I’m as embarrassed as anyone to admit Gentlemen’s Choice was inspired by a one-off comment I heard on a podcast about horse shows, but it’s the truth. On the subject of the current market landscape, a tenured and highly respected trainer in the horse industry said something that stuck with me. He confessed that he felt like an old cowboy like him couldn’t sell horses in today’s world. He went on the explain that back in his day 20 or 30 years ago, people in the market would come to him and he would talk his shit and sell them what he had in the barn. That was the way all the old guys did it, but social media completely changed that. Nowadays, people buy horses on Facebook and he saw that as a woman’s game that he had no interest in.

Obviously it wasn’t the most progressive statement I’d ever heard, but I did think it was an interesting notion. The idea that the art of selling a product was an inherently gendered process. It’s true. There is a specific, cowboy-esque performance of masculinity involved in salesmanship. His observation that this established behavior had been disrupted by modern forms of communication was also very interesting. It implied that this performance followed a sort of script that required the salesmen to have a monopoly on the conversation and will not adapt to different conditions.

With these ideas swirling around in my head — I wrote Gentlemen’s Choice as an interrogation of this specific vein of masculinity. Gordon is a man who desperately wants to embody that cowboy salesman persona, but doesn’t quite have the swagger to really sell it. The Gentleman is a strange enigma of a man who walks into Gordon’s office with the sole purpose of disruption. The two face off in a battle of wills. Who really has control? First one to question it, loses.