It seems unlikely that DeSantis has spent much time in the saddle. There is nothing in his official campaign biography to indicate that DeSantis rode horses during his youth in Florida, his education at Yale and Harvard, his time as a U.S. Navy judge advocate general, or as an adult resident of Florida—although his wife, Casey DeSantis, is an accomplished equestrian. Florida has a modest population of beef cattle, but most residents are more likely to spend their time walking on boardwalks, concrete, and asphalt than in the saddle. In DeSantis’s case, one wonders how his boots’ flat soles fare on the smooth marble floors that line the halls of power. Boots that are functional for working cowboys may, in other contexts, read as impractical, ostentatious, and ornamental flourishes, a reminder not of the wearer’s proximity to the traditional working-class masculinity they are attempting to embody but their distance from it.
Such an aestheticized approach to adornment is what we pointy-headed intellectuals call “fashion,” and it is precisely what renders cowboy style such a durable source of camp and queer parody. Think here of Lil Nas X in “Old Town Road,” Orville Peck, or my personal favorite, Ssion. Or, for that matter, consider the frequency with which drag kings perform in cowboy boots. Wearing such practical boots for such impractical purposes doesn’t shore up an effortlessly authentic masculinity, it demonstrates its effortless inauthenticity; how easily it can be fabricated.
A snag in the fabric makes one, in the parlance of drag performance, easier to “read”—meaning to draw attention to a flaw in another drag performer’s appearance. It doesn’t take much of a tweak to cowboy boots, as one boot expert noted, to “turn them into five-inch stilettos,” an image Trump’s internet fans have embellished further with Photoshop. Most drag performers would be embarrassed if their lifts looked so obvious. Yes, sometimes drag performers accentuate the artifice of gender and make the seams of the outfit more obvious, but often drag performers also aim for “realness,” a term meant to convey the sense that a look is flawless enough that the performer could pass as the real item outside the context of the show or ball, surely what DeSantis’s boots, lifted or not, aim to accomplish. “Realness” comes in an endless variety of stylizations and genres—from prom queen to JAG military butch—that are simultaneously highly exaggerated and yet passionately embraced. If they can’t pass, queens (and kings) read contestants by pointing out the elements of the performance that fail to be real, where the inauthenticity is most apparent: when it’s busted, not camp.