It is this responsibility that awakens a latent purity within Joe. Their attachment changes Joe from a loner, a drifter, a cowboy out of sync with his environment, to a man who now feels that he has 'family' for whom he is responsible. By the film's end, it is Joe who is tending to the dying Ratso again, one orphan fathering the other. The two outsiders meet ironically within the hustling world of the down and outers of affluent New York. Although their relationship begins with Ratso hustling the hustler, it soon develops into an authentic relationship.

In the beginning, it is Ratso who befriends, or fathers Joe. Joe Buck (Jon Voight) and Ratso Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman) on the streets of New York in Midnight Cowboy. Their relationship becomes inverted by the film's end. the homoerotic is interestingly conflated with the boy's desire to be held by a father.' NOTE 10 Joe and Ratso's relationship has all the markings of an intimate partnership, without crossing over into a physical union. Of course, they have a heroic idea of 'a man' that does not include domestic responsibility, and part of their perpetual search for the father is a way to also postpone the need to be a man. For in the words of Garry Leonard: 'They are searching for their fathers so they can be released from the magical spell of perpetual boyhood and become men.

Little is known of Joe's father, or mother, except that they abandoned him at a young age yet, Ratso voices both their longing for their absent fathers, as he speaks of his father often and even takes Joe with him to visit his father's grave. Joe and Ratso's mutual attraction stems from an unconscious longing for their lost fathers. One contributing factor to Joe's experience of being lost, at drift, in America is his loss of family.

Ratso rizzo