NYSocBoy's Beefcake and Bonding

I have a very low tolerance for treacly, saccharine-laced, smarmy movies involving kids, dogs, new attitudes, the magic of everyday life, hugging, feeling, and dancing in the streets. I want intriguing premises, surprising plot twists, and hot guys. So I'm not going to watch Cubby (2019) -- going through the trailer with the sound off was smarmy enough. But it is gay-themed, and for once it's not about a svelte, sophisticated, fey Manhattan lawyer and his fey clubbing friends.

The central character, Mark (Mark Blane), who I assume is also Cubby, is not svelte, not sophisticated, not fey, and not a lawyer. He's sort of chunky, masculine-coded, and autistic.

When he dccides to move out on his own, his mom and friend or caseworker Charles (Peter Kim, left) object. He doesn't have the social skills. And to move across the country, to New York!

But Mark/Cubby goes anyway. He gets a job as a nanny to a six-year old boy (whose name I can't find on the imdb). They bond over coloring books, glitter, and getting their faces dirty.

The trailer also shows arguments/hugging with the boy's mother, who apparently helps Mark/Cubby adjust to living on his own.

Meanwhile Mark/Cubby stalks a mysterious masculine figure he calls The Leatherman (Christian Patrick), who may be a hallucination. Although they do have a conversation in a bar.

He also starts dating Russell (Rodney Richardson, probably the top photo).

There are a lot of hugging, dancing in the streets, and "magic of everyday life" scenes. Not my cup of tea, but at least it breaks stereotypes.

Mark Blane, the writer, director, producer, and star, has produced several gay-themed documentaries, such as The Death and Life of Marsha P. Jones and Stonewall: The Making of a Monument. Also the tv series Hell in the Heartland: What Happened to Ashley and Lauria? Um...let me guess. Homophobic hate crime?

Not a lot of acting credits. Just Cubby, two shorts, and a tv series, Little Voices, "A love letter to the diverse musicality of New York. It explores the universal journey of finding your authentic voice in your early 20s."

Did someone really think it was a good idea to post that? The pretentiousness makes my eyes hurt.

I'm walking through the living room. On the tv screen, two guys are in bed together, one in his underwear. The partner says: "It would have been awkward to tell them we were together."

"What's this?" I ask Bob. "Gay romance?"

"I don't know," he says, eyes on cell phone. "I'm not watching. It's just on."

"How do you not watch something deliberately on Netflix?"

In the midst of texting furiously, he says: "Like I watched a tenth of an episode three years ago, so it showed up on that annoying 'continue watching' list....So I turned on an episode.

"Look up."

But the scene with the gay lovers discussing "telling them we're together" is gone.

The series is Family Business, a French comedy-drama about the black-sheep son of a Jewish butcher in Paris who converts the "family business" into a marijuana coffee house. The one on the right must be the son, Joseph (Jonathan Cohen), and the other is either Ali (Ali Marhyar) or Olivier (Olivier Rosemberg).

An internet search yields no gay references for any of them, except for Jonathan Cohen telling someone that "I'm not gay at all." Searching on Family Business"gay" yields: "A New York City grad student moonlighting as a dominatrix enlists her gay BFF from high school," which is another tv series altogether.

So we have no choice but to rewind and watch the episode.

Scene 1: The guys, Olivier and Jonathan, knock on Clementine's door, and are surprised to find that she is rich enough to have servants. She disgustingly files her feet while they hold hands and ask about "what you said last night." They want her help in opening the cannabis shop. She agrees to invest 20,000 Euros. They press their heads together as if they are about to kiss!

While Olivier is in the bathroom, Clementine tells Jonathan that in exchange for her help, she wants to sleep with his boyfriend. He agrees to arrange it. Olivier returns, but Jonathan is too nervous to tell him about the deal.

Scene 2: Jonathan goes to work at the butcher shop. His Dad is angry about "last night," but Jonathan apologizes. Dad has sold the shop to Waldman., so no cannabis coffee house.

Scene 3: Jonathan visits Olivier at the clothing store where he works. Uncle Youssef (Oussame Kheddam, left) has just gotten out of prison, and is shopping for a new suit. Jonathan is a little afraid of him.

Another main character, Ali (Ali Marhyar) is there with his son, JP. The ex-wife and her new boyfriend, who also happens to be Ali's boss, arrive to pick up the kid. Boss complains that Ali is not doing airport pickups anymore. This must be some secondary plot stuff.

Scene 4: Uncle Youssef pays for the suit and invites the guys to a getting-out-of-prison celebration tonight: "There will be pussy!"

"Um...we're....um...both in relationships," Jonathan says. "We...um...have girls. We're in love."

Apparently Uncle Youssef doesn't know that they're a couple.

They start to come out by asking if Uncle Youssef had sex in prison. He's disgusted by the implication, and walks out. Maybe don't tell him.

Scene 5: The guys are having dinner at the favorite restaurant of Enrico Macias, a famous Algerian Jewish singer (playing himself). If they can get him to agree to the weed shop, Dad will change his mind. But they end up with a bill of 229 Euros, and Enrico doesn't show up. I'm not sure what this scene is for.

Scene 6: The next day. While Olivier orders clothes for his business, Jonathan loses at video poker. A women comes in to his apartment. He explains how the toilet works and asks for six months' rent in advance. Oh, she's subletting his place.

Scene 7: Another woman, who I think is Jonathan's sister Aure, is talking to her Grandmother. She is moving to Japan tomorrow. She already met someone there. Grandma is thrilled; "I'm Ashkenazi (Jewish), but I like sausages. Aure admits that she doesn't like sausages. Wait -- two gay siblings in the family? Grandma is fine with it: "Cherries are good, too."

Scene 8: Jonathan is showing off his new suit, while a woman sets the table. "I saw your brother at the shop today." She hates him -- "He's dead to me!" He saw Uncle Youssef earlier -- so she's his aunt?

Whoops, a passioante kiss. Not his aunt! Maybe it's Ali's sister. And Jonathan is straight! Not possible! Maybe bi, and having an affair with Olivier? I'm totally confused!

Scene 9: Jonathan and Olivier at the restaurant, trying to meet Enrico again. They convince him to have dinner with them. Olivier keeps his arm around Jonathan through the whole evening. They're a gay couple! Meanwhile Aida the Girlfriend is entertaining her parents, and texting "Where are you?"

Scene 10: Jonathan finally gets home, apologizes for being late, sits down at the dinner table, and starts farting. Aida is embarrassed.

Scene 11: Later, in bed, Jonathan explains to Olivier that he farted in front of her parents. "It would have been complicated to tell them we were together after that." They hold hands.

We? Jonathan and Aida? But surely the parents already knew that. Jonathan and Olivier? Why would Aida's parents need to know?

Olivier: "She loves you. She'll get over it."

Weird think to say about your boyfriend's girlfriend! I'm totally confused.

Scene 12: Enrico comes into the shop to convince Dad not to sell it. They get high. The end.

What did I just watch? A gay couple, a guy with a boyfriend and a girlfriend, or what?

I fast-forwarded through the rest of Season 1. There's a scene where Olivier awkwardly tries to have sex with Clementine -- he's obviously not into girls. Olivier and Jonathan are together in every episode. They hug and hold hands, but no kissing, and they are never in bed again. Jonathan is in a couple of scenes with Aida, and they hug once, but they never kiss again, either.

Does that help?

The Devil All the Time: "Sinister figures converge on a young man in a rundown postwar town as he tries to save the ones he loves."

Sinister sounds paranormal -- devil, maybe demon possession? And "the ones he loves," not "his wife an dkids" or "the girl of his dreams." Maybe some buddy-bonding.

Scene 1: Establishing shot of the rusty, decrepit town of Knckenmstiff. Really? It's 1957, but everybody dresses and acts like it's the 1930s -- kerosine lamps are more common than electric lights, and no one has heard of television.

Haunted, hollow-eyed Willard (Bill Skarsgard) has a cross in the woods, where he fights "the devil all the time." Today he brings his 9-year old son Arvin along. Uh-oh, I feel the sacrifice of Isaac coming up.

Flashback to another cross, in the Solomon Islands during World War II, where a young Willard comes across an American soldier skinned and bloody but still alive. He puts him out of his misery, and is haunted by the experience forever.

Scene 2: Down in the diner, waitress Sandy flirts with a photographer named Carl (Jason Clarke, left). The narrator tells us that in the future, they will be known as the Bait and the Shooter, and they will call their victims "models."

Flashback to the same diner in 1947. Willard stops in Knockturn Alley on his way home from the War. He sees the waitress bring a sandwich to a homeless guy, and flirts with her.

Scene 3: Young Willard arrives at home. His Mom hugs him and then criticizes him for drinking (he just now got back from the War!)

He announces that he's in love with the waitress. Too bad he never learned her name. (That didn't bother Charlie in Always Sunny in Philadelphia). Mom suggests a girl from church instead, but Willard can't go to church-- too many crosses!

Scene 4: But there he is, in the rural Pentecostal Church, getting fixed up. Mom promised God that if He brought Willard home safe, she would marry him to Helen, who lost her family in a fire. Geez, everybody has a tragic story!

Today there are special guest preachers: Roy (Harry Melling) and Theodore (in a wheelchair because he drank antifreeze to prove his faith. The Bible says that poison won't hurt God's people). They perform "Are You Washed in the Blood of the Lamb"(an old Nazarene standby!).

Then Roy demonstrates that he is filled with the Holy Ghost because he is no longer afraid of spiders by -- you know. I love this movie!

Scene 5: On the way home, Mom asks why Willard didn't pay any attention to that nice girl (If I had a nickel for every time I had that after-church conversation!) The Narrator tells us that Helen married Preacher Roy instead,

Cut to Willard going back to the diner in KnockMyBalls and flirting with the waitress again -- this time he gets her name, Charlotte. A year or two later, they are married, with baby Arbuckle, looking to move into the house from Scene 1. Willard writes a postcard to his Mom about how everything is going great.

Scene 6: Mom and family reading the postcard. A horn honks; Helen who is apparently living with them, hands over her baby, and goes out to meet Preacher Roy and two others. The Narrator tells us that her body will be found buried in the woods.

Cut to a reprise Scene 1, where Willard advises his son Artwand to pray about the bullies pestering him (of course there are bullies -- the devil all the time). They bring the dog Jack along to pray with them (10 to 1 that dog doesn't make it out alive.)

Two hillbillies with guns approach. I didn't get their names, but I hope they are Tommy (Drew Starkey, left) and Tater (Douglas Hodge). A boy named Tater -- I love this movie. They discuss raping the father and son, but decide against it. (no Deliverance?)

Scene 7: Armbruster lying on the couch reading comic books while Mom sings and makes a cake (aww, nuclear family bliss) .

Dad drives him to a house with several men outside, and beats up one and suffocates him in the dirt. The Narrator tells us that Aardvark would often look back on that day as the best he ever spent with his father. The devil all the time. I love this movie.

But I'm not going to go through it scene by scene anymore. I'll just list the terrible things that happen to the sweaty folk of KnockedUp. We've already had the crucifixion, the fire that killed Helen's family, the antifreeze, the spiders, the bullies who pester Artwangle, and the bullies that Willard beats up.

7. Mom Charlotte tries to kill herself because she is dying of cancer.

8. Willard crucifies the dog as a sacrifice so God will let Charlotte live.

9. It doesn't work. Charlotte dies.

10. Willard kills himself.

11. Meanwhile, Preacher Roy kills Helen to demonstrate that he can raise the dead. It doesn't work.

12. He hooks up with Bait and the Shooter from Scene 2, now a backwoods Bonnie and Clyde who kill men and then have sex with them. (Jeffrey Dahmer, anyone?) Preacher Roy is their next victim.

AnkleBone goes to live iwth his grandma, Uncle Fester, and Helen and Preacher Roy's daughter Leonora in Coal Country, West Virginia, which is just as rundown and archaic as KnockemSockemRobots. About eight years pass, and it's the Swinging Sixties, but everybody still dress and act like it's the 1930s, and no one has heard of the Beatles.

13. Where the teenage Leonora gets bullied.

14. Which ArmandHammer (grown up into Tom Holland) doesn't cotton to, so he beats up the bullies.

15. Then poor Leonora is raped by Preacher Preston (Robert Pattinson).

16. And gets pregnant. When Preacher Preston refuses to acknowledge that he is the father, Leonora kills herself.

17. ArtGarfunkle kills Preacher Preston.

18. He decides to leave town, and...wouldn't you know it...hitches a ride with the Bait and the Shooter. But he guesses that they plan to kill him and have sex with his body, so he shoots them.

19. AlvinandtheChipmunks goes back to Knockstuffup to tell Sheriff Lee (Sebastian Stan) about the serial killing, but wouldn't you know it, the Sheriff is the Bait's brother, and wants to kill Arvid and frame him.

20. Alkali shoots the Sheriff (but he did not shoot the Deputy).

Whew. The Devil all the time.

But the last scene offers some hope, and a moment of homoromantic buddy-bonding. On the way out of town, Arvid hitches a ride with a friendly hippie (Teddy Cole) -- not haunted, not a snake handler, not a serial killer -- and the two drive off toward the groovy psychedelic paradise of...um, Cincinnati. It is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius....

I love this movie.

May 1979: the end of my first year at Augustana College. I'm working on the college radio station, WKRP, broadcasting "The International Pop Hour" on Monday nights: Lorenzo Santamaria (Spanish), Claude Francois (French), Roy Black (German, left), Heintje (Dutch), whatever I can find.

Jim, the station manager, is praising a new tv show: WKRP in Cincinnati (1978-82), a hip, urban workplace comedy about the misadventures of the new dj at a struggling radio station.

So when my program ends for the summer, I watch a few episodes.

It's pleasant enough, but not very interesting: no beefcake, no bonding, no subtexts, just Dr. Johnny Fever head-butting with the conservative radio station owner.

Then comes a rerun of "Les on the Ledge," actually the third episode of the series, originally broadcast last October.

Mousy reporter Les Nessman (Richard Sanders) is banned from interviewing athletes in locker rooms, because they think he's gay.

When Les finds out, he is so traumatized that he rushes out onto a window ledge, intending to jump. He is not actually gay, but the rumor is so humiliating that he wants to die.

The reaction of his coworkers is mixed.

Station manager Andy Travis freaks out just hearing the word "gay."

Jennifer Marlowe, the receptionist, says "So what if Les is gay? His sex life is nobody's business."

Advertising manager Herb Tarlek ruminates, and finally says "It's ok if you're gay."

However, they all agree that being "falsely accused" of being gay is the worst thing in the world, and they understand why Les is on the ledge.

But in 1979 using the word "gay" on the air at all, in any context, is a triumph. Suddenly I am a big fan of WKRP in Cincinnati.

Friday night is date night. During the pandemic, that means Chinese food and a red-envelope Netflix dvd. Bob populates the list, so I have no idea what the movie will be in advance. But his tastes run to science fiction, superhero, and horror, so when I saw the title Parasite, I assumed it was like Robert Heinlein's puppet masters, slimey bogies that attach to your spinal cord and turn you into a zombie.

Until we started watching. It's a parable, about class struggles, the highest grossing South Korean movie in history, and the only one to win best picture at the Academy Awards.

I still didn't like it. I hate movies that suddenly shift from comedy to horror.

The Kims, a family of grifters -- Mom, Dad, young adult son and daughter -- live at the bottom of the bottom of Korean society, literally -- in a basement apartment at the bug end of an alley where homeless guys come to piss. They have jobs as pizza-box folders while waiting for their next score.

It comes from the ultra-rich Park family, who live at the top of the top in an impossibly elegant house where every room is the size of a football field. We don't know where Dad Park Dong-ik (Lee Sun-kyun, left, old photo) acquired his wealth; there's a framed magazine article on the wall about him playing in Central Park, so a musician; but he's also shown evaluating electronic gadgets, so an entrepreneur.

1. Old friend Min-hyuk (Park Seo-joon) is going away for a year, and suggests that son Kim Ki-woo (Choi Woo-shik) fake a university degree and take over his job tutoring the Parks' 16-year old daughter.

Kim Ki-woo gets the job. He and the daughter also start kissing, which I found distasteful. He's at least 23 (the actor is 30), and in a position of authority. Besides, the daughter doesn't seem to be all there.

He suggests that the Parks' 10-year old son, a troubled, hyperactive boy who paints disturbing surreal pictures (how does he sit still long enough?), could benefit from expensive art therapy from:

2. Daughter Kim Ki-jeung. He pretends that they don't know each other (and 20% of the Korean population is named Kim, so no one comments on the similar name).

Daughter gets the chauffeur (Park geun-rok, top photo) fired by leaving her panties in the car, and recommends a new chauffeur:

3. Father Kim Ki-taek (Song Kang-ho, left, old photo).

Then they get the housekeeper, Gook Moon-gwang, fired by making everyone think that she has tuberculosis. And recommend as a new housekeeper:

4. Mother Choong-sook.

They've conned their way into their jobs, but they are perfectly competent, so not much of a problem, right?

Then things start to get bizarre.

The Parks are not aware that there is a secret door in the lower kitchen that leads through a maze of tunnels and stairways to a bunker, where the ex-housekeeper's husband Oh Geun-sae (Park Myung-hoon) has been hiding from loan sharks for four years. He's gone a bit daffy due to isolation. Well, a lot daffy.

Each group of grifters wants to expose the other's secrets. There is a lot of slapstick comedy violence. Then suddenly the tone shifts, and things get deadly. A lot of people get brutally murdered. I'm not sure who -- people who were lying in pools of blood turn up alive later, and people who were stabbed in the shoulder end up kaput. According to wikipedia, ex-housekeeper, her husband, the Kim daughter, and Mr. Park, but there could have been others.

I hate it when you're expecting a comedy and you end up with a tragedy,

Beefcake: A lot of hunky Korean actors, but no one takes off a shirt.

Other Sights: The house is a work of art.

Gay Characters: When Min-hyuk suggests the tutoring job, he tells the Kim son, "I know you won't try anything with her." I interpreted that to mean that Kim Ki-woo was gay, until the kissing begain.

Heterosexism: Rampant frisky hetero-horniness: "let's do it in the kitchen! Pretend that you're the chauffeur...put on daughter's panties...."

Disgusting Plot Twists: From Benny Hill hijinks to a stage littered with blood-soaked bodies.

My Grade: D-

French class offered a practically infinite amount of riches for the beefcake-and-bonding devotee. If you tired of the Green Library, you could always move on to the Marabout Junior series, which featured adventurer Bob Morane.

Bob Morane was a former RAF pilot who worked as a reporter and freelance adventurer, often accepting secret-agent or detective assignments. In later volumes he worked for the Time Patrol, going back to dinosaur times or fighting androids in outer space.

There weren't a lot of illustrations, but those the books had displayed Bob with a massive chest, usually when one of the bad guys, usually Ming "The Yellow Shadow," had him strung up for weird torture.

Bob's best buddy, a Scotch bodybuilder usually traveled with him to provide the gay subtexts, and get strung up for a series of "my hero!" rescues.

Ok, there were some girls. But I don't remember Bob actually having sex, and the girl-chasing was minimal, far less than in James Bond.

Belgian author Henri Vernes published 12 volumes of Bob Morane's adventures (1958-67). Most have been translated into English. There have also been over 100 bandes-dessinee (which I haven't read), a 1964-5 tv series (with Claude Titre as Bob Morane and Billy Kearns as Bob Ballantine), a 1998 animated series, and some tie-in video games and toys.

In the wake of Woodstock, ABC wanted to capitalize on the hippie counterculture, and someone noticed that the key players of the American Revolution were young, too: in 1776, Alexander Hamilton was 21, James Madison 25, and Thomas Jefferson 33. But somebody asked for spies, too, to capitalize on the Cold War spy craze. The result was The Young Rebels (1970-71), about a trio of young-adult spies working to undermine the evil Redcoats.

1. Jeremy (Rick Ely, right), son of the local pro-British mayor. (No relation to Ron Ely, the first tv Tarzan).

2. Isaak (Louis Gossett, Jr., bottom), a former slave and Civil Rights advocate.
3. Elizabeth (Hilary Johnson), a Women's Rights advocate.

Their mentor, Henry, was an elderly Ben Franklin clone (though played by 28-year old Alex Henteloff, left).

Most of the buddy-bonding occurred between Jeremy and Isak, who went on most of the missions together (and Isak required lots of rescuing). But I liked the interaction between Jeremy and the Marquis de Lafayette (Philippe Forquet), a real historical figure who came to the U.S. to fight in the Revolutionary War.

The network had high hopes for the program, and heavily invested in tie-in novels, lunch boxes, and comics. Rick Ely and Philippe Forquet got significant teen idol treatment, sharing the teen magazines with David Cassidy and Davey Jones (Rick Ely even released a teen idol album). My social studies teacher even discussed the series, the first time I had ever heard any teacher talk about tv except in a sneering dismissal of "Brain-rotting junk!"

But there was a problem: Sunday night was already crowded with kid-friendly series, Lassie on CBS and The Wonderful World of Disney on NBC. Besides, if you wanted a trio of hippies, you could watch Mod Squad. 14 episodes aired in the fall of 1970, and a 15th in January 1971, and that was all.

Afterwards Rick Ely had guest spots on Marcus Welby, MASH, and Gunsmoke, did some soaps, and played a gay prisoner on I Escaped from Devil's Island (1973). His IMDB filmography ends in the early 1980s. I heard some rumors that he is still alive, still living in Los Angeles, and gay.

Philippe Forquet, who was a French aristocrat in real life, was heralded as the most handsome man in France, and had been busily playing sultry boyfriends to sexually-liberated women: In the French Style (1963), Three Nights of Love (1967), Camille 2000 (1969), and so on. Afterwards he worked on several tv series before retiring to oversee the family estate and businesses.

Louis Gossett Jr. and Alex Henteloff have both had long careers before the camera.

The first generation of Baby Boomers watched some crazy kids' shows on their brand-new black and white tvs, like Andy's Gang, aka Smilin' Ed's Gang (1951-1960), with the screechy-voiced hosts Andy Devine or Smilin' Ed McConnll, the demonic hell-beast Froggy the Gremlin, and the live action adventures of a very Nordic "Indian boy" named Gunga (1955-60).

It was sponsored by Buster Brown Shoes, an attempt to get kids interested in the most boring item of clothing imaginable: an elderly Little Person in an Edwardian sailor suit would say -- very slowly:

"I'm Buster Brown....I live in a sho....He's my dog Tige....He lives in there too.

The crazy advertising mascot derives from Buster Brown, an early 20th century comic strip (1902-1921) about a mischievous boy who has adventures and then writes a "resolution" to behave more appropriately in the future.

Like many tv series of the 1950s, it had a predecessor on radio, Smilin' Ed's Buster Brown Show (1944-1953), with Smilin' Ed McConnell hawking the shoes and reading the adventure stories.

With a tie-in comic book, Buster Brown Comics. 45 issues were published between 1945 to 1946. You could get them for free at local shoe stores and department stores, which conveniently printed their addresses on the front cover -- presumably while picking up your comic, you (or Mom) would do some shopping.

Each issue featured a humorous story starring Smilin' Ed and the Gang, plus an adventure story starring a muscular teenage boy: "Leathern Cord of Magic,""Dude Ranch Desperado,""Leopard Men,""Desert Raiders,""Ghanga the Elephant Boy."

Most were scripted by Hobart Donovan, the head writer of Smilin' Ed's gang, and the husband of voice actress June Foray (best known for Rocky and Bullwinkle). A number of artists drew the stories, including Ruben Moreira, Ray Willner, and future fantasy illustrator Frank Frazetta.

Remember, this was an era where movies never showed shirtless men except an occasional Tarzan or Bomba the Jungle Boy, and tv was a small black-and-white box with ghostly, hard-to-see images. Comic books were your only source of beefcake images.

And you could get free beefcake comics every other month just by dropping in to a shoe store.

Sounds bizarre, but sign me up!

See also: Andy's Gang

During the "British tv invasion" of the late 1970s, I discovered The Prisoner, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Upstairs Downstairs, and The Tomorrow People, but I missed The Feathered Serpent (1976-78). It was never broadcast in the U.S., maybe because it's not set in Britain. It's set in a mythic pre-Columbian kingdom that mixes Maya and Aztec (and a little Inca), stage-bound -- no exteriors, but with some nicely decorated sets.

The Emperor Kulkulkhan (Tony Steedman) wants to ensure peace with the neighboring Toltecs by having his daughter, Chimalma (Diane Keen), marry the young Toltec prince Heumac (27-year old Brian Deacon). Meanwhile the evil priest Nasca (Patrick Troughton) tries to sabotage the wedding and generally make trouble, sometimes with supernatural assistance.

Although their wedding is an overarching goal of the series, Heumac and Chimalma do not behave at all like lovers; they are diplomatic allies about to create an alliance. They become friends -- especially when they must work together to fight Nasca -- but there is no tenderness or longing between them.

Instead, Heumac devotes all of his attention to his young servant, Tozo (19-year old Richard Willis, right). Twice Tozo is captured by the bad guys and tortured, prompting Heumac to attempt a daring rescue. They also go on a perilous quest together. As the series ends, Heumac, Tozo, and Chimalma sit on the royal platform together, as if they will be co-rulers.

There is also significant beefcake. In the first season, Tozo's long hair and two-piece servant costume make him somewhat too much like a girl to be of interest, but in the second season he drops the suit, often wearing only a revealing Mayan pouch.

Heumac usually wears a sleeveless robe, but during the perilous quest he strips down to another revealing Mayan pouch.

And other characters often display muscular physiques, or at least revealing pouches.

Brian Deacon was very busy on British tv before and after Feathered Serpent, with roles in Love and Mr. Levisham, Good Girls,The Emigrant, and Jesus. The movie Zed and Two Noughts (1986), about twin brothers (played by Brian and his brother Eric) involved in a three-way relationship, features frontal nudity.

Richard Sheridan Willis, who was born on Stratford-on-Avon and named after the famous playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan, is mostly active in theater in Britain, Canada, and the U.S., though he occasionally performs on television and in movies. Here he encounters pirate Peter Sellers in Ghost in the Noonday Sun (1973).

It's time for another game of "finding something to watch on Amazon Prime that's not about the Girl of Your Dreams."

The Hippopotamus. Sounds like something Ionesco would write, but it's actually Based On The Best-Selling Novel by Stephen Fry (all in caps). A semi-famous poet investigates a series of miracle healings. And, apparently, a pink hippopotamus. The trailer shows none of that, however. The aging ex-poet drinks, meets four women, and falls out of a boat.

The trailer also shows a cute guy named David, who is bisexual. According to the plot synopsis on wikipedia, he has "morally dubious sex" with two girls and a guy. Whoa, homophobia. Or biphobia. And no hippotamus. At least there are two beefcake shots.

The Hungover Games. Four guys go to Laughlin, Nevada to celebrate the upcoming wedding of their buddy to Tracey, who "has an Adam's apple and a penis." None of them are particularly attractive, but Damien Bray (left) plays a scuba driver.

They find themselves transported to the future for a parody of The Hunger Games. Goiing through it on fast forward, I find no other gay references, but a lot of boobs, and a last scene where one of he guys meets the Girl of His Dreams.

Drowning Mona. When a woman (Bette Midler) drives her car into the river and drowns, everybody in town is suspect. There are several recognizable stars, including Danny DeVito, Jamie Lee Curtis, and Casey Affleck. But the icon shows Danny DeVito surrounded by hot babes. And it ends with a wedding. Next!

The Courier. A female motorcycle courier must fight off a sadistic.... Next!

Dirty Thirty. On the eve of Katie's thirtieth birthday, her friends Eve and Charlie (a girl) throw her a party that goes out of control. According to the plot synopsis on wikipedia, Charlie is a lesbian, about to marry the Girl of Her Dreams. Not heterosexist, but I still don't want to see it.

The New Guy. Is this a take on The New Girl tv series? No, the guy is shown with two hot babes hanging over him. In the wikipedia page, it's three, one naked. He's a high school student who seeks out the advice of a prison inmate on how to get babes.

Butt Boy. A guy is killing kids and stuffing them up his butt. What? Sounds homophobic, or bottom-phobic, or something grotesque. This picture doesn't seem to have anything to do with the movie, but beefcake is beefcake.

Doomsdays. Two "deliberate vagabonds," a "pirate" named Dirty Freddy and a "peak oil fanatic" named Bruho (it's spelled "brujo") loot vacation houses in the Catskills. Until they meet a runaway teenage boy and a young woman.

"Peak oil" is the point in time when oil reserves start to decline, and eventually run out. Depending on the rate of extraction, oil will run out between 2100 and 2200. Why is that a fanatic obsession? Won't we all be dead due to global warming long before that?

The trailer flashes "doomsdays" a hundred times and shows them hitting each other, but I don't see any actual post-Apocalyptic, psycho-slasher , or peak oil doom going on.

I wonder if they are a gay couple. No, according to a review, Fred falls in love with The Girl.

It's 3:00 am, and I have Season 1 of Designing Women waiting downstairs.

What Florida is to weightlifting, California is to water polo. Nearly every high school and college has a water polo team. But outside of California, they're as rare as boxing teams. After a lot of searches, I just put random towns in the search engine with "water polo" and "high school" or "college," to see what popped up.

1. Denver: The mom of the eleven-year old kid is advertising his cat-sitting and plant-sitting service. She specifies: "hot water polo players not included."

Not even if I tip them?

The kid is wearing a t-shirt from the Broncos water polo team in...California.

2. Chicago showed only girls, and St. Louis showed a lacrosse team --- not the same thing. This is Bluff City Water Polo in Memphis. Doesn't this team look a little young?

3. A search for Harvard University water polo yielded this very shiny team. wait -- it's actually not Harvard University, it's Harvard-Westlake...in California.

4. A search on Albuquerque high school water polo yielded two New Mexico baseball teams and this 25-year old water polo player turned bodybuilder. From California.

The full post is on A Gay Guide to Small Town America

You asked about the hunk on the left in this publicity shot from The Explosive Generation (1961).

Short answer:

He's high school student Dan Carlyle (Lee Kinsolving), helping classmate Bobby Herman (Billy Gray) hold up a girl in a scene that doesn't appear in the movie (it's about teaching sex education).

You're probably more interested whether there are any more beefcake shots.

So am I.

Long answer:

Arthur Lee Kinsolving Jr. was born in Boston on August 30, 1938, son of Rev. Arthur Lee Kinsolving, Rector of Trinity Church, and Mary Kemp Blagden. He had three younger siblings (born in 1940, 1942, and 1948). In 1947, Rev. Kinsolving became Rector of the extremely prestigious St. James Episcopal Church at Madison and 71st in Manhattan.

Going by "Lee" to distinguish himself from his father, the younger Kinsolving graduated from Episcopal High School, an exclusive private boarding school in Alexandria, Virginia, in 1956.

He enrolled at Trinity College, an exclusive private college in Hartford, Connecticut. The summer after his freshman year, he was performing at the Westchester Playhouse, when a Broadway scout signed him on to star in Winesburg, Ohio (which ran from February 5th to 15th, 1958, at the National Theater). He played Seth.

Next Agent Richard Clayton, the gay agent who signed on such gay and gay-vague stars as James Dean, Tab Hunter, and Richard Chamberlain, signed Lee on and got him gigs on some East Coast tv programs (Playhouse 90, Alcoa Theater).

I wonder if Richard Clayton had a casting couch.

After graduating from Trinity in 1959, Lee moved to Hollywood, and appeared in a variety of tv programs, mostly in dramatic roles and Westerns (Have Gun -- Will Travel, The Rifleman).

His movie credits include: All the Young Men, The Dark at the Top of the Stairs (which won him a Golden Globe nomination), Ah Wilderness, and The Explosive Generation.

He retired from acting in 1966 due to "personal frustrations with the business." That is, he hadn't worked in 2 years.

He managed the hip restaurant Toad Hall in Manhattan from 1968 to 1969. I wonder if it's the same Toad Hall in Soho today.

In 1969 he moved to Palm Beach, Florida, where he managed the Lillian Phipps Gallery and later the Wally Findlay Gallery, which "became the opulent setting for flamboyant openings for socially prominent artists."

Must have been some gay people wandering around. Wally Findlay himself died in 1996 at the age of 92, never married.

Lee also raced speedboats and acted as the captain of the DuPont Family yacht.

This guy was well-connected!

He was linked romantically with Tuesday Weld and Candace Bergen, and was married to model Lillian Bishop Crawford from 1969 to 1972. I don't know what "linked romantically" means, but such a short marriage may indicate that he was gay and closeted.

Sometime in 1974, he contracted a respiratory disease that didn't display any symptoms, so no one was aware that he was sick until, on December 4th, he collapsed at his apartment and died. He was 36.

The Photos of Celebrities Website claims that the following shirtless and nude photos are of Lee Kinsolving. Which ones are real?

1. Doubtful.

2. No way.

3. Not even the right hair color.

The new Netflix tv series Ratched is promoted as a prequel, covering the early life of Nurse Ratched in the 1963 Ken Kesey novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (and the 1978 movie version, where she was played by Louise Fletcher). It's just a promotion; the Mildred Ratched of the Netflix series has no connection to the bullying, tyrannical, battle-axe nurse, unless she completely changed personalities between 1950 and 1963.

Which is possible. In this series, people change personalities, lovers, allies, enemies, motives, and goals at the drop of a fedora.

This is actually a season of American Horror Story, with the familiar cast members, gorgeous sets, looney rich people, and endless icky violence. Except only a bit of supernatural, an occasional premonition.

It's 1948, and after insulting a few people on the road, young nurse Mildred Ratched (Sarah Paulson) arrives at the small town of Lucia in Northern California in a stylish aquamarine car (her gloves match the upholstered steering wheel). She moves into the only hotel in town, run by the blowsy "I don't allow no fornication!" Louise (Amanda Plummer), who will become important later, and then goes to the St. Lucia Psychiatric Hospital, a gorgous mansion with offices as big as ballrooms.

Oddly, although cars are shown parked right next to the mansion, everyone parks far away and walks across a field to get there. Also, there are only three nurses on staff in early episodes, and about 300 later on.

Mildred cons her way into a meeting with the hospital administrator, Dr. Hanover (Jon Jon Briones), and then bullies, insinuates, and insults her way into a job as a nurse, where she runs afoul of the mean, petty, bigoted head nurse Betsy Buckley (Judy Davis). Well, for awhile anyway. About halfway through the season, Betsy suddenly becomes very nice. So does Mildred. They end up best friends.

Mildred has a secret agenda (well, the first of several; she keeps changing them): her brother Edmund (Finn Wittrock, right) has been charged with the murders of five priests, and she wants to make sure that he is found incompetent to stand trial so he won't be executed (if he's found competent to stand trial, there should be a trial, not an execution! Did anyone check on criminal procedures?).

Then she wants him to escape, and then she wants to kill him for some reason. Meanwhile he starts a romance with a nurse after one meeting, and they escape together, and....

Everyone else has secrets, too. Dr. Hanover is hiding from his past life, when wacky heiress Lenore (Sharon Stone) hired him to cure her psycho son Henry (Brandon Flynn). But instead, they started partying, took too much LSD (it's impossible to overdose on LSD. Did anyone check on the drug's properties?) and ended up with Henry a quadruple amputee. Lenore feeds him, and asks after every bite if it was "nummy-num," which I actually found more disgusting then the various gouged-out eyes and boiling-water hydrotherapies of other scenes.

Lenore sends a hit man (Corey Stoll) to find and kill Hanover, but before that, he meets Mildred, and they start a crazy sexual relationship: "While we're doing it, let's pretend that you have had your legs amputated, and there's no morphine, so you're screaming in pain."

Meanwhile the boorish, bigoted, Southern redneck, s"you have a nice ass, honey, but you should smile more" governor (Vincent D'Onofrio) is depending on Edmund's execution to get him re-elected for some reason. (The governor of California in 1948 was John Roberts, who would become Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and did not have a Southern accent.)

His assistant Gwendolyn (Cynthia Nixon) has her own secret: she's a lesbian, and in a marraige-of-convenience with a swishy gay man (Michael Benjamin Washington).

Who is black. There are several interracial relationships in this series, which no one gives a second thought to. In the era of miscegenation laws and Jim Crow, that seems like a ridiculous oversight. But why add more drama?

Gwendolyn meets Mildred, assumes that she is gay, and brings her to a lesbian bar. Mildred is horrified and disgusted by the rampant decadence and immorality. But after an episode or two, she does a complete about-face, is completely fine with being a lesbian, and expects Gwendolyn to be her life-partner before they even get around to a second date. Gwendolyn is not up for it, due to the drama, secret agendas, and gratuitous violence in Mildred's life, so she rejects her outright. But in the next episode, they are together without comment.

Strangely, everyone they come out to, without exception, is totally fine with it. Even Nurse Betsy, who was promoting torturous gay conversion therapy literally five minutes before. Even the boorish Governor, upon discovering that his assistant and the "nice ass!" Mildred are lovers, merely says "My sister is like that. It's a hard life. Good luck to you."

More drama occurs when Gwendolyn wants to go to a puppet show. Mildred refuses, and Gwendolyn childishly breaks up with her for the fifteenth time. (Geez, she doesn't like puppet shows! Do something else!). But the puppet show give us the opportunity to see Edmund and Mildred's ghoulish back story, and to hear Mildred tell it all over again later (repeating the exact same story twice was a good idea because?)

I forgot about Charlotte (Sophia Okoneda), who suffers from multiple personalities, including an athlete who was at the 1936 Olympics and now wants to kill Hitler, and the diva Ondine ("I played first chair at the New York Symphony! I performed for Prince Louis II of Monaco! You are nothing! You are garbage!"). She will become important later, and even shows up in the last teaser scene.

There are a few other guys who are not particularly important to the various ridiculous plotlines, but are cute: Huck Finnegan (Charlie Carver), an orderly-turned-head-nurse with a partially melted-off face; and Father Andrew (Hunter Parrish), a priest who survived Edmund's mass murder, only to have things shoved into places you don't want to know about.

Huck Finnegan? Really?

Ratched is stylish, beautifully flimed, lesbian-friendly, with nonsensical plots, little awareness of late 1940s culture other than the costumes, no consistency in characterization. But stylish. My grade: B-.

Norfolk, July 2000

Tarik was 32 years old, working as a dietician in a hospital and cruising for older white guys, preferably cops.

Norfolk was a rough town, and rather homophobic, so you had to be careful: a lot of the cops would let you go down on them, then rob you or beat you up. But there weren't a lot of gay venues other than the bars: he went to the MCC, the gay church, and wrote for Our Own Community Press, the local gay newspaper.

It was at the MCC that he met Mitchy: in his 50s, short, thin, greying, a bit on the femme side (I have an image of Leslie Jordan), and something of a dollar-dropper (trying to attract guys with an ostentatious display of wealth). Three minutes into the conversation, he had mentioned that he lived in Linkhorn, the wealthiest neighborhood in Virginia Beach, and that he owned a Rembrandt. All in a thick Tidewater accent: "Hello theah, deah. Ahm'm from Linhohn. Ah own a pictuah by Rembrandt."

Maybe because he grew up poor and a member of the black-supremacist Nation of Islam, Tarik always found topping rich white guys very erotic, so he accepted Mitchy's invitation to "come ovah."

Not a great hookup. A 45 minute drive, and turns out that Mitchy wasn't into anal; he was an oral top, and not even hung. Plus his house was very cold, the Rembrandt was of a woman, there was another picture of a naked woman in the bedroom, he had torch songs playing constantly, and he was a bit racist: "Would you lakh to heah something else? I know y'all lakh rap..."

But Tarik was not used to being pursued, so when Mitchy called two nights later and asked "Why don't yah come ovah?", he agreed.

More boring oral sex while a naked woman looked down on them and torch songs played, and it was so cold that they had to stay under the covers.

Three nights later "Why don't yah cove ovah for dinnah?"

Mitchy served pork chops! Tarik didn't belong to the Nation of Islam anymore, but he still avoided pork. He filled up on mashed potatoes and green beans, and then there was more oral sex right at the dining room table, before dessert.

And Mitchy insisted that he spend the night.

This was turning into a full-fledged relationship, except Mitchy never wanted to go out. Apparently he was too closeted to go to the bars, and the day they met was the only time he attended the MCC. He looked up in online chatrooms, and went out to First Landing State Park, the outdoor cruising area in Virginia Beach.

Great, an unwanted boyfriend who wasn't into anal, who wasn't hung and who was in the closet!

Tarik accepted "Why don't yah come ovah?" invitations two or three more times before getting the gumption to say "No. Sorry, I don't feel like it tonight."

"But deah, I'm horney. I have needs."

It was always about Mitchy's needs, wasn't it? "Sorry, I don't feel like it."

"But deah, if you won't come ovah, I'll have to go to the park to meet a fella."

"Do what you want. I'm not coming over." Tarik hung up on him.

The next day when he went to the office of Our Own Community press, they were talking about a newspaper article. "Does anyone know if he was gay? Was it really a bashing incident?"

Mitchy's housekeeper found him dead in his bedroom. He had been beaten and strangled. Nothing was taken. The police were baffled, but Tarik figured that he had gone out cruising and propositioned the wrong guy.

Tarik felt guilty, of course. If he hadn't said "no" that night. But Mitchy made the decision to pick up rough trade. He made the decision to stay in the closet.

A few weeks later, Tarik was lying in bed, just dozing off, when the phone rang.

"Hello, deah. Why don't yah come ovah?"

A prank call? But Tarik had told only a few people about his hookup/dates, and no one about Mitch's signature phrase or thick Tidewater accent.

Mitchy still pestering him for a hookup from beyond the grave?

The full story, with explicit sex and nude photos, is on Tales of West Hollywood.

At every school assembly when I was a kid in Rock Island, we had to sing the state song. You were also forced to sing it at football games, wrestling matches, and political rallies:

By thy rivers gently flowing, Illinois, Illinois,
O'er the prairies verdant growing, Illinois, Illinois,
Comes an echo on the breeze.
Rustling through the leafy trees, and its mellow tones are these, Illinois, Illinois.

Has any state song been more reviled and made fun of?

Yep. Across the river, Iowa's state song is just as bad, if not worse:

From yonder Misissippi's stream
To where Missouri's waters gleam
O! fair it is as poet's dream, Iowa, oh Iowa.

Who decided that states should have official songs to be foisted upon schoolchildren and the audiences of football teams, and who decided that they should be uniformly so awful? And heterosexist?

I took it upon myself to read the lyrics of all 50+ state songs (some have more than one).

It was dismal. Song after song of nonsense.

This state is full of badgers, this state is full of sod,
This state is full of sandwiches, this state is under God.

Ok, I just made that one up.

New York's is hands-down the stupidest:

New York is special. New York is diff'rent' cause there's no place else on Earth quite like New York and that's why I love New York.

What, "Start spreading the word, I'm leaving today" was taken?

Contrary to what you might think, that nonsense was not composed by a 5-year old, but by Steve Karmen, an accomplished tv commercial jingle writer: "Aren't you glad you use Dial?", "When you say Budweiser,""The Great American chocolate bar."

Maryland's state song is grotesquely bloody:

Avenge the patriotic gore that flecked the streets of Baltimore,
And be the battle queen of yore, Maryland! My Maryland!

Colorado's is all about mass extinction due to over-hunting:

The bison is gone from the upland, the deer from the canyon has fled,
The home of the wolf is deserted, the antelope moans for his dead

Fortunately, they replaced it with John Denver's "Rocky Mountain High" in 2007.

Over half of the state songs are disgustingly heterosexist, making schoolkids and football teams sing about "Aren't you glad everybody is heterosexual? Aren't you glad those pesky gay people don't exist?"

How many times have you heard Indiana's "On the Banks of the Wabash, Far Away," without knowing who ir what was on that riverbank? Some guy's dead girlfriend:

Long years have passed since I strolled thro' the churchyard.
She's sleeping there, my angel, Mary dear,
I loved her, but she thought I didn't mean it,
Still I'd give my future were she only here.

Georgia has Ray Charles'"Georgia On My Mind," in which the guy thinks of his ex-girlfriend while he's in bed with other women.

Other arms reach out to me, other eyes smile tenderly
Still in the peaceful dreams I see the road leads back to you

By the way, when you google "Georgia football player shirtless," what you get is Darian Alvarez, a soccer player from Honduras. Not that I'm complaining.

Before countering with "South Carolina On My Mind" in 1984, South Carolina's state song was a little more graphic about the guy's girlfriend getting with other guys..

Thy skirts indeed the foe may part,
Thy robe be pierced with sword and dart,
They shall not touch thy noble heart!

After that, Michigan's state song about lost love is sort of a relief. The girlfriend is receding into the distance, while the guy moans "What am I supposed to do without you?"

Tennessee has "The Tennessee Waltz," which we had to sing in grade-school music class; "I was dancing with my darling, etc., etc." Missouri has "The Missouri Waltz," which has a whole complicated story about a father reminiscing to his children about his dead wife.

Oklahoma adopted "Oklahoma!" from the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, which is all about getting married and moving to the land stolen from the Indians:

Ev'ry night my honey lamb and I
Sit alone and talk and watch a hawk makin' lazy circles in the sky

Um...you know that hawk is searching for small animals to kill and eat, right?

Utah's state song is all about Brigham Young, Family with a capital F, and the "No Child Left Behind" Act.

Utah! With its focus on family,
Utah! Helps each child to succeed.
People care how they live.
Each has so much to give.
This is the place!

I just wish these guys were from Mississippi, so there'd be ten of them.

No state song extolled same-sex friendship, and the only one with any beefcake was Alabama's, mentioning two Native American heroes with muscular physiques:

Fair thy Coosa-Tallapoosa
Bold thy Warrior, dark and strong,
Alabama, Alabama, we will aye be true to thee!

Whoops, my mistake. Those are both rivers.

Still, I imagine that grade school kids in Alabama have a lot of fun thinking of dirty meanings to Coosa-Tallapoosa.

Enola Holmes is the most watched flick on Netflix, a family-friendly, teen-friendly, girl-empowerment tale with Sherlock Holmes taking a tangential and completely unnecessary role.

I was creeped out by it.

15-year old Enola Holmes (Millie Bobbie Brown) has been raised in Foxworth Manor by her free-spirited mother Eudoria (Helena Bonham Carter), who taught her all sorts of things unfitting for proper Victorian girls, like archery, martial arts, playing tennis indoors, and...gasp...feminism. Nothing wrong with that, but there is no one else in their lives. At least Mom has secret meetings of her mysterious women's club, but Enola has no friends her own age, or of any age. "We don't need anyone else -- we have each other." They are constantly holding each other, hugging each other, sleeping together. Good God, they are lovers!

On the morning of Enola's sixteenth birthday, Eudoria disappears. No note, no explanation, no sign that she was taken against her will, just gone.

Enola's two older brothers arrive to take charge. They have not visited since they fled to London many years ago, when she was a toddler (Why? Was Smother...um, I mean Mother trying to turn them into lovers, too? I guess they figured that she was just interested in boys, so it would be safe to leave Enola alone with her. They were wrong!).

The oldest brother, Mycroft (Sam Claflin), actually owns the house, and has been sending Eudoria money to pay for renovations that never happened and staff who were never hired. (So Mom has basically spent ten years grifting her son. Incest and fraud! Nice lady!).

He wants to send Enola to a boarding school, where she can meet some kids her own age, and maybe get over her creepy Electra complex. But Enola considers the idea of meeting people besides her Mother/Girlfriend a fate worse than death. "No! Let me stay alone and be happy! I don't need anybody else! I have myself!" Geez, she creeps me out.

To be fair, Mycroft is intent on the boarding school run by his "old friend" Miss Harrison (Fiona Shaw), obviously an ex-girlfriend, who teaches girls to be proper Victorian ladies and find husbands. So it will constrain Enola's free spirit. Still, there will be other girls there, not just Mom/Girlfriend and the housekeeper!

In order to search for Mom/Girlfriend, who left some cryptic clues to her whereabouts, Enola runs away. On the train to London, she accidentally becomes involved in another story: someone is trying to kill the dreamy but utterly inept 17-year old Lord Tewksberry (Louis Partridge). His father has just died, so he stands to inherit Dad's seat in the House of Lords, and cast the deciding vote on a controversial Reform Bill. So now he has a target painted on his back.

Enola helps Tewksberry survive, and they have a few sparking moments of romance. Uh-oh, Mom/Girlfriend will be jealous. Then Enola sleuths out who has been paying the hit men (it's not Mycroft). And that's the story.

Wait! What about the mysterious disappearance of Mom/Girlfriend? Enola was supposed to use her sleuthing skills to unravel the clues and find her!

Oh, she returns on her own. But...then what's the point of all the setup?

Oh, and Enola's second brother is the famous detective Sherlock Holmes (Henry Cavill, top photo), who doesn't do anything. He is apparently in the movie so that Enola can drop his name.

And there is no Dr. Watson. But at least Sherlock doesn't express any heterosexual interest.

My grade: I didn't like the bait-and-switch plotline, and the mother/daughter incest is just creepy. But the sets are pleasant, and there was some racial diversity -- some black extras in the background, and Lestrade is South Asian. C

When I was a kid in the 1960s and 1970s, my friends and I hated variety shows: Ed Sullivan, Red Skelton, Carol Burnette, Andy Williams, Glen Campbell (left). They were old, square, has-beens. And what could be more boring than someone standing in front of a microphone, singing?

But Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In (1968-73) was for us: not exactly variety, or even sketch comedy, but comedic slogans zapped across the screen at lightning speed.

1. Judy Carne yells "Sock it to me!" and gets socked.

2. Rowan and Martin give the "Flying Fickle Finger of Fate" award.

3. Zsa Zsa Gabor gets big laughs by saying the word "bippy."

4. A Nazi spy peers from the undergrowth ("Verry interesting")

5. A spaced-out Goldie Hawn forgets her line and giggles.

6. Flip Wilson's drag persona Geraldine offers herself to all comers: "What you see is what you get."

7. Pigmeat Martin struts across the stage, jive-talking "Here come da judge!"

8. A dirty old man makes mumbling propositions to a purse-wielding spinster.

9. Gary Owens as a baritone-voiced announcer makes nonsequiter announcements.

10. Jo Anne Worley says "Blow in my ear, and I'll follow you anywhere," and giggles.

I can't watch the old episodes broadcast on Amazon Prime. The lightning speed gives me a headache, and the jokes are sophomoric; only children would think it hilarious to say "Look that up in your Funk and Wagnells." The cast members are just big kids, saying things that sound dirty on the playground.

But between 1968 and 1973, the jokes were bright and fresh, and risque and cool. Most importantly, they were ours.

No beefcake, except for an occasional hot guest star, like Davy Jones of The Monkees.
Not much bonding, not even from hosts Dan Rowan and Dick Martin, a comedy team since 1952.
No one ever acknowledged the existence of gay people.

But there was lots of gender nonconformity. Years later we remembered it fondly, as the first hint of gay potential.

1. Alan Sues played Big Al, a feminine sports announcer who had an obsession with a bell he called his "tinkle."

Gay but never out, Alan Sues also played a fey grown-up Peter Pan on peanut butter commercials.

2. Tiny Tim, who looked like a long-haired Dracula, played the ukelele and sang "Tiptoe through the Tulips" in a fey falsetto. He proved he was heterosexual by marrying a woman named Miss Vicky on The Tonight Show.

3. Flower child Henry Gibson appeared with a gigantic artificial flower and recited nonsequiter poems. He was often assumed gay, although he was married to a woman for 40 years.

In his last role of note, Magnolia (1999), he played a cranky older gay man named Thurston Howell (after the millionaire on Gilligan's Islandd), competing with another guy for the attention of hunky Brad the Bartender. He advises: "It's a dangerous thing to confuse children with angels!"

Between 1968 and 1973, we often confused children with angels.

When I was a kid in the 1960s, we were expected to never question teachers, parents, the church, or the government. Their answers were always right, their decisions always fair. To suggest the tiniest fallibility meant grounding, detention, or hellfire.

We were expected to never question the fact that America was the best of all possible worlds, an Arcadia threatened only by the evil empire of Communism and the long-haired hippie freaks. To point out a problem invited swift retribution.

Satire was rare; a parody of big business in an Uncle Scrooge comic, a snarky sketch on Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In, an occasional novelty song like "They're Coming to Take Me Away." And Mad Magazine, bought by an older kid and passed around surreptitiously, like pornography.

Mad began as a comic book, but was changed to a magazine in 1955 to avoid the strictures of the Comics Code Authority. It cost twice as much as a comic book, and at Schneider's Drug Store, it was placed among the adult magazines like Argosy and Esquire.

I didn't dare buy a copy, and the passed-around copies I read at friends' houses always made me feel guilty. There was no way you could justify them as uplifting, insightful, or beautiful. They were pure trash.

That was part of the fun.

The art was grotesque and unpleasant, though occasionally you saw nudity or muscle. In Issue #202 (October 1978), you even got to see bare butts, as Alfred E. Neumann is stared at for tanning the "wrong" body part (top photo).

In Issue #207 (June 1979), he displays a muscular physique in a toga to parody Animal House (yes, I still read Mad Magazine in college. We all did)

The writing was crude, scabrous, and cynical, with a clear message: everyone is a hypocrite; self-serving greed lies behind every pious platitude. Revolutionary for a for a high schooler (or college student) in the 1970s.

But there was one platitude that no one at Mad ever thought to critique: the universality of heterosexual desire. Every boy liked girls, every girl liked boys, same-sex desire did not exist, gay people were ridiculous. I don't remember any gay people in the issues I read, but according to the blog Street Laughter, they appeared 5 or 6 times during the years I read the magazine.

September 1971: "To a Gay Liberationist," illustrated by effeminate guys carrying signs that say "Gay Power,""Freedom for Fags," and "Pansy Yokum is a Misnomer.":

"You shout that you're victimized by bigoted attacks; forgive us if we're more concerned with Indians and Blacks!"

July 1973: A swishy basketball player grabs his teammate's butt (notice the limp wrist and the frilly underwear peeking out from his shorts). The straight guy seems to be saying "WTF?" as the caption reads "You know you've really got a problem..."

April 1974: A fold-in feature in which couples at a maternity ward turn into limp-wristed gays to "solve the overpopulation problem."

You get the idea.

Maybe it's a good thing that I missed those issues.

See also: R. Crumb's Underground Comix

Amazon Prime advertises the indie movie Kid Brother with this photo. So I figured it must have had a name change. Turns out that You and I (2014) is another movie altogether, about two buds, one gay, one straight, who get into complications on holiday in Berlin.

No idea what that has to do with Kid Brother (2017), an indie movie produced on a budget of $20,000 by Detroit filmmakers Bryce and Devin Cameron. It premiered at the Star Wayne Theater as part of a benefit for the Champions of Wayne program ( a mentoring program to help high school students succeed).

Bryce is a high school English teacher. Devin has a M.A. in Screenwriting from the Institute for Art and Design in Ireland. I don't know if either is gay.

1. Alan Longstreet, the meteorologist for the local Fox network and a total "here are 5,000 pictures of my kids" family man, plays Aaron, who has a crappy job, lives in a crappy apartment, and has trouble forming human connections. Not to worry, he gets a girlfriend.

2. When the first actor hired to play Kid Brother Jared couldn't do it, they quickly conscripted Peter Herold. who has several other acting, directing, and producing credits on the IMDB.

The plot: Jared shows up on Aaron's doorstep with a caper. They're going to reconnect with their long-lost father, who is dying of cancer.

I know Aaron is heterosexual, since he gets a girlfriend, but maybe Jared is gay? There are only very basic plot descriptions online, so the only way to tell is to go through the movie on fast-forward.

We start with Aaron clumsily trying to pick up a girl and going home to his crappy apartment alone. Jared arrives, and they spend the next 20 minutes sitting next to each other, walking side by side, and talking to a bartender in an empty bar. Jared sneaks into the bathroom and makes a phone call.

Who did he call? His boyfriend? Their father? Nope, he called Amanda, the girl that Aaron likes. They clumsily interact for awhile, and then Aaron goes to bed alone.

Breakfast. Then Aaron sleeping on the couch while Jared, on the floor, leans against his legs -- very homoerotic, but no doubt unintentional. Then Amanda at the office, dealing with her terrible boss.

Aaron and Jared on the floor, talking while pressing their legs together, lying side by side on the floor (geez, just kiss already!)

They buy stupid costumes for Amanda's "dress up" party. But it turns out not to be a costume party, and the other guests, two elegantly-attired ladies, laugh at them. Jared gets drunk, and Aaron helps him home.

More talking. Aaron and Amanda on a date, followed by kissing in the car, and next-morning shot in bed. Nice chest, Aaron!

Jared is waiting in the living room, pleased as punch over his matchmaking victory.

They finally get around to visiting Dad, and talk and cry at the front door for about five minutes before knocking. Amanda is there, too. But Dad isn't. There's a fight, Jared storms off, Amanda says "Go after him."

Aaron and Amanda being lonely by themselves. They drive and talk, drive and talk, drive and talk, and end up at the police station, where Jared has been arrested for breaking into Dad's house. Aaron explains: "He's angry."

They pick him up. Everyone hugs. They drive in the dark for a long time. In the back seat, Jared gazes dreamily at the couple he succeeded at getting together.

All three are sitting on the couch. The end.

Wait -- what happened to finding Dad?

Aaron and Jared certainly have a homoerotic vibe, but it gets diffused by making them brothers, and by the "happy ending" Amanda. I don't think Jared is canonically gay.

Clerks (1994) was a simple, grainy black-and-white indie movie about slackers working in and hanging out at a convenience store in urban-wasteland New Jersey, written, produced, and directed by 24-year old film student Kevin Smith (who happened to be working at a convenience store at the time). That minimalist beginning spun into the Askewniverse, a complex, interconnected, endlessly self-referential series of movies, tv shows, comic books,video games, and everything else imaginable, starring the same group of actors mostly playing the same characters.

Askewniverse mainstays Jay and Silent Bob (Jason Mewes, Kevin Smith) began as standard stoners, smoking or selling marijuana, hitting on ladies, and being idiots. As the movies, animated tv series, comic books, music videos, and cameos multiplied, they moved into more bizarre terrain: they avert Armageddon and meet God, become the prophets of God, try to sabotage a film that depicted their characters badly, become the comic book characters Bluntman and Chronic, sit on the Jedi Council in the Star Wars universe, and help Santa Claus make toys.

They were intensely homophobic, littering their speech with "that's gay, dude," insulting guys by suggesting that they have gay sex, rejecting ladies who have had lesbian sex, being attacked by gangs of evil lesbians, starting gay rumors to humiliate their enemies. They even subdued a villain by tricking him into going into a gay bar, where he would be gang-raped by the evil gays. Granted, Jay sometimes mentioned an attraction to men, but Silent Bob's look of utter disgust silenced him.

Kevin Smith always claimed that he was parodying homophobia, not promoting it. I didn't agree. So I've seen only a few of his movies, not enough to really understand most of Jay and Silent Bob Reboot (2019).

It's been 20 years since Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back (2001), and the stoner dude couple is way old -- "the oldest guys I've ever met," still hanging out at the long-boarded up convenience store, selling weed. When they discover that their characters are being co-opted in a new Kevin Smith movie, they decide to go to a Bluntman and Chronic fan convention in Hollywood to stop it. On the way, they discover that Jay has an 18-year old daughter, Millenium Faulkon (a Star Wars reference). They join her deliberately diverse girl-power posse (a Syrian refugee, a deaf African-American, and a Chinese podcaster), who have reasons of their own for going to the convention.

The adventures, by turns touching and ludicrous, probably reflect scenes from the previous movies.

On the way, Jay learns what it means to be a Dad (and Silent Bob learns what it means to be a Dad's heterosexual life partner). There are two speeches about how family is everything: "When you have a child, your story ends and theirs begins." Or, as Jay says during the final crisis, "I don't mind dying today, because I know a little piece of me will live on in my daughter."

The guys don't chase any ladies -- that part of their lives is over (although the female manager of a fast-food joint drags Silent Bob into the restroom for sex). The gangs of evil gays have vanished, and so have the homophobic slurs, except for an occasional suggestion that an enemy "sit on a dick." There are many suggestions that Jay and Silent Bob are having sex, but they deny it, "except for that one time," and of course masturbating together. They meet two lesbian couples without recoiling in horror, and Justin Long's character seems to be gay -- he gives them his Grindr screen name.

There are cameos from nearly everyone in the Askewniverse, playing either their characters or themselves, or both, plus some recognizable 1990s tv stars: Brian O' Halleran, Jason Lee, Val Kilmer, Tommy Chong, Ben Affleck, Matt Damon (top photo), Jason Biggs, Keith Coogan (who is looking more and more like his grandfather, Jackie Coogan, Uncle Fester on The Addams Family)

All of them are shockingly old, grizzled, chunky, not at all the teen hunks and muscular leading men we remember from the 1990s. Their world is gone; their stories are over; it's time for the next generation to take over.

No doubt the new Askewniverse will be more diverse and gay-positive.

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