When I was sixteen years old, I was selected to join 500 Nazarene teenagers from around the world in Fiesch, Switzerland for our International Institute.
It was like Nazarene summer camp, with daily sermons, Bible studies, jump quizzes, and seminars on soul-winning, except we had afternoons and one full day off for field trips and sightseeing We could go out on our own, as long as we: 1. Didn't try to make friends with the locals. 2. Didn't set foot in any Catholic church. 3. Were back by 7:00 pm.
But every good Nazarene knows how to bend the rules.
"I'm sure the rules don't apply if we're going to save souls," my friend Annette, a delegate from Idaho, exclaimed. "We're in a country full of Catholic and Reformed Church sinners. Wouldn't it be great if we could plant the seeds of a mighty revival and win Switzerland for the Lord?"
Overbrimming with "Faith in God can move a mighty mountain" and "If you ask anything in My Name, that will I do," we decided to go soulwinning in the Belly of the Beast, the most evil, depraved site imaginable, a Catholic church!
But not in Fiesch -- we figured that would be well-traveled territory. On our free day, we packed several copies of the Gute Nachricht Bibel, a English-German phrase book, some snacks, and a change of clothes, and took the train 2 hours south to Zermatt, in Valais Canton, a famous tourist town at the base of the Matterhorn.
We always remember where we we were, and what we were doing, when we first hear of terrible events, the events that cause the world to become a darker, colder place.
The Assassination of President Kennedy (November 22, 1963) The Challenger Disaster (January 28, 1986) The Murder of Matthew Shepard (October 12, 1998) The 9/11 Terrorist Attacks (September 11, 2001) The Orlando Nightclub Attacks (June 11, 2016)
6:45 am on the morning of June 12th. I came into my office in my bathrobe, booted up my laptop, and started working on a blog post. Suddenly my partner was standing in the doorway.
"Have you seen the news?" he asked.
"No. Why."
"You lived in Florida -- do you know anyone in Orlando?"
"No. I lived in Wilton Manors, not Orlando, and I'm not in contact with anyone I knew there except Yuri, who now lives in London, and...why? What happened in Orlando?"
"Check the news. Or don't. Maybe you don't want to know."
So I checked CNN. Mass murders at a gay nightclub in Orlando. 40 dead. Then 50. 53 injured. The biggest shooting mass murder in U.S. history.
Orlando won't be known for the Magic Kingdom anymore.
When I teach criminology, I always tell my students to not be alarmed, the homicide rate in the U.S. is actually decreasing. Most homicides are the result of arguments going wrong; your killer is very likely to be a friend or intimate partner. You are more likely to be killed by a bolt of lightning than by a serial killer or mass murderer.
Unless you're queer. Then they come hunting. They blame you for everything that goes wrong, from floods to famines to being turned down for a date. They dream of a world where you don't exist, and they will do anything in their power to help create that world.
They can do quite a lot. Go to a gay venue, wear a gay pride t shirt, walk hand in hand with your partner, have short hair if you're a woman, sway and swish if you're a man, wear a pink shirt if you're a boy, go out for sports if you're a girl. You're a target.
So what do we do? Go back into the closet, drop pronouns, introduce partners as roommates, avoid writing on gay topics, hide?
Or band together and sing, like the MCC "We are fighting for our lives"?
At least times have changed a little. When the Upstairs Lounge in New Orleans was firebombed on June 24, 1973, 32 gay people were killed, and 15 injured. The press refused to cover the story, except for a few articles that condemned the victims or made fun of them.
The Orlando tragedy has gotten news coverage.
Presumably Pat Robertson will issue a statement blaming the victims for their own murders, but most politicians and religious leaders have not -- yet. Except for the Lieutenant Governor of Texas, Dan Patric who posted a celebratory Bible verse on his Facebook page before an aide convinced him to take it down.
Mark Rubio put in a call for blood donations. Paradoxically, gay men are forbidden from donating blood.
Upon discovering that the killer was Muslim, Donald Trump used the opportunity to reiterate his policy of banning all Muslims from entering the U.S. He doesn't say what he wants to do with Muslim citizens, 1% of the population.
I hope this tragedy doesn't push him to victory in the upcoming election. I keep having weird premonitions that this is 1933 Germany all over again.
Zagor is a comic book series first published in Italy in 1961, with later versions in the former Yugoslavia, Austria, Greece, Israel, and Turkey.
It is set in early 19th century Pennsylvania, a pristine wilderness where young Patrick Wilding becomes Batman: he sees his parents murdered, and grows up lusting for vengeance.
Or maybe he becomes Robin: he trains with a group of acrobats, like Dick Grayson.
Or maybe he's Tarzan: he moves into the wilderness, where the natives call him the Lord of the Darkwood. He travels by jumping from tree branches, like Tarzan swinging from vines. He fights monsters, poachers, desperados, and jungle beasts...um, I mean coniferous forest beasts...like bears, cougars, and alligators.
Or maybe he's the Phantom: "Zagor" is short for the Indian name Za-Gor-Te-Nah, the Ghost with the Hatchet (his preferred weapon). Like the Phantom, the Ghost Who Walks.
Note that he always wears a red sleveless shirt with a yellow bird emblem.
Or maybe he's the Cisco Kid: he has a bumbling sidekick, Chico, who looks and acts like Pancho from the tv series.
There have been three movie versions in Turkey:
Zagor (1970), starring Cihangir Gaffari (who appeared in American films as John Gaffari and John Foster).
Zagor kara bela (Zagor and the Land of Trouble, 1971) and Zagor kara korsan'in hazineleri (Zagor and the Black Pirate's Treasure, 1971) starring Levent Çakir.
Levent Çakir is rather inadequately muscular, even though he also starred as the Turkish Superman.
The Vatican Museum has a huge number of nude Greek and Roman masters, like this Apollo. The penises were "fig leafed" for about 100 years under the jurisdiction of some of the more puritanical Popes, but they're back.
Tiring of Greeks and Romans, head for the Sistine Chapel. Everyone has seen reproductions of the Creation of Adam, but did you know that the chapel is bursting with beefcake?
When you've finished checking out the 800 or so naked men on the walls and ceilings of the Vatican chapels, look for the Swiss Guards, the elite Vatican police corps since the 16th century. Apparently they are chosen for their hotness.
The acrobats always perform shirtless, so you can see their muscles straining and flexing as they adopt their complicated positions. So why shouldn't they perform shirtless for the Pope?
Setauket, Long Island, February 1999 This is Yuri's third date with Daniel -- they met on Valentine's Day -- and he has invited me and some of his other friends out to dinner to meet him. Daniel seems to be exactly his type: early 40s, handsome, bearded, with a bodybuilder's v-shaped torso, ample chest hair poking out over his t-shirt, and of course an enormous bulge (Yuri likes them gigantic).
I usually stay over with Yuri on Wednesday nights rather than going all the way into Manhattan and back again the next morning, but I don't want to suggest "sharing" so soon in their relationship, so I say "Well, the Long Island Railroad awaits..."
"Can't wait to get back to the City, huh?" Daniel asks.
I've been having rather a bad day, and I don't relish the idea of two hours on a train, a 20-minute subway ride, and a five block walk in the in the February ice, so I snipe "No, actually, I don't like it there at all."
Gulp -- that was the mistake. All gay men living east of Chicago are expected to believe that Manhattan is Heaven, to be desired, dreamed of, wept over, and fought over. You don't like Heaven? Blasphemer!
"Maybe you're staying overnight with Yuri too much," Daniel says, with a note of jealousy in his voice. "Maybe you're not giving it enough time."
"I only stay with Yuri on Monday and Wednesday nights. I'm in the City five nights a week. It's just that...everyone is a stranger. The streets are crowded with ghosts, time travelers, lost souls."
I'm on a roll. "My roommate is a stranger. All of my friends are here on Long Island. I don't have any hangouts, like the French Quarter in West Hollywood or Orphan Andy's in San Francisco. I'm always alone."
"What is hangout?" Yuri asks.
I explain it to him.
"Ok, that's easy. We come to the City this weekend, find you a hangout. You pay for dinner."
"It's settled, then," Daniel says. "The Great 'Find Boomer a Gay Hangout' Quest of 1998." He pauses. "And you don't need to go back to the horrible bright lights of Manhattan tonight. I'm sure one of these Long Islanders will take pity on you and offer you his bed."
When I was growing up, one of my favorite stories in my Children's Bible was of Cain and Abel.
They are the children of Adam and Eve, the first two brothers in the world. They both offer food to God, Abel animal meat and Cain fruit.
God, being a vegetarian, prefers Abel. Cain gets jealous, and in a fit of rage, kills his brother.
He is then forced to wander, but he worries that everyone he meets will want to kill him (the world has filled up quickly). So God gives him "The Mark of Cain" so he will be safe.
Rather thoughtful. I would have gone with life in prison for murder, but...
The story has a number of plot holes and inconsistencies. But look at those sculpted abs and enormous biceps!
Throughout history, artists who wanted to depict the homoeroticism of two muscular men together, without women around, have drawn on Cain and Abel. They struggle, strain, press together so tightly that you can almost forget that they're trying to kill each other.
And, in the modern era, you can comment on warfare, bigotry, and homophobic hate crimes.
Abel is the quiet, gentle, gay-coded shepherd. Cain is depicted as a big bully, a rough-and-tumble farmer.
Adolph Bougereau, The First Mourning (1888), emphasizes Adam and Eve's despair over losing their boy, who is depicted as feminine, almost pre-Raphaelite.
In his 1899 depiction, Danish painter Laszlo Hegedus gives Abel (facing us) a self-righteous sneer, while Cain (the one with the bare backside) has red hair, symbolising anger.
Fellow Danish artist Svend Rathsack (1885-1941), primarily a sculptor, was interested in both male and female nudes. His Cain (1910) emphasizes the muscles and buttocks of the brothers, as Cain strikes Abel with what looks like an animal bone.
John P. Reilly (1928-2010) was a Catholic artist who drew inspiration from the Byzantine world. There's no nudity in his Cain (1958), but I thought it was interesting that Abel, the good guy, is tall, thin, and handsome, while Cain is a short, squat, grunting Morlock. He's also trapped; maybe his genes have already doomed him to be a murderer.
The Bible doesn't say how old Cain and Abel were, but most artists make Cain middle-aged and Abel a sallow youth. Eric de Saussure's 1968 version makes them both boys. Oddly, Cain is dark-skinned and Abel light-skinned.
I have to include this version by Bill Hoope (2001), if only because I want to know where they got the globe, and why they're attacking it with animal bones.
A Germanic language influenced by Slavic and Hebrew, Yiddish was spoken throughout the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe from the 9th century on to World War II.
Jewish immigrants to the United States brought a strong tradition of Yiddish literature, art, and theater. In the early 20th century, entertainers such as the Three Stooges and the Marx Brothers introduced many Yiddish words into everyday English, including klutz, schlep, kitsch, and chutzpah. Many more are familiar: nebbish, schvitz, tuches.
There are still 1.5 million native speakers of Yiddish, mostly in the Ukraine, Israel, and the United States. They are mostly elderly: except in a few Hasidic communities, the language is not being taught to the younger generations.
But many young Jews are learning Yiddish in order to embrace their cultural heritage. You can major in Yiddish Studies at Columbia University and Rutgers, The Digital Yiddish Library offers free downloads of over 11,000 titles.
So knowing a few Yiddish words for penis might come in handy for cruising at your local synagogue.
Note: most of these terms are obscene, so don't use them when your boyfriend's bubbie is making kiska in the other room.
Large/Extra-Large Schlang, schlong. From the Persian for "snake." Donald Trump was being quite vulgar when he claimed that Hillary Clinton was "schlonged" by President Obama.
Schlanger. An extra big schlang.
Schmohawk. An extra big schlanger. They don't get much bigger.
Schtrunkel. The biggest of the big. Literally "tree trunk." Schtupper. From "schtup," to have sex with someone.
Schvantz. From the Middle High German for "tail."
Yung. From "young man."
So Yiddish has 4 words for a small penis, 7 for an average size, and 7 for an extra-large?
Dad is tanned, muscular, smiling, wearing a sombrero that invites us to "Kiss My Ass!"
The photo is dated September 8th, 1959, a little over a year before I was born. There are two names written on the back, "Frank" and "Jared."
Frank is my father, but who is Jared? The burro?
And how did this grinning, bawdy, irreverent 21-year old turn into the Dad I knew, conservative, somber, serious, who rarely laughed and never joked or fooled around? What changed?
Here is all I learned through my life until about two weeks ago:
June 1956: Frank graduates from high school in Indiana, and joins the Navy. He spends the next three years seeing the world, visiting Japan, Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong, and the Philippines, learning to repair things deep down in the hulls of the big ships, and buddy-bonding. He calls it the best time of his life.
June 1959: Frank returns to Indiana for a two-week long shore leave and reunites with his high school sweetheart, who is working at the A&W. They impulsively get married, and drive with her sister and brother-in-law cross country to Long Beach. They move into a tiny apartment.
The next year is a blank space in their lives. They don't talk about it. There are only a few mementos and photographs. I know that they went to Knotts Berry Farm and Tijuana, that a couple of relatives flew out for a visit, and that Mom bought a set of encyclopedias from a fast-talking salesman, and that's all.
June 1960: Frank's four-year tour of duty ends. His Captain asks him to stay on, with a promotion to Chief Petty Officer, but he refuses. Instead, he and Mom return to Indiana and move into a house on South Randolph Street. He goes to work in the factory, which he calls a "godddam hell hole" for the next thirty years.
Why did Dad abandon a Navy career he loved for a factory job he hated?
Why did they leave Long Beach?
Indianapolis, May 2016
I'm visiting my parents on the way back from New York. My nephew is digitizing their old photos, and I see the "Kiss My Ass" burro photo again. Emboldened, I decide to coax as much information out of them as possible.
Maybe the statute of limitations has passed, or maybe after nearly 60 years they don't care about their youthful transgressions anymore, but Mom and Dad both open up, describing their apartment, the corner grocery store, the movie theater where they saw Ben-Hur and Pillow Talk. "You went to movies?" I ask, shocked. Nazarenes are forbidden from setting foot inside movie theaters.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view."That's not all!" Dad says with a laugh. "We played cards. We danced. We even drank -- just beer, one time, but if the preacher or our parents found out, we'd be in big trouble!"
"We made friends with all sorts of people that would set my Mom and Dad off," Mom adds. "Blacks. Jews. Catholics. Mexicans. And...well, you know..."
"Gays?" I suggest.
Suddenly Dad becomes somber. "It was the Fifties. We didn't know about things like that."
"Or if we did, we thought it was very rare," Mom adds, "You'd never meet anyone like that in a lifetime, which is good because it was the worst thing possible, like a sin and a crime and a sickness, all rolled up into one. Then we met that boy..."
"Jared, from the burro photo?" I ask with sudden inspiration.
"Yes," Dad says. "We were supposed to give him a copy of the photo -- that's why his name is on the back. But we didn't get a chance."
Long Beach, June 1959 Frank was 21 years old, newly married, living in a small apartment on Broadway Street in Long Beach.
Jared lived down the hall. He was 16 or so, short, slim, kind of frail looking, with bushy black hair that was out of place in the crewcut 1950s, and a preference for bright colors, bold reds and greens.
His dad was overseas, and his mom worked, so he got ignored a lot, and he quickly latched onto my mom and dad. Frank, the youngest of four kids, never had the opportunity to be a big brother before, and he relished the attention. They went out for hamburgers, to the movies, to the beach.
Jared liked hanging out with Mom, too. He came over sometimes during the day, to watch her soap opera, As the World Turns. and then help her cook dinner.
Of course, they didn't think anything of it at the time.
When they showed Jared the photos from their trip to Tijuana, he asked for a copy of the one with Frank on the "Kiss My Ass" burro -- to show his friends at school.
"That's a weird photo to show your friends," I point out. Dad shrugs. "That's what he told us." I wonder if it ever occurred to them that Jared might have another reason to want a picture of the shirtless, muscular Frank.
But before they had a chance to make a copy of the photo from the negatives, Jared vanished. He just stopped coming around.
Dad wondered if he was upset with them, or sick. He went over to check, and Jared's mom said that he went to a home "to get help."
What kind of home? What was wrong? She kept her eyes down and wouldn't say. No, they couldn't visit. No, they couldn't write. He needed to be alone, to get better.
Talking it over, Mom and Dad began to suspect: Jared was a soft, gentle boy, feminine, domestic. Could he be suffering from that disease, the one that no one should talk about? Could his parents have found out, and put him in an asylum?
Then just around Thanksgiving, Jared died. A tragic accident, his parents said, but gave no more details. The funeral was up in Fresno. Mom and Dad didn't go.
"That spring, when we found out I was pregnant," Mom says, "We thought it would be a good idea to move back to Indiana, to spare our baby the bad influences. You know, the drinking, the movies, the Catholics."
"And the gays?" I ask.
She nods. "We were worried that if we stayed in Long Beach, whatever turned Jared that way, might turn you, too."
"You can't turn gay," I tell them, annoyed "Either you are or you aren't."
"Well, we know that now, but in the Fifties we thought it was like protecting you from the measles. And remember, there was no Gay Pride then. It was all shame and misery. We wanted to spare you, and your brother and sister, when they came."
"Jared died almost exactly a year before you were born," Dad says. "I don't believe in reincarnation, of course, but when you started acting like that, you know, with your Book of Cute Boys, or saying you and Bill were a Mama and a Papa, or asking for a statue of a naked man for Christmas, I knew that I was seeing Jared again."
In West Hollywood, we had spent so many years hearing that same-sex desire was evil, aberrant, incomplete, faulty, sick, or non-existent that we celebrated it -- a lot.
Most conversations involved who you were having sex with and who your friends were having sex with.
Most leisure activity involved having sex, watching someone else have sex, or looking for someone to have sex with.
Sex was used to introduce new guys into your social circle, to be polite, as a party game, as a form of recreation. You went to bed with the boyfriends of your roommates and friends, and with the roommates and friends of your boyfriend, without giving it a second thought.
Imagine, in that sex-infused world, simply not being interested.
Turns out about 1% of the population is asexual, not interested in sex with anyone.
They usually (but not always) experience aesthetic desire, finding some people hot and some not. According to a survey conducted by the Asexual Visibility and Education Network, over half have a sexual orientation: 27% are heterosexual, 26% bisexual, and 13% gay or lesbian.
They often enjoy romantic relationships (only 20% are a-romantic, interested in friendships only).
They may even engage in sexual activity, to please a partner or fit in with societal expectations: 12% are currently sexual active.
But they are not into it. They would rather eat cake.
Asexuals face an uphill battle. Doctors want to give them hormones, psychiatrists want to treat them for a presumed history of abuse, they're asked "if you've never tried it, how do you know you don't like it?" and told "They're told that they must be suffering from a psychological trauma or a history of abuse, that they need hormones or psychotherapy, and that they just haven't met the right person yet.
The same things LGBT people hear from their straight "friends" all the time.
Here are some famous people who were/are probably asexual, although they are often assumed gay: Politician Ralph Nader Comedian Janeane Garofalo J. M. Barrie, creator of Peter Pan Artist Edward Gorey Sir Isaac Newton Jonathan Frid, Barnabas on Dark Shadows T. E. Lawrence, "Lawrence of Arabia"
And Jughead Jones from the Archie comics. For years he was a "woman hater," not interested in women, so we all assumed that he was gay. Then, in the 1980s, to assuage suspicions, he was heterosexualized, and given about as many girlfriends as the girl-crazy Archie. But in his most recent rendition, a reboot by Chip Zdarsky and artist Erica Henderson, Jughead is outed as asexual.
The Giver (2014) just showed up on my Netflix recommendations. It was about a teenager who "thinks thinks" in a conformist dystopia -- pretty much the protagonist of every young adult movie -- and discovers that "the adults are lying -- only real is real," pretty much the plot of every young adult movie.
But the boy has two friends, a boy and a girl, and there's something about a younger boy who also "thinks thinks," so I figured there would be some moments of gay-subtext buddy bonding, plus the muscular Brenton Thwaites shirtless in at least one scene.
Thwaites plays Jonas, who, along with his inseparable childhood chums Asher (Cameron Monaghan) and Fiona (Odeya Rush), has just graduated to adulthood in a close-knit community with no name -- although there are others, according to the Chief Elder (Meryl Streep), who appears mostly in holograms.
It's like the Village in The Prisoner tv series, with sculpted grounds and lovely architecture, and everyone always polite to each other. with everyone constantly being monitored, drugged, and lied to. For instance, Jonas' father (Alexander Skarsgaard) has the job of testing newborn babies and killing the rejects -- but because of his daily drug injection, he believes that he is "sending them to Elsewhere," a beautiful Otherworld.
People who are too old to be productive citizens are also "sent to Elsewhere." Shades of Logan's Run.
Also, everything is in black and white, no one is taught the history of what happened before, and no one is allowed to fall in love. Shades of Brave New World.
I wonder what their high school classes are like.
After their graduation, Asher is assigned a job as a drone pilot (shades of Star Wars), Fiona goes to work at the baby-killing facility, and Jonas becomes the apprentice to the Giver (Jeff Bridges), an old man who lives in a cabin at the edge of the world and is the only person permitted to lie, be impolite, and remember the past. He shares memories of the past with Jonas by touching him.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.The memories are of everyday events from "back and back and back": a gypsy wedding; a Jewish Shabat; some kind of Hindu festival; someone riding a sled to a cabin with a Christmas tree; and lots of people laughing and hugging and kissing.
The past was great! Jonas concludes. People felt things then! They experienced love!
Trying to feel what they felt in the past, he stops taking his daily drugs, and becomes aware of the horrors of the Village.
His parents brought home a new baby, Gabe, but it failed its Maturity Test, and so must be sent "to Elsewhere." Jonas knows what that really means, and vows to save Gabe.
He asks Asher and Fiona for help. Guess which one helps, and which one rushes off to tattle to the Elders?
Yep -- guys always betray you, girls are true blue.
Freudians say that the goal of adolescence is to move from the "latent homosexuality," with same-sex pals, to "mature" heterosexual love. It's complete garbage, of course, but this movie is definitely selling it.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view. So Jonas grabs the baby and rushes out of the Village, down the steep cliffs, and into the northern California wilderness, being pursued by a murderous Asher (who relents at the last minute and just throws him into a river to drown instead of zapping him).
He didn't bring any baby food or diapers, but Gabe doesn't complain through at least 24 hours of falling off cliffs, nearly drowning, and finally sledding through the snow. Their fate is ambiguous; presumably they freeze to death.
BUT: Jonas' defection has somehow turned off the memory-zapping device, and now everyone remembers things that happened long before they were born. So the world is saved.
I guess. I don't understand it, either. I'm still angry that EVERY young adult movie is about a Boy and a Girl falling in love, with the Male Friend, when he is present at all, turning into a betrayer.
During my first year in college, the drama club performed The Time of Your Life (1939), William Saroyan's Pulitzer-prize winning play about the lost and wounded denizens of a seedy San Francisco bar. Every one of them expressed some type of heterosexual interest, with one exception: Willie, a teenage pinball player. During the 1970s, all teenagers in mass media were portrayed as churning cauldrons of heterosexual horniness, but Willie never once looked at or mentioned a girl.
I didn't usually care for the heterosexism of Modern American Literature, but I tentatively sought out the other works of William Saroyan (1908-1981), and found melancholy stories about working-class Armenian immigrants in California, mostly with crushed dreams or memories of past glory.
And endless homoromantic subtexts.
My Name is Aram (1940). Aram grows from age 9 to young adulthood without ever falling for a girl, though he is drawn to many men and boys, including his best friend Panko and his beautiful cousin Dikran.
There is even a veiled reference to gay people. In one story, his Uncle Melik, about to travel by train from Fresno to New York, receives advice from his own uncle: "An amiable young man will offer you a cigarette. It will be doped." On the train, Melik waits for the cigarette offer, but it never comes, so he takes the initiative and offers a young man a cigarette. They become friends.
The Human Comedy (1943). Teenage Homer has a job delivering telegrams during the War, mostly about soldiers who have died; but he doesn't have to deliver the telegram about his older brother Marcus, because Tobey arrives, who knew Marcus "better than anyone in the world," to tell the family.
Meanwhile, though Homer gazes at a "beautiful girl," he finds solace in the eyes of men.
In the 1943 movie version, the actors who portrayed Marcus and Tobey, Van Johnson (left) and John Craven, were both gay.
"The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze" (1935): he doesn't really fly on a trapeze. He is dying, with no women among his dying thoughts. Instead : he remembered the young Italian in a Brooklyn hospital, a small sick clerk named Mollica, who had said desperately, I would like to see California once before I die."
On and on, a world where coming of age does not mean "sex with an older woman," where death does not mean "letting go of the faces of women," where life is big and dangerous and sad and lived among men.
Saroyan, by the way, had some ties to the post-War gay community. He frequented the Black Cat Bar in San Francisco, became friends with gay director Vicente Minelli (they collaborated on a musical together), and in 1955, a radio biography starred gay actor Sal Mineo.
I never do anything erotic in my office. It's down a narrow corridor, with six other offices right there, and thin walls so everyone can hear everything. Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view. But earlier this week I made an exception. I figured it was safe enough, during a tornado.
It was Summer Orientation:hundreds of newly-admitted students and their families were getting tours of the campus, going to advising meetings, checking out the gym, and talking to me, starstruck over meeting a Real College Professor..
Here are the six guys I met. You have to decide which one I hooked up with
When I was very little, he was on My Three Sons (1960-1972). I paid most attention to the college-age son Robbie Douglas (Don Grady, left), who like boys, but sometimes I noticed that his pipe-smoking, newspaper-reading Dad (Fred MacMurray) was married to a man.
He never had and never mentioned a wife. Instead Uncle Charlie (William Demerest) did all of the "motherly" duties, like vacuuming, wearing aprons, and fixing bag lunches. Naturally I assumed that they were married.
Apparently together a long time (seen here in 1935).
When I got a little older, I saw Fred MacMurray in Kisses for My President (1964), about the first female president of the United States (Polly Bergen). MacMurray played her husband, Thad McCloud, who is humiliated by becoming the "First Lady," in change of garden clubs and redecorating the White House. It was almost like being married to a man.
Then in a series of Disney movies: The Shaggy Dog (1959), The Absent-Minded Professor (1961), Bon Voyage (1962), Son of Flubber (1963), playing a scatterbrained professor or bumbling dad. He always had a wife, but the movie mostly involved bonding with gay actor Tommy Kirk, who played his son or favorite student.
From the 1930s to the 1950s, Fred MacMurray starred in dozens of movies of every conceivable type: Westerns, war, film noir, comedy, family-man drama. They were mostly of the B variety. The only one I've seen is Double Indemnity (1944), a noir in which his Walter Neff hatches a murder scheme with unhappily married Phyllis (lesbian actress Barbara Stanwyck, later of Big Valley), but also has a gay-subtext buddy-bond with his boss, Barton Keyes (played by some famous gangster guy of the 1930s).
Before that Fred MacMurry was an all-round athlete and 1930s heartthrob who posed semi-nude for his fans.
Not a bad gay output for a man who was a conservative Republican and homophobic. He owned a property called Waller Beach, in the Russian River area, north of San Francisco, and had a "clothing optional" policy for the patrons. Until he discovered that many of the patrons were gay. Then he started calling the sheriff and having them arrested for indecent exposure.
I was saddened to learn of the death of 27-year old Anton Yelchin in a tragic accident Sunday morning. Best known for playing Chekhov in the new Star Trek movie series, Yelchin was a rising star adept at comedy, horror, and drama.
Born in Leningrad in 1989, Yelchin moved to the U.S. with his parents and began acting professionally at age 10, in the tv series ER.
On a 2003 episode of Without a Trace, he plays a shy, gay-coded boy who is kidnapped along with his classmates.
Starring roles in Jack, Fierce People, and Alpha Dog followed, plus a tv series, Huff.
As a teenager, Yelchin did his share of hetero-horny "Girl Walking in Slow Motion Across Her Yard" roles, but he also did some homoerotic buddy-bonding, notably in House of D (2004), where an adult Tom (David Duchovny) recalls his adolescent friendship with the mentally challenged Pappas (Robin Williams), and in Terminator Salvation (2009), where Marcus (Sam Worthington) goes back to the past to stop Skynet from taking over the world, and bonds with the teenage Kyle (Yelchin).
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.The Star Trekreboots with Kirk and company just out of Star Fleet Academy, have occupied Yelchin's time for the past several years. When I was a kid, I thought that Chekhov and Sulu were a romantic couple.
Yelchin still managed to find some independent vehicles, such as a remake of Fright Night, the heterosexist paranormal saga Odd Thomasand the spy caper Dying of the Light (where he buddy-bonds with Nicholas Cage)
In 1998, Yuri and I were in Johvi, Estonia for Jaanipäev, St. John's Day, a national holiday.
The day before, June 23rd, is Võidupüha, Victory Day, commemorating the Estonian War of Independence, and the struggle for freedom of all of the Baltic nations.
There are similar midsummer festivals all over the Balkans and Scandinavia. In Finland they involve both bonfires and saunas, naturally.
In the Slavic countries, St. John's Eve is like Halloween, a time when the barrier between our world and the spirit world fails, and there are ghosts and goblins running around. Gay Russian writer Nikolai Gogol's short story "St. John's Eve" is about a man who searches for a treasure that can only be discovered that night, but meets the devil instead.
When I met Will the Bondage Boy in November 1987, he was the picture of a Silverlake leatherman.
He was in his 30s, short and compact, bearded, with a muscular, hairy chest and a little belly.
He worked as a bartender at the L.A. Eagle, he wore chaps, boots, and a leather jacket almost everywhere, and he had a fully equipped dungeon in his basement.
I naturally assumed that he had been into leather as long as he had been out. But no: not too long ago, he was a West Hollywood twink, with a closet full of polo shorts and cargo pants, Duran Duran on his car stereo, and no bondage experience except for a few vague fantasies.
He claimed that his awakening came in the summer of 1986, during a wild night with film star Keanu Reeves.
West Hollywood, July 1986
Although Will and I were both living in West Hollywood during 1985-86, our paths never crossed, that I know of. I was into the Metropolitan Community Church, Asian guys, and Muscle and Fitness. He was into musical theater, fashion, and...well, dancing.
He and his best friend, Scott, were at the Rage, the twink dance club, with occasional forays to Mickey's and Studio One, four or five times per week, every week, month after month, year after year, dancing and cruising, dancing and cruising.
"It was like we were killing time, just waiting around for our life to begin," Will says.
One night in July, a couple of weeks after Gay Pride, Will and Scott were in the Rage, as usual, when Scott started cruising a Cute Young Thing: tall, thick black hair, sharp features, a soft, smooth chest, and an enormous basket.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view. His name was Keanu, which he said meant Breeze over the Mountains in Hawaiian. His parents were native Hawaiian and British, but he grew up in Canada. He just moved to L.A. a few months ago. He was living with his stepfather and trying to make it as an actor.
After they danced for awhile, Keanu said "Let's get out of here!"
Summer is my least favorite season, and we're right in the middle of it, with the heat, humidity, tv reruns, people forcing you to play outside, all of your friends away on vacation, long, boring days with nothing to do, and unnaturally bright evenings where the sun refuses to go down.
Here are the things I liked about summertime when I was a kid. Maybe I can translate them into adult activities.
1. All of the boys and teenagers in the neighborhood walked around with their shirts off. Even the adults, sometimes. I remember two super muscular grownups sitting on lawn chairs on their patio, drinking beer.
2. The Denkmann Summer Carnival. Games, cotton candy, and a sort of flea market where you could get comic books cheap.
3. The bookmobile came every Tuesday. It wasn't just a place to get books. I met lots of cute boys there.
4. Sitting on a blanket late at night to watch the 4th of July Fireworks.
5. Mother Goose Land. It's not as lame as it sounds. They had an Old West town, where you could ride burros and pan for gold.
6. A trip to Indiana to visit our relatives, but it was always followed by a horrible week camping in the Northwoods.
7, Nazarene summer camp. I complained at the time -- nothing to do but Bible study, sports, and church -- but I got to hang out with lots of cute guys, and our counselors were always hunky teenagers. Besides, I got to see Brother Dino naked in the shower.
8. Sitting in the kiddie pool, those round plastic things that you filled with a garden hose.
9. My birthday excursion, where I could bring 3 or 4 of my friends to any place in town that I wanted. My birthday is actually in November, but I always postponed the trip to summertime, when the fun things like Niabi Zoo were open.
11. Summer Enrichment Classes sponsored by the Department of Parks and Recreation. I remember taking Spanish, astronomy, and archaeology. They also had physical fitness classes.
12, Sodas at Country Style. In the Midwest, a "soda" is a concoction of ice cream and root beer or cola. If you want the soft drink alone, it's called "pop." I started calling it "soda" when I was living in California, which got me lots of weird looks back in Rock Island.
13. Swimming lessons at Longview Park. One summer the teacher coaxed me into jumping into the deep end with the promise that if I drowned, he would give me mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.
14. By the way, the only time I ever saw African-Americans in the segregated 1960s was at Longview Park Pool. In swimsuits. Something to look forward to!
15. Dinners comprised solely of corn on the cob (which my parents called roshineers) and tomatoes.
16. Dinners comprised solely of newly-picked green beans with bacon and onions.
17. The Prospect List. Every year the Nazarene Church had a contest to see who could contact the most prospects, people who had attended church or Sunday school just once. It was lots of fun trying to track them down and hearing their stories: "Well...um...I found a new church that...um...I like better.
19. Walking barefoot on the hot concrete of the sidewalk.
20. Sleepovers. Ok, we had sleepovers during the schoolyear, too, but during the summer they often entailed sleeping in tents in the back yard.
21. Summertime boyfriends: guys who you would hang out with while your regular boyfriend was on vacation or otherwise unavailable.
22. Road construction. It's a pain for adults, but for kids too young to drive, it's fun to watch the construction workers walking down the highway in their yellow jackets and sunglasses.
23. Summer replacement series. Back before tv series began and ended year round, the summer reruns were sometimes augmented by 10-episode miniseries, weird comedies, musical-variety shows, and even cartoons.
24. Shakespeare, for free, every summer in Lincoln Park. You brought lawn chairs and snacks or even a dinner. Actually, I didn't go to any performances until college, but I'm sure it was there.
25. Practicing for cross country in the fall by running five miles, all the way downtown and back.
26. Kentucky Fried Chicken. The stores are open year round, but for some reason we just had it in the summer.
27. Baseball games. The games were rather boring, but I liked looking at the players.
28. Fudgsicles, push-ups, and ice cream sandwiches.
29. Watermelon.
30. My brother and I making extra money by mowing lawns for the Old Lady Schoolteachers and other elderly neighbors.
32. Watching Days of Our Lives and One Life to Live with my mother. I wasn't a big soap opera fan, but it was a bonding opportunity.
33. For that matter, being able to watch Dark Shadowsall the way through, instead of catching the last fifteen minutes after running home as fast as I could.
34. Seeing miscellaneous workmen with their shirts off at unexpected moments.
So, 32% involve seeing cute boys or men, 23% food, 20% excursions, 12% bonding with family members, and 9% the heat.
I think I can turn those things into adult activities.
My boyfriend Troy and I are traveling crosscountry from Upstate New York to Indianapolis to visit my relatives. Cleveland is a convenient halfway point, so we get a room at the Flex Club, which offers a full gym, two swimming pools, a steamroom maze, and a bar downstairs, and bathhouse facilities and hotel rooms upstairs.
7:00 pm
After we check into our room, Troy hits the cruising area, and I go to the gym. The only other guy there is not particularly muscular, obviously not a gym regular, gamely trying to figure out how to bench press.
I go over and offer to spot him.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.His name is Lester. He's in his 20s, of medium height, unruly black hair, black eyebrows, and sharp features, not handsome but pleasant in a quirky bohemian way, He has with a thin chest, prominent nipples, and nicely rippled abs, plus a soft Southern accent that I find attractive. He reminds me of my Kentucky Kinfolk.
I steer him toward the Nautilus machines and demonstrate proper form.
"So, are you from Cleveland?" he asks.
"New York, actually. I'm just here for the night. My boyfriend and I have a hotel room upstairs."
"Wow, I just have a locker. I heard the hotel rooms were nice -- I've never been in one."
During the 1970s, a series of sketches on The Carol Burnett Show featured the young Vicki Lawrence in old-lady drag as the abrasive matriarch of a dysfunctional Southern family. In 1983 she spun off into Mama's Family as the elderly Thelma Harper, still grumpy but considerably nicer -- a champion of the underdog, fighting such social ills as illiteracy, nursing home abuse, and sexual harassment in the workplace.
Her family consisted of her conservative sister (Rue McClanahan, later of The Golden Girls), her dimwitted son Vint (Ken Berry, center, previously of Mayberry RFD), his sexually voracious wife Naomi (Dorothy Lyman, right), and his kids.
The son was played by Eric Brown, left, star of the sex farce Private Lessons.
After a season, the show was cancelled. It returned in syndication in 1986, with the sister and kids gone, and Allan Kayser (left) introduced as Bubba, Thelma's juvenile delinquent grandson.
And the jaws of gay men everywhere dropped. The 22-year old Kayser had a dazzling smile, a stunning physique, and an amazing bulge, and he knew it. And the producers knew it.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view. In every episode, he was crammed into muscle shirts and sweatpants or painted-on jeans, and his body always got the limelight, even when something else was going on.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.Mama's Family immediately became must-see tv. It aired on Saturday nights, so we watched Mama's Family and The Golden Girls before going out to the bars.
The only gay content was Thelma's subtext friendship with mousy neighbor Iola (Beverly Archer). Bubba's plotlines were standard teenage sitcom fare -- school projects, teams, dates -- with no significant male friends, except his Uncle Vinton, and that relationship was avuncular, not romantic.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.During the 1980s, Allan also starred in a few B-movies that allowed him to show off his bulge and biceps, including Hot Chili (1985) and Night of the Creeps (1986).
When Mama's Family ended in 1990, he retired from acting, married, and moved to Missouri. He has appeared in only a few small roles since.
He still has a stunning physique, and he is still gracious to his gay fans.
One day in 1988, I was at the gym in West Hollywood, and I saw someone wearing a t-shirt reading "Married...with Children Fan Club."
I knew about Married...with Children. On Sunday nights, my roommate Derek and I always watched the beefcake-heavy: 21 Jump Street and Werewolfon the fledgling Fox network, but we turned the tv off when the "Love and Marriage" theme song began.
Who wanted to watch a tv show that praised the heterosexual nuclear family?
Al (Ed O'Neill) and Peggy (Katey Sagal) are a middle-aged married couple who hate each other. Sexually voracious Peggy keeps trying to trick, cajole, or berate Al into having sex with her, but he isn't interested (although he likes women in general).
In the first season plot arc, Al and Peggy have fun trying to destroy a naive newly married couple, Marcy (Amanda Bearse) and Steve (David Garrison). They're like George and Martha in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf,except their tactic is criticizing wives and husbands, respectively, and it works! The couple soon divorces, and Marcy hooks up with metrosexual boytoy Boomererson (Ted McGinley).
Other episodes involve problems with the kids, the promiscuous teenage Kelly (Christina Applegate) and the rowdy preteen Bud (David Faustino) -- soon a nerdy teenager.
No significant buddy-bonding, although Peggy and Marcy and Al and Boomererson come close.
Lots of beefcake -- Kelly had lots of shirtless, muscular boyfriends, such as Dan Gauthier, and in later seasons, Bud began to muscle-up big time.
Gay people appear only once.
Yet Married -- at least in its early years, before the downward spiral of Seasons 7-10 -- artfully revealed the flimsy foundation of the "fade out kiss," the myth of universal heterosexual destiny. In the heart of the Reagan-Bush Era of conservative retrenchment, that was worth any number of "old friend visits and turns out to be gay" episodes.
Amanda Bearse came out in real life in 1993, and the rest of the cast are strong gay allies.
Ed O'Neill now stars in Modern Family, as the patriarch of a family that includes a gay son and son-in-law.
David Faustino played gay characters in Get Your Stuff (2000) and in Killer Bud (2001), and in Ten Attitudes (2001), he played "himself," not gay but on the gay dating circuit (for a sleazy reason). He also played "himself" in the webseries Star-Ving (along with buddy Corin Nemec). See his post here.
He's currently in talks with producers about a Married spin-off, with Bud as an adult, married...with children.
