gayest cowboy movie ever made? Most experts offer up "Red River"

"Stephan Cohan's book Masked Men discusses the definition of masculinity in the movies, especially those movies which are so stridently heterosexual that they raise doubt about what is really going on. Cohan argues that the Howard Hawks western Red River is a gay love story between John Wayne and Montgomery Clift. Clift later starred in films like Suddenly Last Summer in which his gay sexuality was actually a thematic element.

If Red River is a gay love story, how about Sands of Iwo Jima? In both of these films, women come on to John Wayne and he pushes them away. In Wayne's personal life he was not the swaggering macho man he presented himself to be. Dominated by his mother as a child, he married dominating women as an adult. He even claimed to be the victim of spousal abuse.

Is is possible that the "chemistry" between openly gay Montgomery Clift and macho man John Wayne reflects post-war ambivalence about alternative sexuality? Red River ends with an embrace between John Wayne and Montgomery Clift, while Joanne Dru, the female whom they have both spurned, scolds them. This is a departure from the book the film is based on. In the book, Clift gets the girl when Wayne dies. In the movie, the boys get each other."
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=105x280580

So what's the gayest cowboy movie ever made? Most experts offer up "Red River" (1948) and the strange, passionate love-hate thing between John Wayne and Montgomery Clift. It's now known that Clift was gay, and that colors the way in which his twisted dance with the Duke is seen. On the evidence of the film itself, it probably didn't occur to many people in 1948, which for all its intensity, feels more Oedipal than homosexual. It's a drama of generational usurpation as second-in-command Clift leads a coup against the insane Wayne; the latter recovers his wits but can't be shed of his anger, and he tracks the boy down and the two have an epic punch-out.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/23/AR2005122300323.html