Queer History Month: Midnight Cowboy

In honour of Queer History Month, MQUP would like to highlight the important books published in our Queer Film Classics series. This series aims to meet the diversity, quality, and originality of classics in the queer film 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 transmit 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 Queer 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 film. 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 queer cinema.

By shifting the perspective away from previous interpretations of Midnight Cowboy as homophobic and problematic, Towlson argues for a new interpretation of the film as a proto-queer buddy movie and a critical forerunner to films such as My Own Private Idaho and Brokeback Mountain.

Watch this clip from Midnight Cowboy (1969) which shows a disagreement between Ratso (Dustin Hoffman) and Joe (Jon Voight): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKZQEDh_KAA

View more clips here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6UG7H2dcos&list=PLZbXA4lyCtqoyTuHxzbO5PtUwIeFF2H4_

Jon Towlson is a film critic and author. He lives in Yorkshire, United Kingdom.

Excerpted from Chapter 1, Midnight Cowboy by Jon Towlson

Midnight Cowboy and John Schlesinger’s Filmography

“What attracted me to the character of the Cowboy,” Schlesinger wrote to screenwriter Jack Gelber (whose early draft script of Midnight Cowboy he rejected), “was his basic innocence and naiveté and need for love” (cited in Mann 2004, 293–4). Schlesinger’s identification with Joe Buck no doubt stemmed from his own feelings of isolation, from growing up gay in a middle-class English family in the 1930s. According to biographer William J. Mann, Schlesinger felt he could never live up to his father, an eminent pediatrician, and spent much of his childhood trying to please him. At private school, by his own ad- mission, he was “good at practically nothing,” (quoted in Mann 2004, 58) and being both Jewish and (to use Mann’s word) a “poofter,” (2004, 63) felt persecuted for being different. However, public school also enabled him to experience close relationships with other boys, and early sexual experimentation. This, according to Mann, was the only thing that made Schlesinger fit in there. Later, he would start to forge a gay identity in the British Army, as a performer in the Combined Services Entertainment Unit, staging campy shows to troops in Singapore. This, as Mann reports, was Schlesinger’s “first real exposure to a community of homosexual men” (2004, 81).

Although he would eventually find a fulfilling relationship with photographer Michael Childers in the late 1960s, this would not happen until Schlesinger was forty-one years old, following a string of romantic failures with men who were bisexual or otherwise “unavailable.” According to Mann, Schlesinger was, for much of his adult life “caught up in a professed search for love,” while at the same time “afraid to love” (2004, 127); as such, he failed to return the affections of several partners who offered it to him, while he would pursue instead those who did not return his affections. He could not, in Mann’s words “see past the image of his ‘perfect man’ that he cherished in his mind” (2004, 127). In this respect it is easy to see why Schlesinger would identify with Joe Buck of the novel, who cannot see past the image of his “perfect woman” – the rich, older mother-figure (“I want me a blonde lady to fuck, and have her take care of me all my life.”) “Certain themes attract me,” Schlesinger has said of what drew him to Midnight Cowboy, “like the difficulty of finding oneself, the difficulty of finding happiness … Even though I haven’t the same sort of fantasies and illusions as Joe Buck, I could sympathize … I know what it’s like to be lonely, and to be a failure” (quoted in Mann 2004, 268).

The notion of “connecting with the material” would become a mantra of the New Hollywood, and this is one of the ways in which we can see Midnight Cowboy as a prototype of the New Hollywood, where directors like Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Robert Altman, and Steven Spielberg would champion “personal” films over studio assignments. For Schlesinger, Midnight Cowboy was highly personal, even if he did play down its gay angle. Mann re- counts how Schlesinger’s first producer, Joseph Janni – with whom Schlesinger had made A Kind of Loving (1962), Billy Liar (1963), Darling (1965), and Far from the Madding Crowd (1967) – turned down Midnight Cowboy because he felt that its homoeroticism would stigmatize Schlesinger. Schlesinger would not concede this point to Janni. As Mann notes: “he would continue to in- corporate homosexual elements into his films for the rest of his career” (2004, 269). This he had started to do in Darling, in his sympathetic portrayal of Malcolm, the fashion photographer (played by Roland Curram). At the time this was seen as a breakthrough gay role: a non-sissy, non-faggot character who is kind and supportive to the protagonist, Diana (Julie Christie), during her modeling career, and who infects her with his joie de vivre during their trip to Italy.

It would take Schlesinger and other directors of the Free Cinema movement to essay positive gay characters (such as Murray Melvin as Geoffrey in Tony Richardson’s A Taste of Honey [1961]) in the lead up to the decriminalization of homosexuality in Britain in 1967. (It should be noted that the British New Wave was a shelter for bi and discreet gay actors and filmmakers such as Richardson, Alan Bates, Dirk Bogarde, and Lindsay Anderson.) Of course, we might now look at Melvin’s character type as “The Gay Best Friend” to the heterosexual protagonist – precursor to the modern romantic comedy staple of the non-threatening gay relegated to a secondary role in the narrative. Equally, it is a significant departure to the implicit homophobia of 1950s films like Tea and Sympathy (1956) and Suddenly Last Summer (1959) in which the latent gay male friend needs to be kept on the heterosexual straight and narrow by the female protagonist.

As Mann argues, Schlesinger would take a bold step forward for gay representation in 1971, by making the lead character of Sunday, Blood Sunday openly gay. Daniel’s story (as played by Peter Finch) is the film’s essential narrative. When asked by Gene D. Phillips in 1969 why homosexuality was be- coming commonplace on the screen, Schlesinger replied: “It comes from what’s happening all around. Everybody does more or less what he wants to these days, and no one asks anything about it. Films are a reflection of that attitude, and homosexuality is just one part of the whole scene” (1969, 62).

It is hard to situate an assignment and adaptation industry director such as Schlesinger as a queer auteur. This is especially difficult in the later stages of his career when he ceased initiating his own projects – he eventually be- came, essentially, a director-for-hire. However, Sunday Bloody Sunday remains the exception that proves the rule, a film that many consider a queer master- piece of its kind. The film’s Wikipedia entry opens with the assertion that Sunday Bloody Sunday is significant for its time in that Finch’s homosexual character “is depicted as successful and relatively well-adjusted, and not par- ticularly upset by his sexuality … a considerable departure from Schlesinger’s previous film Midnight Cowboy, which portrayed its gay characters as alienated and self-loathing, as well as other gay-themed films of the era, including The Boys in the Band (1970) and Some of My Best Friends Are … (1971).” We might see it, appearing as it did after Midnight Cowboy, as Schlesinger’s at- tempt at an earnest “coming out” film.

A number of bids have been made to identify his oeuvre along similar lines: in her account of Schlesinger as a Great Director for Senses of Cinema, Béatrice Schatzmann-von Aesch describes “a lifelong preoccupation with gender relations, particularly homosexuality, a distinctive intellectual middle-class out- look, an interest in other cultures and races, and a commitment to filmmaking as entertainment” (2003). For the purposes of arguing queer authorship one might add Schlesinger’s celebration of male nudity, of which Midnight Cowboy is full (if not explicit). Add to that a whole career of working with queer icon- divas and queer actors – Julie Christie and Shirley MacLaine prominent in the former category, Alan Bates and Dirk Bogarde most prominent in the latter. Others might consider Madame Sousatzka (1988) as a neglected queer pedagogy narrative.

Of his detractors, Russo was very clear in his condemnation of Schlesinger for being – if not a closeted gay – a closeted filmmaker. Further to his criticisms of Midnight Cowboy, Russo was furious regarding Marathon Man (1976), and what happened in the translation of novel to film: the Roy Scheider character (he plays Hoffman’s brother, who is a smuggler for the Nazis) is gay in the book, but his sexuality is muted (if not erased) in the film adaptation. At one point, while sitting in his hotel room, Scheider says to his male supervisor, “I miss you, get your ass over here,” a reference to the character’s sexuality in- conspicuous enough that audiences invariably miss it. Russo argued this was “straight washing” of gay characters, and his anger at Schlesinger as a closeted filmmaker has not gone unnoticed by many commentators.

Of course, there continued to be resistance to Schlesinger’s gay politics from the film industry, especially in the 1960s. David V. Picker at United Artists eventually championed Midnight Cowboy – but was at pains to say it was John Schlesinger that attracted him to the project rather than the material itself. Indeed, when producer Jerome Hellman took an option on the novel in 1966 and started to shop it around the studios, the response to the subject matter was ambivalent. In an article entitled “The Sixties in America,” found among clippings in John Schlesinger’s personal papers housed at The Margaret Her- rick Library (original source unknown), Gene D. Phillips writes: “Schlesinger wanted to make a film of James Leo Herlihy’s 1965 novel, but when he suggested the project to ua, he found that a reader in the story department had already submitted an unfavourable report of the book. The report said that the action of the novel ‘goes steadily downhill’ from the outset, and recommended that the company not acquire the book for filming.”

Schlesinger would later joke that a reader’s report “in the files of mgm” stated that “if the story could be cleaned up and some songs added it would be a splendid vehicle for Elvis Presley” (afi 1998, 3). However, beneath Schlesinger’s good humour about the studio’s perception of the novel, is recognition of the controversial aspects of the story. Schlesinger was highly conscious of the fact that Midnight Cowboy would be seen as a gay film; as Mann writes, “he recognized early on the homoeroticism inherent in Herlihy’s novel; he acknowledged that it was, in effect, a love story between two men. But he also saw it was far more universal than that” (2004, 269).

Schlesinger had, in fact, first approached Gore Vidal to write the screen- play, knowing, no doubt, that Vidal was gay. According to Schlesinger, Vidal said to him: “‘I know why you want me to do it. I’ve done it all before, with The City and the Pillar,’ which was a very early gay novel which Gore had written” (afi 1998, 4). At the American Film Institute Louis B. Mayer Seminar conducted with Schlesinger in 1998, moderator Frank Pierson expressed surprise at the fact that by asking Vidal to write the screenplay Schlesinger was approaching Midnight Cowboy as a gay-themed piece; Schlesinger concurred with Pierson’s comment that Midnight Cowboy is not about the “gay- ness of that world or of those characters” (1998, 4). Schlesinger remarks to Pierson that Midnight Cowboy was received by many as a gay film (and by some as anti-gay), although it was not intended as such: “I had a friend of mine who read that I was doing it and said, ‘I cannot understand why you’re doing this thing about two boring faggots in New York’ and I said, ‘Well, you’re reading it all wrong. It isn’t like that’” (1998, 17). It seems that Schlesinger was, in fact, playing off the essential ambiguity of Herlihy’s novel. It is gay but at the same time it’s not. This, of course, contributes to the apparent reluctance of Schlesinger’s film to come out of the closet, something that also marks Herlihy’s novel – albeit to a lesser extent.