Depicting masculine males in extremely perilous circumstances all started with hung cowboys. When I was a young boy, I read about how cowboys were hung by the neck during the Wild West era of United States history. This deeply violent, forbidden subject fascinated a boy of 13 or 14 without parental supervision while on visits to the public library in the days before the Internet.

During elementary school, I had been taught that my country, the United States, was civilized and peaceful. How could I reconcile these teaching with what I knew from my reading? I discovered during my reading at the public library how hangings had been held in the 19th century in the United States. Some of these executions were done by vigilantes–white men who used hangings to terrorize and control black men. Other hangings were official as a way to instill a public awareness of the legal authority of the state, which exercised the exclusive right to execute those who were wrongdoers.

Hollywood movies and television series screwed up my search for knowledge by portraying cowboy hangings in stories that celebrated and glorified the cowboys as an icon of masculinity. Of course, an adult might realize the what the movies depicted was only make-believe, but try explaining that to a young male who liked to read and who developed a vivid imagination.

Some of the historical accounts that I read mentioned how it was not unusual for a man being hanged to display an erection while on the gallows with a noose around his neck. Some accounts even reported that a man may even have an unwanted orgasm while his hands were tied behind his back as he waited to die. Surely, I thought, this could only have happened in ancient Persia or some far-off place. Not in the civilized United States!

Since I lived in the Western States, as I was growing up it was not unusual to see men in real life who would dress in traditional cowboy clothing—blue jeans with or without big buckles, leather chaps, well-worn cowboy boots, and, of course, the universally-appealing cowboy hat. I learned that I am not alone in my attraction to cowboys as icons of masculinity and the violence that cowboys endured.

You easily can find tourist attractions in our so-called civilized 21st century that make it possible for the general public to watch re-enactments of an outlaw cowboy being hung by the neck at the end of a rope.

I attended such a staged cowboy hanging outside of Las Vegas, Nevada, for example. There were tourists from as far off as Asia and as nearby as Arizona. We all watched the simulation of a cowboy being hanged that I captured in photographs. Two samples of my photographs are shown on this page. The full set of hung cowboy photographs is available for you here at MachoFace.com. 


I have also explored the subject of men on the cross in controversial illustrations.

Read more: Fear, evil, violence and sex have a linkage.

The gallery below shows many of my illustrations featuring men hung by the neck.

Gallery commands: “SL” button starts the Slideshow. “FS” button displays gallery in Full Screen mode. “i” button displays the text description.