I have mentioned before that I get the most excited about visiting countries or places where the culture and lifestyle are completely different from my own. Conversely, I get disappointed when I go somewhere expecting to see another way of life, expecting to be submerged in exotic customs and sensational apparel, only to find there’s a McDonalds on every street corner and no one really wears fantastical garments on a day-to-day basis the way I was hoping they would.

This happens to me more often than you might think, where I realize I am eager to see either the romanticized version of a culture or the way that culture might have lived a hundred years ago (but doesn’t anymore). One of my frequent revelations is to discover that only a very small (usually rural) percentage of a culture dresses and behaves in the ways I was imagining, the ways of yesteryear, and they are few and far between and certainly not the norm.

I can’t help it, I get a little crestfallen when I fly halfway around the world and there are not enough perceptible changes from the American way of life. I think it’s why I keep flying further and further away and traveling to lesser and lesser developed places. I want to see primitive cultures and tribal people that are more likely to have a piece of bone through their nose than they are a smartphone in their pocket. I want to live with people who have spears instead of credit cards and get their food from the forest rather than the supermarket. I want to ride with them not in their foreign cars but on their camels or… lightly-tamed wolves. Or better yet, on some animal I’ve never even heard of before! It would be my dream come true to discover a hidden culture of people somehow preserved and unchanged by time, living in antiquated and ancestral ways. But alas, I am frequently let down, as so much of the world has joined forces with modernity. Also, I don’t think you can ride a wolf.

I know I am not the only person who travels in hopes of experiencing a romanticized and bygone culture, and I know this because I live in one of those places that very regularly leaves visitors disappointed: I live in Dallas.

Throughout my life, both at home and abroad, people have confessed to me that their visit to Dallas was not at all what they were expecting. Where were all the horses? Where were all the cowboys? The cattle, the ranches, the prairies? I’ll be honest, there was a time when this used to piss me off to no end. I would get irrationally irritated at how ignorant these people were, how twisted and unrealistic their expectations were of my beloved hometown. “They think we are all red-necked cowboy hicks!” I’d fume. “They think we walk around in chaps, ride our horses to work, and lasso up any lady folk that catches our eye along the way! It’s preposterous!”

However, it didn’t take long for me to see the error of my ways. Only a very small amount of international travel is necessary to realize that these people are not ignorant or even at fault for believing these things, there is a very simple explanation for why people seem to be confused about Dallas the world over: They have been fed a steady diet of misinformation. The way Dallas is portrayed on the world stage, in both tourism campaigns and in filmed entertainment, is nothing short of absurd.

I want to quickly interject— just so there’s no misunderstanding here— if I came all the way from another country to visit Dallas, primarily because I wanted to see tons of stereotypical Country & Western cowboy stuff, like I’d seen in the movies, I would be woefully disappointed, too. Our cowboy culture has been strategically exploited and sensationalized overseas, when really, as we all know, it is much less common and a more localized phenomenon. And it mainly occurs outside of the downtown area, in mostly rural locations. Being aware of this discrepancy between what's promoted in tourist advertisements, and what a destination is actually like in reality, has helped so much in tempering my expectations of other cultures. It is logical that to find the cool, old-fashioned stuff, you always have to get out of the city or metropolitan areas.

So why do people think they are going to come to Dallas proper and be inundated with cowboys? Why do they think in the ninth largest city in the entire United States and in a metroplex that is home to twenty three Fortune 500 companies, we’d all be riding our horses to school and work? I blame both Hollywood and the tourism industry for this. I also heavily blame our association with Fort Worth.

Most days, my work takes me all over Dallas in a fairly wide berth, but I might go an entire week without ever seeing someone dressed like a cowboy. People in other countries always find this very hard to believe, so when I am traveling abroad, I always try to pay very close attention to any and all depictions of Dallas that happen to come my way. It turns out, people aren’t complete idiots after all. They are just responding to what they are being sold. I want to unequivocally say, that based on everything I have seen of how Dallas is presented to the world at large, in both tourism advertisements and in entertainment, I, too, would be very, very, confused about Dallas.

I would be confused about when, where, and with what frequency I could expect to encounter a cowboy, a Texas long horned steer, or people riding horses. I would be a little mixed up about how many people live on cattle ranches and when it is appropriate to wear a bandanna, but I would be especially confused about what exactly exists in Dallas, and what exists in Fort Worth. The long running (and then briefly rebooted) television show “Dallas” certainly doesn’t help, as the writers and producers seem to take such wild artistic liberties with the truth that my beloved city of Dallas is all but unrecognizable to me, and I live here!

Growing up, I distinctly remember a scene from the original "Dallas" television series where they went went outside on their "Texas ranch" and had a lovely conversation against the beautiful backdrop of our huge, majestic, Texas mountains.

Hmm.

It turns out, people the world over are just like me, they don’t want to travel to a faraway place only to see more of the same, more of what they could have seen back home. Cowboys are distinctive, photogenic, and interesting, so they get played up in both entertainment and tourism advertising. I myself have fallen under this spell, and admit that even though cowboys are not a part of my daily life, they are featured heavily in my PHOTOGRAPHY OF AMERICA. Recognizing all of this gives me pause, and often makes me wonder: when the roles are reversed and I am in another country, how much of what I am being shown is authentic, and how much of it is them feeding me what they know I want to see? The same way we do in Dallas with our cowboys? How much of what I’m being shown is a romanticized version of their culture, a sensationalized version of reality put on show SOLEY FOR MY BENEFIT as a tourist?

My best friend used to bartend in downtown Dallas, and after seeing some of the promotional materials about Dallas that are presented overseas, I totally believe her when she tells me that people from the Middle East, Europe, and many other countries would show up to her bar dressed like they were about to put on a stage production of "OKLAHOMA!" It’s not their fault, we did this to them, this is what we are telling and showing them they should wear for a night out on the town in Big D!

A warning, tourists, before you arrive here with a suitcase full of western wear, you might want to practice wearing this stuff first before you debut it in Dallas. Cowboy attire is trickier than it looks (especially when mixed with copious amounts of drugs and alcohol...)

On a trip to visit a friend in Austin, my chum had planned us a night of pub crawling and live music venues, and I decided to go out wearing a hip rockabilly look for the evening.

I don’t know if you realize this, I sure didn’t, but the soles of cowboy boots are slick and slippery and snazzy like a tap-dancing shoe, plus, they have a big chunky high heel on the back. Neither one of these things is something I’m used to wearing, so I tripped on an uneven sidewalk and sprang my ankle almost immediately. It eventually swelled up so much that I had to remove the boot completely and take a taxicab home while it was still daylight out.

Plus, while cowboy hats served a very real purpose out on the western frontier, they are quite impractical for a night out on the town. Once you commit to wearing a cowboy hat for the evening, you better pray you don’t encounter any situations or establishments that require you to suddenly take it off, because you are going to look atrocious. It’s like wearing a hotbox on your head, turning everything underneath it into a sweaty, swampy mess. At dinner, everyone else (who didn’t decide to idiotically wear a cowboy hat) will still look dapper and great, but when shown to your table and forced to take off your hat, for politeness’s sake, you will look like you just ran a marathon. You will also probably have a livid red stripe across your forehead where the hat band dug into your skin, but maybe no one will notice. They’ll be too distracted by your matted wet hair and the rivulets of sweat that are dripping down your face and neck.

Even if you are never confronted with a situation where you absolutely have to take it off, you will probably find yourself desperately wanting to take your hat off anyways. Wearing a cowboy hat is a bit of a flamboyant fashion statement in all but a very few, very specific, situations. It always feels like a costume to me, and that’s because, in my case, it very much is. And unless you actually work outside on a ranch, it probably will be for you, too.

People from other countries, hear this: don’t be surprised if you wear your cowboy out on the town in Dallas, only to discover you don’t see another person all evening who is also wearing one. And trust me, if you top off your outfit with chaps, you WILL BE THE ONLY ONE WEARING CHAPS. This would be like me showing up to a Hawaiian boardroom meeting dressed in a grass hula skirt and no shirt. Wrong time, wrong place.

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A Digression:

I got the distinct impression it was because he had just bought a pair in preparation for his upcoming trip to Texas, but I had a long conversation with a man in ICELAND who seemed utterly deflated when I told him I could not think of a single place in all of modern-day Texas where it would be appropriate for him to wear leather chaps. He suggested the Mesquite Rodeo, that he'd clearly read about online, but I explained to him that chaps would only be fitting attire if he was scheduled to perform in the rodeo, not simply attend one. That wasn’t what he wanted to hear. After thinking about it a bit more, I of course thought of one place where his leather chaps would be appreciated— the gay bars— but I knew from talking with this man that a gay leather bar was not where he was hoping to go in his chaps. So I told him, sure, wear your chaps to the rodeo. What's the worst that could happen?

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Conversely, just like I mentioned at the beginning, about often having to seek out very rural areas in other countries in order to find the cultural equivalent of a cowboy (someone wearing heritage garments, living a more traditional lifestyle, and participating in the kind of activities that are wonderfully stereotypical and a joy to photograph) it is very possible for you to have someone curate a cowboy-centric itinerary for you here in Dallas. You will likely go to more rural areas, in which case, yes, you might be taken to establishments where everyone in the entire bar has on a cowboy hat.

Or maybe you'll spend a day on a dude ranch surrounded by cattle and horses and real-life cowboys. You could take in a rodeo show and see performers who have spent their entire lives learning to ride wild horses and tame bucking broncos. (Again, not to be confused with the Dallas gay bar The Roundup— where you won't find any cows but certainly a lot of boys …) However, showing up to Dallas dressed in full cowboy regalia and then just going out to dinner in downtown or shopping at the local mall… you might feel silly. You’ll definitely feel sweaty.

Keeping the cowboy parallel firmly in my mind, I have to assume that many of the experiences I have had overseas might be the foreign equivalent of a Texas dude ranch: a somewhat contrived melting pot of past and present cultures. I’m not saying that there aren’t real Bedouin tribes in the WADI RUM or Berbers in the SAHARA who don’t currently live in the way I was shown, I’m just saying that my experiences in both of those deserts was probably more akin to a cowboy retreat or a dude ranch here in Texas than to any approximation of real life.

Are there really cowboys in Dallas who sit around a campfire each night cooking beans in a cast iron skillet while singing and strumming their guitars? Probably, just like I’m sure there are really Berbers who nightly roast a whole pig in the ground while strumming away at their gimbris.

All of this is really happening in the world, I just think the bigger question becomes— yes, but how many of them are doing this without a tour group or camera crew present? The answer is, probably much, much, less than you have been lead to believe.

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Two important things to be aware of about the photos featured above: not only did I photograph this cowboy in rural Wyoming, not Texas, he is also an actor on a film set dressed in period attire. However, in modern times and much closer to home, here is my uncle on his farm, just outside of Dallas, Texas.

This is how he really dresses, at home on his ranch, where there are cows, horses, and plenty of cattle. Some nights, hand to God, I think he might even cook beans in a cast iron skillet over an open fire. Whether or not he sings and plays the guitar while cooking is unknown to me.

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Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m running late. I need to change into my cowboy boots, chaps and hat, and get on my horse, I have a business meeting in Fort Worth I need to attend.