cultural capital while simultaneously reproducing misogynoir through an ideal of black beauty measured through approximation to Whiteness. Ironically, her presence offers an example of how the film’s project of Black reclamation remains entangled with the racialised and gendered conventions it seeks to disrupt.
Mary urges her audience to “break their shackles,” just as she has done as a bisexual woman of colour.
Mary’s flamboyant saloon introduction evokes the visual grammar of blackface minstrelsy, but she controls her self-presentation. Her red dress signals the commodification of sexuality, while her face paint and top hat gesture towards a reclaimed – if highly stylized – African and slave heritage. Her shotgun symbolises an appropriation of phallic power.
Yet Mary’s power - hyper-feminine yet armed – remains structurally ambivalent. When she encounters her former lover, Nat Love, she is momentarily disarmed. He introduces a familiar Western trope - seen in Johnny Guitar (1954) and Forty Guns (1957) according to which the gunfighter must reclaim his gun if the dominant woman - played by a cross-dressing Joan Crawford and Barbara Stanwyck - is to put down hers.
Initially, however, this narrative authority resides with Cuffee (Danielle Deadwyler), a transgender character and Mary’s lover. His name is generic and used by slaveholders for enslaved men, which allows Cuffee to subsume his marginalized transgender identity within an already oppressed male identity. As Mary’s saloon doorman, his job is to confiscate men’s guns, which is what he does to Love.
The transgender cowboy assumes the phallus by confiscating men’s guns - thereby appropriating both a symbol and means of enforcing power.
In a symbolism familiar to cross-dressing characters in Westerns, he is making up for his lack of penis in his pursuit of Mary by castrating his competitor. Yet he ultimately becomes a transitional figure – even helping to orchestrate Mary’s relationship with Love before retreating into lonesome queerness.
Cuffee’s role elsewhere in the film further exposes the instability of Western codes. In one memorable scene, Samuel deconstructs the familiar “Black rider” trope - famously subverted in Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles (1974) and Django Unchained – when Cuffee is forced to wear a dress during a bank robbery in a White town.
Samuel’s plays with the “Black rider” trope to humorously highlight the intersection between race and gender.
As he rides through streets under the gaze of its White inhabitants, we know that his visible discomfort derives not from violating racial codes but from clothing that contradicts his gender identity. The soundtrack’s celebration of Black female empowerment - Fatoumata Diawara and Lauryn Hils version of “Black Woman” – furthers this ironic contrast: Cuffee is not the proudly defiant symbol of intersectional resistance the song suggests, but simply uncomfortable.
His confidence returns during the robbery when he retrieves his gun beneath the layers of crinoline, reinforcing the idea that his masculinity is structurally embedded in Western codes of violence.
On the frontier, power derives from neither Whiteness nor Masculinity but the gun.
Within the film, masculine identity is also placed under scrutiny. Samuel’s Jim Beckwourth - R. J. Cyler – forms a camp double act with the stylishly dressed Bill Pickett (Edi Gathegi) and is drawn into a rivalry with the legendary gunfighter Cherokee Bill that hinges on speed and penetration. Their constant bickering frequently slips into Freudian innuendo, transforming the conventional Western gunfight into a metaphor for sexual anxiety.
“Every time I talk of my speed a motherfucker wanna pull Cherokee Bill out they ass”
Beckwourth agrees to fight because the Devil is white and Love once saved him from a lynching. Yet his exchange with Pickett suggests other reasons that collapse the distinction between violence and and sexuality in his competition with Bill. Subliminally, the fixation on guns and asses, invokes the anal attraction between the two gunfighters. It’s the opposite of Cuffee’s action of restoring Love’s guns, which, as the cinematography and music suggest, transforms him into the object of Mary’s heterosexual desire
Beckwourth’s sexual anxiety is brought into even sharper focus by his reaction to Cuffee’s “gender reveal” scene.
Though a dated mechanism, the “gender reveal scene” is a humorous way of exhibiting Beckwourth’s sexual anxiety.
Nobody seems surprised by Cuffee’s reveal, least of all the cinema audience. However, Beckwourth’s - “That was a close shave! I thought I was falling for a fella” – is a crude joke that exposes his panicked relief at discovering Cuffee’s biological sex. It allows him to re-calibrate his earlier attraction and disavow his latent homosexual desire.
Ultimately, love itself is the film’s most unstable category. Nat Love’s relationship with his half-brother and nemesis, Rufus Buck, is central to the narrative. Both men are shaped by the murder of their mothers and consumed by revenge, leaving little room for other relationships. Love has turned his back on Mary; Buck spends his time brooding in an art-deco styled bar surrounded by blue-painted, androgynous dancing figures whose stylized presence evokes decadence and gender ambiguity. Buck is a queer Western archetype – Pike Bishop in The Wild Bunch (1969), Ben Wade in 3:10 to Yuma (1957, 2007) - the exhausted outlaw tired of killing who finds himself drawn to another man.
Their most overtly queer encounter takes place in prison, where Love is stripped and beaten before Buck.
The kinkily voyeuristic scene in the Western when the cowboy hero is stripped to the waist and beaten to prove that he is a man
Westerns repeatedly stage such scenes - intensified and racialized in this case The whip recalls the reduction of Black bodies to “flesh” under the commodification of slavery, while the camera eroticizes Love’s body as it follows the eyeline of the horrified yet erotically fascinated Mary and Buck. His whistling reminds us of Eastwood’s No Name stripped to the waist and beaten in A Fistful of Dollars (1964) - a scene which mixes brutality with toughness and kinky voyeurism. Buck’s fixation, however, is allegorical: like Napoleon, he recognises that his time is over, and he wants the love beaten out of Love so that he can kill him, thereby following the degradation of the seminal Biblical crime of Cain and Abel.
The watching Treacherous Trudy reminds us of the Western’s preoccupation with regenerative violence.
Buck’s death initially appears to prepare us for the conventional Western ending, in which the hero cleans up the town before riding into the sunset alone. Instead, the film concludes with Nat watching Mary passionately kissing Cuffe goodbye, while a Gospel choir sings “My love will never die.” Cuffee’s own story has culminated in him defeating the legendary gunfighter Cherokee Bill (who always cheats), which positions him – a Black transgender cowboy – as the unexpected arbiter of Western morality. When he is offered the role of town marshal, he accepts because “I always kinda wanted to be a deputy, sheriff, marshal person” – a phrase that suggests that wrapped up in his notion of the code is a gender identification that will allow him to remain a “person.”
The film nevertheless ultimately contains this queerness as Mary and Love ride off together. Although this ending is heteronormative, it is one constructed on greater gender equality, in which the woman is transformed from a damsel in distress who motivates the cowboy’s quest, into the cowboy’s riding partner. This equality under love (not Love) may suggest a happy ending, but Samuel’s final shot of the watching Treacherous Trudy reminds us of the gospel of violent revenge that has been the motivating principle of the film. In doing so evokes the cyclic nature of the Western violence and prepares us for the sequel.