"Are you telling me that John Wayne was a fag!?!"
It was fun seeing Voight, who hails from the Bronx, playing a naive Texas panhandle hayseed. The book by James Leo Herlihy is also great, and is a bit more explicit in telling Joe's backstory (told confusingly in "dream sequences" in the film).
Oh, never read the book. Yeah, I didn’t quite get what was going on when he was recalling his past.