Midnight cowboy gay
Queer History Month: Midnight Cowboy
In honour of Queer History Month, MQUP would prefer to highlight the vital books published in our Queer Film Classics series. This series aims to meet the diversity, quality, and originality of classics in the queer movie canon, broadly conceived, with equally compelling writing and critical insight. Books in the series have much to teach us, not only about the art of film but about the queer ways in which films can transfer our meanings, our stories, and our dreams.
Each week this month, we will be sharing a blog post featuring an excerpt from a title in the QFC series, as well as clips from the movie in question.
Receive 30% off all Homosexual Film Classics titles using the code MQQF at check-out.
Midnight Cowboy– the story of a small-town stud’s attempt to make it big as a hustler on the streets of 1960s New York – is an indisputably iconic movie. Though recognized in terms of its early adoption of Nouvelle Vague cinematography and editing techniques, and renowned for an Oscar win in spite of controversy over its X-rating, Midnight Cowboy has yet to be understood as a classic of homosexual cinema.
By shifting the perspectiv
In my head, John Schlesinger’s 1969 classic Midnight Cowboy is intertwined with Miloš Forman’s 1979 adaptation of Hair for some reason, to such an extent that I look after to mix up Jon Voight and John Savage. I have no convincing explanation why this is the case, but I suspect it may be that I watched at least the beginning of Midnight Cowboy at an age when I was too new to really obtain in what the film was about, so all that stuck with me was a adolescent hick from one of the more rural states taking a bus sit on to New York to begin a new life and, once there, falling in with a very different crowd than what he was previously used to. Perhaps Harry Nilsson’s melancholy beat “Everybody’s Talkin'”, playing over the Greyhound ride Joe Buck (played by Voight) takes to the Big Apple, added to that mostly inaccurate memory.
Those similarities are there, but they’re entirely superficial. Where Hair‘s Claude Hooper Bukowski goes to New York City after existence drafted into the Army to proceed to Vietnam, Joe Buck has drafted himself into a very different considerate of service: he wants to place his carnal talents, and his cowboy outfit, to fine use to m
Question about Midnight Cowboy - was Ratso Rizzo supposed to be gay?
Small_Hen1
Just saw Midnight Cowboy for the first time, and I was actually caught off guard by how moving I found it. It helps that I’m not bothered by movies which are dated, and that I adore character studies, buddy movies, and films with gay themes (if I’d established what the feature was about, I’d have seen it sooner). But anyway, back to my question.
For about 90% of the so called homosexual subtext between Rizzo and Joe, I’d speak it’s there to illustrate the signal that the friendship between the two of them transcends all the bare, humiliating, or violent sexual experiences Joe has had (or the absent experiences of Rizzo). Even the scene where Rizzo presses longingly against Joe while Joe fixes his hair seems to be more about these two men’s desperate need for meaningful contact with another person. But one scene did have me questioning whether I was supposed to observe more there, and that was the scene where Rizzo fantasizes about Florida.
It’s a weird scene all around, with the all the zany music and fast motion, but one thing about it did trap my attention. Fantasy Joe never wears a shirt.
These efforts are revealed by the way in which the award-winning screen adaptation made significant changes from the gritty 1965 novel by James Leo Herlihy on which it was based. The basic outline of the movie is true to the plot of the novel: the arrival of a young Texas hustler in New York City; his failure to make it with women and his turn to soliciting gay men; and his relationship with “Ratso” Rizzo, a crippled, smalltime grifter. But much of the film’s back story, told by means of flashbacks, is significantly different from the book. Herlihy’s depiction of Joe, the “Cowboy” in the title, is considerably more complex and elaborated in the book than in the movie version. In the novel, Joe is ambiguous about his sexuality from the outset. His childhood is marred by an unstable mother who abandons him, leaving him to live with his grandmother. Although he has sex with women, he’s also attracted to men. In one incident, while visiting a whorehouse, he’s raped by two men: the gay confidant who accompanied him and the son of the madam. This proves to be a turning point for Joe, who thereafter has sex with both men and women.
What screenwriter Waldo Salt did in the screen convert