Gay reference?

I think, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.....

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Didn't Rubber duck ask Pig Pen if he was going to drive his Love Machine through the backdoor and up the ole dirt trail?

Thats funny I just saw it for the first time and thats what I was wondering. I don't think it's far fetched at all.

Much has been said about "The Wild Bunch" and its sexual politics. Peckinpah clearly has given thought to the ways that male-exclusive, machismo cultures (like the one depicted in Convoy) buzz with homosexual undercurrents.

Is it actually suggesting specific acts? No. But there's a definite subtext in many Western movies. (You might not call Convoy a western per se, but it's in the vicinity.) Think of these movies as monuments to the masculine in the tradition of the great Greek sculptures. There's a bit of sexuality in that kind of reverence of male power (and violence).

I know you started this thread almost exactly 10 years ago, but I just saw this movie the other day. It played at Lincoln Center here in NYC, and there was a fair amount of people there. We get to the scene with the three very gay looking characters on the hill, and they say their name and the audience almost dies laughing. To compound that scene, trying to invite the other guy for a ride in his truck is pretty damned hysterical.

You see, this movie was made in 1978. That was when The Village People were popular. Not much later than this Cruising came out. The gay crowd back then were tough, macho, leather clad guys. At least one faction of the homosexual population. If you weren't gay back then, or wasn't attuned to it, they looked like macho guys. Look at The Village People. You had a biker, an Indian, a cop, a construction worker, and so on.

This whole movie had a bunch of very gay imagery as well. The shower scene, some of the jokes, Kris Kistofferson running around shirtless for half the movie (which could be for the boys or the girls). Ali McGraw even had the nice short butch haircut to go with it, and the Jamaican trucker driving woman was of questionable sexuality as well.

It has already been mentioned in other responses that Peckinpaw has previously included some commentary on overly macho guys and their relationships to each other, so it would not surprise me if he was making a statement here. I also noticed that the whole black trucker subplot was added to the script by him as well, which means he obviously tried to include other groups in this movie as well, and the idea of racism, and maybe even homophobia too. Look at the religious freaks he added in! He turned the whole trucker thing in to a hippy love orgy!

After the movie ended, a bunch of us were standing in the lobby, discussing how gay the movie turns at that point. This was the general opinion of more than a few people, including a couple of my gay friends. I think to pretend that the three truckers, their names, and the invite of the interviewer on the truck were not gay references would be ridiculous or very blind of people.

Either way, this film was a great mess, well worth seeing!

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