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Everybody's Talkin' About Gay Cowboys
When Brokeback Mountain won the Golden Globe for best motion picture drama of 2005, solidifying its lead in the race for Oscar glory, Dave Germain of the Associated Press informed his readers that the Academy "has never given the best picture Oscar to a gay-themed film."
Actually, they have, and it, too, involved a cowboy of sorts.
Based on a novel by James Leo Herlihy, Midnight Cowboy won the Oscar as best picture of 1969. Though the relationship between its lead characters, seedy Rico "Ratzo" Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman) and naive aspiring gigolo Joe Buck (Jon Voight), is not obviously sexual, the film is a tour of a pre-Stonewall Big Apple when the influence of Andy Warhol and his infamous Factory was at its height, and homosexuality was inching its way out of the shadows but still a source of shame.
There’s shame, too, in the Wyoming of 1963 in which Brokeback Mountain is set. The same-sex lovers played by Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal must also hide their desires. Bottom line," Ledger’s Ennis Del Mar tells Gyllenhaal’s Jack, "we’re around each other and this thing grabs hold of us again at the wrong place, at the wrong time, and we’re dead." But Ennis and Jack share a passion fueled by genuine affection. If not for the homosexual’s non-existent status in American society at the time, one can see them settling down to enjoy what Jack calls "a good life together" with "a place of our own."
The homosexuals in Midnight Cowboy express no such hope. Even the oddball misfits played by Hoffman and Voight, who share an apartment in a condemned building, regard them with contempt and even fear.
"That’s faggot stuff," Rico says of Joe’s macho cowboy act.
"John Wayne!" Joe shouts. "Are you tryin’ to tell me he’s a fag?"
But Joe has little luck marketing his wares to women. He strikes out in bed with his one female client until she insinuates that he’s gay. The resulting encounter is fueled more by rage than desire. Joe is much more successful at attracting men.
The several homosexual encounters in Midnight Cowboy are desperate clandestine episodes. There’s some frantic groping in a movie theater balcony, and a hotel room encounter in which Joe subjects his elderly trick to a severe beating.
Like Brokeback Mountain, Midnight Cowboy subverts the image of the cowboy as the straightest of all shooters, suggesting that some of these strong, silent types were tight-lipped for fear of expressing their feel ings for each other. All those men with their phallic guns sharing a bunkhouse in a world without women certainly smacks of something other than heterosexuality.
We can only guess what the ultimate western hero, John Wayne, would think of Brokeback Mountain, but in a notorious 1971 "Playboy Interview," he called Midnight Cowboy "perverse." Wayne wasn’t alone in his aversion to the film. Years later, John Schlesinger, the film’s openly gay director, told Entertainment Weekly that his crew "were very disparaging of the film."
The first shot signaling the start of the so-called culture war may have been fired on April 7, 1970 when Midnight Cowboy was named best picture at the same Oscar ceremony at which the Duke was honored for his role as a more traditional cowboy in True Grit.
In 1969, there was little talk of Hollywood’s liberal bias, or charges that the dream factory was out of touch with the mainstream. Despite being branded with the now defunct X rating ("No one under 17 admitted"), Midnight Cowboy was embraced by mainstream filmgoers who made it one of the year’s biggest box-office hits. Ferrante and Teicher, the piano duo who defined "easy listening" in the 60s, memorably covered John Barry’s haunting instrumental theme, and Harry Nilsson’s rendition of Fred Neil’s "Everybody’s Talkin’," which provides the soundtrack for Joe Buck’s journey from Texas to New York, is now a pop standard. In the 90s, the film inspired a humorous homage on TV’s Seinfeld.
"What you can’t change, you’ve just got to ride out," Ennis says in Brokeback Mountain.
A lot has changed in the 36 years between Midnight Cowboy and Brokeback Mountain but not because gay people chose to "ride out" the attitudes that kept us marginalized. We took the reins and challe nged them. Like Rico, who pounded on the cab that nearly ran him down, and shouted, "I’m walkin’ here," the drag queens of Stonewall raised a fuss in the summer of Midnight Cowboy’s release. It was a showdown worthy of a great western, and proof that even cowboys who ride sidesaddle can be pretty tough customers.
by Brian W. Fairbanks
