Joe buck is gay

Movies have been often characterized as innovative, ground-breaking, trend-setting or wildly original, and these terms can be overused, but I cannot emphasize enough what a bold and courageous experiment in cinema was Midnight Cowboy. It is hard to comprehend that it has been 58 years since this Oscar-winning film was released, but May of this year will mark that milestone.

Having only seen the butchered and watered-down TV version years ago, I was almost moved to tears at the excellence of this work of art by John Schlesinger.

He's clearly got some kind of lung disease and he's fading rapidly as winter comes on. After his eviction and a failed attempt to hustle a kid in a theater, he hit rock bottom and re-encountered Ratso, who also fleeced him by diverting him to a Homosexual Religious Fanatic. Joining the channel at his mid-20s, Joe was known as the youngest man to announce the games.

That’s faggot stuff! We went to movies regularly. And if we base, you know, a movement on an illness, you know, that's not doing a service for anybody. To listen to the whole interview, use the audio player below. And, it is best proved by the life scenario of Joe. Well, Joe is timely speculated as gay. And he's doing that in "Midnight Cowboy" as well.

Also, gay liberation is moving in, you know, "Midnight Cowboy" comes out in May 1969 and one month later just happens to be the Stonewall riots. And again, it speaks to the New York character of Ratso. Schlesinger denied it. And I mentioned earlier Dustin Hoffman had come out of nowhere to become a big star thanks to "The Graduate," which was very much a generation gap movie.

This supposedly Pimp Manager, played brilliantly by John McGiver was the one that he needed to connect him to the older ladies in need of his servicing. And part of that is the relationship between these two guys and the wonderful acting of Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman, part of it's the story and the and the music, I mean, you can't ever leave out Harry Nilsson and "Everybody's Talkin’" about something that drew audiences in there as well.

There's a scene of a baptism, you know, and John Schlesinger's people got about 40 town residents to come out and do that. I was going to Columbia University in New York, finishing my sophomore year, and I had spent two years with very little money in my pocket, occasionally going to classes, a lot of time going to movies, sometimes going to Times Square to go to movies, because you could see a double feature in Times Square for about 75 cents or so.