Equestrian

“We know what art is! It’s paintings of horses,” Alec Baldwin’s Jack Donaghy says from his elegant top-floor office in 30 Rock. George Stubbs’s masterpiece “Whistlejacket”;  “Napoleon Crossing the Alps” on his rearing warhorse Marengo, by Jacques-Louis David; English hunt scenes. Horses are a quintessential subject in European, and especially English, art. They evoke palatial country estates passed down over the centuries and the breeches, boots and hunt colors of the men who ride for sport and leisure. Yet the equestrian aesthetic is now synonymous with Ralph Lauren, who deconstructed the WASPish polo style into something modern and American, only to have his own discerning innovations copied to an endless, commercial degree.

Is it gay to be a horse guy? According to my parents, the answer, hilariously, is “yes.” I never grew up riding in a very professional or competitive manner because, as I recently learned as an adult, my parents thought it was just too gay. Everyone knows the stereotype of a horse girl. My parents certainly did, after raising two girls in the horse-show world. Linked to social privilege, emotional intensity and a bit of naivety, the horse girl eventually shifts the obsession with her horse into her boyfriend and becomes the caricature of a high-maintenance clinger. I can see why my parents wanted to avoid that type of socialization for their only son. But the stereotype isn’t all true (my sisters turned out normal.