Will I love Midnight Cowboy?

You’ve all heard of the movie (and if you haven’t, shame on you). So, as a book person, I’m always interested in how close to the source these adaptations are. Boy, am I glad I read this? It was a true gift, like getting a bonus to the movie. 

 First, the story of self-styled Texan cowboy Joe Buck, eager to leave his dishwashing job to seek the glamorous life of New York City, was followed very closely to what you will find in the book. Joe has limited talents or skills to warrant the life he envisions for himself in… show more.

I’m sad the brilliance of Herlihy’s novel has been overshadowed by the (admittedly also brilliant) movie it inspired. What the film can’t include is the dangerous repression of sex and sexuality, described in unrelenting detail, that defined Joe Buck’s childhood. The novel’s indictment of this tyranny and the effects it has on people, both individually and collectively, is embedded in its portrait of gay men driven to self-hatred by religion, discrimination, and social pressure. The homosocial love that develops between Buck and Ratso, Midnight Cowboy tells us, could only happen outside the boundaries—represented in the novel by middle-class economics and… show more.