NYSocBoy's Beefcake and Bonding

I've met many white guys who say things like "I'm not at all racist, I'm just not into Black men sexually." Or Asians, or Hispanics, or Native Americans...

When I look surprised, they continue: "It's a taste, not a statement of social status. If you're not into fat guys or guys with small endowments, or guys with beards, it doesn't mean you don't want to hang out with them, or be their friends, or that you think they're inferior socially -- just the bedroom is off limits. They don't turn you on."

Ok, is liking your men thin, or big beneath the belt, or clean shaven the same thing as liking them white?

Not at all.

Let's say you are not attracted to dark skin. You like your men pale.

It's never a set-in-stone rule. Everyone is open to exceptions with the right guy. I am not at all into blonds or redheads -- except when I am.

I like them big, muscular, bodybuilders, or husky or fat. But I've been with skinny.

Even if, for some crazy reason, you have a set-in-stone rule -- only pale guys can ever get through your bedroom door -- is every Black, Asian, and Hispanic guy automatically disqualified?

Of course not. Many People of Color have relatively light skin, and many Caucasians are quite dark, either naturally, or through tanning beds. Spot the Caucasian in the photos below:

Actually, there aren't any significant physical traits shared by every member of any racial groups. That's a myth. No matter what configuration of skin, hair, and eye color you find attractive, there will be some white, Black, Asian, and Hispanic guys with it. Why block them out?

So what, exactly, are you not attracted to?

1. An Image in Your Head. Let's say you're "not attracted" to Asian guys. The image in your head is probably of a very specific Asian guy: short, thin, smooth-skinned, beardless, under-endowed, sort of feminine. You're forgetting about the many Asian men who are tall, muscular, chunky, kind of hairy, and aggressively masculine. Why cut yourself off from an entire population based on a stereotype?

2. Social Status. Sociology tells us that we are attracted to markers of social position, wealth, prestige, and power. Institutional racism means that "whiteness" is valued, and markers of racial difference devalued. Juries are more likely to convict black defendants than white defendants charged with exactly the same crime. Students give black professors lower course evaluations than white professors. And in the bedroom, you want to ally yourself with someone of a "high" social status.

People of Color often report that white guys who date them expect to be dominant, "in charge" of the relationship, as fitting their "higher" social status.

3. Culture. Racial minorities have developed distinctive subcultures, with their own distinctive foods, costumes, vocabulary, music, and social norms. Group members differ in their participation, but the culture is always out there. Maybe you're worried about trying to fit into a culture that you don't know well.

4. Family. Many of my relatives practice "subconscious" racism, the little things that signify social exclusion, such as subconsciously rolling up the car windows when we enter a black neighborhood. My father is a little more consciously racist. When I date Black, Asian, and Hispanic guys, I always think very carefully about how to bring up the subject. Maybe you're thinking "I'm not into that group" because you fear your family's disapproval.

So you're not attracted to negative stereotypes, markers of low social status, a different culture, and your family's disapproval. Gee, it sounds almost like what you had to go through to acknowledge your attraction to men in the first place,

See also: Alan and I Cruise for Thugs.

Today every health club has a sauna, a little wooden room where the temperature is high so you can sit around naked, sweating in either wet or dry heat, with relaxation and maybe other benefits.

It's a standard part of many workout routines (pictured: Russian bodybuilder Mikhail Sidorykov).

Sometimes guys like to do things in saunas, but I don't understand the attraction. Why would you want to touch someone who's covered with sweat?

But the nudity is nice. Where else can you get a good, long look at naked men sitting still? (The shy wear swimsuits or cover their privates with willow branches.)

Finland has more public penises than any other country in the world, except maybe Bhutan, so it makes sense that the sauna originated there (it even plays a role in the first Finnish novel, Seven Brothers.)

Almost every house has one -- there are 2 million saunas for a population of 5 million, and a Finnish Sauna Society with 4200 members.

Entire families or groups of friends go in at once for bouts of naked sweating, preferably accompanied by hitting yourself with a willow switch, and followed by running naked through the snow to cool off (or a cold swimming pool, if no snow is available).

Finnish saunas are generally hotter than the American versions, and you stay in longer, up to thirty minutes.

Beginning in 1999, World Sauna Championships were held in Heinola, Finland, about 1 1/2 hours north of Helsinki. Contestants from over 20 countries facing an incredibly high starting temperature of 230 F. Rounds typically lasted less than 3 minutes.

Can you imagine anything more dangerous?

Amazingly, the championships continued annually for 10 years without incident.

Then, in 2010, two contestants passed out after 6 minutes in the sauna. Vladimir Ladyzhensky died, and Timo Kaukonen was hospitalized with burns over 70% of his body.

The city of Heinola will not be holding championships in the future.

The sauna remains an integral part of Finnish culture. But most Finns know how to handle heat with care.

See also: The Top Public Penises of Finland and The Garden of Gay Dreams and Nightmares.

In the fall of 1986, shortly after I returned from Japan, I was living with Alan, who dragged me to the gay Asian bar Mugi twice a week. Our other roommate, Chaiyo, was from Thailand. I was taking a class in Chinese literature at USC (as part of my doctoral study in comparative literature). Three days a week, I drove downtown to my job at the Community Redevelopment Agency, which was in the midst of revitalizing Little Tokyo.

With all of that Asian influence, you might expect me to meet a lot of Asian guys. But I didn't. The problem was, they found Alan so infinitely attractive that I couldn't compete. Even if he didn't do anything.

One day in September 1986, I brought an Asian guy home. Alan was watching tv in the living room, so I introduced them casually as we passed through.

"Wow, you're roommate is hot!" my date exclaimed. Sometime during the night, he got up to use the bathroom and "accidentally" stumbled into the wrong room, and into Alan's bed!

Alan didn't mind, but I wasn't yet comfortable with the West Hollywood custom of "sharing" dates with one's roommate, so I was horrified.

Not to worry, there were lots of non-Asians around. L.A. was ethnically diverse. In fact, it was 50% Hispanic.

50%! I liked those odds! On October 4th, 1986, I went to the Plaza or the Silver Platter (I forget which) and met Raul from East L.A., a cook in a Filipino restaurant, short and slim with small hard muscles.

Was it safe to bring him home, or was Alan infinitely attractive to Hispanic guys, too? (This was before we started going to Tijuana.)

I decided to take the bull by the horns: I invited Raul over for dinner Friday night "with my roommates."

He insisted on cooking -- "I'm a professional chef, I do all the work" -- chicken adobo, broccoli, and a Filipino rice cake called puta (no connection to the homophobic slur).

Raised in Iglesia Pentecostal Jesucristo, Raul was fascinated by Alan's plan to start a gay Pentecostal church in Thailand. "But...how can you be cristiano, if you are gay? The Bible says that God hates gays."

After dinner, Alan grabbed his Bible and his Greek New Testament and started explaining how they didn't condemn gay people at all, starting with the story of Sodom -- it's about lack of hospitality, not gay people.

I already knew all about it, so I quickly got bored.

Famous gay couples, Ruth and Naomi, David and Jonathan. Chaiyo fled to his room to watch The Golden Girls. Raul jumped up and took the place he vacated next to Alan on the couch.

Ephesians and Romans: incorrect translation from the original Greek. Arsenokoitai means "male prostitute," not "gay man." Alan's arm was wrapped around Raul's shoulders.

In the Book of Acts, Philip meets an Ethiopian eunuch, and invites him to spend the night. Eunuchs were usually gay. Adam whispered something in Raul's ear and tried to fondle his leg; Raul laughed and pushed his hand away.

I knew where this was headed. "Hey, sounds like you guys have a lot to talk about," I said. "It's late. I'm going to bed."

"Ok," Raul said, barely noticing me as he looked down at a passage in the Greek New Testament -- or was he looking at Alan's bulge? "We will be done soon."

Yeah, right! I thought. I'll see you at breakfast!

I went to my room, got undressed, and lay in bed with a book, fuming with jealousy. I heard muffled conversation from the living room, then a burst of laughter. Then an ominous silence...were they kissing? And footsteps heading down the hall to Alan's room. Someone used the bathroom.

Then my door opened. It was Raul!

"Man, that Alan...talk, talk, talk," he said, stripping off his shirt. "I mean, it was interesting, but come on, man! I'm on a date!"

He slid out of his pants and climbed in bed next to me. "And he's so grabby! If I didn't know better, I would think he was cruising me! You weren't waiting too long, were you?"

"Not at all." I turned off the light.

See also: Alan and I Cruise for Thugs; and I Bankrupt the Gay Porn Industry

When I was a kid in the 1960s and 1970s, you never saw a penis except in the locker room after gym class. No pictures. There were plenty of pictures of naked women, but male dangly bits were deemed de facto obscene, so there weren't any. Maybe on a statue or a naked Amazonian Indian in an occasional issue of National Geographic. Otherwise you had to make do with looking for bulges.

When I turned 18, I could buy "dirty" magazines, but they were all about women except for Playgirl, which I didn't dare buy. Sometimes I bought Hustler, because nude men would be shown alongside the women.

In grad school in Bloomington, I finally found porn magazines aimed at gay men: Blueboy, Honcho, In Touch. You could see penises, but they were frightfully expensive, $3, $4, or even $5 (twice my hourly salary) for nine or ten pictures.

In the 1990s, the internet allowed you to go to online bulletin boards, pay a monthly fee, and download jpgs, hundreds of them. Guys who had been bereft of erotic imagery for the last 30 years suddenly found themselves spending an hour or twoevery morning just looking at and downloading images. Maybe 20 a day, or 7300 per year.

Then in the 2000s, bulletin boards were replaced by blog sites like tumblr, and suddenly every hunk with an i-phone was posting nude selfies. Today you can see uncountable thousands of pictures instantly.

But the guys who were bereft of erotic imagery earlier in life were still overwhelmed. It's like you were starving for half your life, and suddenly you are invited to a nonstop banquet. You gorge yourself, worried that the display will someday end. So you continue to spend an hour or two every morning downloading images.

And before you know it, you have 10,000.

I've used many of them as illustrations on this blog, but there are thousands more. Here are some of my favorites. In each category.

Asian. (Top photo.) Lots of men from China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, and South Asia. I like this sultry Desi with a Kielbasa+.

Ballet and Opera Bulges. (Second photo.) Admit it -- you go to the ballet primarily for the bulgeworthy tights. Here's a trio of buddy-bonding guys with tripods beneath the belt.

Batman and Robin. I have a whole folder of pics of the Caped Crusader and the Boy Wonder, both canonical and fan art. Nightwing -- Robin all grown up -- shows a fabulous physique but no basket in this canonical drawing.

Black. It's the insouciant attitude and the cap that makes this photo. And the baseball bat between his legs.

Bulges. Charlie Day of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia displays the second most important reason I'm a fan. The first is his comedic talent. Ok, who am I kidding? His comedic talent is #2.

Celebrities. I have over 1000 pictures of shirtless and nude celebrities. Most I've seen in things, or at least heard of. This one is labeled Casey Moss. I have no idea who that is.

Ok, I just looked him up. He's the one on the right, a star of Days of Our Lives.

But I'm really more interested in following that trail of hair down his abdomen to his...

His friend is invited, too.

Comics. Comic book and comic strip characters saying and doing fun things, especially things that, taken out of context, sound dirty. Looks like Mr. Magoo's sexual expertise was too much for the twink he hooked up with.

Dads and Sons. Not sex photos, but shirtless or naked, at the beach or in the sauna. This is an interesting series, Dad and Son photographed every year, as dad gets a little saggier and son gets a little more buffed. The changing hair styles are fun, too.

Dwarfs and Other Unique Men. Men who are very short, very tall, or have other unusual physical qualities. Some interesting -- and hot -- nude photos, but I'm going to go with this muscular swimmer who is missing a leg.

Fine Art. Lots of reproductions of male beauty in statues and paintings. Franz Metzner was a German sculptor known for his stylized musclemen. In this poster, two nude men are hoisting a flag to celebrate the International Exposition of Industry and Labor in Turin in 1911.

Hung. My file of supersized guys contains some whoppers, but I like this amateur shot of a Spanish guy posing for the camera in his attic.

Ran out of space. Next up: Kilts, Matadors, Muscle, Nerds, Outdoors, Rednecks, Richie Rich, Sleeping Men, Snow, Suits, Urinals, and Vintage.

Why would gay teenage boys like One Day at a Time (1975-1984), the sitcom about Indianapolis divorcee Ann Romano (Bonnie Franklin) and her two teenage daughters? Sure, it was hip and "with it," one of the stable of realistic comedy-dramas that Norman Lear trotted out -- All in the Family, The Jeffersons, Sanford and Son, Alice, Maude -- for audiences sick of 1960s fantasy and hillbilly fare.

But there were no gay characters. No "mistaken for gay" episodes. No episodes where regulars discover that their brother/college buddy/coworker/coach is gay -- evenAlicehad one of those. For all its hipness, nothing but weeks and months and years of dreary heteronormativity.

So what was the attraction?

1. The endless parade of boyfriends. Practically every hunk in Hollywood over age 30 played one of Ms. Romano's beaus, and practically every Tiger Beat fave rave guest starred as Barbara or Julie's dates. Two long-running teen dreams were Chuck (William Kirby Cullen) for Julie:

And Cliff (Scott Colomby) for Barbara (standing next to competition John Putch). Colomby later played the slim, androgynous Tony in Caddyshack.

Eventually Julie married the hunky Max Horvath (Michael Lembeck, center), and Barbara married stick-in-the-mud Mark Royer (Boyd Gaines, left)

2. In 1980, after Ann's boyfriend dies, she adopts his 14-year old son, Alex Handris (Glenn Scarpelli). Usually end-of-series cast additions are a disaster, but Alex brought wit, style, and humor to the doddering series.

And a decided lack of interest in girls, in spite of the "I'm so into girls!" lines that the scripts made him say.

Glenn Scarpelli came out a few years after the show ended. Today he runs a public tv station in Sedona, Arizona with partner Jude Belanger. He also seems to have joined a gym:

I'm reviewing my collection of 9,248 pictures of men collected from 20 years of internet bulletin boards and blogs.

Last time: Asian to Hung.

Kilts. Several dozen photos, both posed and candid, demonstrating that Scottish guys go commando under their kilts.

Latino. Men from Latin America, or Hispanic men in the United States. They can be of any race. This guy from Mexico City has been reading Garfield before demonstrating his Kovbasa+.

Matadors. I think the enormous bulges are part of the costume, symbolic of the matador's virility and power. I also have some where the bull's horns have ripped open the costume, leaving the penis exposed. It's not spectacular.

Middle East. Arabs, Turks, Persians, and Israelis. Bedouins a plus. And a Kurdish guy with the most enormous Kovbasa+++.

The problem is always where to classify. This guy could easily fit into Muscle and Outdoor as well. I downloaded a program to find duplicates.

Military, Police, and Guards. Men in uniform, including border and castle guards, hot cops from various countries, and cute soldiers taking selfies. They can't get too far out of uniform, or you can't tell that they're military.

Muscle. Most of the guys in the collection are muscular, but this folder is reserved for the ones who stand out as particularly buffed, and don't fit into any of the other categories.

I like the messy room. He decided to take a selfie in the midst of doing laundry.

Nerds. You know you're a nerd when you spend more time trying to see what book he's reading than looking at his penis. Guys wearing glasses or bow ties, reading books, or doing science fiction or superhero cosplay.

Old Guys, Chubs, and Bears. Guys of the more mature persuasion, of heftier girth, or with an exceptionally hairy chest. It's surprising how often all three come together. This guy has only two of the three qualities, but he has a nice smile.

Orcs and Other Fantasy Beings. It started with Orcs -- who would have thought that some guys find Tolkien's baddies sexy? Here's a very well endowed Orc captured and forced to carry heavy weights around. The folder also contains elves, dwarfs, hobbits, fairies, goblins, angels, demons, and furries (animal people).

Outdoors. Guys at festivals, nude beaches, nude bike races, or just displaying their goods in public places, like this Hungarian maintenance man.

Pairs. I'm not big into action shots, but I like pairs of guys, brothers, friends, or lovers, kissing, hugging, or just hanging out side by side.

Next:Punks through Urinals

See also: 10,000 Naked Men, Part 1: Asian through Hung.

I have been reading Piers Anthony's Xanth novels, on and off, ever since the first, A Spell for Chameleon in 1979. They are set in a fantasy land that bears a striking resemblance to the mundane Florida. Magic works, but not in the expected way. Every human has just one power, and some of them are silly or useless. There are also unicorns, centaurs, ogres, fairies, demons, dragons, gargoyles, and golems -- the fanciful list goes on and on.

Anthony draws you in with his cleverly convoluted plots and endlessly creative puns. Even the titles are punny: Centaur Aisle, Roc and a Hard Place, Currant Events, Stork Naked.

And the covers often involve beautifully realized beefcake (drawn by Darrell K. Sweet): utterly naked young men, beefy knights, muscular centaurs and demons. You expect lots of homoerotic buddy-bonding inside.

But you'll be wrong. All significant relationships are heterosexual. Same-sex friends always betray you in the end. And there are no gay people, anywhere.

Stork Naked proposes that in Xanth, the old tale of babies coming from storks is true; prospective parents simply send the proper forms to the stork headquarters, and wait nine months for delivery. Since no straight intercourse is required, one would expect same-sex partners to apply for babies quite often; but only male-female couples are mentioned.

Every reference to desire, love, or romantic relationships in the book, and in all Xanth books, carefully specifies that it is straight.

When a fairy tells the adventurers about a strange lake filled with “love water,” they ask: “Standard love elixir? Male loves nearest female, and vice versa?”

“Yes. I have seen creatures there. I couldn’t make out exactly what they were doing, but always male and female.”

Piers Anthony could easily let his “standard love elixirs” target the nearest person, and have the fairy say “they were usually male and female.” But he is doggedly deter-mined to keep Xanth gay-free.

In his newsletter, Piers Anthony offered three responses to a fan’s criticism of the ongoing erasure.

First, as someone who is “110% straight,” whatever that means, he could never create believable gay characters (yet he is easily able to create ogres, demons, centaurs, mermaids, and talking storks).

Second, he is afraid that his publisher will not permit such a “controversial” move (but Avon Books has published many books with gay characters).

Third, he is afraid that including a gay character will ruin sales.

Straight science fiction and fantasy fans do seem to be more homophobic than usual. On an online forum, a fan asked why so many gay men like the genre, and was told that it gives them hope: “since sf has new inventions and discoveries, there would be a great possibility for a cure for it.”

A guide to Science Fiction Conventions advised straights who are subject to a same-sex advance to “refuse politely and clearly” instead of physically attacking their “assailant.”

Since the “new wave” of sociological speculation in the 1970s, many science fiction stories have depicted some form of “alternative sexuality.” There are species with three or more sexes or none at all, species whose sex organs change every season or at random, societies where technology makes changing one’s sex as easy as changing one’s shoes. Nevertheless, every sexual encounter, every romance involves a being who is male (right now) and one who is female (right now). The message is clear: one can be attracted only to beings with complementary sex organs; same-sex desire does not exist.

Some stories are set in future or magical societies in which bisexuality is “accepted,” but not people drawn exclusively to the same sex, not gay people, especially not gay men, and any characters who happen to mention in passing that they are bisexual experience only straight passion during the course of this particular story.

The vast majority of science fiction and fantasy stories do't bother with "alternative” sexualities at all, or even with offhand references to bisexuality being “accepted”: there are straight men and women, period.

So why do I keep reading it?

Because occasionally I will find an Earthfasts, a Something Wicked This Way Comes, or a Lord of the Rings.

See also: Michael Moorcock.

During my first 30 years, there were no photos of naked men available anywhere, or you could get them only occasionally, in expensive, hard-to-find magazines. Then suddenly, around 1995, internet bulletin boards made hundreds of photos available. Then, with guys posting smartphone selfies, thousands. So I started collecting them. During the last 20 years, 've accumulated about 10,000. Here are some of the highlights of my collection:

Punks and Chavs. Emos, scene kids, beatnicks, gang bangers, mods and rockers, various bad boys with beards, blue hair, mohawks, pierced tongues, tats, and enormous beneath-the-belt gifts.

Rednecks and Cowboys. Farm boys, country boys. anyone wearing a feed store cap, standing next to a tractor, listening to country-western music, or asking "Y'all wanna climb up to the barn loft?"

Richie Rich. Yes, I have a full collection of comic book scans from that brief period in the 1970s when Richie Rich, the previously nondescript rich kid of Harvey Comics, joined a gym (or, I suppose, had a gym constructed in his mansion, lifting bags of money and giant diamonds). It only took a few lines to suggest pecs and biceps, but what a difference it made!

Sleeping. You're asleep, having an erotic dream, and the covers start to tent. Or you kick the covers off, giving your buddy a full view. He thoughtfully takes a picture and posts it on the internet for thousands of strangers to admire. If only he included your telephone number, your date requests would skyrocket.

S/M. Guys tied up, struggling against the ropes, gagged, blindfolded, like Tarzan and Bomba the Jungle Boy in the old movies of my childhood. Except here they're naked.

Snow. I never take my shirt off outside when the temperature is under 70, and rarely until it reaches 80. There's something sexy about a guy who walks around in the buff when it's cold enough to be snowy. And exhibits no discomfort. Or shrinkage.

Sports. Guys in sports uniforms, or preferably out of them. Unless they're wearing wrestling singlets that show off their packages. A surprising number of wrestlers become aroused during the match.

Suits. Nazarenes required men to wear suits to church, three times a week, but since leaving the Nazarenes, I've worn suits maybe once or twice a year. Guys who wear them all the time are extremely sexy. Especially when they show you their equipment while still wearing the suit.

Teams. Preferably swim teams or wrestling teams with bulges displayed, but groups of guys are fine, too. Here a frat displays its underwear and ties.

Urinals. Guys whose friends snap their picture just as they are pulling it out at the urinal. I also have some of guys doing more than that.

Vintage. Old black and white photos, some Victorian porn, but mostly guys from my parents' and grandparents' generation hanging around nude.

Such photos are very rare. In those days photo developing services usually rejected male nudity, so if you took a nude selfie, a camera-buff friend had to develop it for you. And you'd be too embarrassed to let it survive for your heirs to scan and put on the internet.

See also:
10,000 Naked Men, Part 1: Asian to Hung
10,000 Naked Men, Part 2: Kilts to Pairs

In the summer of 2003, I visited my old speech teacher, Mr. Lundquist, aka Mr. Blowfish, in Washington, Iowa. I ended up asking my sister-in-law if I could borrow her car for another day, then driving an hour north to Mount Vernon, Iowa, to spend the night with his son, Sam.

Well, Sam was extremely hot: shorter than me, dark skin, red hair, and a tight, lean physique.

Besides, I was suffering from Florida's dearth of Asian men, and Sam was Asian (actually half Vietnamese, half Swedish)..

Besides, he had just taken a tenure track job at a small college in the heart of the Straight World. I sensed that this might be my future, and I wanted to see what it was like.

He had literally just moved in to his apartment in someone's house a few blocks from the campus. We had to walk through a clutter of boxes to get to the bedroom, where the bed was unmade and the lamps were sitting on the floor.

"Sorry about the mess," he said, wrapping his arms around me. "When you drive down to spend the day with your Dad and brothers, you don't really expect to bring someone home."

Sam was very energetic and very passionate -- maybe too passionate. We didn't get much sleep that night -- every time I dozed off, he would initiate another session. Of course, he was 26 years old, but still, it seemed odd.

In the morning he took me to breakfast at a weird diner stuck in the 1950s, where scruffy men in overalls ordered things like "The Farm Boy": 3 eggs, 3 slices of bacon, 3 sausage links, hash browns, pancakes, and toast. He tried to grab me under the table, but I pushed his hand away.

Then we toured downtown -- 3 blocks of depressing brown brick buildings, mostly bars and small, deserted boutiques -- and the campus -- more of the same.

"Why Cornell College?" I asked.

"Well, I wanted a liberal arts college where I could really get to know the students. And I'm basically going to be the entire art history program. This year I'm teaching Italian Renaissance, Asian, and Precolumbian. Try doing that at Stanford."

"Did you get an offer from Stanford?"

"Actually, my only other offer was in Utah. Mormon country, full of rattlesnakes and homophobes! Cornell is much more gay-friendly."

"But does it have a gay presence?"

"Um...I don't think so. There's a gay bar in Cedar Rapids, about 20 miles away."

"20 miles isn't bad." I didn't have the heart to tell him that I lived a 3-block walk from a dozen gay bars, restaurants, beaches, and boutiques.

"Besides, Des Moines is only 2 hours away, and Chicago is 4 hours. I'll be driving to one or the other every weekend."

We both knew that he wouldn't -- once the semester began, he'd be too busy, or the weather would be too bad. On most weekends, he'd be stuck in Mount Vernon.

Next Sam took me to his office, which was very nice, with real bookcases and a window looking out onto the quad -- actually, an alley, but if you stood right up against it and looked to your left, you could see the King Chapel.

He shut the door, drew me close, and started kissing me.

"Hey, wait -- this is your office!" I exclaimed, shocked. "Anybody could walk in at any moment." Besides, I was sweaty from walking around the campus on the second-hottest day of the year.

"Come on, it's Sunday -- there's nobody around," he murmured, nuzzling my neck.

I've spent my whole life on college campuses, as student and professor. But that was the first time I actually had an erotic encounter in a professor's office.

Sam drove us into Cedar Rapids that afternoon. It was more of a city: there was a nice Vietnamese Restaurant, a nice park with jogging trails -- he tried to kiss me on the jogging trail, but I refused -- and an art museum that specialized in the work of Grant Wood.

He suggested that we finish the day in Cedar Rapid's one gay bar, but I was tired from lack of sleep, so we went back to his apartment in Mount Vernon and watched a movie instead.

Followed by another night of outrageously energetic bedroom calisthenics and another gut-buster breakfast.

"How long are you going to be in the area?" Sam asked.

"My flight to Fort Lauderdale is on Wednesday."

"Great, that gives us three more days...."

He wanted me to spend the rest of my visit with him? But -- I came back to the Midwest to visit my family and friends! "Well, I have to get my sister-in-law's car back."

"No problem. I'll follow you to Rock Island, you can drop off the car, and then we'll drive back."

"Um...it's about 70 miles."

"I don't mind...in the country, you have to drive a lot."

"Besides, I need to get to the gym," I continued.

"You can use the campus gym as my guest."

Suddenly I realized what was happening: Sam had latched onto me as an escape from Straight World isolation and tedium. If I didn't act fast, I would become "the boyfriend." He might even ask me to stay in Mount Vernon. "I have a better idea. Let's spend the day in Rock Island -- I want to introduce you to some friends of mine. I just have to make a couple of phone calls first."

After we worked out, Sam followed me to Rock Island, where we dropped off the car and toured all the old sights of his childhood. In the evening we had dinner with Dick, my old bully, now a muscle bear in his 40s, and his partner Jack.

A night of energetic sharing followed.

Dick is bigger than me, both in height and in beneath-the-belt gifts -- #7 on my Sausage List, a Kielbasa+. Sam was suitably impressed.

The next day he drove back to Mount Vernon with their phone number in his pocket and an invitation to visit anytime.

And I got to visit my family and friends.

See also: My Night with the Son of Mr. Blowfish. and Hooking Up with the Pizza Boy

In 2011, Mackenzie Astin starred in Caught at the Zephyr Theater in Los Angeles. He played a gay man blissfully planning a wedding with his partner (Will Beinbrink), when suddenly his Bible-thumping sister arrives for some screeching.

I hadn't heard much about Mackenzie, son of John Astin and Patty Duke, younger brother of Sean Astin, since the 1980s. His biggest claim to fame then was a starring role on The Facts of Life (1985-88), about four girls in a private boarding school.

By the time he hit the series, the girls had graduated and were working in a boutique, Over Our Heads. He played Andy Moffett, an orphan adopted by end-of-series lead Beverly (Cloris Leachman).

Teen magazines gave Mackenzie some attention, but not a lot. Maybe because he wasn't very muscular. He was soft, pretty, and feminine, a tween version of Kurt from Glee.

During the 1990s, he grew hard, hairy, and rather gaunt, as he tried to distance himself from his gay-coded teen years with macho hetero-roles: Iron Will (1994), about a dogsled competition; the Western Wyatt Earp (1994); Ernest Hemingway's wartime buddy in In Love and War (1996).

But Mackenzie played a lot of gay characters, too. In Stranger Than Fiction (2000), he plays a gay man named Jared who kills someone and asks his straight friends to help him hide the body. In the short-lived tv series First Years (2001), he played a gay lawyer living in San Francisco.

Out as bisexual, Mackenzie is married to a woman, and a gay ally.

The earliest generation of Boomer kids have fond memories of tv programs that, at least to modern sensibilities, seem outlandish and bizarre. You Can't Do That On Television in the 1980s can't even begin to compete with the weirdness of Kukla, Fran, and Ollie, Pinkie Lee, or Howdy Doody.

But the weirdest of all was Andy's Gang (1955-60), hosted by long-time Western sidekick Andy Devine (previously a radio and tv series hosted by Ed McConnell, and called Smilin' Ed's Gang)

1. A scary kid with blond page boy curls and one eye perpetually closed announced "I'm Buster Brown...I live in a shoe. Here's my dog Tige...he lives in there,too." Whereupon the studio audience went wild with laughter (actually, it was the same clip of a hysterical kid, over and over again).

2. The anarchic Froggy the Gremlin kept popping in to skewer human pretensions and stir things up. Cue the same clip of a studio audience going into hysterics.

3. A cat named Midnight could talk. But she said only one word: "Nice," and it sounded more like a meow. Cue the hysterical laughter.

But gay kids in the audience were waiting for the "Story Time" segment about Gunga, an Indian boy (surprisingly buff college student Nino Marcel). He was supposed to be Indian, but he looked sort of like Jay North on the similarly-Indian themed Maya, or an older version of Jonny Quest. I'll bet he had blond hair under that turban.

Although they lived in India, Gunga and his boyfriend, Rama (a surprisingly buff Vito Scotti) got into Bomba the Jungle Boy-style adventures with animal poachers, lost cities, and savage cannibal tribes.

But unlike Bomba, they had no interest in girls. Rama was the one who usually needed rescuing.

They were amazingly physical in their interactions, always hugging, clinging together, touching arms and shoulders.

Afterwards, Andy would end the program by underscoring the buddy-bonding: "We're pals, and pals stick together!" Then, to keep Christian fundamentalists happy, "Remember, Sunday school or church tomorrow!" (No Hindus in the audience, apparently.)

Nino Marcel also played his Gunga Ram character, but with a different premise, in the feature film Sabaka (1954): he is a young elephant trainer who vows revenge against the evil cult that killed his family. His costar was none other than the famous Boris Karloff.

You can watch the full movie here.

See also: Burr Tillstrom, the gay puppeteer behind Kukla, Fran, and Ollie.

I really dislike advertising mascots who belong to the group that is being eaten. There's something grotesque and ghoulish about sentient beings proclaiming how good they taste after being killed and cooked.

The scariest of the bunch are the M&Ms, sentient, three-foot tall versions of the candy, three male (red, yellow, blue), two female (green, brown).

They are eager to participate in human society. But every time they make friends, get jobs, get invited to parties, or in this case, go on a date with William Levy (top photo), they discover that their human "friends" actually want to eat them.

The M&Ms follow stereotypic gender roles, with females distinguished from males by their eyelashes and lipstick. And there are occasional homophobic jokes, as in this commercial when the Orange M&M (Eric Kirchberger) discovers that a pretzel person will be going inside him.

But there has been at least one M&M commercial with a bisexual text. The Brown M&M (Vanessa Williams) is at a party, when her friend warns that she should stay away from the cruising Kristen: "She'll devour you!"

The savvy Brown M&M hooks Kristen up with the Red M&M (Billy West), who is shown being dragged off to what he hopes is a night of sex.

So Kristen is into both men and women -- or at least male and female pieces of sentient candy.

I don't know if Rob Pruitt, who plays the Blue M&M, is the same Rob Pruitt as the artist, but the artist (the naked one with the panda on his penis) is gay.

See also: Scary, Heterosexist Ads of the 1960s.

When Chuck, my Friend with Benefits in Dayton, said that he was the cornhole champion of Western Ohio, I was mildly surprised.

"No, really, I've won trophies. They're still on display in my parents' house."

I was even more surprised.

"Mom and Dad took me to my first cornhole tournament when I was five, and I've been a fan ever since."

Ok....what?

Turns out that in western Ohio, but nowhere else in the world, cornholing is a game where you have to throw a beanbag full of corn kernels into a hole.

It's rather difficult. Even the top players rarely get more than 50% "ins."

It was invented by the German immigrants in Cincinnati during the 19th century, and spread through the region. They played it at school carnivals, fairs, festivals, and at home. Alone, or in teams. There were tournaments and prizes.

Ohio residents who moved out of state soon discovered the other meaning of the term "cornhole." That didn't stop them from promoting the game.

The American Cornhole Association has a list of dozens of tournaments scheduled this summer, most outside of Ohio.

At the Wyoming State Fair
At the Parkersburg, West Virginia Homecoming Festival
In Jacksonville, Florida.
There's a Battle of the Bags Cornhole Tournament in Napa, California, with a $100 per team entry fee.

The players are mostly male, and often cute, although shirts generally stay on. The fun is in watching them play, and thinking about the more common meaning of "cornhole."

And wondering what other interesting pursuits German immigrants have brought to the U.S.

See also: My Friend with Benefits.

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 non-verbal, single-panel comics 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, 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: Sean and the World of Gay Leathermen; The Mystery of Cavelo; and Gay Comics of the 1980s.

The story about Scott, the theater major with the professor fetish, is probably the most risque on the blog.

The bondage isn't the most risque part.

He was 22 years old, and I had just turned 54, an age gap of 32 years.

That's not the most risque part, either.

Read the whole story on Tales of West Hollywood

I missed most of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (1964-68). First it was on past my bedtime, and then there were too many competing choices (The Time Tunnel, Hogan's Heroes) -- so I watched only sporadically, when one of my friends insisted. But I had more than one friend who thought it was "good beyond hope."

It was a buddy spy series, like I Spy and Wild Wild West, but with an interesting twist. In the heart of the Cold War, we heard over and over that "Russkies" were all evil monsters plotting our destruction. But one of the secret agents was Russian.

The premise: The USSR, the United States, and other countries have set aside their differences and formed U.N.C.L.E. (United Network Command for Law and Enforcement) to fight the evil THRUSH (acronym unknown), which wants to "subjugate the human race."

The plots were much more extravagant than anything seen on Mission: Impossible, rivaling Batman in campiness:
THRUSH tries to bring Hitler back to life.
THRUSH invents a deadly hiccup-inducing gas.
THRUSH invents an exploding hula-dancing doll.
Pat Harrington, Jr. (later on One Day at a Time) steals a rare book containing THRUSH code.
Sonny and Cher play clothes designers with THRUSH code hidden in one of their dresses.

But the main draw was the "The Man," American Napoleon Solo (Robert Vaughn, previously seen shirtless in Teenage Caveman), and his partner, the Russian Illya Kuryakin (Scottish actor David McCallum). They were not only spy partners: they seemed to live together (and when traveling always took hotel rooms with just one bed). They expressed their affection with the easy nonchalance of Starsky and Hutch. And, contrary to James Bond style, they mostly ignored women.

Solo was a no-nonsense man's man (notice the use of his last name). By contrast, Illya (notice the first name) was soft, quiet, intellectual, "feminine." As a result, he was captured by the baddies a lot more often: 8 times (Solo was captured alone 4 times, and they were captured together 10 times).

Sometimes the capture was specifically to egg Solo on. For instance, in "The Deadly Quest Affair," Viktor Karmak (Darren McGavin) tells Solo that Illya has been sequestered somewhere in New York City, and he has 12 hours to find him before Illya is killed by nerve gas.

There were also many shirtless and underwear shots. David McCallum had the blond, shaggy-haired dreaminess that appealed to preteens, so he received the lion's share of coverage in teen magazines.

There were lots of book tie-ins and miscellaneous toys.

After U.N.C.L.E., the two moved on to other projects, but returned to their characters in The Return of the Man from U.N.C.L.E. (1983). They are called back into service 15 years after they broke up. Dig their civilian careers: Solo became a computer developer, and Illya. . .um. . .a fashion designer.

I was never a Boy Scout, but I was a Cub Scout -- for about five minutes in the winter of fourth grade.

They promoted it heavily in school, with film strips and guest speakers, and a giant assembly where they extolled the wonders of the Loud Thunder Boy Scout Camp.

Lots of cute boys hugging in swimsuits.

It sounded like a good way to increase our cruising options, and get more cute boys for our sleepovers, so Bill, Joel, and I joined.

I liked the cool blue uniforms, the Indian lore, and the various guidebooks that demonstrated how to win merit badges: swimming, diving, life saving.

And our pack consisted mostly of boys we didn't know from class, so we did get some new opportunities for meeting cute boys.

The pack leader was cute, although I never saw him like this.

Bill and I always cut out just before the final song, "God Bless America," and ran home through the dark winter night to catch The Partridge Family. It was fun being out after dark by ourselves.

But the benefits were far outweighed by the horrible arts-and-crafts activities!

First, we had to glue something together. How was I supposed to know that new tubes of glue need a pin-prick? I squeezed and squeezed, and the whole thing burst all over my scout uniform.

Not the best way to attract the attention of a cute boy. My mother never did get it clean again.

And we were supposed to build cars out of a block of wood, and paint them. Smelly, messy, disgusting.

But the worst was the Boy Scout Jamboree that we had to attend downtown. Boy Scouts demonstrating inane skills, like gardening and being nice to old people.

The one I remember the most vividly is "how to build a fallout shelter" for nuclear war. Way to put a damper on the afternoon!

The opportunity for cruising wasn't worth it. Bill and I dropped out. Joel stuck around.

A few years later, Harvey comics featured a series in which Casper becomes a Cub Scout. Spooky and Hot Stuff join, too.

Apparently they are all eight years old.

I couldn't figure out why someone who regularly fights mad scientists, monsters, and aliens would want to spend his evenings glueing things together and carving cars out of wood blocks.

Unless Casper was looking for new cruising opportunities, too.

See also: Looking for Beefcake on the Swim Team and The Hookup at the Sleepover.

The 1980s was the era of the teen operator, the teenager who works behind the scenes, enraging tyrannical assistant principals and college deans. He starred in virtually every TGIF sitcom, from Family Tiesto Growing Pains; he used his stealth to save the day in Toy Soldiers; he ruled the school in Ferris Bueller's Day Off.

Parker Lewis Can't Lose (1990-93) was a late entry in the teen operator canon, a Ferris Bueller clone that aired on Fox on Sunday nights.

Parker (Corin Nemec, left) ruled the school with flashy costumes and surreal antics, along with his bud, the uber-cool Mikey Randall (Billy Jayne, previously Billy Jacoby, below), and their nerdish protege Jerry Steiner (Troy W. Slaten).

They had several allies, including inarticulate man-mountain Kube (Abraham Benrubi) and Nick Comstock (Paul Johannson), manager of their diner hangout.

And several nemeses, including the cartoon-villain principal Grace Musso (Melanie Chartoff), who was obsessed with men with "big hands," and her vampiric crony, Lemmer (Taj Johnson), who could appear and disappear at will.

There was a lot of heterosexism; about half of the episodes involve somebody trying to get with a heterosexual crush.

But Parker and Mikey made a cute couple, with Jerry as their surrogate son, and later Kube found a soulmate in the obese Coach Kohler (John Pinette), in spite of their respective hetero-crushes.

In the third season, hunky bricklayer Brad Penny (Harold Pruett) became interested in Parker, and tried to win his "friendship." When Parker rejected him, he got revenge by stealing Jerry, who dropped out of school to join him in the career of bricklaying.

After Parker Lewis, Corin Nemec had a stable career, mostly playing sleazoids: two serial killers, an Adolph Hitler lookalike, and "himself" (in the webseries Star-Ving with buddy David Faustino).

He was the associate producer of the evangelical Christian film Hidden Secrets (2006), and starred as an ex-gay guy who can't accept God's forgiveness for his sinful past. Yuck.

Billy Jayne had some acting and directing credits, but he's better known now as a commercial producer.

Troy Slaten is now an attorney.

I love the Louvre. I could go every day. But everybody else on Earth, literally, wants to visit, too. It gets 8,000,000 visitors per year, so if you're not careful, you'll be caught up in the crowds.

1. Go on Wednesday or Friday evening (they're open to 9:45 pm). Or else Christmas Eve; you'll have the place to yourself.

2. Buy your ticket online, and pick it up at a FNAC store.

3. Don't go through the crystal pyramid; try the Passage Richelieu, off the Rue de Rivoli.

4. Skip the Big Sights. The Mona Lisa looks like the Mona Lisa, and the Venus de Milo looks like the Venus de Milo. Target!

People have been going to the Louvre for beefcake since 1793. In the 1920s, Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald spent afternoons looking at the penises on statues.

Here's a perfect 3-hour beefcake tour.

6:45 pm: Having picked up your ticket and had a quick snack, go through the Passage Richelieu, and wander around in the French sculptures for about 15 minutes. Look for Julien's Wounded Gladiator and Desjardin's Captive (above).

7:00 pm: Go up two flights to the Second Floor, and the German, Dutch, and Flemish paintings. Finding the beefcake here takes a little work, so it's best to do it at the start, when you're not tired yet. Look for Malouel's round Pieta with the naked Jesus, Carl Van Loo's portrait of Neptune, and Van Dyck's Amor and Psyche. About 20 minutes.

7:20 pm. Next stop, the French paintings in the Sully Wing. You're looking for Oedipus and the Sphinx (Ingres), the semi-nude Echo and Narcissus (Poussin), Berthelemey's Creation of Man, Couder's Fight Between Hercules and Antaeus (top photo), Pierre Subleyras's Charon, with a nude backside (left), and Francois Boucher's Venus Demanding Arms for Aeneas.

More after the break

And the piece that hangs on every gay man's wall, Flandrin's Young Man Nude by the Sea.

About 40 minutes.

8:00 pm: down to the First Floor, turn right, and stop for a snack at the Cafe Mollien, by the Mollien Staircase (regular snacks are essential to the successful museum experience).

8:15 Turn right again to the Denon Wing, and the Italian Renaissance paintings. Jesus on the cross, Pietas, Saint Sebastians, miscellaneous saints, demons, and muscle gods from everyday life.

You're looking for Magegna's Martyrdom of St. Sebastian, the androgynous John the Baptist of Leonardo da Vinci, Perugino's St. Jerome Supporting Two Men on the Gallows, Clovio's Rape of Ganymede. About 45 minutes.

9:00 pm: Downstairs to the Ground Floor again, and the Etruscan Antiquities. The beefcake is big, blatant, and ubiquitous, though somewhat more common in the Greek antiquities. 1/2 hour should be enough time to gawk at the Apollos, Ares, satyrs, torsos, Hermes Tying His Sandal, and The Torment of Marsyas.

Save a few minutes for the Italian Renaissance sculptures, especially Michelangelo's Slaves.

9:30 pm: Believe me, you don't want to spend more than three hours at any museum, or you'll come down with image overload. Retrace your steps (the best part of any museum visit) to leave through the Passage Richelieu.

9:45 pm Head north toward the Pyramides Metro Station, have dinner at Naniwa-Ya (11 Rue Sainte-Anne), and then stop in at the Til't Sauna (41 Rue Sainte-Anne) to look at real-life penises.

See also: A Beefcake Tour of France and A Beefcake Tour of the Musee d'Orsay.

When I was a kid, I hated bright, sunny days. I much preferred dark, cloudy, and rainy.

I know, it made me weird. In People of the Lie, M. Scott Peck states that people who prefer cloudy days are evil, probably demon-possessed.

But I had a good reason for it:

Dark, cloudy days meant that I could stay inside and read, watch tv, or play with my toys. But the moment the sun came out, my parents would demand "It's a nice day! Go play outside!"

"But there's nothing to do out there!"

"Nonsense! Use your imagination!"

They then deposited me on the doorstep with the demand that I not return for two hours. It was 2:00 pm.

2:00: Usually I sought refuge with a friend whose parents weren't so unreasonable, but one day in the spring of 1970, when I was in fourth grade, my boyfriend Bill was off visiting his grandmother and Greg (who gave me my first kiss) was sick. I knocked on Joel's door, but he wasn't home. I was stuck "playing outside."

2:10: I walked around, admiring the architecture of the houses, trying to distinguish between types of trees, examining ant hills and dandelions.

That took about 5 minutes.

2:15: I walked to Dewey's Candy Store on 22nd Avenue, avoided Dick the Mean Boy, browsed the aisles carefully, and selected a Mars Bar. About 15 minutes.

2: 30: I walked to Schneider's Drug Store on 38th Avenue, avoiding the Face of Pure Evil (now it's an Aldi's). I immersed myself in Donald Duck, Casper, and Little Lulu until the clerk yelled "Buy something or get out!."

2:45. An hour and 15 minutes to go!

I saw a boy I knew from school, and asked "Want to play?"

Ok, but play what? All of my games are inside.

Um...when my parents were kids, they divided into groups called "Cowboys" and "Indians" and tried to kill each other.

Sounds gross! I'm a pacifist!

We could race down 41st Street. Whoever gets to 18th Avenue first wins!

Discussion, walking to the starting line, race, congratulations: 15 minutes total.

3:00. A whole hour to go. Would this torture never end?

Then I started noticing things.

A teenage boy mowing his lawn. A short-sleeved shirt open to reveal a patch of his tanned hairless chest, his biceps brown and hard.

Two guys repairing a roof, one older guy, one younger, maybe his son. Their shirts tucked into their pants pockets. Rippling muscles in their backs and shoulders.

My neighbor from down the block washing his car, naked except for plaid shorts and tennis shoes, husky, hairy, pale.

Three teenagers playing basketball in the schoolyard, their shirts off, their muscles gleaming in the sun.

Two guys hanging out in their backyard, wearing only swimsuits, probably getting ready to go to Longview Park Pool. One massive and solid, the other slim, with a tight chest and abs.

After that, I didn't mind playing outside, at least during the summertime. It gave me lots of opportunities to use my imagination.

See also: The Face of Pure Evil.

Is it Racist to Have a Type?

The Finnish Sauna Championships

Raul and My Bed-Switching Roommate

Twenty Years, 10,000 Naked Men, Part 1: Asian to Hung

One Day at a Time

10,000 Naked Men, Part 2: Kilts to Pairs

Heterosexual Centaurs, Demons, and Ogres

10,000 Naked Men, Part 3: Punks to Urinals

Son of Mr. Blowfish: Hooking Up in the Professor's Office and Everywhere Else

Mackenzie Astin: Bisexual-Inclusive

Andy's Gang: Beefcake and Bonding on 1950s Children's TV

The Bisexual M&M

The Cornhole Champion of Western Ohio

Tom of Finland

Scott the Theater Major: the Most Risque Story on this Blog

The Man from U.N.C.L.E.

Cruising in the Cub Scouts

Parker Lewis Can't Lose

A Beefcake Tour of the Louvre

Playing Outside