NYSocBoy's Beefcake and Bonding

In response to a 13-year old boy's video that went viral, Hasbro has just announced that it will begin selling Easy-Bake Ovens in neutral colors, with ads showing boys as well as girls. This is a victory against sexism, of course, but it is also a victory against heterosexism.

When I was a kid, boys weren't allowed anywhere near the kitchen (this book was published in 2006). Girls were carefully instructed in the art of boiling, baking, sauteeing, and simmering, in order to prepare them for their futures as housewives, but boys were expected to have no use for such skills, since they would all have wives to cook for them.

On the tests of adequate masculinity that they kept forcing us to take in school, one of the questions was: "What does fricassee mean?" If a boy knew, he got a visit from the school nurse.

The only boy you ever saw cooking was Jughead in the Archie comics, and he was a "woman hater" (that is, gay).

Thus, any interest in or aptitude for cooking in boys was viewed as a rebellion against our heterosexual destiny: "If you learn to cook, you won't need a wife, so you'll never get married."

Or: "If you enjoy cooking, you must want to become a wife! "

The Easy-Bake oven was the most rebellious of toys you could put on your Christmas list: all pink and pastel, with only girls in the commercials, and the print ads talking about how much "she" will enjoy practicing for her future as someone's wife.

At Christmas 1969, when I was nine years old, I asked for one, and caused my parents a lot of anxious conversations behind closed doors. When they emerged, they smiled fearfully like the parents of the demonic kid on The Twilight Zone, and asked "Um...do you think you might like to play pee-wee football next spring?"

Santa brought me a football.

In the fall of 1970, I asked for an Easy-Bake Oven for my birthday. More anxious conversations, and afterwards my parents signed me up for Judo.

I've been to three county fairs in the last month. Not that I'm complaining -- they're a major source of summertime beefcake, as well as a fascinating glimpse into a different world.

Fairs originated in the Middle Ages, when most people engaged in sustenance farming, and brought their excess into town to trade for items they might need.

By the 19th century, most people were buying from professional merchants, and fairs became a place to see the latest agricultural equipment and techniques, and compete over the best produce and livestock.

There were state fairs beginning in the 1830s, and county fairs in the 1870s (international expositions of industry and commerce were called worlds' fairs in the 1880s).

Eventually there were carnival-type rides and games, musical acts, races, and other activities, and fairs became a place for fun rather than business.

Nazarenes weren't allowed to go to fairs -- places of sin and corruption -- and of course in gay neighborhoods you wouldn't be caught dead at the heteronormative nuclear-family gun-toting beer-swilling redneck fest -- so I didn't go to any until I moved to the straight world in 2005.

They are, indeed, full of nuclear families and gun-toting, beer-swilling rednecks, but don't let that dissuade you. The opportunities for physique watching are endless.

1. Those nuclear family dads are often built, and wearing muscle shirts (it's always a hot day, and fairgrounds offer no shade).

2. The beer-swilling rednecks are often hot, too, in a seedy, rough-trade way.

3. Fair employees and volunteers, always buffed young men. They don't take their shirts off often, but you can see some tight shirts and tighter jeans.

4. Groups of teenagers and college boys. They don't take their shirts off, either, but they often wear those shirts with no sides, so you can get a side-glimpse of their chests.

5. Hang around the livestock exhibits to see farmboys who have won awards for their sheep, goats, cows, pigs, and horses (this is how everybody displays their goats, with face against crotch. I don't know why).

Can you imagine what it's like to live on a farm, taking care of animals every day, taking a bus 5 miles into town to go to high school? For city folk, it's a completely alien world.

But nowadays have smartphones and wi-fi, so they're as connected to the wide world as the rest of us.

6. Don't forget that there are other gay guys in the straight world, who come to the county fair for physique watching.

See also: Summertime Beefcake at the County Fair

Tony Dow (1945-) who played big brother Wally on the iconic 1950s sitcom Leave It to Beaver, was one of the few teen idols of the period to regularly be photographed shirtless. He was already an athlete, a Junior Olympics diver, when he was cast, and during the five years of Beaver, he just kept bulking up. He never appeared shirtless on the show itself, but he gladly obliged the teen magazines.

Afterwards he continued to act and direct, although he remained most famous for countless parodies of Wally and the Beaver.

Later in life he pursued his passion for art, becoming an accomplished sculptor. He specializes in both cityscapes and the human form. Here's The Diver in bronze.

I thought I had seen all of the beefcake photos of the young Tony Dow, but thanks to the exhaustive searches on Pinterest, the internet has yielded some more.

Same swimming trunks as in the first photo, but an exterior by the pool.

His hair is different; this is another day.

Is that a bulge?

A younger version.

Shirtless interior, a bit older. He really liked the color white.

This is a different pair of white shorts. He must have bought them in bulk.

I wish I knew who the cute friend was. They're both bulging a bit.

See also: Tony Dow

I knew that boys' adventure series of the 1920s (such as the Hardy Boys) usually involved teenage same-sex pairs with a passion, exclusivity, and domesticity you would never see today: gay partners in all but the name.

But I didn't know how far back the fad extended until the Scans Daily website posted some cover scans of Bowery Billy, a teen sleuth from the mean streets of New York. His adventures appeared in Bowery Boy Weekly, one of the illustrated story papers called "penny dreadfuls" because they cost a penny, and they were "dreadful."

A precursor of the working-class East Side Kids of 1930s movies, Billy was, according to the blurb, "an adventurous little Street Arab (homeless kid.)" He talks like this:

"Green bananers! So dis pair is layin' for Bernard Gildersleeve, der millionaire that's jest come, from Chicago to show der fellers in New York how to blow in their boodle!"

Billy was tied up and threatened as much as Robin the Boy Wonder and other superhero sidekicks of 1940s comics. This contraption seems designed to zero in on his manhood.

But who was rescuing him? Did he have a boyfriend? A girlfriend? An adult benefacator?

After a diligent search, I managed to track down and read a story -- really a short novel, over 50 pages long. And it turns out that Billy lives with a boy named Lulu.

Really Louis, but Billy gave him a girl's name because he originally thought he was a sissy: he is "pale and delicate-looking," but with an inner resourcefulness. He knows how to use his fists.

The two live together, go out on adventures together, and rescue -- and then ignore -- girls together. Of course, Billy needs rescuing quite often as well, and here Lulu is about to be drowned by evil cultists as Billy rushes in.

At the end of the story I read, "Bowery Billy became the millionaire's guest on board of the beautiful yacht. Lulu Drexel remained with him for the night."

I'm reminded of the line in The Well of Loneliness (1928) which caused it to be judged obscene. The lesbians meet, talk of love, "and that night they were not parted."

A gay teenage romance in 1904.

When I was in college, you couldn't walk into Adam's Bookstore at the Augustana Student Union or Readmore Book World downtown without seeing a dozen sci-fi novels by Philip Jose Farmer (1918-2009) on display. Bright, colorful paperbacks with amazingly muscular hunks on the covers, sometimes nude, and stories inside that sounded fascinating.

Sometimes they were.

There were three main types:

1. The World of Tiers: The Maker of Universes (1965), A Private Cosmos (1968), etc. A man from our world is trapped on a multi-plane world occupied by various human, alien, and mythical beings. He kills lots of bad guys and falls in love with a girl. Yawn.

2. The Riverworld series: To Your Scattered Bodies Go (1971), The Fabulous Riverboat (1972), etc. Every person who has ever existed wakes up on the banks of an endless river. Richard Burton, Alice Liddel (the inspiration for Alice in Wonderland), Mark Twain, a Neanderthal named Kazz, and other colorful characters search for answers.

The first book is great, but it takes three more before anyone solves the mystery, and then it's a complete let-down: "So this was what all the fuss was about?"

Still, it was nice to imagine every person who has ever lived standing around naked, including Genghis Khan, William Shakespeare, andmy high school history teacher,

3. I was most interested in the postmodern, self-referential mash-ups of fictional heroes: Tarzan meets Doc Savage (Lord of the Trees and the Mad Goblin, 1970), and Sherlock Holmes (The Adventures of the Peerless Peer, 1974).

The Jules Verne hero Phineas Fogg meets aliens (The Other Log of Phileas Fogg, 1973).

Dorothy's son returns to Oz (A Barnstormer in Oz, 1982).

One of the first sci-fi writers to incorporate sexual activity into his stories, Farmer went wild, with graphic descriptions of multiple sexual acts. But no gay characters that I can recall, though in A Feast Unknown (1969), Tarzan and Doc Savage find that they can only get aroused through violence, so they enter into a violent homoerotic relationship of sorts. It was originally published as porn.

Also, in Flesh (1960), the good guy mass-murders a tribe of gay-stereotype Elves.

The Beverly Hillbillies, one of the 1960s line of hayseed comedies (others included Petticoat Junction, Green Acres, Gomer Pyle, and The Andy Griffith Show), slogged on from 1962 to 1971, and your parents watched every week, so you couldn't avoid it. It was amazingly popular with adults: some of the regular episodes -- not even Christmas specials -- became the most watched episodes of all time.

The basic premise: a hillbilly from Bugtussle, Tennessee or Arkansas, Jed Clampett (Buddy Ebsen), becomes unbelievably rich when oil is discovered on his property, so he moves to a mansion in Beverly Hills, along with his crotchety mother-in-law Granny (Irene Ryan), his daughter Ellie Mae (Donna Douglas), and his dumb-lunk nephew Jethro (Max Baer Jr.).

Though they became marginally assimilated after nine years, they still wore hillbilly clothes, ate possum pie, and referred to their swimming pool as a "cement pond." Plots usually involved big city types trying to dupe and manipulate them, but their backwoods wisdom, orneriness, or dumb luck win out in the end.

The message: big city life is dehumanizing. Only in the country can real be real.

Other plots involved Ellie Mae's dating, Jethro's get-rich quick schemes (odd, since he already was rich), and Granny's dislike of all things big city.

There was never much beefcake in hillbilly comedies. Max Baer Jr., son of the famous boxer Max Baer, had a nice physique, but rarely showed it on camera. We were supposed to laugh at his dopiness, not sigh over his muscles.

Bonding was also rather uncommon. Most of the primary relationships were platonically male-female: Jed and Granny, Ellie Mae and Jethro, bank president Mr. Drysdale and his secretary, Miss Hathaway (Nancy Culp, who incidentally was gay in real life.)

But gay-vague was everywhere.

1. Mr. Drysdale's son, Sonny (Louis Nye) is sophisticated, well-educated, and not interested in girls. His parents keep trying to hook him up with Ellie Mae (so he will eventually inherit the Clampett millions), but he will have none of it. He and Ellie are just friends.

2. Hollywood star Dash Riprock (Larry Pennell), a parody of Rock Hudson, is handsome, suave, and not interested in girls. He vaguely courts Ellie Mae, but his heart isn't in it, regardless of how much his studio pushes them together.

Apparently the producers thought it hilarious to keep having Ellie Mae run into men who were not interested in girls.

3. Jethro had a "twin sister," Jethrine. She stayed back in the hills, and didn't show up often, but when she did, it was obvious that it was Jethro in drag. I got the distinct impression that everyone was just playing along, responding to his drag persona as if she was a different person.

See also: Petticoat Junction; Green Acres

During the 1980s, the buzzword was "family values," which meant that only people who had heterosexual nuclear families had value. We heard again and again that the only life worth living involved husbands and wives raising horny teenager and wisecracking preteens. That's why Married...with Childrenwas such a big hit, immersed in a pool of Family Ties, Family Matters, Growing Pains, The Wonder Years, and The Cosby Show.

But there was a glimmer of inclusivity in The Hogan Family (1986-91), which began as Valerie, a star vehicle for Mary Tyler Moore Show second banana Valerie Harper She played the matriarch of a nuclear family consisting of airline pilot husband Michael Hogan (Josh Taylor, left), horny teenager David (17-year old Jason Bateman, previously of It's Your Moveand Silver Spoons), and wisecracking twins who looked nothing alike Mark (15-year old Jeremy Licht) and Willie (15-year old Danny Ponce).

After a season and a half, Harper left in the midst of a salary dispute -- and proved not indispensible. Her character was killed, Aunt Sandy (Sandy Duncan) moved in, and the renamed series got top ratings for another three years.

As is common in nuclear family sitcoms, the kids soon took over. The twins usually had episodes involving cheating, bullies, staying out past curfew, friends (notably Andre Gower), and the "discovery of girls." By the last season, they were as heterosexually active as David.

Jeremy Licht had soft, androgynous features, and became the darling of the teen magazines.

Danny Ponce was frequently ignored. But many gay teens preferred him to Jeremy Licht

.Especially in later seasons, when he toned up. Here's what he looks like after Hogan.

Jason Bateman was mostly ignored, too -- there are no shirtless teen idol pix of him anywhere. But his David got most of the serious episodes (premarital sex, drunk driving, gambling), and he had ample time for buddy-bonding, particularly with the gay-coded teen-operator Rich (Tom Hodges).

Rich died of AIDS in a December 1990 episode.

They didn't specify how he contracted the disease, but as this was the first sitcom AIDS episode where everyone didn't yell "Blood transfusion!" over and over, the silence was more than enough to tell us that David's friend was gay.

Most of the cast members are gay allies. Jason Bateman has played gay characters many times. Jeremy Licht and his wife Kimberly are vocal supporters of gay rights; 2012 he participated in Brice Beckham's CCOKC video (Child Celebrities Opposing Kirk Cameron).

There's a Jason Bateman story on Gay Celebrity Dating Stories.

See also: Danny Ponce

Duke University in Durham, North Carolina is the Harvard of the South, with an 11% acceptance rate and tuition of $53,000. The Duke University Press publishes impenetrable, jargon-heavy books with titles like Abject Performances and Infrahumanism. So I didn't expect to find much beefcake there.

But it turns out that all of that money can be channeled into extensive media promotion of Duke athletes. Wrestling is especially well represented.

Team superstar seems to be Jacob Kasper, a Redshirt Senior from Lexington, Ohio. We even get a list of "fun facts," like his favorite karaoke song is "Don't Stop Believing."

Matt Finesilver is a prominent newcomer, a freshman from Greenwood Village, Colorado, where he was a four-year letter winner at Cherry Creek High School.

Matt's three brothers are also on the Duke team.

Matt and Josh (left) are twins, and Junior Redshirts Zach and Mitch (below) are twins.

Imagine the tuition!

No, I'm not imagining anything else.

There are some team members who don't have twins. Alec Schenk is a Redshirt Junior from Perry, Ohio.

While rich white guys are disproportionately represented, there are a few minorities on the team. Kaden Russell is a freshman from Medina, Ohio, where he lettered twice at St. Ignatius.

And Freshman Maliik (two i's) Marcin is a townie, from Durham, where he lettered four years at Charles E. Jordan High School. He also lettered in football.

Here's the whole crew on a run at the beach.

I don't know if any of them are gay, but Duke athletes participate in a "Sports and Social Justice Initiative" to teach them how to advocate for gay rights, and the 80+ "Athlete Allies" march in the Durham gay pride parade.

In West Hollywood, gay bars always had a theme song that you would hear over and over, at least once an hour, every time you visited.

From 1985 to 1993, I went to Mugi, the Asian bar in Hollywood, almost every Saturday night, sometimes Wednesday or Friday, too. That means that I heard "One Night in Bangkok" at least 300 times.

From 1990 to 1995, I went to the Faultline, the leather bar on Melrose, near Los Angeles City College. There were some Asian guys there, too, of course.

I was there almost every Sunday afternoon, sometimes Friday or Saturday, too. So I heard their theme song over 300 times.

I never heard it anywhere else. I didn't know the title or the group, and I didn't bother asking.

It seemed to be a Gay Pride anthem:

Open up the closet door, watch out, here I come.

Although some of the lyrics seemed to involve a bar pickup:

You, I don't even know your name, baby.
You, something something, baby.

With a chorus:
Round, round, round, round, something something baby, round round round round.

Years later, I heard the song again, at the gym of all places, and it brought me back to those many nights and Sunday afternoons surrounded by shirtless and leather-clad men. When I got home, I did an internet search.

It's "You Spin Me Round (Like a Record)", by the British band Dead or Alive, released in December 1984, peaked at #4 on the dance charts in January 1985.

Boy, did I get the lyrics wrong! The "gay pride anthem":

Open up your lovin' arms, watch out here I come.

The bar pickup:

If I, I get to know your name, baby
Then I could trace your private number, baby

No specific gay content, although the lead singer of the bad was the fabulously feminine Peter Burns (bottom left), an androgyne in the mold of Boy George, who married a woman and then a man, but divorced him and declared in homophobic contempt that "gay marriage doesn't work. It's better to marry a woman."

Other members were Mike Percy, Steve Coy, and Tim Lever.

I'm still trying to figure out why an androgynous dance number was the theme song in a leather bar with no androgyny and no dancing.

It doesn't really matter. Even though I know the lyrics now, I still can hear in my head the gay pride anthem from 300 nights at the Faultline:

Open up the closet door, watch out, here I come.

See also: One Night in Bangkok

After posting on the four twins wrestling for Duke University, I started looking for more twins who competed on wrestling or swim teams together.

Turns out that twins often choose the same activities growing up, so there are quite a lot of twin swimmers, memorialized in articles with titles like "Seeing Double" and "Double Threat."

1. Ben and Josh Rudgayzer of Hewlett High School on Long Island.

1. Cale and Shane Blinkman (#1 and #3) represented the St. Croix Swim Club of Stillwater, Minnesota at the USA Swimming Speedo Junior Winter Nationals in Iowa City in 2016.

3. Todd and Charlie Boaz swim for Bloomington High School in Illinois. Todd also plays football.

4. Jay Litherland (right) of the University of Georgia made the U.S. Olympic swim team. The other triplets, Kevin and Mick, tried but didn't make the cut.

5.Back in 2009, Bill and Dan Jones from Fremont, Michigan swam for Harvard.

More after the break

6. Max and Lex Hernandez-Nietling scored big at the Class 5-1A State Championship at Topeka, Kansas in 2016. They were juniors at Bishop Miege High School in Roeland Park, Kansas.

I can't tell which two are Lex and Max. Here's aphoto of Lex.

7.Colin and Morgan Richter from Cleburne, Texas, when they swam for Goucher College in 2014.

8. Ryan and Patrick Gridley of New Trier High School in Northfield, Illinois.

I don't know which two they are. Maybe this picture of Ryan with hair will help.

9. Vincent and Thomas Finello (#1 and #4) of the Viewpoint School in Calabasas, California.

10. Brandon and Richard Keller swam for Olympic High School in Charlotte, North Carolina. But then Richard went to Towson University, and Brandon went to the University of Cincinnati.

Kim's Convenience (2016-) which just appeared on Netflix, is a popular Canadian sitcom adaption of a play that has run since 2011. It's about a Korean-Canadian family running a convenience store in a diverse neighborhood of Toronto.

It seems a bit retro: in each episode, the curmudgeonly, old-fashioned Mr. Kim (Paul Sun-Hyung Lee) rams head-first into something about modern society that he doesn't understand. In the first episode, it's gay people.

He refuses to allow a gay pride poster to be placed in his shop window, because why do gay people have to advertise themselves with a parade? Koreans don't march down the street yelling "I'm Korean!" If they're gay, why can't they be quiet, respectful gays?

I started to cringe, having heard this complaint a dozen times, even from gay people. It is a standard homophobic misconception that gay pride is about proclaiming that you have gay sex rather than celebrating survival in a hostile world.

Accused of being homophobic, Mr. Kim backtracks by offering a 15% discount to gay people during Pride Week. Through the rest of the episode, he decides who warrants the discount and who doesn't.

He tells Boy Toy (Alexander Nunez) "You're not gay, you're just pretending." Boy Toy returns with a flamboyant friend as proof, but Mr. Kim merely asks him what his favorite movie was in college. Caddyshack. Straight.

But when a guy (Andy Yu) drops in to apply for a job, Mr. Kim offers him the discount. He protests that he is straight, but Mr. Kim wink-winks "Sometimes it takes awhile for the gay to come out."

He does give the discount to a drag queen after a conversation about "Why you dress like a woman?" She actually seems pleased by the question, and replies: "It feels comfortable. It feels like home."

The episode was not exactly offensive, at least not offensive enough to turn off, but it made me uncomfortable. It was like watching people talk about me behind my back.

No gay people appear, or are referenced, in any of the other episodes I sampled. Evidently the gays were the problem of the week, and the show moved on:

A friend asks Mr. Kim to become a "wingman" on a double date.

A kid runs wild in the convenience store, and the mother refuses to discipline him.

Mr. Kim gets a crush on the new female pastor, and insists on not charging her for anything.

After the first few episodes, the convenience store was relegated to the B plot, while the primary plot involved the problems and relationships of the two Kim children:

Janet (Andrea Bang), a photography student at OCAD University, struggles to achieve independence by moving out, getting a job, and refusing to "marry a nice Korean Christian boy." .

Jung (Simu Liu), who hasn't talked to his father in years, works at a car rental company, where he has a crush on his female boss. He doesn't appear to own a shirt.

The writers play up Jung's hunkiness deliberately, as a remedy to the countless sexless Asian characters in media.

Simu Liu has also appeared in the play Banana Boys, about the stereotypes Asian Canadian men face, such as "they are bananas (yellow on the outside, white on the inside)."

Other male characters include:

Kimchee (Andrew Phung, center ), a clownish slob, Jung's roommate, coworker, and bromantic life partner.

Gerald (Ben Beauchemin), their nerdish, self-depricating coworker, and eventually Janet's platonic roommate.

Terence (Michael Musi), another coworker at the car rental place, who Kimchee doesn't like.

Alex (Michael Xavier), Jung's childhood friend who briefly dates Janet.

Enrique (Rodrigo Fernandez-Stoll), a regular customer at the convenience store.

Alejandro (Mark Grazzini), who dates Jung's boss.

Roger (Kevin Vidal), who briefly dates Janet's friend.

Raj Mehta (Ishan Dave), who dates Janet.

Peter (Zach Smadu, left). I don't know who he plays. I just had trouble finding beefcake photos of the other actors.

I like the fact that the Canadian locale isn't closeted: this is definitely Toronto. The scene where a guy tries to rob the convenience store with a knife instead of a gun made me want to move there.

But I don't like the exclusion of gay people from the universe, after the first "gay problem" episode.

I had so much success with swim team twins that I tried it out with wrestlers: twins on the same wrestling team in high school or college, preferably posed together in their singlets.

There are quite a lot of them.

1. Jack and Luke Bokina wrestle for Mattituck High School on Long Island.

I could only find singlet pics of Jack, but here they are wrestling each other. Jack in yellow, Luke in blue.

2. Jeff and Justin Holm from Harper Creek, Michigan, wrestled for Olivet College in 2014-2015 (not Olivet Nazarene College, another one). Jeff transferred to Ohio State, and Justin, to the University of Nebraska, splitting up the team.

3. Finally, a picture of the two together, in singlets. They are Marco and Gator Groves (Gator's real name is Bobby), who graduated from McClintock High School in Tempe, Arizona and went on to Arizona State.

4.In 2013, Ethan and Grayson Dolan of Long Valley, New Jersey won the "Beat the Streets" Championship at Madison Square Garden in New York. They were 8th graders at Long Valley Middle School.

In 2018, they are the Dolan Twins, internet celebrities who have had a comedy program on Awesomeness TV for 3 years.

5.Saxon and Brayden Lyman (carrying the coach in their arms) placed in the state competition in Des Moines, Iowa in July 2018. They also play football at Eagle Grove Community School.

More after the break.

6. Alex and Andrew Hoover from Mt. Spokane High School in Mead, Washington, were state contenders in 2016. They went on to Case Western Reserve.

7. Zahid and Anthony Valencia (#3 and#5) wrestled for St. John Bosco High School in Bellflower, California, and then for Arizona State.

8. Hser Eh and Hser Moo Pwee escaped from their native Burma in 2007, and in 2015 were wrestling for Worthington High School in Minnesota. They are currently attending Minnesota Technical College.

9. Paulando and Geralando Dennison wrestled for Whitehorse High School, Montezuma Creek, Utah, in the Navajo Nation. They were also on the track team, and performed songs on their youtube channel.

10. The Wissel Twins, Ryan and Tyler, are wrestling for Highland High School in Medina, Ohio

They're #1 and #5 in this photo.

In Illinois and Iowa, highway rest stops have trees and grass, and sometimes hiking trails. In Indiana and Ohio, they have a different idea: travel plazas. No trees, no grass, nowhere to walk except on hot concrete parking lots, but lots of things to spend money on

There are four travel plazas on the I-90 in Indiana, and seven in Ohio. The architecture is identical: a court with bathrooms and travel information, a convenience store, a travel souvenir store, and three fast-food restaurants, where you may be able to get a salad.

They are all bright and airy, rather pleasant except for having no trees or grass, and since everyone stops there, they are perfect for physique watching. Nobody takes their shirts off, but there are plenty of handsome faces, hard pecs and shoulders, and bulges on display.

Here are the top 10 physiques I found on my last crosscountry trip:

1. A muscle dad texting by the soda machines, his preteen daughters in tow.

2. It's hard to tell in a small photo, but this guy sipping a soda outside the Starbucks was breathtaking.

3. Blond wearing pink sunglasses and a tight black t-shirt, strutting around, aware that he's making everyone's jaw drop.

4. Cute nerd dad with an unshaven face eating burgers with his wife and toddlers.

5. This guy with his hands covering his crotch was applying for a job. He was asked "Why do you want to work here?" and replied "It would be interesting to meet people from all over the world." More likely it's the only job available in a small town in Indiana?

6. A very friendly high school senior from a suburb of Chicago, eating at Burger King with his father and little brother.

7. This guy isn't quite old enough to be of beefcake interest, but what's with the chicken hat?

8. He was at a table with three older, fatter guys. When he stood up, I was blinded by the bulge.

9. An employee of the Ohio Toll Road Authority, chatting up one of the clerks at the convenience store. A female clerk, unfortunately.

10. A suspicious guy in a cut-off t-shirt, with his male friend and two girls. They must be locals hanging out.

I only had a conversation with one of these guys; the others came and went quickly. But that's the fun part: a glimpse of beauty that you will never see again.

In case you're wondering who this boy is who showers wearing a towel and seems very happy to be looking at the muscular adult hunk, his name is Martin Spanjers, and he was playing the teenage Rory on the TGIF sitcom Eight Simple Rules for Dating My Teenage Daughter (2002-2005), about an overprotective Dad. It wasn't as heterosexist as it sounds

1. Dad was played by the gay-friendly John Ritter, who originated the "straight pretending to be gay" bit on Three's Company (1977-84).
2. Mom was played by the gay ally Katey Sagal, star ofMarried with Childrenand Futurama.
3. The teenage daughter takes a girl to the prom in order to make a stand for gay rights.
4. At the same prom, Rory's date turns out to be a lesbian.

5. Grandpa (James Garner), brought in after the tragic death of John Ritter, thinks the school principal is hitting on Rory.
6. James Garner originated the "attracted to a guy who's really a girl" in Victor/Victoria (1982).
7. Rory is one of the standard gay-vague sitcom kids, soft, shy, pretty, and struggling valiantly to act girl-crazy.

After Eight Simple Rules, Martin did the usual guest star bit, on 90210, Family Guy, and Good Luck Charlie. Then he got a starring role on the vampire drama True Blood, with Joe Manganiello. When his parents discover that the teenage Sam Merlotte is a shapeshifter, they abandon him -- he comes home from school to find the house deserted. A lot of gay kids could relate to parents unable to accept their true identity. He drifted for a long time, through a series of failed relationships, unable to find a home anywhere, not even among werewolves. Finally he grew up (into Sam Trammel), and opened a bar in Bon Temps, Louisiana, where he dated women but had erotic dreams about men.

Martin also made some quirky black comedies, such as Sassy Pants (2012), in which a teen (Ashley Ricards) runs away from her oppressive mother to live with her deadbeat Dad, and bonds with her Dad's much younger boyfriend (Haley Joe Osment). Martin plays her younger brother, who is also gay.

More recently he has appeared in tv series such as Larry and Lucy, Angel from Hell, and Hot Girl Walks By. He lives in L.A., but I don't know if he is gay or not.

We've had nostalgia-trip tv series about the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, so I guess it's about time for a "coming of age" tv series about a heterosexual guy looking back on his childhood in the wonder years of the 1990s.

Play by Play (2017-), available on go90sports and the Complex Network, follows the adventures of ESPN sportscaster Pete Hickey (voiced by series creator Kevin Jakubowski) as he looks back on his adolescent self (Reid Miller), a freshman at St. Roman High School in Des Moines, Iowa.

He's got a former athletic superstar big brother (Tyler Emerson Crim), a doltish dad (Jonathan Bray), a best bud (Max Amor), The Girl of His Dreams (Elle Jo Trowbridge), and various friends, enemies, and teammates.

Plots include trying to get on the team, being bullied, getting his own room, joining crazy clubs to impress girls, trying to draw girls away from the crude jocks they're dating, first date, first kiss, girls! girls! girls!. Which, as you know, is all every adolescent boy thinks of, every minute of every day.

The series shouts, loudly, that heterosexual desire and behavior is universal human experience, a boy's "coming of age" means becoming interested in girls, gay people absolutely, emphatically do not exist.

Pete enters his freshman year at a previously all-boy school, but now it admits girls. So, according to a synopsis, "every sophomore, junior and senior at his school — all dudes — are gunning for the girls in his grade."

Every one, with no exceptions. Not one boy in a hundred, not one in a thousand, not one in a million is gay.

In an interview, Jakubowski states that he had a similar experience when attending Fenwick High School, a selective Catholic school in ritzy Oak Park, Illinois: the freshman class was the first to admit girls, so "every" older boy in the school was trying to date the freshmen girls, leaving "all" of the freshman boys in the dust.

Not one of them was gay.

Um...Kevin, your heterosexism is showing. I know for a fact that there were gay people in Oak Park, Illinois in the 1990s. And today Fenwick High School has an Equality Club, "empowering marginalized groups of people such as women, the LGBTQ community, African Americans, and other minorities."

For a show about sports, there's surprisingly little beefcake: no locker room scenes, everyone wears uniforms to class, big brother wears a bathrobe at all times. I could find beefcake photos of only two minor cast members, Aiden Alexander (above) and Ben Getz (left).

But I wasn't looking very hard. I was busy thinking back to my high school experience in the 1970s, where preachers, teachers, parents, and peers were constantly screaming at me "What girl do you like? What girl do you like? What girl? What girl? What girl?"

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même.

When I was growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, heterosexual desire was assumed a constant, a universal of human experience. Same-sex desire was not only never mentioned, it could not be mentioned.

It not only didn't exist, it could not be conceived of.

It wasn't just a certainty that no boy on Earth had ever longed for the touch of another boy, not once in the history of the world.

We were unable to even imagine the possibility.

Boys who obviously longed for boys?

They were looking for a buddy or a role model.

Boys who obviously didn't care for girls?

They were shy, or immature, or hadn't found the right girl yet.

Boys who were derided as "fairies" and "fags"?

Their interest in art and ballet, their inability to catch a ball, obviously represented deficient masculinity, but they desired girls as heartily as every other boy.

Desire for the same sex was simply beyond the boundaries of our imagination.

It was easier to conceive of hobbits.

But there were hints, mysteries to mull over, to contemplate like zen koans, to puzzle out like cryptograms.

Men on tv or in movies who cared for each other, fought for each other, and walked side by side into the future.

Men who didn't marry, who lived alone or with other men.

Men who hugged.

Who smiled at me, or touched me on the shoulder.

The sight of a muscular frame that filled me with inexplicable joy.

Small subtle signs.

Through the looking glass.
Take the red pill.
With a bit of a mind flip, you're into the time slip.
It's not raining upstairs.

Sometime in junior high, I read an one-page story in an Archie comic book. Big Ethel's friends criticize her for being indiscriminate, accuse her of accepting dates with anyone, anytime, anywhere.

On the contrary, Ethel says, she has very exacting standards.
1. Her date must be a boy.
2. He must be breathing.
3. He must be a slow runner (so she can catch him as he's fleeing in terror).

It was just a throwaway joke with the punch line of "slow runner." But I was mesmerized. There was something -- a logical fallacy -- a paradox -- a hint.

Slowly it dawned on me: Ethel has a rule about dating only boys.

Such a rule is necessary only if there are other groups of people whom she could date.

Does she only date teenage boys, and not adult men?
Or only date boys, and not girls?

Could a girl date a girl?
Could a boy date a boy?

It's not raining upstairs.

I grew up in the golden age of teen idols: David Cassidy, Shaun Cassidy, Robbie Benson, Bobby Sherman, Leif Garrett. Top rated tv shows, #1 songs, gushing articles in teen magazines ("Find out what it's like to kiss Bobby!").

And beefcake. It took awhile to get your big break, so the teen idols were adults, in their late teens or 20s, with physiques and bulges. They appealed to guys in high school and college. Even adults often found them hot.

Today any 10-year old with a Youtube account can upload a video of him singing or telling a joke and suddenly gain 3,000,000 followers, sponsors, a movie deal, and fame. As a result, the teen idols tend to be very, very young, of interest to junior high kids and maybe, in a stretch, high schoolers, while the adults, if they have heard of them, are saying "call me in about five years."

To illustrate, here are the top 10 male teen idols from the website Teen Idols 4 You:

#10. Jace Norman, star of Nickelodeon's Henry Danger, posing here in his underwear. 18 years old, barely an adult. A very skinny adult. And remember, he's been on Henry Danger for 4 years. And he's only #10.

#9. Alex Ruygrok, Australian, a model who began his career in January 2017 by posting pictures of himself in various fashion designs to Instagram. He got lots of followers and sponsors, and was featured on the cover of Fashion Kids in January 2018. He's now 13 years old, so he must have started at age 11.

#8. William Franklyn-Miller, a 14-year old British actor and model. He has appeared in about six episodes of tv series, including Arrow, Neighbours, and Jack Irish, but he still managed to get 979,000 followers on Instagram.

Call me in about 4 years.

#7. Romeo Beckham, a 15-year old British guy. I don't know why he has 1.5 million followers on Instagram. Is it because he's the son of soccer star David Beckham?

I think he's the one on the left.

#6. Miles Heizer. An actual adult (age 24). He has appeared in Parenthood, CSI, The Arm, and elsewhere. His popularity is probably due to his role in the suicide drama 13 Reasons Why. This is not a gay romance scene.

#5.Ricky Garcia. Ok, this one is old enough to drive a car (age 19), starring on the Disney Channel's Best Friends Whenever and in the movie Bigger, Fatter Lier (2017). He's also a singer. He's on the right, on a date with #1 Asher Angel.

#4. Johnny Orlando, age 15, an internet celebrity whose song "Mackenzie" has 11 million views on Youtube. He's also made some movies.

Have you noticed that, regardless of age, they all have shirtless or underwear photos uploaded for the edification of their fans? And they all seem to have abs.

#3. Carson Lueders, age 16, an internet celebrity with 3 million instagram followers, a singer who loves his friends, family, and God. He's legal to date in some states, but why would anyone over the age of 13 want to? Even though the stars-and-stripes shorts are kind of cool.

#2. Bryce Gheisar, a 13 year old Canadian actor known for the Disney Channel's Walk the Prank (2016-2017) and Wonder (2017), about a boy with a physical deformity going to a mainstream school. Unfortunately, I think he's the one on the right. Could I get a date with the boyfriend instead?

And the #1 teen idol in the world:

#1. Asher Angel, aka "Ashy Boy," Jonah the heartthrob on the Disney Channel's teencom Andi Mack. 15 years old.

He's the one second from the left, making gang signs while immersed in a pool. Call me in about 5 years.

I do like his choice of friends, though, especially the red-trunks guy with his boyfriend leaning against his crotch. Is Asher gay?

When I was growing up in Rock Island, the western edge of my world was Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and the eastern edge was Lasalle-Peru, about 90 miles away. I knew Interstate 80 east to Chicago, of course, but we didn't stop at any of those towns. We visited Lasalle-Peru quite often, for jump quizzes at the Nazarene Church and music contests at Lasalle High School, for orchestra concerts and drama club events at Illinois Valley Community College; and several times a year, usually on Saturdays in the summer, we visited Starved Rock State Park.

It's named after a sandstone butte where the Illiniwek (after who Illinois is named) were besieged by the Ottawa and Potawatomie tribes until they starved to death. The story is probably apocryphal, but there is archaeological evidence of human habitation since the Pleistocene Era. There was a little museum, a trolley, and a lot of hiking trails down the canyon and to see the waterfalls.

On the way home, we drove into Lasalle for ice cream or hamburgers, and passed a "haunted house," four stories, dark and spooky, with rotundas and staring windows. Once I saw a naked man staring out the window.

See: The Naked Man in the Haunted House

I haven't been there for over 30 years, so I thought it would be interesting to check on the beefcake at the edge of the world.

Lasalle-Peru High School still has the Cavaliers, with wrestling and swimming.

Their main rival is St. Bede Academy, a Catholic prep school in Peru. It was male only until 1973.

St. Bede's star wrestler looks a little chunky, but I guess that's an advantage in matwork.

Illinois Valley Community College does not offer intercollegiate swimming or wrestling, but you can join an intramural team.

If you search on "Illinois Valley Community College Bodybuilding," you get the "Jeremiah 29:11 The Anywhere Office Bodybuilding Helping other’s create healthy lifestyles," with a guy named Mark who is going to continue his baseball career.

I don't know what any of that means, but Jeremiah 29:11 says: "For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future."

Nice to be sure.

You also get an ad for "Dynamite bodybuilding an fitness by J.W. Fitness Guru an personal trainer." He asks "Who is ready to make changes to their physique to this degree? Who is sick and tired of being sick and tired of living and unhealthy lifestyle? I will give you guaranteed success and Supply you with the knowledge and wisdom of a Champion✔👌 Free consultations available right now"

The eastern edge of the universe seems to be populated mostly by bodybuilding shills.

I think I'll stick to the YMCA.

I watched part of the first episode of the Cartoon Network's Rick and Morty (2013-) a couple of years ago, and turned it off, bored. But people kept telling me how great it was, so I bought the entire Season 2 and binge watched.

Rick Sanchez is a foul-mouthed, misanthropic, drunken mad scientist who drags his squeamish tween grandson Morty (both voiced by series co-creator Justin Roiland) on complex, blood-and-puke filled adventures in the multiverse.

Sometimes his other relatives (forceful daughter Beth, her sitcom-inept husband Jerry, self-involved teenage granddaughter Summer) tag along.

Example: when his spaceship battery goes dead, Rick reveals that he has created an entire microverse inside the battery and populated it with beings who generate the electricity by stomping on foot-generators.

But a scientist in the microverse has created his own mini-microverse, and populated it with beings who generate the electricty for his world, so they no longer feel the need to run Rick's generators. And in the mini-microverse, another scientist....sort of like Inception, with more blood and puke.

Example: alien parasites have infested the house, pretending to be family members and friends, and inducing everyone complete sets of memories, so you think you've known them forever. So how can they tell who belongs there?

They know that six people belong there: the main family, and Sleepy Gary, who is actually married to Beth. Ok, seven: Frankenstein has been a close friend for years. Ok, eight, including the Raptor. Ten...ten people have always lived in the house. No, twelve...

I have to admit, the plotlines are interesting, with effusively creative universe inside of universe. The blood and puke, not so much.

And Rick's habit of ending every sentence with "Morty" gets annoying.

"We got to get out of here, Morty. Hand me that cosmic defrazzler, Morty. This should do the trick, Morty. But there's no telling what universe we'll end up in, Morty. We'll just have to wait and see, Morty."

And I can't stand Morty's whining. Or his hetero-horniness. He has a crush on The Girl of His Dreams back at school, and in most parts of the multiverse, he finds a cute alien babe and "lets his penis do the talking."

Then there's the homophobia.

Fans point to the episode "Auto Erotic Assimilation" as evidence that Rick Sanchez is pansexual. Not so: Rick is a grungy, sleasy, grab-their-tits, two-dollar hooker hetero horndog. In that episode, he has sex with a being named Unity, who has taken over the bodies of everyone on a planet. Unity talks to him through male and female beings, but when they have sex, he specifies that he wants a stadium filled with attractive female bodies, and the bleachers filled with men to be amazed at his sexual proficiency. That's heterosexual to the nth degree.

Rick doesn't even like gay people. His favorite slur is "cocksucker!" It's not just a denigration of oral sex; although men and women both can engage in that activity, Rick only uses it to demean men, by implying that they are gay. For instance, in "The Wedding Squanchers," he denigrates his son-in-law Jerry: "My name is Jerry, and I love to suck big hairy boners and lick disgusting testicle sacks."

I happened to watch the episode about an hour after doing just that.

Obviously the show expects us to find gay sex disgusting.

"Gay" is also used as an all-purpose put-down: "That's gay."

According to the fan wiki, there have been several actual LGBT characters on the show. Let's take a look at them:

1.The alien parasite pretending to be Sleepy Gary has introduced memories of a secret gay romance with Jerry. They keep it closeted.

2. Father Bob, the priest at the town church, has gay desires that he must hide, because, of course, God hates gays.

3. An alternate universe version of Summer is a lesbian, who is dating the alternate universe version of Summer's nemesis, Christina LaCroix. She is attacked by other alternate versions of herself. Can't have those lesbians around!

4. An alien tv commercial tells us about Trunk People are men who have elephant trunks on their faces, which allows them to have sex with both men and women.

Silly me -- I thought there were people right here on Earth who had sex with men and women both. Apparently the writers believe that bisexuality is physically impossible.

Or did they mean sex with men and women at the same time is physically impossible?

News flash: you have a penis or a vagina, a mouth, a butt, and two hands. That's five partners, of whatever gender configuration you want. Try a cisgender man, a cisgender woman, a transman, a transwoman, and someone who is intersexed.

5. Maybe that's why bisexual actress Kristen Stewart has a cameo, having sex with an alternate universe Jerry. See -- she's actually straight.

6. The partially mechanical humanoid Revolio Clockberg Jr. (aka Gearface) tries to pick up college girls, but he also reads a magazine called Queer Gear, which appears to show a mechanical humanoid having sex with a machine. It's in the background of a scene; you have to freeze-frame and blow it up to see it.

7. King Jellybean, a giant anthropomorphic jellybean, tries to molest 14-year old Morty in the bathroom: "Stop being such a fucking tease, you sweet little vaginal potato!" Morty beats him to death.

Yep, all gay men are sexual predators and pedophiles. Teenage boys better be careful in public restrooms!

Even Family Guy never went that far.

I won't be watching any more episodes.

The most flamboyantly feminine actor in the 1970s was not Paul Lynde or Charles Nelson Reilly: it was Dom Deluise (below), who played gay-coded roles in many of his buddy Burt Reynold's movies (Smokey and the Bandits II, Canonball Run, The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas), and many of his buddy Mel Brooks' movies (Blazing Saddles, Silent Movie, The World's Greatest Lover). It seemed that you couldn't go to any comedy where Dom wasn't camping it up.

His characters were all gay stereotypes -- in fact, they were rather homophobic -- but you never saw positive portrayals of gay men anywhere. Just depicting them as vivacious, fun-loving, and not monsters was a step forward in 1976.

Dom continued to work steadily during the 1980s and 1990s, moving into voice work, appearing as himself everywhere on tv, and publishing some best-selling cookbooks. No movies with "real" gay characters, except for Girl Play (2004), in which a director casts two women to play lesbian lovers, and they end up falling for each other.

With all his flamboyance and camp, and his close friendships with closeted gay performers like Liberace and Jim Nabors, most people assumed that Dom was gay. Maybe he was, but that didn't stop him from being married to Carol Arthur from 1965 to his death in 2009.

His three sons are all actors, but they have resisted the family tradition of flamboyant, gay-coded characters, playing mostly cops and other macho types:

1. Peter (left), born in 1966, is best known as Officer Doug Penhall on 21 Jump Street.

2. Michael, born 1969, had a recurring role on The Gilmore Girls.

3. David (top photo), born in 1971, is best known as the father of a family of wizards in the Disney Channel's gay subtext Wizards of Waverly Place.

Easy Bake Ovens and Gay Identity

Physique-Watching at the County Fair

More Beefcake Photos of Tony Dow

Bowery Billy and his Boyfriend Lulu

Philip Jose Farmer: Gay Sci-Fi with Muscles

The Beverly Hillbillies

The Hogan Family

Duke University Beefcake

"Open Up the Closet Door": The Theme Song of 300 Nights in a Leather Bar

Small Town Swim-Team Twins

Kim's Convenience: Gay People are the Problem of the Week

High School and College Wrestling Twins

The Top 10 Physiques at a Travel Plaza on the Toll Road

Martin Spanjers: 8 Simple Rules for Playing Gay

"Play by Play": Girls are the Meaning of Life, Yet Again

Spring 1973: My Date Must Be a Boy

The Top 10 Teen Idols in the World

The Bodybuilders of the Eastern Edge of the Universe

"Rick and Morty": More Homophobic than"Family Guy"?

Dom Deluise and Sons: Gay Stereotypes Were a Step Forward