NYSocBoy's Beefcake and Bonding

I've seen a heterosexual porn film.

Just before Halloween in 1982, when I was a 21-year old grad student in English at Indiana University, Deep Throat (1972) was shown in the Student Union. I don't know how the Student Activities Council managed to get such a thing shown without howls of outrage, but there it was.

Why did I go?

1. I wasn't out to anyone except my brother, and I was trying hard to maintain a heterosexual facade. I even bought Playboy magazines to leave lying around.

2. I wanted to fit in. So when the other guys in Eigenmann Hall invited me with statements like "Awright! We're gonna see some breasts!", I could hardly refuse.

3. College Avenue Adult Books sold In Touch and Mandate magazines, with pictures of naked men, but I had never heard of any gay porn films, so this was the only way I could ever see a film with penises.

Turns out that Deep Throat wasn't that bad.

It's a comedy, with humorous dialogue and parodies of self-help fads, and the sex is not much more explicit than the mainstream movies of the 1970s. Linda Lovelace finds that she cannot have an orgasm through conventional heterosexual intercourse. She sees a doctor (porn star Harry Reems), who recommends the alternative "deep throat." It works, so she practices again and again and again.

With a series of enormously endowed men.

Eventually she marries the most super-endowed.

So: not much heterosexual intercourse, few naked ladies, and lots of penises. What more could you ask for?

I'm not recommending that you rush out and see Deep Throat; we have other options now, thousands of all-male porn films, countless pictures of nude men on the internet.

But when you grow up in utter silence, where same-sex desire is beyond the boundaries of what can be conceived, even heterosexual porn can provide a glimpse of freedom.

See also: Peter Berlin; Do You Have Anything Gay?

One day in 1988, I was at the gym in West Hollywood, and I saw someone wearing a t-shirt reading "Married...with Children Fan Club."

I knew about Married...with Children. On Sunday nights, my roommate Derek and I always watched the beefcake-heavy: 21 Jump Street and Werewolf on the fledgling Fox network, but we turned the tv off when the "Love and Marriage" theme song began.

Who wanted to watch a tv show that praised the heterosexual nuclear family?

Big mistake. Married skewered the institution.

Al (Ed O'Neill) and Peggy (Katey Sagal) are a middle-aged married couple who hate each other. Sexually voracious Peggy keeps trying to trick, cajole, or berate Al into having sex with her, but he isn't interested (although he likes women in general).

In the first season plot arc, Al and Peggy have fun trying to destroy a naive newly married couple, Marcy (Amanda Bearse) and Steve (David Garrison). They're like George and Martha in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf,except their tactic is criticizing wives and husbands, respectively, and it works! The couple soon divorces, and Marcy hooks up with metrosexual boytoy Jefferson (Ted McGinley).

Other episodes involve problems with the kids, the promiscuous teenage Kelly (Christina Applegate) and the rowdy preteen Bud (David Faustino) -- soon a nerdy teenager.

No significant buddy-bonding, although Peggy and Marcy and Al and Jefferson come close.

Lots of beefcake -- Kelly had lots of shirtless, muscular boyfriends, such as Dan Gauthier, and in later seasons, Bud began to muscle-up big time.

Gay people appear only once.

Yet Married -- at least in its early years, before the downward spiral of Seasons 7-10 -- artfully revealed the flimsy foundation of the "fade out kiss," the myth of universal heterosexual destiny. In the heart of the Reagan-Bush Era of conservative retrenchment, that was worth any number of "old friend visits and turns out to be gay" episodes.

Amanda Bearse came out in real life in 1993, and the rest of the cast are strong gay allies.

Katey Sagal and Christina Applegate have made public statements supporting gay marriage.

Ed O'Neill now stars in Modern Family, as the patriarch of a family that includes a gay son and son-in-law.

David Faustino played gay characters in Get Your Stuff (2000) and in Killer Bud (2001), and in Ten Attitudes (2001), he played "himself," not gay but on the gay dating circuit (for a sleazy reason). He also played "himself" in the webseries Star-Ving (along with buddy Corin Nemec). See his post here.

He's currently in talks with producers about a Married spin-off, with Bud as an adult, married...with children.

When I was a kid, Halloween was my favorite holiday -- no gifts of football equipment, no hanging out with boring relatives, no Judy Garland singing "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas." Instead, you got to do things that were usually forbidden: dress up, roam around the neighborhood late at night, and accept candy from strangers.

Halloween movies are as likely as Christmas movies to have heterosexist plotlines. But here are 7 where the gay subtexts outweigh the boy meeting the girl:

1. It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown (1966). Linus waits for the Great Pumpkin to rise from the pumpkin patch, Charlie Brown goes trick-or-treating and gets rocks instead of candy, and there's disappointment and heartbreak all around.

2. Mad Monster Party? (1967). Dr. Frankenstein invites all of the Universal monsters, plus his human nephew Felix, to a party to celebrate his discovery of "the secret of ultimate destruction": a nuclear bomb! Felix falls in love with the creature Francesca, and triggers the bomb, killing all the monsters and probably everybody else! Oh, and he turns out to be mechanical too. But in spite of his strange hetero-romance and genocidal tendencies, Felix is "queer," an oddball outsider among both monsters and humans.

3. Hocus Pocus (1993). Teenage Max (Omri Katz, who would grow up to star in at least one gay-themed movie), fights three lesbian witches played by gay icons: Bette Midler, Kathy Najimy, and Sarah Jessica Parker. Max gets a girlfriend, but the climax involves saving his little sister and two of his male classmates, a gay bully couple. Plus "pocket gay"Jason Marsden as Binx, a boy transformed into a black cat.

4. Halloweentown (1999). Grand dame of campy movies Debbie Reynolds is the gay-vague grandmother of a teen witch who embraces her heritage in Halloweentown. Plus Luke (Philip Van Dyke, top photo), a cute guy who was once a goblin, and the gay-vague brother Dylan (Joey Zimmerman, left). The sequels are no good.

5. Underfist: Halloween Bash (2008). The minor characters of The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy,including Fred Fredburger, General Skarr, Jeff the Giant Spider, Hoss Delgado, and Irwin, team up to fight giant candy monsters who eat trick-or-treaters. Like the series itself, lots of gay subtexts: Jeff and Skarr are gay-coded, Hoss and Irwin have a thing going on, and there's a surprising amount of beefcake. It's never been released on DVD, but you can see it on youtube.

6. Paranorman (2012). It's not set on Halloween, but you've got zombies, ghosts, a witch, and a gay teenager.

7. Hotel Transylvania (2012). Single Dad Dracula (Adam Sandler) and his teenage daughter Mavis run a hotel for monsters. Lots of gay symbolism in the "we are a persecuted minority!" and "we can't reveal who we really are!" rhetoric. The human Jonathan (gay-positive Andy Samberg, left) accidentally arrives and woos Mavis, but also shares a big gay subtext with the Dad. Check out the scene where he plops into Dracula's lap in the sauna. And the PG-13 jokes about the Invisible Man's nudity.

Movies about slavery in the antebellum South are very popular, and not entirely because people want to know more about that shameful period in American history. Because of the opportunity to gawk at muscular African-American actors wearing next-to-nothing. Unfortunately, these movies tend to overplay the heteronormativity, with the muscular men being torn from their wives and kids and struggling against all odds to return.

Here are the best and the worst of the gay-subtext slavery movies:
1. Tamango (1958) stars Alex Cresson as a newly captured slave who starts a revolt on the ship from Africa to Cuba, and incidentally falls in love with a woman.

2. The Legend of N* Charley (1972), now usually released as Black Charley, is about three escaped slaves facing prejudice in the "contemporary" U.S.. Charley (Fred Williamson) and his buddy Toby (D'Urville Martin) have a gay-subtext bond, and actually ride off into the sunset together.

3. One would expect the multigenerational Roots saga (1975) to be chock-full of beefcake and bonding, but except for the degradation and torture of a youthful Kunta Kinte (Levar Burton), everyone is chastely clad, and every relationship that matters is male-female.

3. Mandingo (1976), the most sleazy of the blacksploitation vehicles of the 1970s, with Perry King as a sleazy slave owner and Ken Norton as the slave he forces to become a boxer. In between sparring with each other and taking off their clothes, they have "forbidden" romances with women.

4. Drum (1976) was a sequel with Warren Oates substituting for Perry King.

5. The Odyssey of Solomon Northup (1984): Northup (Avery Brooks) is a freeman who is kidnapped, sold into slavery, and struggles to return to his family.

More after the break.

6. Glory (1989) is set during the Civil War, where Colonel Robert Shaw (Matthew Broderick) becomes the leader of an all-black regiment. He butts heads with Private Silas Tripp (Denzel Washington), an escape slave. They eventually buddy-bond, and when they are killed in battle, they are buried side-by-side.

7. Amistad (1997) is a big-budget, rather pretentious account of some newly captured slaves who take control of the slave ship La Amistad (rather an ironic name) off the coast of Cuba in 1839. The leader, Sengbe Pieh (Djimon Hounsou), is imprisoned while the case is played in court. He befriends lawyer Robert Baldwin (Matthew McConaughey).

8. Jamie Foxx is not particularly handsome, but he is very well endowed, as evident during his nude-torture scene in Django Unchained (2012). Attempting to reunite with his wife, escaped slave Django (Foxx) buddy-bonds with German trader Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz) and runs afoul of a simpering gay-vague but heterosexual villain (Leonardo DiCaprio) before killing all the white people and their black allies.

9. Savannah (2013) is not actually about slavery, but it does star Chiwetel Ejiofor as ex-slave Christmas Moultrie, who falls in love...um, I mean befriends hard-drinking white dude Ward Allen (Jim Caviezel) in late 19th-century Savannah.

10. We return to the life of Solomon Northrup in 12 Years a Slave (2013), with Chitiwel Ejiofor playing Solomon, wandering through an antebellum world where all men are attracted to women and suspicious, at best, of each other.

See also: Roots.

Most of my autobiographical posts have been about my father's family, Grandma Dennis, Aunt Nora, and Cousin Joe, because I have more memories of them: we stayed with them on holidays, and they took me places.

We visited my mother's family, too, at my Grandpa Howard's farmhouse in Garrett, but it was sort of boring -- impenetrable Kentucky accents, smoking and drinking, endless discussions of things that happened 100 years ago back in the hills.

And no one to play with, except for my Cousin Buster. Sometimes my Uncle Paul would play -- until the summer after 3rd grade, when he got married and turned into an adult. I have only a few solid memories: swimming in the pool down the road, catching frogs, fishing, having milkshakes with his friends, learning how to "pee in the wind" (with the wind blowing away from you, so the stream is carried a long way).

And the Naked Man in the Peat Bog

There was a peat bog beyond the cornfields, a swampy, mossy expanse that looked like a good place to catch alligators. But Paul -- he never liked to be called "Uncle" -- told us never to go near it: "There's a Naked Man who lives in there, and he eats kids. If you get too close, he'll pop out and grab you and cook you for his dinner!"

"Why doesn't Grandpa Howard tell him to move out?" I asked, already aware of property rights.

Paul thought for a moment. "He's been living here a lot longer than we have, more than a hundred years."

"Well, if he's that old, he can't run very fast. I can get away, I bet!"

Kentucky Kinfolk

Frankly, I didn't believe him. Besides, I really wanted to catch an alligator, and the thought of seeing a Naked Man just sweetened the deal. Maybe I would even see his "shame"!

So one day in the summer of 1969, when we were visiting for the wedding, I decided to go exploring. I brought my cousins Graydon and Dayton (Kentucky Kinfolk).

We walked quickly through the back yard, where Paul and three of his friends were playing horse shoes -- they didn't see us -- then past the barn and the vegetable garden. We pieced our way through the high corn row for maybe a quarter mile, until it opened up into a little grove of trees, with the peat bog beyond. It was mossy-gold, with little specks of shimmering water. There was a musty, earthy smell. I thought I heard splashing.

"Are you sure there are alligators in there?" Cousin Graydon asked.

"I just heard one!"

We got some sticks and started poking around in the moss, swirling the muddy water that oozed up. I thought I saw a gold glinting shape -- maybe an alligator, or maybe lost pirate treasure, which would be just as good!

Then suddenly the Naked Man came lumbering out of the cornfield. Pale, muscular, kind of hairy, his chest and belly smeared with mud. Gigantic penis. An orange mask over his face. He held his arms up like Frankenstein and lurched toward us, moaning "Ummmmm!"

Shrieking in terror, we ran as fast as we could back to the house, where Paul and friends were quietly playing horse shoes.

"Why...what's the matter, kids?" he asked in surprise. "Did you see a rattlesnake?"

I didn't notice at the time that he was grinning. Or that one of his friends was missing.

For a long time, I thought I had a real paranormal experience, like the Gay Ghost of Davenport House. But recently my partner suggested that Paul might have set the whole thing up to scare us away from the dangerous peat bog.

It worked. We never went back.

But why did he think a naked man would be especially frightening? The gigantic penis became one of my favorite childhood memories.

Jean Denizot's La Belle Vie (The Good Life) is the winner in the Venice Film Festival's Europa Cinemas Label and is getting reviews like: "a masterpiece!"

Sigh. Here we go again.

Brothers Sylvain and Pierre (Zacharie Chasseriaud, Jules Pelissier) have on the run with their father Yves (Nicolas Bouchaud) for 11 years, ever since he lost them in a custody battle with their mother. They spend their time splashing around naked under a waterfall, paddling down the Loire River, and reading Huckleberry Finn.

But the homoromantic idyll vanishes when 18-year old Pierre disappears after stealing a horse, leaving 16-year old Sylvain alone with his father.

Without his older brother, Sylvain is horribly lonely. Until he meets Gilda -- "his first girl, his first crush, and the first stop on his way to the good life."

I guess there's no way on Earth that Sylvain could ever have met a boy.

Nope. According to Hollywood, or in this case, cinema francais, male relationships are irrelevant or destructive. They may be ok for children, but eventually all men grow up, and gaze longingly at the girls walking in slow motion into their lives. Hetero-romantic desire is the only road to happiness -- as James Brown tells us, a man is nothing, nothing at all, without a woman.

I've seen it all before, from The Summer of '42 on down, over and over and over and over.

The homoerotic import of Huckleberry Finn and Jim the escaped slave rafting down the Mississippi has been well-known for many years. Even homophobes notice.

In 1961, Leslie Fiedler wrote "Come Back to the Raft Again, Huck Honey," bemoaning that Huck and Jim, like many men and boys in classic American literature, are afraid to grow up and establish "mature" heterosexual relationships, so they fall in love with men.

When both you and your intended audience are fully aware of the gay subtext, how will you build a stage musical out of Huckleberry Finn that adequately avoids it?

Especially when you know that the actors will be much closer in age than the 14-year old Huck and adult Jim of the novel?

That was the problem that Roger Miller and William Hauptman faced when they wrote Big River, which premiered on Broadway in 1985, at the height of the 1980s homophobic backlash. In that political climate, no way could they allow the slightest hint of Jim and Huck liking each other!

So they had Huck and Jim explicitly reject the idea that they could have any kind of emotional bond:

I see the friendship in you eyes that you see in mine
But we're worlds apart, worlds apart
Together, but worlds apart

Then they gave Jim s a quest: to go to the North, make some money, and buy his family out of slavery.

And the newly heterosexual Huck gets a girlfriend, Mary Jane Wilkes, who asks him to stay in Arkansas with her:

Did the morning come too early
Was the night not long enough
Does a tear of hesitation
Fall on everything you touch

He decides to move on, not because he isn't interested, but because he made a vow to help Jim escape to the North.

Finally, they defer the homoeroticism onto the Duke and the King, two gay-vague villains of the old, simpering school. The "Royal Nonesuch" show, which they advertise to grift the townsfolk, purports to be a horror of gender indeterminancy:

Well, it ain't no woman and it ain't no man
And it don't wear very many clothes
So says I, if you look her in the eye
You're better off looking up her nose
It's actually the Duke and the King mooning the audience.

Does it work? Does Big River adequately erase the gay potential?

Not really. It takes a lot more than that to keep gay subtexts away.

See also: Huck and Jim on the Raft

The Krofft animatronic Saturday morning shows like Pufnstuf and Land of the Lost usually involved boys trapped far from home, but the 1973-1975 entry, Sigmund and the Sea Monsters, used the "I've got a secret" theme instead. Sigmund (Billy Barty), a three-foot tall blob of green tentacles, is expelled from his abusive family for being “a rotten sea monster.” He wanders up onto the beach and befriends two human boys, Johnny (Johnny Whitaker) and Scott (Scott Kolden). Most episodes involve Sigmund being befuddled by human society while hiding from his bullying brothers (who need him back for some mercenary reason), and the boys being likewise befuddled by sea monster society while trying to hide Sigmund from human authority figures.

Johnny Whitaker had previously starred as the saccharine Jody on Family Affair (1966-71), and as a shepherd boy who jumps off a cliff and becomes The Littlest Angel (1969). He was only fourteen at the start of Sigmund, but still, he was on display far more than other Krofft boys. His opening shots at the beach, in a swimming suit and then a muscle shirt, showed a toned body with surprisingly firm biceps, and later he sauntered around the set in impossibly tight jeans that almost allowed gay kids to overlook his hair, fluffy, carrot-red, with the texture of cotton candy.

He would show off his muscles that same year in Tom Sawyer (1973), with Jeff East as Huckleberry Finn.

Sigmund critiques the myth of the heterosexual nuclear family both overtly through the bickering sea monsters, and more subtly through the human family: parents absent and never mentioned, the adult guardian a no-nonsense, grumpily affectionate, arguably lesbian housekeeper (played with gusto by character actress Mary Wickes).

It is difficult to categorize the relationship between Johnny and Scott (especially since the actors use their real names): they are often shown sleeping in bunk beds, and they both acknowledge Zelda’s authority, so they most likely live together, but they are never identified as brothers, and they played best buddies in The Mystery of Dracula’s Castle. If they are brothers, then they exhibit an extraordinary physical intimacy, always touching arms and shoulders or chummily reclining against each other’s bodies.

In “The Nasty Nephew” (October 1973), as they are prevaricating about the noises coming from their club house (where Sigmund is sequestered), Johnny reaches behind Scott’s back and takes his hand. They hold hands for a long moment, and then Scott shrugs him off. This is an odd gesture, with no rationale in the plot: they are not exchanging any sort of signal, and teenage boys have few other legitimate reasons for holding hands. But perhaps the behind-the-back intimacy mirrors the sea monster in the club house, both truths about their “friendship” that must be kept secret from the outside world.

Johnny announces in the theme song that the program is about “friends, friends, friends,” presumably Sigmund, but many of the lines seem to discuss a more intimate relationship: “a special someone” who will “change your life.” The unaired final verse makes it explicit:

I can't change the way I feel, and wouldn't if I could.
I never had someone before, who made me feel so good.

The inevitability, the loss of control, and the “feel so good” in the sex-happy 1970’s all point to romance instead of friendship.

Similarly, Johnny’s 1973 solo album, though entitled Friends, overbrims with tracks like “It’s Up to You,” “Lovin’ Ain’t Easy,” and “Keep It a Secret,” about romance that must be hidden, submerged behind the façade of friendship. But surely Johnny does not mean that he is secretly in love with a 3-foot tall sack of green tentacles. Instead, the mandate to care for Sigmund and keep him safe from the prying eyes of adults gives Johnny and Scott a reason to spend every moment together, to concoct wild schemes and harrowing rescue attempts, to share the joys and terrors of a secret life.

Perhaps the Krofft Brothers became aware, on some level, of the same-sex desire implicit in the relationship between Johnny and Scott. Though none of the other Krofft boys ever exhibited heterosexual interest, several episodes of Sigmund introduce a girl during the last two or three minutes: anonymous, with no lines, alien to the plot, present just so Johnny can gaze at her and sing love songs. This strategy backfires, as the girl, straw-haired, tanned, and freckled, looks exactly like Scott Kolden.

In the second year, therefore, the Krofft Brothers introduced a new theme song. To avoid conjecture about what sins a sea monster might commit, they made the reason for Sigmund’s expulsion from sea monster society explicit: like Casper the Friendly Ghost, he refuses to scare humans. He encounters Johnny and Scott on the beach, and now all three are “the finest of friends that ever can be.” The suggestion that Johnny has found a “special someone” has vanished in favor of a triad of buddies.

We need not assume that Johnny Whitaker, a devout Mormon who would serve as a missionary in Portugal and graduate from Brigham Young University, was consciously adding a romance to his character’s on-screen friendship with Scott. The intent of a performer does not diminish the possibility that a teenager might find hope in his image flickering on a television screen, months or years later and thousands of miles away. But it is inspiring to discover that, though Johnny Whitaker and Scott Kolden both married women and raised heterosexual nuclear families, they have remained close friends. Their relationship is intimate, loving, and permanent. Who cares if they ever kiss?

There are only about 30 gay bath houses left in the United States, down from the hundreds in the 1970s -- they have fallen prey to homophobic health regulations, a puritanical culture, and hook-up apps like Grindr. But chances are you're within 300 miles of one, and it's well worth a destination visit.

Here are 15 reasons why you should include a bathhouse on your recreational agenda:

1. Going to bathhouses is a part of gay history. Before the 1970s, bathhouses were the only place where men could socialize without fear of being assaulted by homophobes or arrested. Many early Gay Rights pioneers did their organizing at bathhouses.

2. You can go during the daytime, instead of waiting around until 10:00 or 11:00 pm to hang out in a bar.

3. And there's no cigarette smoke clogging your lungs, no obnoxious drunks, and no blaring music, like in a bar.

4. You will see more naked men than you ever thought possible. The only other place to see naked men in real life is in a locker room, where you can, at best, steal a glance at the guy stripping down next to you. At the bath house, there are dozens of naked men, of every size and shape, and none of them mind gawkers.

5. You will discover the infinite variety of same-sex relationships. You will meet men who have sex with men but fall in love with women, men who have sex with women but fall in love with men, men whose boyfriends are ok with "playing," men whose boyfriends aren't, and everything in between.

6. You will discover the infinite variety of same-sex behavior, from newbies who have never had sex before to regulars who have sex twenty times per week.

7. You will discover that life doesn't end at age 40. You will see 60, 70, and even 80-year old men, vibrant, active, knowledgeable. Where else in age-stratified gay culture can you talk to men who lived through the dark ages before Stonewall and the first heady days of Gay Liberation?

8. You don't have to spend any money except for your membership and entry fee. You can wander around all day for free.

9. There's no hurry. Club meetings end in a few hours, bars end at 2:00 am, but most clubs are open 24 hours a day, and your membership is good for 12 hours. You can also go out, have dinner, and come back again.

10. There's no day or night. Most parts of the Club are bathed in warm semi-darkness, with no windows. Time stands still. It's an eternal "now."

11. Finding a partner is much easier than exchanging endless "stats? pic?" emails and then arranging a meeting. You see someone you like, make eye contact, and walk toward him, or just grab. If he's not interested, he says "No, thanks," or if it's noisy, raises his hand in a "stop" gesture. But to be honest, refusals aren't very common. Most guys are interested.

12. If you just like to watch, most guys don't mind spectators.

13. If you just want to meet people, striking up a conversation is much easier in a bath house than in other gay venues. Something about being naked or in a towel makes most men lose the Attitude.

14. They have fully-equipped gyms, so you can get your workout in before, during, and after cruising.

15. Plus steam rooms, saunas, swimming pools, and often discos and restaurants. You can get all of your recreational needs met under one roof.

When you leave, blinking, into the bright light of the city, you've exercised, had a sauna, had as many partners as you want, watched, chatted with people, and seen a hundred naked men. That's a lot to accomplish in just a few hours.

See also: 15 Rules of Gay Cruising.; That Bathhouse in West Hollywood

You probably know the type of guys I find attractive:

1. Short, the shorter the better.
2. Muscular or husky. Fat is good. Bodybuilder too.
3. Dark-skinned. Black, Asian, Hispanic. If you're Caucasian, then maybe Italian, Greek, Spanish.
4. Religious, or better yet, clergy.
5. Gifted beneath the belt.

So how did I end up with a guy who was taller than me, thin, a fair-skinned blond, and not religious?

Well, at least he met trait #5.

It was during my horrible year at Hell-fer-Sartain State College in Texas, the worst place in the world. I drove into the Montrose, the gay neighborhood of Houston, to the Wilde and Stein Bookstore. While I was browsing in the fiction section, a guy approached me -- very tall, at least 6'8" to my 6'1, lanky, blond, wearing tight jeans and a lumberjack shirt.

"Don't I know you from somewhere?" he asked, in retrospect the oldest line in the book. But we chatted, and it was a relief to meet someone who wasn't deeply closeted or was overloaded with weird quirks.

His name was Carl, he was 27 years old, and a real life cowboy -- he grew up on a ranch near Abilene.

We went to dinner at the Hobbit Cafe, which, in spite of its name, served Mexican food, to the mall to buy me a pair of cowboy boots, dancing -- at a regular gay disco, not a cowboy bar, and then back to his apartment.

It was such a relief to meet someone who wasn't closeted or kooky that I didn't mind his lack of the traits I usually find attractive, or that he lived in Pasadena, on the south side of Houston, a good 40 miles from me.

During the usual date small-talk, Carl told me that he worked in human services. Now, sitting on the couch in his apartment, he said "You know what? I'm just going to come out with it. I'm not exactly in human services."

"What, then?"

"I'm a cop."

I felt the blood draining from my face. Same-sex acts were illegal in Texas (they would be until 2003), and the police actively sought to entrap "homosexual deviants" in the bars and bookstores of Montrose. Put your hand on his shoulder, you're under arrest for lewd conduct. And we had been dancing together, groping, and kissing....

"It's not like that," Carl said, sensing what I was thinking. "I'm gay. In the closet, of course."

"Of course." If he were discovered, he would be instantly fired. "Um...the gay community doesn't have a very good attitude toward the police."

"I know. That's why I don't usually tell people until the second or third date. It scares them off faster than finding out that I'm bisexual." He conked himself on the head. "Whoops, I let another one slip out, didn't I?"

"You sure did. Any more closets you want to open?"

"Yeah. I'm an atheist. I grew up in a fundy household, and all of that God crap just riles me up!"

Hmm-- I believed in God, and went to church, but I decided to not mention those few details. I wanted to see this guy in the bedroom! "Bisexual, atheist, cop," I joked. "I'm surprised you haven't been lynched!"

We went into the bedroom, and Carl revealed that, although he was missing traits #1-4, he more than made up for it with #5.

On our second date, he came up to my apartment, with a pizza -- 45 minutes late. He explained that he had stopped to help a lady fix her flat tire.

A good Samaritan, too. This one might be a keeper.

We sat in the living room, eating our pizza from the coffee table. Carl started checking around the room. An Eastern Orthodox icon. A Catholic crucifix on the wall. A small bronze statue of The Madonna of Regensburg that I got during my semester abroad. A bookcase containing Church and Society, Halley's Bible Handbook, Dag Hammarskjold's Markings, Three Treatises of Martin Luther, God in the Dock by C.S. Lewis...

"Don't tell me you're into that God crap!" Carl exclaimed, his mouth full of pepperoni.

"Well...um, I was raised Nazarene, but they're way homophobic, so when I was in grad school I started going to the Metropolitan Community Church. There's one in Houston. I don't get there very often, but...."

"Church is church. It's all about hating homos!"

"No, the MCC is different. It was founded by the Rev. Troy Perry, who's gay, and most of the members are gay."

"Self-loathing, no doubt." His voice changed to a squeaking falsetto. "Oh, I'm gay, I'm so worthless, I need God to wipe my sins away."

"But the MCC teaches that gay is ok. God loves gay people, and..."

"Enough is enough! I didn't come here to listen to the whole God spiel!"

I was starting to get angry. "Well, Carl, if I don't mind that you're an atheist, you shouldn't mind that I believe in God, right? Difference of opinion and all that?"

"I don't have to respect ridiculous opinions. What if you thought the moon was made of green cheese? Should I respect that?"

We went on like that for awhile, and Carl ended up leaving.

Turns out that I was lacking one of the traits that the bisexual cowboy cop found attractive.

See also: Bruce Figures It Out.

Life in West Hollywood in the 1980s and 1990s was cyclical. There were no seasons -- it was warm and sunny every day -- but you were always planning on the next event.

The social calendar began in June, with Gay Pride. Then:
Outfest (July)
Sunset Junction (August)
AIDS Walk (September)
Hollywood Film Festival, Halloween Parade (October)
Hollywood Christmas Parade, Thanksgiving (November)
The L.A. Gay Men's Chorus Christmas Concert (December)
The Tournament of Roses (January)
Valentine's Day (February)
Cinco De Mayo (May)

When I first moved to West Hollywood, Halloween was an informal affair. All of the bars offered costume contests, and patrons would walk from the Gold Coast to the Cafe Etoille to Mickey's to the Revolver in costume, adulating in the attention from passersby. In 1987 it became an official parade modeled on Mardi Gras in New Orleans: the West Hollywood Halloween "Carnaval."

Every year it became bigger, noisier, more crowded, and oddly, more homophobic, as heterosexual tourists came into town to stare, point, and make jokes. Eventually everyone in West Hollywood avoided Santa Monica Boulevard that night, making do with private parties or the bars of Silverlake, on the other side of town, and letting newcomers take over.

And they did. Today the West Hollywood Carnaval draws 500,000 people, more than any other event in Los Angeles except for the New Year's Parade.

If you can manage the crowds and the gawkers, there's beefcake to be had. Costumes tend toward the whimsical and drag, but once and a while there's a muscleman or two.

The Flash is one of the primal characters of the Golden Age of Comics, appearing in 1940 and rebooted several times as DC consolidated universes. Flashes include Jay Garrick, who gained super-speed after accidentally inhaling "heavy water" in 1938; Barry Allen, who got splashed with chemicals, and named himself after his childhood hero; his nephew Wally West; and his grandson Bart Allen.

The new tv series returns to Barry Allen (Grant Gustin, left), who experienced a Batman-like trauma early in life, when his mother was killed and his father was framed for the murder.

Raised by the kindly Detective West (Jesse L. Martin), he has grown up into a police investigator and paranormal specialist, a moody Fox Mulder. Then, after being doused with chemicals and hit by lightning, he discovers that he has become a "metahuman" with special powers.

The accident created other metahumans, too, with various powers. Some are good, some evil. And there's an Agency with a sinister interest in them. And Barry's dousing with chemicals wasn't really an accident. It has something to do with who killed his mother....

Sounds like there's going to be a lot of Batman-X Files - X Men mythology included with the mutant-of-the-week.

Will there be any gay content?

Lots. Even a couple of gay characters: Barry's boss, Captain Singh (Patrick Sabongui, left), is gay, although this fact hasn't been mentioned yet, and his boyfriend Hartley (Andy Mientus) will become a super-villain, the Pied Piper.

Barry is played by Grant Gustin, who played a gay character on Glee.

Iris West (Candice Patton) was Barry's girlfriend, then wife, in the comics, but here the two were raised together, so a romance between the adopted brother and sister might not be on the table.

Barry has a buddy bond relationship with Eddie Thawe (Rick Cosnett), a coworker with a dark secret who will eventually become his arch-enemy, Professor Zoom. They may have a Superman-Lex Luther thing going on.

And there will be ample beefcake. Many superheroes and villains will be dropping by, including The Arrow (Stephen Amell), Captain Cold (Wentworth Miller), and Heat Wave (Dominic Purcell).

In the first years of the twentieth century, everyone read Uncle Tom's Cabin, the novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe (1852) that, in Abraham Lincoln's famous joke, "started the Civil War."

Or they went to see one of the many silent film or theatrical versions.

The characters and events were as intimately familiar as anything in today's Harry Potter or Twilight series.

You would call anyone evil a Simon Legree.

Anything with an unknown origin was compared to Topsy, who was never born; she "just growed."

Jokesters called anyone impossibly virtuous a Little Eva.

And Uncle Tom, the doddering, creaking, white-haired, who sang and danced and reveled in his slavery, proclaiming it the best of all possible worlds?

By the 1940s, his name was being applied to African-Americans who supported or abetted racist policies. Today anyone in an oppressed group who sells out to the oppressor is called an Uncle Tom.

Like the gay writers and actors who fill our tv screens with screaming-queen stereotypes.

But in the original novel, Uncle Tom was no sell-out: he was strong-willed and principled, standing up to slave owners to obey the dictates of his conscience.

And he wasn't a doddering oldster: he was in his 40s, still strong, his muscles an object of both admiration and fear.

The comic book versions depict him as more of a sex symbol than an elderly minstrel, his overalls falling open to reveal his massive chest.

The poster for the 1965 film version (top photo) shows the back side of a naked muscleman, and promises: "the real story of how it all happened -- the SLAVES, the MASTERS, the LOVERS!"

Although the movie contains no nudity and no lovers.

Uncle Tom has a wife in the novel, but she is of minimal importance. What is important is the homoerotic desire that he elicits in his owners:

Simon Legree, who beats him because he refuses to harm another man.

And especially Augustine St. Clare, the gay-vague fop who opposes slavery even though his wife forces him to own slaves, and who wants to free Tom but can't bear the idea of not being able to gaze on his sleek, shimmering muscles anymore.

See also: The Uncle Tom Award #1: Todd Graff; and Brock Ciarlelli, the Uncle Tom of the Middle.

My mother's family moved to Indiana when she was seven years old. She was born in Magoffin County, Kentucky, in the Appalachians, where the Hatfields and McCoys feuded, where ultra-fundamentalist churches handle snakes, where everyone goes barefoot and listens to Country-Western music and rides around in red pickup trucks.

Really.

My Uncle El was old enough to stay behind, working on the farm, then for the gas company, marrying, and having a huge number of children -- 12 in all. Three were my age or a little older, El, Graydon, and Dayton.

We met in Indiana, at my Uncle Paul's wedding, where we saw the Naked Man in the Peat Bog.

During the summer after 7th grade, my parents and I drove down to visit. I liked hanging out with them so much that for years I thought of Kentucky as a "good place," where same-sex desire was open and free.

I didn't see them again. When I was a kid, we always went to Indiana to visit our other relatives instead, and when I was living in West Hollywood and New York, I flew back to Illinois twice a year to see my parents and brother and sister. And the years passed and passed and passed.

I got my Ph.D. I moved to Florida. I hadn't seen them for 30 years.

At Christmastime in 2004, I was back in Rock Island for the holidays, when the phone rang. My Uncle El had died on January 1st, his birthday. Did I want to drive down for the funeral?

I had only met him twice, but I wanted to go. I wanted to see Kentucky again.

Uncle El had 12 children, 31 grandchildren, and 14 great-grandchildren, plus brothers and sisters, cousins and second-cousins, and third cousins, and some friends who weren't even relatives, all filling up the Maysville Baptist Church, the Howard Family Cemetery, and then the white frame house on a mountaintop that I remembered from 30 years before.

Was Kentucky still a "good place"? Not hardly.

It was heterosexuality as far as the eye could see. There were Howards, Shepherds, Praters, Gearhearts, and Handshoes, all reuniting over casseroles and pies and cakes, all introducing boyfriends and girlfriends and husbands and wives and kids,

Graydon, now 43, was working for the power company in Michigan. Dayton, 45, and El, 47, ran an auto repair place in Mayville, Kentucky. They were all married with children, and some grandchildren.

My parents cautioned me to not "talk about guys" (their code for "gay topics"), lest the Bible Baptists lynch me, so when I was asked "Where's your wife?" and "Did you leave your wife back in Florida?", I replied with a vague "Oh, I'm not married."

When I was asked "How old are your kids?", I replied with a vague "Oh, I don't have any kids."

When men gave me an inclusive nudge and exclaimed "You know how women are!" or "You know how wives are!", I responded with a noncommittal shrug.

Was there even a glimmer of gay potential in this paeon to heterosexual marriage and reproduction?

Maybe a glimmer.

1. Cousin Graydon and his wife were big fans of Will and Grace. "That Jack always cracks me up!"

2. I told Cousin El about Angels in America, the HBO miniseries about gay people that aired a couple of weeks ago, and he smiled politely.

3. Cousin Dayton introduced me to his 15-year old son, Joel, "a real lady's man!"

"Dad, that's lame!" Joel protested.

"But it's true! He's always hanging around with girls. He even joined the drama club at school, just so he'd have his pick of the girls."

"Dad! I joined drama club because I want to be an actor!"

Wants to be an actor? Always hanging around with girls?

"I lived in West Hollywood for 13 years," I said. "I know quite a bit about the movie business. When I get home, I'll send you some of my old books."

"That'd be cool," Joel said noncommittally, anxious to be rid of the oldsters.

When I got back to Florida, I sent Joel a box of books: a history of Hollywood, my old textbook from acting class, some Shakespeare and Ibsen, and "accidentally,"Geography Club by Brent Hartlinger, about a teen who starts an undercover gay club at his high school.

He sent me a nice card, thanking me, but not mentioning Geography Club.

Some glimmers of gay potential.

See also: Kentucky Kinfolk; and The Amish Teenager in Red Underwear

When I was in grad school in Bloomington, Indiana in the early 1980s, I used to buy a gay porn magazine at College Avenue Books: In Touch for Men, which featured not only pictures of naked men, but articles on gay history and culture, dating tips, movie reviews, and even comics.

I was particularly drawn to a series of comic featuring macho icons like bikers, cops, lumberjacks, and cowboys, impossibly muscular and impossibly well endowed, interacting with each other. Aggressive, athletic, and masculine, they were a sharp contrast to the contemporary mass media depictions of gay men as soft, willowy sissies.

They all had the same "look": they had wavy hair, Castro Clone moustaches, and long faces, and square jaws. They were always smiling, enjoying every moment of their lives.

There were occasional romantic or humorous moments, but mostly the comics were about sex. Not the furtive, guilty sex of the 1960s tea rooms -- this was bold, aggressive, joyful, in public, in full view of passersby, who, more often than not, would ask to join in.

There was no homophobia in this world, but not much gay culture, either. Not many gay rights marches or meetings of the Gay Activists Alliance, not a lot of scenes set on Christopher Street. Impossibly muscular, impossibly well endowed men interacted in police stations, gas stations, army barracks, tattoo parlors, in the woods. It was a raw, primal world of same-sex desire. I had never seen anything like it.

The artist was Tom of Finland, aka Touko Laaksonen (1920-1991), who began publishing drawings in the early Physique Pictorial in the 1950s. By 1973, he had become so famous that he was able to quit his job in advertising and devoted himself full-time to his art. He published in In Touch, Mandate, the Meatmen series of gay comic anthologies, and eventually in comic-book length (but wordless) tales of Kake, a gay man on the prowl.

By the time I discovered him, in the 1980s, Tom was falling out of favor. His work was not political enough, ignored homophobia and AIDS, and portrayed gay men as obsessed with sex. Besides, it set the bar for male beauty impossibly high, ruining the self-esteem of those who didn't fit his rigid standards of age, size, and body type.

Ok, but sometimes you just want to look at hot guys.

Today Tom has been rediscovered. There are retrospectives of his work in museums in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Berlin, and Helsinki. You can buy Tom of Finland books, dolls, and a cologne. In September 2014, Finland released a series of postage stamps featuring iconic Tom's men.

See also: Do You Have Anything Gay?; and Gay Comics of the 1980s.

Born in 1874 in Budapest, Harry Houdini was a magician, escape artist, and showman. And one of the few men of his generation for whom we have beefcake photos.

One of his favorite tricks was the "overboard box escape": he was handcuffed and manacled, then nailed into a box, which was thrown into the ocean.

No doubt seeing his powerful, muscular body nearly nude in chains was half the fun.

Several contemporary movie hunks have replicated the famous pose, including Paul Michael Glaser (in The Great Houdini, 1979) and Johnathan Schaech (in Houdini, 1998).

But Houdini has a gay connection other than his beefcake appeal to both male and female audiences:

1. He married Bess Rahner, in 1894, and remained married to her until his death in 1926 (she died in 1943). They had no children, reputedly because she had a problem that kept her from ovulating. Some people speculate that she was intersexed.

2. He starred in several silent films produced by his close friend and fellow magician Arnold DeBiere. They were not financial successes, and one of them caused him near-bankrupcy. He blamed DeBiere, leading to a loud public "breakup."

3. He developed another close friendship with Arthur Conan Doyle, author of the Sherlock Holmes stories and an avid spiritualist. They, also, had very loud, very public "breakup," and the resulting bitterness led Houdini to spend the rest of his life as a spiritualist debunker.

4. He purchased -- or at least was a frequent guest in -- the Laurel Canyon mansion owned by R.J. Walker, a furniture magnate whose son killed his male lover by pushing him off a balcony. The lover continued to haunt the mansion until it burned down in 1959.

5. He died of peritonitis while performing in Montreal. He was entertaining some young male fans in his dressing room, when McGill University student J. Gordon Whitehead punched him repeatedly in the stomach. Eyewitness accounts are contradictory; no one knows why. Did Houdini invite the blows to prove his toughness? Or was Whitehead responding in homophobic rage to some gesture or statement?

I returned to West Hollywood after my semester in Nashville completely discouraged. I had spent 6 1/2 years in three graduate programs, and what did I have to show for it? A lot of useless knowledge, a M.A., and a a huge amount of debt. But what else could I do besides become a college professor?

I took the Strong-Campbell Interest Inventory. I read What Color is Your Parachute? And I tried:

1. Spring 1992: Actor. I got good reviews in my college plays, and I had some connections in the industry, like Richard Dreyfuss. How hard could it be to get a job in a sitcom? So I signed up for an acting workshop. My first improv scene was: "Jeff, you're returning from a long trip. Your wife meets you at the door, and you hug and kiss." I ran.

2. Spring 1992: Stand-up Comedian. I was good at telling jokes, so I signed up for a class with Judy Carter, who wrote the Comedy Bible. She said: "Your shtick should be about your relationships. Jeff, are you married?" I shook my head. "Divorced? Widowed? Separated? Living with a girl? Going steady?" Finally I told her "Gay," and she yelled: No! You can't be a gay comedian!" I ran.

3. Summer 1992: Translator. I bought some dictionaries, worked on some sample documents, and contacted a lot of translation agencies. I expected to get assignments translating Rimbaud, Verlaine, Thomas Mann, and Garcia Lorca into English. Turns out, surprisingly, the greatest writers in world literature were already translated.

4. Fall 1992: Juvenile Probation Officer. All I had to do was meet with the delinquents once a week to make sure they were going to school, getting vocational training, keeping away from drugs, and so on. Great, except I had to be in the closet all the time. If the boss suspected that I was gay, I would be fired instantly: "We can't have a homo working around kids!"

I endured the homophobic comments from the kids, police officers, case workers, and everyone else for about nine months.

5. Summer 1993: Writer. I tried to write a fantasy novel, but I had a problem with the plots. If you're not walking across the continent to vanquish the Dark Lord by throwing something into something, what else is there?

So I wrote a Gay Guide to Religion, scientifically ranking every Christian denomination in the U.S. by its level of homophobia. My agent hated it: it's a slap in the face of all the conservative Christians!

6. Summer 1993: Architect. Why not? I loved old buildings. It would require going back to school again, but it wasn't hard getting a job as an Architectural Assistant at Gruen Associates, the guys who invented shopping malls. Meanwhile I signed up for some architecture classes at UCLA. Who knew that they would go bankrupt and lay me off after a year?

7. Summer 1994: Tour Guide. Why not? I went to Europe every year anyway, and I spoke five languages. I decided to specialize in taking gay tourists on tours of Scandinavia, Estonia, and Russia.
Ok, I had never been to those places, but I figured it was a good niche. Turns out I was wrong. 10 ads in gay magazines, no customers.

8. Fall 1994: Employment Counselor. Most resume services charged $5, but I figured I could charge people $200 each to give them a job test, write their resume and cover letters, and give them interview tips. Surprisingly, this plan didn't work.

9. Fall 1994: Minister. Back in junior high, I thought that God had called me to become a missionary. Maybe He wanted me to become a minister! I called the Metropolitan Community Church, and signed up as a student clergy. It wasn't as glamorous as I expected: they put me in charge of the church hotline, which unfortunately got a lot of questions that weren't related to religion: Where's the best cruising area in town? If I say I'm gay, how much money will you give me? How big is your..."

10. Spring 1995: Computer Technician. I figured I could pay my way through seminary by becoming an IT professional. I had to take apart a computer and stare at the innards. Enough said.

Seeking a change of venue, we moved to San Francisco in 1995.

11. Fall 1995: Chemist. Maybe I should become a professor, but not in the humanities. Maybe the sciences were the place to be. So I signed up for three introductory science classes at San Francisco City College. I failed calculus and physics, and only passed chemistry by studying six hours a day.

12. Spring 1996: Veterinary Assistant. It didn't require as rigorous a scientific background, there was a veterinary hospital just two blocks away, and I love animals. But not necessarily injured, limping, whining animals in pain. Maybe I should go back to the humanities.

Then one day I was walking across the campus at Berkeley, and I glanced into a classroom and saw the name "John Locke" written on the blackboard. I took it as a sign: go back to graduate school, get your Ph.D., become a college professor. But not in the physical sciences or the humanities. Go into the social sciences.

In the fall of 1997, I enrolled in a fourth graduate program, in sociology at Stony Brook University. This time I graduated.

This is one of the iconic images of the 1990s, a bodybuilder with a Superman hairdo oiled up and flexing against an indeterminate background.

It burst onto the scene in 1994, and suddenly appeared on bedroom walls across West Hollywood. We all thought that the model was gay, or at least aiming his biceps directly at a gay audience.

Wrong on the first count, maybe not on the second.

He was 25-year old Johnathan Schaech, a fitness model who had just broken into acting with a recurring role on the Melrose Place spin-off Melrose Place (1994-95).

During the mid and late 1990s, Schaech's biceps could be seen everywhere. Everyone in San Francisco assumed that he was gay, even when he starred in the hetero-romance How to Make an American Quilt (1995) and The Doom Generation (1995), Greg Araki's tale of a three-way romance between alienated, homophobic teenagers.

Everyone in New York assumed that he was gay, even when he starred in Welcome to Woop Woop (1997), about a con artist in a colorful town in the Australian outback, and Finding Graceland (1998). A guy who thinks he's Elvis, a girl who thinks she's Marilyn Monroe, and Las Vegas.

Plus the usual tv movies about evil boyfriends who terrorize their exes and poor boys who find love with rich women.

Finally, in 2001, he married Christina Applegate, formerly of Married...with Children, and was interviewed in The Advocate, and we discovered that he was heterosexual. But an ally who was fully aware of his gay fans, and even played to them.

Schaech continued to work in the 2000s, appearing in a couple of movies every year, but he never managed to quite find his niche. He was too pretty to play Man-Mountains who take out small countries with their bare hands, too buffed to play New Sensitive Men who learn to cry and care. His roles became increasingly small, hetero-erotic, and fully-clothed.

They Shoot Divas, Don't They?
Mummy an' the Armadillo
Living Hell
Sex and Lies in Sin City
Chromeskull: Laid to Rest 2
Hidden Moon

Plus two kind-of gay roles:
Splendor (1999), about two guys in love with the same girl who decide to share

If You Only Knew (2005), in which a heterosexual guy pretends to be gay so he can share an apartment with the girl he is crushing on.

More recently, Schaech has been starring in tv series like The Client List and Ray Donovan, and become a writer/director/producer.

See also: Harry Houdini and the Gay Ghost.

When PBS came to Rock Island in the 1970s, it brought us a full-fledged British invasion. Sitcoms (Father Dear Father, Good Neighbors), science fiction (The Prisoner, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy), costume drama (Upstairs Downstairs) -- and since they were on PBS, they were all educational, approved even by teachers who derided all other tv as "mindless trash."

Monty Python's Flying Circus (1969-74) was the most bizarre of the lot. Ostensibly a comedy-sketch show with a regular troupe of performers, like Saturday Night Live, it had sketches that bled into other sketches, or stopped halfway through, weird semi-animated characters commenting on the action, visual puns, in-jokes, moments of sudden chaos. In Britain, there were antecedents in The Goon Show and This Was the Week That Was, but in America we had never seen anything like it.

And we loved it. We repeated catch phrases over and over (I still use "Nudge nudge, wink wink, say no more!").

We discussed the inner significance of sketches with the zeal of literature scholars.

We sang "The Lumberjack Song" and "Spam!"

We went to the movies, Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975) and Monty Python's Life of Brian (1979).

In retrospect, we didn't like Monty Python very often. Many sketches were incomprehensible, too bizarre, too busy savaging British programming conventions that we had never heard of. And why are men in drag portraying elderly women with Yorkshire accents by definition hilarious?

But some of the sketches were -- and still are --anarchic gems.

Dead Parrot ("This is an ex-parrot!")

Hungarian Translation ("My hovercraft is full of eels.")

Nudge Nudge Wink Wink ("Is your wife...into photographs?")

Spam ("No one expects the Spanish Inquisition!")

There was a fair amount of nudity, many more exposed chests and abs than you would ever see on American tv. Eric Idle (left) was particularly likely to be displayed in the altogether.

And, surprisingly for the 1970s, there were no swishy stereotyped gay characters, After Graham Chapman came out to the other troupe members in 1967, they were careful to avoid overt stereotyping of gay men, although their distaste for transvestism is often apparent.

In fact, a number of sketches skewered homophobia, as when one character suspects that another is a "poof," and casually shoots him. Or a "Prejudice Game," in which anti-gay prejudice is placed on equal footing with racial and religious prejudice -- revolutionary in the 1970s.

See also: Saturday Night Live.

There are several rites of passage between a boy and his Dad:

When he teaches you to shave.
When he lets you drive for the first time.
When you can beat him at arm wrestling.

But the biggest is The Talk, when Dad sits you down and explains The Facts of Life.

By which he means the mechanics of biological reproduction, how sperm and egg cells merge their chromosomes to turn into an embryo, and nine months later, a baby.

Why is this the sole subject matter of The Talk?

Biological reproduction may be interesting, but it's irrelevant, the physiology of the past. What about your respiratory, circulatory, nervous, and muscle systems? What about the nutrition and exercise necessary to ensure that your body works properly? Surely those are Facts of Life of more immediate importance.

The reason is obvious: The Facts of Life Talk isn't really about biological reproduction. It's about Sex, aka heterosexual intercourse.

Dad assumes that the quest for heterosexual intercourse, will occupy your thoughts, color your decisions, throughout your life. You will choose colleges and careers solely on the likelihood of heterosexual intercourse, marry to be ensured of a regular partner, get a job and a house and have kids to ensure that she sticks around, and spend your declining years on a park bench, gazing at "all the pretty girls" and wishing that you could have heterosexual intercourse with them.

By the time Dad sat me down for the Talk, I already knew all of the Facts of Sex, except for one.

1. We learned some of the Facts in seventh grade health class. The teacher showed us a drawing of a man and a woman, facing us like the greeting to aliens on the Pioneer Space Probe, with the testicles and ovaries circled. He explained that sperm from the man's testicles merged with eggs from the woman's ovaries, which was then embedded into the uterine wall and developed into a fetus.

Ok, but how did the sperm get to the ovaries, when they're a good five feet from each other? Teleportation?

"Don't get smart! You already know about sex! That's all you kids think about!"

2. Ok, so we reproduced through sex. That must be why my Sunday school teacher, Brother Dino, admonished us not to have sex before marriage, or God would strike us with incurable diseases as a punishment. He didn't want kids having kids.

But what exactly was sex? What did you do to draw the wrath of God and make a baby?

"Good question!" Brother Dino said. "It's not just sex. God hates anything that defiles the body."

Which didn't answer the question.

3. At Nazarene summer camp, I asked an older boy named Marty to explain the procedure. He told me about going from first base (kissing) to second base (feeling the girl's breasts over her bra) to third base (feeling under). He even demonstrated by feeling my chest under my shirt. But then he got nervous and left before the home run.

How did feeling under a girl's bra make sperm go from your testicles to her ovaries? The two organs were still a foot or more apart!

4. In eighth grade at Washington Junior High, my friends and the jocks claimed that they had sex often, a dozen times a week. As we walked down the halls, they would say "I've had her...had her...had her..."

I couldn't ask them, so I asked Bill's big brother, Mike.

"Ok," he said, "The home run: you put your penis inside the girl's vagina." (yes, he used the technical terms). "That's an opening that leads all the way up to her ovaries. So the sperm comes out and goes right up the tube to the egg."

"But...but...pee comes out of your penis, too!" I exclaimed. "How do you make sure that sperms come out instead?"

Mike began to blush. "Um...when you get older, sometimes...you know, it gets bigger...and like turns into a baseball bat."

"Sure, I know all about...um, baseball bats," I said, feeling very grown up and sophisticated. No one had ever mentioned that Fact of Life before.

"Well, when you're like that, only sperm can come out. When you're not, only pee."

"But..you can't control when that happens. How do you get it to happen when you want to have a baby?"

He laughed. "Oh, you'll find out, Bud. Believe me, you'll find out!"

So I sort of knew the procedure. But Mike left out the most important Fact of Life.

Can you think of what it was?

5. In the fall of ninth grade, Dad took me out to the back yard, sat me in the grape arbor where, he said, someday he would host my wedding, and had the Talk.

"You had Sex Ed, right?" he started off. "You know about sperm and eggs, and all that?"

"Sure."

"Do you have any questions?"

"Well..." Yes, I had a question. "I already learned about running the bases, and what to do with your penis if you want a baby. But I hear guys talking all the time about having sex when they don't want to make a baby."

"Don't do it!" Dad said sharply. "God will punish you with incurable diseases."

"Sure, sure...but...why would you want to? I mean, if you don't want to make a baby, what's the point?"

"What's the point?" he repeated, staring at me. "What do you mean, what's the point? It's a girl -- let's say a really cute girl -- and you've been kissing her, and feeling her breasts."

I looked away, toward the garage. "That's gross! Girls are all soft, with no muscles, no penis. Nothing cute. I mean, why would you touch them like that, unless you had to?"

I didn't realize that I had said too much until it was too late. Dad stood abruptly, snarled "Don't be a wise guy!" , and nearly ran back to the house.

Like Mike, Dad left out the most important Fact of Life. It took me years to figure out it out on my own:

Sometimes you want to hit a home run with a boy, not a girl.

See also: Getting past first base; and Seeing Brother Dino in the Shower.

Fall 1982: A Porn Film for Halloween

What's Gay about "Married with Children"

Top 7 Halloween Movies for Gay Kids

Beefcake and Bonding in Movies about Slavery

The Naked Man in the Peat Bog

"La Belle Vie": Boy Meets Girl, Yet Again

Big River: They Couldn't Get Rid of Gay People

The Sea Monster in the Club House

15 Reasons You Should Go to A Bathhouse

The Cowboy Cop in My Bedroom

The West Hollywood Halloween Carnival

The Flash: Gay Characters and Subtexts in a DC Comics Reboot

Uncle Tom's Cabin: The Slave as Object of Desire

Spring 2004: My Kentucky Kinfolk Grow Up

Fall 1982: I Discover Tom of Finland

Harry Houdini and the Gay Ghost

My Careers as an Actor, Tour Guide, Chemist, Stand-up Comedian, Translator, Minister....

Johnathan Schaech: Playing to His Gay Fans

Watching Monty Python's Flying Circus

Dad Explains the Facts of Life (Except the Most Important One)