NYSocBoy's Beefcake and Bonding

Time to look at Teen Idols #11-20, to see if they can hold a candle to the teen idols of the Golden Age, such as David Cassidy, Shaun Cassidy, and Robby Benson.

11. Brooklyn Beckham. Another of soccer guy David Beckham's kids. He doesn't seem to sing or act, but he was on the cover of the magazine Man About Town, in an article entitled "Drop the Boy."

Kind of pasty, and what's with the Cupid tattoo? But at least he's 19.

12. Aiden Gallagher, age 14, Nicky in the Disney teencom Nicky, Ricky, Dicky, and Dawn.

13. Levi Miller, age 15, Calvin in A Wrinkle in Time. I liked the movie, but I thought Levi was miscast. Calvin should be a long, gawky stringbean, not the school Golden Boy. I'd like to know who his friends are.

14. Bradley Steven Perry, age 16, star of the Disney Channel's Good Luck Charlie

15. Izan Llunes (right, with his brother and father Marco). Androgynous, like a young Leif Garrett. He won the Spanish musical competition La voz kids, has two albums, and stars in the Netflix series Luis Miguel. I don't know how old he is. Six?

16. Jake Short, age 21, star of the Disney teencom A.N.T. Farm. He's on the right, with Austin North and Bradley Steven Perry. Not the most buffed of the group.

17. Joshua Rush, age 16, who has appeared om Andi Mack, Parental Guidance, and Blue Boy. He's on the right, in the arms of Asher Angel, who really gets around.

So does Joshua:

I'm not slut-shaming; there's nothing wrong with dating two guys at once.

There are shirtless pics of Joshua, but he's with a girl.

18. Merrick Hanna, age 13. According to wikipedia, he's a "popping and animation style dance, mostly focusing on dancing like a robot." He gave an "interstellar performance" on America's Got Talent at age 11, and won the Shorty Award for Best in Dance. His sponsors include Honda and the Gap.

We have to get to #18 before the teen idols stop posting selfies of their abs. During the Golden Age, such things were rare; there were only two shirtless photos of Shaun Cassidy in existence, and just one of Leif Garrett.

19. Anthony Ursin, age 13, a French actor known for Chocolat (2016).

20. Nicolas Bechtel, age 13, from Disney's Stuck in the Middle and the soap General Hospital.

Believe it or not, he's got shirtless selfies out there for the edification of his 711,000 Instagram followers.

Was there any 1970s teen idol more dreamy than Robby Benson? Sure, David Cassidy, Donny Osmond, and Leif Garrett were cute, but Robby's blue eyes, coiffed hair, and soulful pout could cause thousands of straight girls and gay boys to swoon with goofy smiles on their faces, even without a beefcake shot.

Even his single scene in The End (1978) as a baby-faced priest confessing Burt Reynolds, was a show-stopper.

But to top it off, Robby soon developed a physique than would shame Scott Baio and Adrian Zmed, with a tight muscular chest and six-pack abs.

And the producers knew it. All of his earliest movie roles -- Jory (1973), Troy (1973), and All the Kind Strangers (1974) -- featured ample shirtless shots. When he moved on to teen angst, dying in Death be Not Proud (1975), Ode to Billy Joe (1976), and The Death of Richie (1977), the beefcake completely overshadowed the gravitas of the plots.

Hs only significant bonding was in The Chosen (1981), about the romance between an Orthodox and a Hasidic Jewish boy -- otherwise his characters are busily falling for girls or dying. But the gay kids in the audience weren't paying attention to the plot anyway. They were waiting for the next shirtless shot.

When Robby moved on to young adult roles, mostly involving bigotry and sports, the beefcake continued. Who could forget his underwear shot in Ice Castles (1978), his nude locker room scene in Running Brave (1983), or his magnificent shirtless scenes in Die Laughing (1980) and Harry and Son (1984)?

After a few years in the post-teen idol sleaze-movie ghetto -- City Limits (1984) and California Girls (1985) were good only for fast-forwarding to the shirtless scenes -- Robby managed to establish himself as a grown-up actor. He continued to appear regularly in movies and tv through the 1980s and 1990s, gradually shifting into voice work (he was the voice of the Beast in the 1991 Disney movie Beauty and the Beast).

Robby was one of the first Hollywood actors to play a gay character, instead of the ubiquitous "best friend to the gay guy" role (in Ode to Billy Joe).

And though he has never officially acknowledged his debt to gay fans, he has worked on a number of gay-friendly projects, from Ellen to Sabrina the Teenage Witch.

There are nude photos on Tales of West Hollywood.

And I have a post on his son Zephyr. What's it like being the son of the most beautiful teen idol in the world?

This photo says: "Carson Beach, South Boston, 1940"

My only question is, why didn't they have classes like that when I was a kid?

"First, kneel in front of your partner. Use his legs to steady yourself. Then..."

Ok, it's actually "Learn to Swim Week" in the summer of 1940. The Boys' Club held three classes a day at Carson Beach.

South Boston or "Southie," 3 miles from Boston Common (15 minutes by car), is traditionally a working-class Irish neighborhood (the site of Boston's St. Patrick's Day Parade). It's also the site of the first public housing in the U.S. and the Irish Mob, the first major gang in the U.S.

A list of "Things You Didn't Know about South Boston" includes: don't go to Sully's Castle Island (a burger place) on weekends, when it gets too crowded; a "spuckie" is a local term for a submarine sandwich; it's the inspiration for the Edgar Allan Poe story "The Cask of Amontillado"; and Good Will Hunting is an accurate depiction of Southie guys, "cute, scrappy, and devilishly charming."

Sounds colorful.

I imagine generations of Southie guys cooling off at Carson Beach. In the 1970s, photographer Nicholas Nixon, a professor at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, captured several beach hunks in the background of his photos of women.

In the 1920s you could also cool off at the L-Street Baths. Apparently many people didn't have bathtubs in their apartments, so they used the baths for hygiene as well as hookups.

Carson Beach winds around Old Harbor, across from Joe Moakley Park (named after a Congressman who served the district from 1973 to 2001. Here he's going to Carson Beach with two buds (I think he's the one on the right).

It's near the University of Massachusetts Boston and Boston College High School (a Jesuit all-boys prep school), so lots of Southie guys to choose from.

Today every gym is crowded with guys with 60-inch chests and 20-inch biceps, but 130 years ago, they were rare. Poor nutrition, poor hygiene, and a lack of understanding of kinesiology limited the average man's ability to build muscle.

Those few who developed muscular physiques found themselves in demand in carnivals and circuses as 'strong men," celebrated for their raw strength rather than for their size and symmetry.

But they certainly provided an erotic thrill. Contemporary accounts often praise their masculine beauty.

The most famous of the strongmen was Apollon (the Greek god Apollo), born as Louis Uni (1862-1928), who joined the circus at the age of 14 and eventually became a headliner, appearing in music halls throughout Europe. His act involved such feats as bending the iron bars of a cage, lifting 300-pound train wheels over his head, and holding two cars back with chains.

Donald Dinnie (1837-1916) appeared in 11,000 sports competitions, including 16 Scottish Highland Games, where he excelled in wrestling, hurdling, cable-throwing, and hammer-throwing. He became the equivalent of a millionaire through his exhibitions in the United States and Europe, where he was advertised as "The Strong Man of the Age." In an early advertising tie-in, his likeness was put on bottles of Iron Brew, a soft drink aimed at athletes.

Interestingly, he was 6'1" with a 48 inch chest and 15 inch biceps.

At my peak condition, I had a 51 inch chest and 17 inch biceps, and I was nowhere near "The Strong Man of the Age." Not even "The Strong Man of the Hollywood Spa.

Edward Aston was a boxer, wrestler, and finally a competitive weight-lifter. In 1910, he won the World Middle-Weight-Lifting Championship, and in 1911 he was named Britain's Strongest Man with such feats as a clean and jerk of 282 pounds

Not bad for someone who weighted 160 pounds. Schwarzenegger, who weighed 235 pounds, just managed a 298 pound clean-and-jerk.

He wrote an early weight-training manual, Modern Weight Lifting; and How to Gain Strength.

Sig Klein (1902-1987) grew up in Cleveland, in the early days of physical culture. He performed feats of strength on stage and in competitions, and in 1927 was named the world's greatest athlete by Le Culture Physique magazine. He was featured in Ripley's Believe It or Not 10 times.

Later he moved to New York and Attila Studio, which trained athletes, bodybuilders, stuntmen, and actors, among them Zero Mostel, Montgomery Clift, Ben Gazzara, David Carradine, Joel Grey, and Karl Malden.

I don't know who this guy is, but he has quite a physique, and he has quite substantial beneath-the-belt gifts.

Thomas Inch (1881-1963), "Britain's Strongest Man," is known for lifting the "Thomas Inch Dumbbell." It was specially designed, weighing 172 pounds (the heaviest dumbbells you can get today weigh 50 pounds).

See also: Circus World

Born in 1960, the sandy-haired, scruffy Lance Kerwin was very busy in the early 1970s playing in After School Specials and "problem of the week" tv moves such as The Loneliest Runner (about a teenager who still wets his bed), The Boy Who Drank Too Much (with Scott Baio) and The Death of Richie (with Robby Benson).

But gay kids took notice when his tv movie James at 15 (1977) began with an extended shot of the teenager getting up in the morning, wearing only white briefs (or maybe they were pajamas).

For the intro to the tv series (1977-79), he wore a t-shirt. Still, James was a swimming champ, so there were ample swimsuit and locker room scenes to ameliorate the teen-angst plotlines. Though James becomes the first television teen to openly have sex -- he beds a Swedish exchange student on his sixteenth birthday, whereupon the title of the series changes to James at 16 -- most of the plotlines involve buddy-bonding with his jive-talking best friend Sly.

Critics loved the "realistic depiction of modern high school life," a "welcome change from sitcom hijinks," but teenagers tuned in for the shirtless scenes and then switched the channel to Welcome Back, Kotter.

After James, Lance starred in a few more teen-angst movies, as well as several movies featuring same-sex romance, including Salem's Lot (1979) and The Mysterious Stranger (1982), with Chris Makepeace.

His transition to adulthood was difficult. After years of drug and alcohol abuse, arrests, and rehab, he became an evangelical Christian minister. But that didn't end his problems; in 2010 he was placed on probation for falsifying documents to obtain food stamps.

July 20, 1978: a Thursday. I am 17 years old, a new high school graduate looking forward to starting college next month, living in a small town in the Midwest with my parents, brother Kenny (age 15), and sister Tammy (age 9).

We gather around the big color tv set in the living room. A tv program comes on at a specific time, so if you are late, you miss it.

7:00 pm: The Waltons, Welcome Back Kotter, or CHIPS?

Mom and Dad and Tammy vote for The Waltons, a treacly concoction about a rural family sticking together in Depression-era North Carolina: In this episode, Ben (Eric Scott) and Jim-Bob (David W. Harper) date each other's girlfriends. They're both cute, but...

Kenny and I retreat to our upstairs bedroom to watch our small black and white tv.

I want to see CHIPS. What could be better than Erik Estrada in a bulging motorcycle cop uniform? But it's Kenny's turn to decide, so Welcome Back Kotter: wisecracking Gabe Kaplan as the teacher of the Sweathogs. Horshack (Ron Palillo) gets a crush on Gabe's wife. Gross.

7:30 pm: What's Happening! or the last half of CHIPS?

It's my turn to choose. I hate watching the last half of tv shows, so we go with the comedy about black teenagers. Raj (Ernest Thompson) cozies up to Luther (Erin Blunt), the boy Dee is dating. Could he be interested Luther? No -- he wants to get with the boy's sister. Gross.

8:00 pm: Barney Miller, Hawaii Five-O, or James at 15.

I want to see James at 15. Sure, it's a "problem of the week" drama about an angst-ridden high school boy, but Lance Kerwin is mega-cute. But it's Kenny's turn to choose: the cop show Hawaii Five-O. Book 'em, Dano.

I go downstairs, where the rest of the family is watching Barney Miller, a hip sitcom about a run-down New York police precinct. A man causes trouble at a sperm bank when his deposit is allowed to "go bad."

It's a little embarrassing watching this with my parents and baby sister.

8:30 pm: The last half of tv shows or Carter Country.

The hijinks of police officers in a rural county in Georgia, President Carter's home state. Dumb, but there are some cute guys on it. I like Guich Koock (have you ever heard of such a great name?)

9:00 pm: Baretta, Barnaby Jones, or What Really Happened to the Class of '65?

It's Tammy's bedtime. Mom and Dad want to watch Barnaby Jones, about an oldster detective. Upstairs, Kenny wants to watch Baretta. I don't really care -- I'm not interested in any of them. So Baretta...

Don't go to bed with a price on your head -- don't do it.

Keep your eye on the sparrow, when the going gets narrow

I lie on my bed and hide a teen magazine behind a book so I can look at a shirtless pinup of Erik Estrada while Kenny watches tv.

July 19th, 2018, a Thursday night. I'm 57 years old, a college professor in a small town in the Midwest, living with my boyfriend Bob and our housemate, and sometimes his dates and hookups.

Bob gets off work at 7:00 and picks up a Thai chicken salad from Panera for dinner.

Wrecked on Hulu or Luke Cage on Netflix?

It's Bob's turn to choose, so Luke Cage. I'm not sure what's going on; what's the point of a superhero who can't fly or use x-ray vision? All he can do is stop bullets. But at least Mike Colter is hot.

Next, it's too much trouble to switch from Netflix to Hulu, so Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Bob's working on his laptop. I look over his shoulder:

Gay porn.

Flashback to me looking at a shirtless Erik Estrada while my brother was watching Baretta.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même

Shane Haboucha got off to a heterosexist start. In the music video "Stacey's Mom," the 13-year old played a kid obsessed with the breasts of his school friend's mother.

Nothing for gay boys to like in that, except maybe the pubescent beefcake.

His exposure led to guest shots on Bernie Mac, Oliver Beane, That's So Raven, and CSI, plus a recurring role on Everwood (2004-2005).

Mostly girl-crazy characters, even in the gay-friendly Everwood. Indeed, Bernie Mac was quite homophobic. (in a promo, Bernie discovers that his nephew likes girls, and shouts "My boy's normal!").

But there were also gay-positive roles.Thee OC episode "The Secret" (2003), about a boy with a gay dad.

On CSI (2005), Shane played a gay-vague boy victimized by a pedophile.

On Without a Trace (2005), he played a gay-vague boy who plans to bomb his school. The school bullies torture him so he'll reveal its location.

Desperation (2006), based on a Stephen King novel, gave Shane some homoromantic moments. When his friend Brian (Darren Victoria) is hit by a car and suffers brain damage, David Carver (Shane) prays for his healing, and offers himself to God as a substitute sacrifice. Immediately after, he and his parents are captured by the demonic sheriff of a ghost town. Brian recovers. David saves the day.

Shane's last acting role listed on imdb is in 2013. IMDB also says that he graduated from Loyola Marymount University in 2014, and now lives in Irvine, California.

He hasn't updated his facebook or twitter accounts since 2013, but here's a recent photo.

No doubt you've heard about Bronson Harmon, whose wrestling scholarship to California Polytechnic (San Luis Obispo, CA) was revoked after a video surfaced of him at a Families Belong Together rally. They were protesting the Trump Administration policy of taking children from their parents at the border and keeping them behind barbed-wire fences.

Bronson, his father, and some others wanted to demonstrate their approval of the policy, and their belief that anyone who disapproved must be an illegal immigrant, so they started yelling "Send them back!"

Somebody in the group called Abdul Lesaing the n* word. He turned and began filming them in case they got violent.

Apparently Bronson assumed that he was gay as well as brown-skinned -- he was carrying a sign promoting world peace -- and yelled "F*k off, Faggot!"

They did get involved in a violent confrontation later, but Abdul wasn't there.

Although his scholarship was revoked, Bronson will still be attending Cal Poly this fall. I wonder if he knows that his college has a LGBT Pride Center.

Homophobes are horrified by the idea of men desiring them -- they are afraid that it means they are gay. So here are some pictures of Bronson. Try not to look.

Are you not looking?

Bronson gets a lot of praise from people in his home town of Oakdale, California, near Stockton in the central valley. I imagine that a lot of them would approve of the anti-gay slur as well as the "Send them back!" So here are some pictures of Oakdale wrestlers.

Try not to look.

Is that a brown person in the back row?

This is definitely a brown person. 29% of the population of Oakdale is Hispanic, 2% Asian, 1% Black.

The Oakdale High Cross Country Team.

I was surprised to discover that the home page of Oakdale High advertised a Rainbow Prom held by the Gay-Straight Alliances of four high schools. Open to everyone aged 14 to 20, held at Modesto Center Plaza.

I'm guessing Brandon would be surprised, too.

Just look at the beefcake, and don't look down. This is Mich Kemeter walking a 99-foot tightrope across Taft Point in Yosemite National Park.

Why? Because it's there.

He's followed by Dean Potter.

Jerry Miszewski holds the world record, 704 feet across the Cosumnees River Gorge near Sacramento. It took 90 minutes.

Notice that he is attached to the line. An important safety precaution. Jerry fell 72 times before he made it all the way across.

Highlining is a new extreme sport that developed out of rock climbing and tightrope walking. You cross canyons and gorges. Although you are attached to the line so you can't fall, you have to overcome fear and fatigue as you wend your way across.

At a more reasonable distance from the ground, tightrope walking is good for balance and coordination, skills useful in many sports.

Here Spencer Seabroke demonstrates the difference between a tight,rope and a slack rope. Slacklining is even more challenging, since the rope is swaying and adjusting more.

The line can be as slack as you want. More slack, more difficult to walk.

Or you can add to the challenge by upping the danger of what lies below. Here Josh Beaudoin crosses a slackline over crocodile-infested waters.

The Yoga Slackers travel the world, looking for interesting places to slack. And take their shirts off.

This photo on Bygone Boys states:Football team “Novotorzhskaya sports mug” the Russian Empire. Torzhok, 1913.

Torzhok is a popular tourist town in Tver Oblast (previously Kalinen Oblast) about 200 km northwest of Moscow. It has a Russian Historical and Ethnographic Museum, the historic Sts. Boris and Gleb Monastery, and the Novotorzhskiy Kremlin, a historic palace, where you apparently can get the sports mug.

It's interesting to look at the faces of men and boys from the past, try to imagine who they were, what they were doing when this moment of their lives was frozen, and what happened after.

Back in 1913, Torzhok was a small town, a backwater on the Tvertsa River (a tributary of the Volga), and football (soccer) was a relatively new sport in the Russian Empire. In the late 19th century, British workers living in St. Petersburg began forming their own leagues. Russians began following their model, forming leagues at first in St. Petersburg, and by the 1900s, in other cities of the Empire. The Russian Premier League was founded in 1910.

These guys were groundbreakers.

No doubt many of them would be fighting in World War I and the Russian Revolution. But imagine what those who survived would see in the course of their lives.

The end of the Russian Empire and the beginning of the Soviet Union.

Lenin

Stalin

World War II

The Cold War

Khrushchev

Television.

The first cosmonauts.

Maybe, in their old age, perestroika and the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

Today Torzhok still has a football team, as well as swimming and gymnastics.

The World Harmony Run, a global relay race through 100 countries promoting international friendship, passed through Torzhok in 2006. This torchbearer may be the grandson or great-grandson of one of the Torzhok footballers.

Or two or three.

Or maybe they left. Between 1 and 2 million people emigrated from Russia during the Revolution of 1917. Most moved to Eastern Europe, Germany, and France, but thousands made it to the United States (including Vladimir Nabokov and Yul Brynner).

West Town in Chicago, near the gay neighborhood of Boystown, gained the nickname Little Russia.

West Hollywood also drew a large Russian community.

Some of these men in the photo, later in life, may have belonged to SAGE, the gay senior citizen's group. Their sons may have been regulars at the Faultline, their grandsons at the Rage, when I was living in West Hollywood in the 1980s and 1990s. I may have dated them.

I always did have a thing for Russian guys, after all.

See also: My First Gay Rights March.

Of all the authors that teachers foisted upon me as a kid to embrace Rock Island's Scandinavian heritage, the absolute worst was Hans Christian Andersen. I hated fairy tales anyway -- who needs fairy godmothers, when there are rocket ships blasting off to Jupiter? -- and these were grim, morbid, horrible:

"The Little Mermaid": A mermaid sacrifices her life to save a handsome prince.

"The Brave Tin Soldier." Yeah, he's brave, until he gets too near a fire, and melts to death.

"The Snow Queen." A cold person keeps kidnapping children and freezing them to death.

"The Little Match-Seller." A girl selling matches..um...freezes to death.

Is it like cold in Denmark, or is this some sort of metaphor?

"The Garden of Paradise." A prince dies.

One or two of his cautionary tales were ok -- "The Emperor's New Clothes" and "The Ugly Duckling." But really, who wouldn't rather be watching Fractured Fairy Tales on Rocky and Bullwinkle than reading about people dying?

Later I discovered that Andersen was gay or bisexual in real life. In fact, his psychiatrist invented the term homosexual from the Greek homo (the same) and the Latin sexualis in order to diagnose his condition.

Gay but depressed. No wonder his characters keep dying.

I've never seen any of the film versions of Andersen's fairy tales, but I understand that Disney let The Little Mermaid, Ariel, live, in the 1989 animated version.

And displayed Prince Eric shirtless, although probably not as suggestively as this fan art from Lucien-Christophe on Deviant Art.com.

If you want to see beefcake in the Hans Christian Andersen oeuvre, you need to seek out the occasional stage version of "The Emperor's New Clothes" (above), or The Little Mermaid stage musical.

Eric doesn't display much, but King Triton, Ariel's father, is bare-chested.

Although sometimes the actor wears a ridiculous beard.

Hans Christian Andersen's "The Emperor's New Clothes" (1837) is a fairy tale with no fairies in it, about two scoundrels who tell an Emperor that his new outfit will be invisible to people unfit for their position or impossibly stupid. They actually just pretend to make the new clothes, and dress him in nothing.

He struts about naked, with everyone afraid to say anything until a small boy points out "The Emperor has no clothes."

The phrase is often used to criticize yes-men who are afraid to point out their boss's flaws and mistakes. Such as, for instance, the Republican Congress telling the Orange Goblin, "It was a good thing that you said" every day for the last 18 months.

Writers who want to adapt "The Emperor's New Clothes" for the stage run into two problems:

1. The story is very short, with one-dimensional characters. It has to be extensively fleshed out.

2. You can't have a guy running around naked in a performance that will draw children.

They usually end up just making the Emperor a vain fashion-plate, and giving the plot to someone else. For instance, Alan Jay Friedman's musical adaption (1969) has a princess and a prince disguised as a commoner save the kingdom from villains exploiting the Emperor's love of haute couture.

Alan Schmuckler and David Holstein have a musical version where the Emperor and his daughter Sam learn to get along with each other through judicious costume choices.

Eric Coble has a Caribbean adaption: Jasmin wants to wear a simple sash, but the Emperor of the island requires fancy clothes. Until the magic tailor Buzz Butler arrives.

The Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens musical puts a gay-subtext take on the story. When 14-year old Marcus becomes emperor, he is uncertain how a wise ruler behaves. A Swindler offers to give him a magical suit that will allow him to know everything. His advisors are opposed to the idea, but he puts on the suit anyway, and everyone begins "yessing" him. Only Arno, the palace mop boy, turns out to be a true friend, and tells him the truth.

See also: Hans Christian Andersen

When I was growing up in Rock Island, we thought of the north as evil.

If you drove straight north on the I-61, you passed towns with disturbing names like Grand Mound, Lost Nation, and Temple Hill, redolent of H. P. Lovecraft's eldritch horrors, weird nature cults, children of the corn.

Then, after about an hour, you reached Mordor, aka Dubuque, Iowa, a town of 50,000 on a bend in the Mississippi.

It was on best route to western and central Wisconsin, but the preacher, Sunday school teachers, and old saints at church would always advise against it:

"Stay away from Dubuque! It's overrun by cults! You'll be brainwashed and never come back!"

They were so insistent that I always felt a little frisson of dread, even in college, when we drove through on the way to Madison for a film festival, and again on the way to the Wisconsin Dells resort for the weekend.

It didn't help that my first boyfriend Fred's ex-fiancee, aka the Wicked Witch of the North, lived in Mordor..um, I mean Dubuque.

Dubuque is actually a very pretty town, hilly, with some interesting architecture.

And a Medieval castle (actually the Julien Dubuque monument).

What scared Nazarenes was: the Roman Catholics.

53% of the population.

Seat of the Archdiocese of Dubuque.

Four Catholic colleges and seminaries, a dozen Catholic schools, convents, monasteries, churches, cathedrals...

Today Dubuque's high schools and colleges offer a full range of beefcake potential.

I like this picture of summer swimming lessons at the public pool. Reminds me of my childhood, where I got swimming lessons at Longview Park every year.

Wrestling singlets are also common.

But what makes Dubuque stand out today is the muscle.

The UPA Powerlifting and Bench Pressing Championships, Mighty Muscle on the Mississippi.

Eric Lilliebridge broke the world record in 2015 with a 2,353 pound lift.

There are also bodybuilders. John Hermsen, a local bodybuilding trainer, won the Gopher State Classic in his weight class.

There are 23 gyms and fitness centers in Dubuque, more per capita than any other town in the Midwest.

Since 1996, readers of independent comics have been treated to the adventures of Jim Woodring's Frank, a bipedal "funny animal" who looks like he escaped from a 1930s Max Fleischer cartoon.

Frank inhabits a surreal, chaotic world called the Unifactor, surrounded by grotesque plants and animals, landforms that turn into people, monstrous gods and demons, the spiritual emanations of real-world people, symbols, metaphors, and jivas (immortal essences shaped like gaudy tops).

The stories are wordless, except for an occasional cryptic remark. You are expected to find your own meanings.

It is crazy, weird, surreal fun, with lots of gay subtexts.

Frank's main nemesis is the Manhog, a naked, sweating, hedonistic hog-person, The Manhog is often abused by his superiors in the Unifactor hierarchy, and, jealous of Frank's comfort and privilege, seeks revenge. But in one story he finds enlightenment through the ministrations of a caring friend or lover, and seeks out Frank to make amends.

One of the main sources of discord in the Unifactor is Whim, a demon-moon faced stick-being who conducts weird body-altering experiments and otherwise torments other beings. But he, too, can be read with a gay subtext for his intensely physical interest in Frank.

So I thought. But then I noticed some strongly conservative, almost Puritanical moralizing in Jim Woodring's comments.

Frank is "completely naive, capable of sinning by virtue of not knowing what he's really about."

Manhog is "an unholy hybrid of human ambivalence," who has sinned so much that he deserves all of the suffering he gets.

The beings in the Unifactor are inhabiting a spiritual realm, surrounded by myths and symbols, trying to find the ultimate reality that will explain their existence.

What is that ultimate reality?

In Congress of the Animals (2011), we find out. Frank goes exploring, enters another realm of consciousness, and finds "what we all are looking for."

A girl.

At first I thought I could still salvage Frank. Maybe it wasn't a girl, maybe it was a boy, or a being of indeterminate gender. Maybe "what we all are looking for" is a friend.

Nope, it's a girl named Fran. Frank gets a girlfriend.

Is the ultimate meaning of life creating art? Helping people? Exploring? Finding God?

Nope, "what we are all looking for," is heterosexual romance.

And erasing gay people from the world.

Spencer Horsman is not a character on Bojack Horseman. He's a professional magician.

He learned performing at an early age from his parents, both circus clowns. Kenneth Horsman (1958-2016) performed as Ken-Zo the Clown for the Barnum and Bailey Circus, and as Ronald McDonald. Later he opened the Illusions Magic Bar and Theater in Baltimore.

Spencer began touring as a ventriloquist and comedian at age 8. By age 15, he had appeared on The Late Show with David Letterman, The Jerry Springer Show, and the Statler Brothers Show on tv, and with David Copperfield in Las Vegas.

He is also an escape artist. He appeared on America's Got Talent in 2012. hanging upside down in a straitjacket, suspended from ropes that were set on fire, while a mouth-like gadget threatened to eat him if he fell.

It's very important for escape artists to display their physiques. The audience wants to see muscles straining against the chains.

In 2015, Spencer almost drowned while rehearsing an escape from a water-torture cell, suspended in the air, chained with padlocks, while water poured over him. He was briefly hospitalized, but recovered and now performs the perfected stunt.

Today he headlines at the Illusions Bar and tours with the Supernaturalists, Criss Angel's international troupe of 9 "mind-blowing" magicians.

I can't find any documentation on his Facebook or Twitter accounts, but I assume that Spencer is gay.

When I was a kid in the 1960s and 1970s, teen idols were popular for three or four years, about the time it took for their earliest fans to enter high school and move on to adult stars. Today, it's like five minutes? I just did posts on the top 20 teen idols about a week ago, but when I returned to the Teen Idols 4 You website today, most of them were gone, replaced by a new crowd:

Here are the previously-unmentioned teen idols of July 27,2018:

1. Aramis Knight, an American actor playing M.K. on Into the Badlands, a post-Apocalyptic martial-arts shirtless drama about guys who do 1000 crunches a day.

2. Brandon Rowland. I don't actually know what he does besides post pictures of himself in his swimsuit but he and Hunter (and their abs) are currently on a meet-and-greet tour of the U.S. $25 for kids, parents free.

3. Davis Cleveland, Flynn on the Disney Channel's Shake it up. He apparently likes girls. But Davis --- just a six pack? Most teen idols go for like 20.

4. Jacob Sartorius. Sounds like someone out of a science fiction novel where the Roman Empire never fell. The sartorius is a muscle in the thigh, a brand of scales, and a pharmaceutical company. Jacob must be a heir to one of them. But he's most famous for singing on the internet, which got him a record contract, and abs.

5. Casey Simpson. Haven't there been like 100 teen idols named Simpson? Aaron, Jonathan, Cody, Casey, Carmen, Cilantro, Cockamamie? I don't know which one this is, but he's got an ugly face. I guess he expects everyone to be looking belong the chest and above the belt.

6. Noah Schnapp,Will in Stranger Things (you know, the one that falls for the mysterious girl from another dimension or something). Winona Ryder looks creeped out by the hug.

No shirtless pics, but I'm sure his abs are spectacular.

7. Sean O'Donnell, a 22-year old actor whose credits include Love Simon, I Ship It, and Speechless. Is it like a requirement for teen idols? "Your acting is ok, kid, but I can't count your abs, so no dice."

8. Asa Butterfield. I love the name. It makes me think of an old fashioned farmer driving a horse and buggy through the cornfields of Kansas. He's actually British.

In my day we looked for baskets, but I guess the ability to do sit-ups is also important in a boyfriend.

9. Ronan Parke, a British singer who appeared on Britain's Got Talent and got a record deal. His album, Ronan Parke, peaked at #22 in the UK. There was a controversy where Simon Cowell was accused of "grooming" the boy. For stardom, not sex, I assume.

He must be the one in the middle. The other two aren't quite abworthy.

10. Mace Coronel of Ricky, Dicky, Dock, and Dot, or whatever that Disney Channel quadruplet show is. Google Images thinks this is him. Probably because of the abs.

There were lots of African-American characters on tv in the 1970s, but Hispanic actors continued to find themselves cast as Anglo or Italian. Freddie Prinze was one of the first to be cast as Hispanic. The stand-up comedian (actually half Puerto Rican, half German) entertained audiences with dialect stories and catchphrase like "Ees not my job!" Appearances on Jack Paar and The Tonight Show led the 21-year old to a star vehicle, Chico and the Man (1974-78).

Auto garage owner Ed (Jack Albertson, Grandpa in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory) is elderly, crotchety, widowed, and depressed -- until Chico (Freddie Prinze) arrives, looking for a job and a place to live. At first the bigoted Anglo rebuffs Chico with ethnic slurs and general nastiness -- but Chico likes Ed -- a lot -- so he keeps coming back, keeps trying, until finally, his resistance lowered, Ed allows himself to love again. Um...I mean, the two become friends.

Who were they kidding? They were the most obvious gay couple in 1970s tv. All they needed was a scene of the two holding hands.

Wait, there was one.

Freddie was handsome, and obviously gifted beneath the belt, but he gave fans few shirtless shots, not even when he was interviewed for Playgirl.

The world was shocked when the superstar, who had just signed a multi-year, multi-million dollar contract with NBC, committed suicide on January 28, 1977. Stories appeared about depression, drug abuse, marital estrangement.

NBC bizarrely tried to continue Chico and the Man without him. They finished up the third season with Chico "visiting his father in Mexico," and then had Ed meeting and adopting the preteen Raul (Gabriel Melgar). But their relationship was distinctly grandfather-grandson, not boyfriend-boyfriend.

When Raul finds Chico's old guitar, and Ed explains that it belonged to someone he loved who died. He's been widowed twice.

A tv movie about Freddie's life appeared in 1979: Can You Hear the Laughter? The Freddie Prinze Story, starring Ira Angustain.

Strangely, I always associate Christmas Day with boredom. Opening and playing with your presents takes about an hour, Christmas dinner takes another hour, leaving fourteen hours to sit around the house, with no school, friends incommunicado, bad weather outside, and nothing on tv.

Time to break out your stash of Robert Louis Stevenson books.

The Scottish novelist (1850-1894) is relegated to the junior high classroom nowadays, probably because his works aren't usually heterosexist.

His two main subtext novels both involve bonds between teenage boys and adult men:

Treasure Island (1883), an adventure with pirates and buried treasure in the South Seas, originally serialized in the magazine Young Folks, deliberately written with "no women in it." No heterosexual imaginings, but young Jim Hawkins develops a grudging friendship with Long John Silver.

My favorite version was full of beefcake illustrations by N.C. Wyeth.

In every generation, the current Hollywood It-boy seems to get a chance to play Jim Hawkins: Jackie Cooper (1934), Bobby Driscoll (1950, left), Kim Burfield (1972), Christian Bale (1990, above), and Kevin Zegers (1999).

Kidnapped (1886): David Balfour, tricked out of his inheritance by a villainous uncle, travels the rough Scottish Highlands, where he is rescued by and buddy-bonds with the rogueish Alan Breck. Again, "no women in it."

David has been played by Freddie Bartholomew (1938), James MacArthur (1960), Lawrence Douglas (1971), Brian McCardie (1995), and Anthony Pearson (2005). Some versions give him a girlfriend.

This photo is actually from The Light in the Forest, but I couldn't resist including a shirtless shot of James MacArthur.

A statue commemorating David and Alan Breck has been erected in Edinburgh.

Some scholars also find a subtext in The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), but I didn't see one.

The Black Arrow (1888) was a heterosexual romance, but The Master of Ballantrae (1889) is about two brothers, James Durie and his brother Harry, on opposite sites of the Jacobite Rebellion. There's some heterosexual romance, but the emphasis is on the enmity between the two brothers melting into love. They die the same hour, and are buried under the same stone.

Bisexual Errol Flynn (left) starred in a famous 1953 version.

So, was Robert Louis Stevenson gay? According to his biography, Myself and the Other Fellow, by Claire Harmon, no, but he appreciated homoerotic desire, and he enjoyed the attention of the many gay men who were drawn to him.

Since most of Ohio consists of suburbs of Cleveland, Dayton, Columbus, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, and Toledo, there's always a gay neighborhood nearby. New Lexington is about as rural as you're going to get: an hour from Cleveland, just south of the Perry State Forest, near towns named Moxahala and Alabama Hill.

It's an old city, as American cities go. The original inhabitants were the Mound Builders, or as the village website tells us: "Far back, beyond the memory of men, and even traditions, a race of people lived here before the red man."

Wow, people living here before men and even red men!

"Men" moved to the region in 1817, and named the village after Lexington, Massachusetts.

Today New Lexington "is dedicated to the people of New Lexington." Figures.

Its economy seems to be based mostly on agriculture, although there are a lot of vacation rentals around.

It states that there is a middle school, a high school, and a college. The college is "Hocking College Perry Campus," which looks like a single building out by the fairgrounds.

According to Trip Advisor, its best restaurant is named "Pizza Place and Restaurant." A reviewer eloquently describes the food as "yummy."

Its motto is "stuff your face."

There's a bowling alley and a swimming pool.

The news for New Lexington:
New Aldi store opens
Mayor appeals impeachment
Wrestlers win tournament.

Sounds terrible.

But there's one thing that makes New Lexington stand out: a website with gigantic photos of everyone on the high school wrestling team.

I had to shrink them down to 25% to make them small enough to post.

This guy is especially well represented. His mother, who teaches in the school system, has a display of 20 photos of him on her class website. Come for the homework assignment, stay for the beefcake.

They really like their wrestling in New Lex. They start in 5th grade.

And never stop.

Almost makes up for the lack of a swim team, a theater, a used bookstore, or...well just about everything else.

In an April 1940 episode of the radio Adventures of Superman, the Man of Steel helped a young boy named Jimmy Olsen protect his mother's shop from racketeers. Sensing audience identification, the producers soon gave Jimmy a part-time job at the Daily Planet so he could follow leads on his own, snoop around abandoned warehouses, get into trouble, and require lots of nick-of-time rescues.

Jimmy arrived in Superman comics in November 1941, somewhat older, perhaps seventeen. He was a redhead, like the cliche sidekick in boys' adventure novels of the period, and his v-shaped torso suggested muscleman potential. But he was never a sidekick, like Robin to Batman, or Bucky to Captain America. Jimmy never lived with Superman, he never learned Superman's secret identity, he only participated in the adventures by accident. Was he homoromantic partner, or merely a coworker and pal?

In Jimmy Olsen's comic book series, which began in 1954, it doesn't take a lot to find the romantic subtext beneath the boy pal text. But in the tv and movie versions of the mythos, things are a little different.

TV first:

1. In The Adventures of Superman (1952-58), Jimmy Olsen (former teen idol Jack Larson, top photo ) seems mostly a coworker to Superman (George Reeves). We rarely see the two together, except on the job, and even then, Lois (Noel Neill) usually forms the third. Jimmy requires rescue alone (without Lois or Perry present) just once, when he is kidnapped by a transvestite in "Double Trouble" (1953). He bonds with editor Perry White (John Hamilton) more often.

Jack Larson is gay, and even states that he was out on the set during the period; maybe that explains why he kept Jimmy carefully free of any romantic feelings for Superman.

2. Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman (1993-97) starred Dean Cain and Terri Hatcher as the famous couple (yes, now a couple), with the standard antipathy turning into romance ("He's so...arrogant!").

Jimmy was played by Justin Whalin, a former child star (the child of lesbian parents in a 1993 School Break special). Given the hetero-romantic story arc, it would seem that Jimmy would be a third wheel, but he actually has an unrequited crush on the hunky Clark. And there are a few Jimmy-rescues.

3. Smallville (2001-2011) was about Superboy, the teenage Clark Kent, so Jimmy (Aaron Ashmore, left, with an unidentified hunk) was not introduced until Season Six, when Clark arrived in Metropolis.

Jimmy had at least two girlfriends during his three years on the program, and expressed any romantic interest in Clark or Superman.

Clark Kent (Tom Welling) did have a homoerotic bond with a young Lex Luthor (Michael Rosenbaum), but not with Jimmy.

Not a very good record. Where there is a gay subtext at all, it is between Clark Kent and someone else. Why has one of the most substantial and overt homoromances in all of comics failed to make it on the small screen?

The Top Teen Idols in the World, #11 to #20

Robby Benson's Six Pack

The Boys of Carson Beach

Your Grandfather's Beefcake: Circus Strongmen

Lance Kerwin

Watching TV in 1978 and 2018: Plus ça change...

Shane Haboucha

The Brown-Skinned Beefcake of Bronson Harmon's Home Town

The Men on the Tightrope

The Boys of Torzhok

Hans Christian Andersen: the Gay Writer of Fairy Tales about People Dying

Staging the Male Nudity in "The Emperor's New Clothes"

The Bodybuilders of Mordor

Frank Finds What We're All Looking For

Spencer Horsman, the Buffed Escape Artist

The Abs of the Top 10 Teen Idols

Chico and the Man: Anglo-Hispanic Gay Couple

Tales of Boys and Men: Robert Louis Stevenson

The Beefcake of New Lexington

Jack Larson and other TV Jimmy Olsens