Re-Examining the Famous Gay Subtext of ‘Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid’ 50 Years Later

It’s no secret that queer lovers of classic cinema strive to see ourselves in the narratives. Louis was in love with Rick in Casablanca, Eve Harrington was in love with Margot in All About Eve, Joe and Jerry were genderfluid in Some Like It Hot… the list goes on. Whether it’s intentional or not—and statistically speaking, it sometimes is, given that gay people have always existed—homoerotic subtext is sometimes the only way for us to find representation, especially among the classics.

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, which turns 50 today, has always been an easy target. It’s perhaps one of the most celebrated westerns and one of the most celebrated buddy pictures—two genres that are, as a generally agreed upon rule, pretty homoerotic. (See: Brokeback Mountain.) In the western, men—and it’s almost always men—are removed from society, above its rules, secluded, and often wearing tight blue jeans. In the buddy picture, men—and it’s almost always men—forge deeper emotional connections with each other than they ever do with their wives or girlfriends. And, because this is Hollywood, these men are almost always devastatingly beautiful. But on my rewatch of the film in 2019, I came away with the distinct impression one point has been missing from this conversation: The subtext in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is not so much gay—or perhaps, it’s better to say, not just gay—but bisexual and polyamorous.

Butch Cassidy and Harry the “Sundance Kid” Longabaugh are two affable, sharp-shooting outlaws, played by Paul Newman and Robert Redford at their most attractive and charming. We don’t know how long Butch and Sundance have been together, but we assume it’s all their lives. (There is an official origin story in the poorly-reviewed prequel, Butch and Sundance: The Early Days, but most choose to overlook it.) They work together, rob trains together, drink together, an, eventually, die together. They bicker like a married couple, but never once does either suggest they go their separate ways. They are, in a sense, life partners. It’s no surprise, then, that audiences have been musing for decades as to whether there was ever anything romantic going on between them. Yet despite its status as a quintessential buddy film, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, there is a woman in the lives of these two men: Etta Place.

Played by Katherine Ross, who two years earlier was nominated for an Oscar for The Graduate, Etta is not just some insignificant, disposable girlfriend. She is, at least briefly, part of the team. Screenwriter William Goldman and director George Roy Hill take pains to establish her relationship with both men. She’s Sundance’s girlfriend, yes, but she has an equally meaningful connection with Butch, as we see in the vaudeville-esque bicycle sequence set to “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head” (written by Hal David and Burt Bacharach for the film, who won an Oscar for it). At one point, Etta even asks Butch, “Do you ever wonder if I’d met you first if we’d be the ones to get involved?”

The heteronormative term for this would be “love triangle,” I suppose. But Butch and Etta’s closeness doesn’t bother Sundance one bit, nor do they seem to think it might. When he catches the two of them in an embrace, neither move away from each other. “What are you doing?” he asks. “Stealing your woman,” Butch replies. “Take her,” says Sundance, turning away. Later, right before the three of them abscond to Bolivia, a five-minute-long “good times” montage shows the three of taking carriage rides, rowing boats in Central Park, and taking family portraits, often with Etta in Butch and Sundance’s mutual embrace. Once in Bolivia, they live in a house with walls so thin that Sundance and Etta easily converse with Butch while in their separate bedrooms. It’s not a love triangle—it’s a threesome, and it’s a threesome that’s so blatantly obvious I can’t imagine it was unintentional on Goldman’s part.

Though there’s still a long way to go, gay and lesbian relationships becoming more and more commonplace in film and TV. Polyamory, however, is still fairly taboo. TV shows are slowly warming to the idea that open relationships could be used as more than just a punchline, thanks to shows like House of Cards and The Magicians. But the only recent film examples that stand out to me are Alfonso Cuarón’s extremely sexual Y Tu Mamá También, and Angela Robinson’s underappreciated 2017 historical romance, Professor Marston and the Wonder Women, the latter of which chronicles the creator of Wonder Woman and the two women he loved. That Butch Cassidy depicted a polyamorous relationship fifty years ago—and one whose dynamic is decidedly less sexually appealing to straight men—is pretty astonishing.

Why then, have the queer readings of Butch Cassidy focused pretty exclusively on Butch and Sundance? Probably because there’s an unfortunate tendency in the modern culture of shipping—that is, the act of wishing two characters were in a relationship, often driven by homoerotic subtext—to disregard bisexuality. Sometimes that’s due to understandable suspicion of “straight-washing,” via the introduction of an underdeveloped female character who serves no purpose outside of being a warm and definitely female body for an otherwise queer male character to sleep with.

Etta certainly could have used more development—a script flaw Goldman seems to have been aware of, given her “I’ll sew your socks and be an obedient girlfriend” speech—but her relationship to both men is too significant to be dismissed. At the same time, those relationships hardly take away from the homoerotic subtext of the movie. As Andy Samberg and Justin Timberlake cheekily pointed out, it actually is gay if it’s in a threeway. Well, it’s bisexual anyhow. The line between sexual and emotional relationships is a fine one, and two men and a woman living in a tiny house under one roof is a very blurry line at best.

After it becomes clear Butch and Sundance will never escape the law, Etta, unwilling to watch the men she loves die, returns to America. The two outlaws—in denial about their fate right up into the very end—let her go. Thus, their happy life of polyamorous domesticity comes to a close, as does the film, very soon after she leaves. But the legacy of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid lives on, and after 50 years, I think it’s high time we embrace this film for the bisexual, polyamorous love fest that it truly is.

Where to watch Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid