Can three decades have passed since I sat in a darkened Manhattan cinema transfixed by the cherubic-faced Robby Benson giving the performance of a lifetime as the innocent and emotionally troubled Billy Joe in the movie Ode to Billy Joe? Any gay person watching that landmark flick could immediately identify with the conflicted protagonist and both sympathize and empathize with his plight.
The 1967 Bobby Gentry hit song “Ode to Billy Joe” never revealed why the title character jumped to his death from the famed Tallahatchie Bridge in Mississippi. But, unlike the song, the film explained why the troubled teen committed suicide. Growing up in the rural South in the heart of redneck territory and the Bible Belt, Billy Joe had earlier had a single same-sex sexual encounter by which he was so traumatized, his self-worth so shattered, that he concluded he couldn’t face another day. It was, by 1976 standards, a bold and brave attempt to tackle head-on a subject that was rarely discussed in its exploration of the impact of extreme sexual repression upon a confused and disoriented youngster growing up in the rural South. The prospect of having to confront his girlfriend after internalizing the guilt, shame, and remorse over violating the number one taboo of his homophobic, macho milieu was just too much for the young man to handle. Doubting his self-worth and losing all self-respect after that one illicit sexual experience, Billy Joe decided that he no longer deserved to live. John Simon was the film critic for New York magazine at that time, and I anticipated a favorable review of what I considered a breakthrough attempt to depict a life and death in the heart of the Bible Belt. Instead, Simon vaingloriously ridiculed as preposterous the idea that a young man might take his own life over “a homosexual experience [author’s emphasis].” What this out-of-touch commentator completely failed to grasp was that in that homophobic, macho milieu, the taboo of indulging in gay sex generated so much guilt and fear that suicide could seem the only way out. Until then I had great respect for Simon as an urbane, sophisticated reviewer on a par with his much-esteemed counterpart at The New Yorker, Pauline Kael. But when it came to homosexuality, Simon had a severe blind spot that prevented him from grasping, for example, how peer pressure, which imposes tremendous stress on teenagers in general, could be even more severe for those questioning their sexual orientation. The dramatic rise in the teen suicide rate since Simon’s review bears out the severity of the problem and the plausibility of Billy Joe’s final act. And with gay kids today committing one-third of all teenage suicides, Ode to Billy Joe turns out to have been prescient indeed. Ben Edward Akerley is the author of The X-Rated Bible: An Irreverent Survey of Sex in the Scriptures.
