NYSocBoy's Beefcake and Bonding

When I lived in Upstate, I had a third floor apartment, directly above a crazy bodybuilder named Richard.

He wasn't really a bodybuilder, but he had a respectable physique, big biceps and a thick, hairy chest, and he never wore a shirt.

Sounds nice so far, except he was crazy. Whenever he saw me get Chinese, Thai, or pizza, whenever he saw me with a Price Chopper shopping bag, he went into a tirade. That stuff was destroying the world!

Chickens were tortured to death so we could eat them!

Bananas were grown by slave labor and transported through gas-guzzling, ozone-depleted trucks, with the truckers denied access to health care!

I should only eat free-range, free-trade, gluten-free, locally grown, organic, tie-dyed vegan goop.

He had a girlfriend who was even worse.

His apartment was full of free-trade, world-saving, garbage-into-art drek: bowls made of saris by women rescued from human trafficking in Bangladesh, pillows made of discarded brown rice bags by orphans with tuberculosis in Nicaragua; planters made of gun casings by wide-eyed children forced into military service in Zaire.

Plus about a thousand palms, bonsai lemon trees, rubber trees, paduratas, ficus, and ferns. It was like walking into a rain forest.

With those ghostly, whistling Peruvian panpipes, flutes, tambors, and ocarinas playing constantly.

The uncensored story is on Tales of West Hollywood.

Ok, I've told you about 114 boyfriends, dates, hookups, and sharing experiences on four continents over a period of 36 years. I have a few more good dating/hookup stories, but it's about time to expand to some of the other things I've done. Like eat.

My memories of places I've lived often center on restaurants where we went. The food, the waiters, the people I went with, and the food.

1. Rock Island. Harris Pizza, no question, the best in the universe. We ordered several times a year when I was growing up, and I always insisted on getting it when I returned for a visit. Once I tried to pick up the guy at the counter, but my friend Dick did instead. They've been together ever since.

2. Bloomington, Indiana. Viju and I used to go to Bob's Burgers (no relation to the tv show) after an unsuccessful night of cruising at Bullwinkle's, and sometimes with out hookups after a successful night. You could get a hamburger with a fried egg on top. The waiters were paid extra to get enthusiastic over the food. And they never gave us weird looks for being two (or four) men together.

3. West Hollywood. Obviously the French Quarter, our go-to place for brunch, lunch, and an occasional dinner. Remarkable for their 8" long fried zucchini sticks. And for their cute waiters who flirted for tips. If you sat at the little tables outside, sooner or later everyone you knew would pass by. Once I hooked up with our waiter -- the next day, when I saw him at the gym.

4. San Francisco. Orphan Andy's, with a diner atmosphere, cute waiters, and even cuter clientele at the beginning of Castro Street. It was also cruisy -- my friend David hooked up with a lot of guys there.

5. New York. There were about 10 Thai restaurants in a 10 block radius of my apartment, but I always went to a little Thai restaurant near the Flatiron Building that's not there anymore. Stuffed, deep-fried chicken wings with a sweeet sauce! Never found them anywhere else. I brought Yuri there the first time he visited me in Manhattan.

6. Paris. Speaking of Thai restaurants, during my summer in Paris I went to Suam Thai almost every night, and I tried to go back whenever I visited later. No Angel wings, but good pad thai to go. I managed to hook up with the chef -- while he was still working.

7. Florida. The Courtyard Cafe, Wilton Manors' answer to the French Quarter, with a huge patio where dozens of gay men gathered for brunch every Saturday. Lunch was ok, too. My friend hooked up with a waiter here, and dated him for six months.

8. Amsterdam. Indrapura, an Indonesian restaurant notable for its chicken and beef satay, was on Rembrandtplein, just across the street from the guest house I always stayed in, and less than a mile from the Horseman's Club. I never hooked up with any waiters, but I did get cruised by a lot of the regulars.

9. Dayton. I didn't eat out much, but when I did, it was Giovanni's in Fairborn, the best pizza outside of Rock Island. You walked through a narrow hall to get there, where you could see the pizzas being made by muscular guys in tight green t-shirts.

10. Upstate New York. The Neptune Diner, one of those old-fashioned glass and steel diners that advertises "steaks and chops," whatever those are, but has a menu 30 pages long. I liked the gyros, the moussaka, the pancakes, and the chicken. Chad, the housemate of the Satyr , who I dated in the fall of 2008, was a waiter there.

11. The Midwest. No gay restaurants in this small town -- there's a gay coffee house with a limited menu -- so we always go to the Lone Star Barbecue for breakfast. Pancakes, "cowboy potatoes," and brisket-omelettes. Plus a long-haired hipster waiter with a ripped chest and huge biceps. I've seen him naked at the gym. It's only a matter of time...

Ok, looks like I included a few hookups here, too.

Three's Company (1977-84) premiered at the height of the disco era, when sex was on everyone's mind, and it was about people having sex. Or, rather, about people thinking that other people were having sex: finding them in bed together, overhearing innocent conversations that sounded sexual, or just assuming.

No one actually had sex at any time during the eight year run, not even long-married apartment complex managers, Mr. and Mrs. Roper: joke after joke branded him impotent. Nor, when they left, self-designated ladies' man Ralph Furley (Don Knotts of The Andy Griffith Show).

Certainly not the two single girls who occupied the apartment near the beach in Santa Monica: plain-jane Janet (Joyce DeWitt, right, next-door neighbor to one of my friends in West Hollywood) and dumb-blond Chrissy (Suzanne Somers, left, who was eventually replaced by two other blondes). Or their roommate, cooking student Jack Tripper (John Ritter, who would later star on Eight Simple Rules with Martin Spanjers).

Wait -- a guy with two girls? Mr. Roper/Mr. Furley demanded. This is the 1970s -- it's impossible for a man and a woman to be alone together without sex happening. You can't live here!

Jack and the girls hit on a novel solution: he'll pretend to be gay! Whenever Mr. Roper or Mr. Furley are around, he'll sashay about, limp-wristed and lisping, and maybe bat his eyes at them. He'll have to hide his girlfriends, of course, or explain them as drag queens.

What could possibly go wrong?

Not much. Most episodes ignored the pretending-to-be-gay angle in favor of heartwarming sitcom antics:
The roommates get a new puppy.
They buy Mr. Roper's car.
Jack and Chrissy take over Janet's babysitting job.
Janet has two concert tickets, and can only invite one of the roommates.

Jack's gay persona was a negative stereotype, no gay characters ever appeared, and at the end of the series, when Jack plans to get married, he announces that he's been "cured." The writers had apparently never met a real gay person. But still, there was a lot for gay kids to like on Three's Company.

1. In the fall of 1977, Anita Bryant's Save Our Children campaign was in full force and our preacher had just discovered gay people, so all I heard about gay people was: subhuman monsters, bogeymen who lived only to seduce and destroy. It was remarkable that anyone would pretend to be such a person, for any reason.
2. Or that a landlord would rent such a person an apartment.
3. Or that others would willingly flirt with the guilt by association. Even horndog neighbor Larry (Richard Kline) had no qualms about people thinking that he was gay.
4. Jack eventually forgot to do the limp-wristed bit, becoming a conventionally masculine pseudo-gay guy.
5. You could hear the word "gay" frequently.
6. There were frequent muscular men as guest stars, such as Steve Sandor

In 2012, it was rebooted in the stage play 3C, starring Jake Silbermann.

Before you come out, "best friend" is often code for "boyfriend," or someone who would be a boyfriend if only you knew that gay people existed.

After you come out, you realize that a "best friend" is something entirely different.

Not a romantic partner, although you may share boyfriends and hookups.

Not a roommate, although you may live together.

Someone with whom you share a fraternal bond, someone closer than a brother, closer than a lover, who stands beside you as boyfriends and jobs and years pass.

I don't know how best friendships begin. You meet, and it's like you've known each other forever. He moves instantly into an empty space in your life that you didn't even know existed.

You may mistake the instant connection for passion, and date for awhile, but after a few weeks or a few months, you realize the truth: your connection is on another level altogether.

I know how best friendships end:

1. They require constant contact. When one or the other moves out of town, a daily barrage of letters and emails gradually diminishes to once a week, then once a month, then "it's been a long time -- how you doing?"

2. They are exclusive. They can withstand casual boyfriends, but not a serious relationship.

When one of you moves in with a partner, the other becomes an ordinary friend, one of several who you call every few days, part of the rotation of guys invited over for dinner every few weeks.

Since coming out, I've had six best friends.

Bloomington: Viju.
Hell-fer-Sartain, Texas: nobody
West Hollywood: Alan, then Raul
San Francisco: David
New York and Florida: Yuri
Ohio: Chuck
Upstate: nobody

All but Viju and David were ex-boyfriends. All but Alan and David were younger than me. All were outgoing, flashy, and uninhibited, drawing me into adventures that I would never consider on my own (I'm always the one in the group who says "I don't think that's a very good idea.").

Sometimes we become so engrossed in the search for passion that we forget the joy of having someone just sitting beside you on the couch.

(Illustrations borrowed from the Hot Guys of Facebook tumblr).

See also: 15 Rules of Gay Cruising.

Islam doesn't have quite the beefcake potential of Hinduism or Jainism. No androgynous gods, no naked holy men. The Quranic prohibition of idol-worship is often interpreted to mean "no human figures, period," and even when humans are allowed, propriety forbids bare chests, let alone nudity.

But there are remnants of the penis-obsessed Graeco-Roman culture and muscular transplants from the neoclassical greats of Europe -- and, sometimes, contemporary Muslim artists get away with arguing that the only way to depict strength, honor, liberation, or war is through muscle. Nothing sexual is intended.

One assumes.

In fact, I found at least 20 impressively nude or muscular statues, reliefs, and other public works of art in the Islamic world (countries with 50% or higher Muslim populations).

Here are the first 10, arranged roughly from west to east.

1. Ceuta (a Spanish colony on the coast of Morocco): The Pillars of Hercules, two mountains standing guard at the entrance to the Mediterranean, is memorialized in a statue of Hercules.

2.Algeria was under French domination for over 100 years, from 1830 to 1962, so one might expect some equivalent of the Luxembourg Gardens or the Musee d'Orsay. There isn't a lot, but in Jijel, about 350 km from Algiers, you can see Le Pêcheur (The Fisherman), a boy mending his nets.

3.Tunisia, likewise, was under French domination from 1881 to 1956, but about the only significant beefcake art is, oddly a statue of the first president, Habib Bourguiba, in Ksar Hellal. He's liberating four oppressed peasants, including two muscular, half-naked ones.

4. Libya was the site of the Roman Province of Tripolitana, so there are many statues of muscular men, now in the National Museum. This one came from the Hadriatic Baths.

More after the break.

5. Much of the rich beefcake art of ancient Egypt has been scattered through Europe and the U.S., but some remains, like this one outside the Alexandria Library.

6-7. And in the Museum of Antiquities in Cairo.

8. Only 16% of the population of Israel is Muslim, but it's in the Middle East, so I'm including it anyway.

At the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, you can see The Great Warrior of Montauban, a beefy, muscular guy, naked but lacking a penis, carrying a sword.

It actually has nothing to do with the Middle East;Montauban is in France. It was sculpted by Antoine Bourdelle to commemorates the Franco-Prussian War.

9. Martyr's Square in Beirut, Lebanon is topped by Renato Mazzacurati's memorial. Freedom is leading the half-naked soul of a martyr to Paradise while his body lies prostrate below. He's not supposed to be armless, or ridden with bullet holes -- he's a favorite target for revolutionaries.

10. The extremely conservative countries of the Arabian Peninsula are generally lacking in artistic representations of humans of any sort, so it's surprising to find Coup de Tete by Zinedine Zidane in Doha, Qatar. It's a 16-foot tall depiction of two guys, one punching the other in the stomach.

Apparently it commemorates the World Cup in soccer.

They're not nude, and they're not hugging, but at least they're two guys.

See also: The Gay Arab World; and Farshad: A Gay Muslim Surprise in Brittany

Many people in the northern states of the U.S. are afraid of the South, that vast territory that extends from Washington DC, 1200 miles to Miami Beach, and west 1000 miles to Kansas City. It's full of screaming homophobes, racists, Confederate wannabes, guys wearing overalls and feed store caps who drive pick-up trucks down dusty roads yelling "Git 'er done!"

It has all of that, but it also has top research universities, a world renowned opera company, three gay meccas (Atlanta, Fort Lauderdale, Miami), some gay-friendly resorts, the best Chinese food I've ever had, and lots of beefcake.

It's hot, so guys take their shirts off a lot.

Here are the top 10 public penises of the South:

1. The capital of Missouri isn't Kansas City or St. Louis, but Boomererson City, population 40,000. Its manageable size makes sightseeing easier. Look for this beautiful neoclassical Mercury outside the State Capitol.

2. This African-American boy is too young to be proper beefcake, but he's certainly an unexpected find, sitting shirtless at the George Washington Carver National Monument in Diamond, Missouri, near Joplin.

3. I've been to Kentucky several times to visit my mother's kinfolk, but I didn't know that there was a 30-foot tall fiberglass replica of Michelangelo's David, penis and all, in downtown Louisville (on the corner of Main and 7th). Of course, it has some residents in an uproar, yelling "Think of the children!"

4. Speaking of uproars, right in the heart of downtown Nashville, Tennessee, on Music Row (Division and 16th Avenue North), traffic stops as drivers gawk at Musica, a group of nine 10-foot tall naked men and women holding the Goddess of Music aloft. They're not usually carrying guitars.

It wasn't there when I spent a semester in Nashville; it was unveiled in 2003, the controversial work of sculptor Alan LeQuire.

5. The War Memorial Auditorium, across from the State Capitol, features this hunky slab of marble holding a sword and a goddess, his penis coyly covered.

6. Memphis, Tennessee is named after the ancient Egyptian city, so there's a 25-foot fiberglass replica of the famous statue of Ramses II on the campus of the University of Memphis (on Central Avenue).

More after the break

I stopped in Oxford, Mississippi in 1984, on my way to Hell-fer-Sartain State University. No good public art, but a lot of cruising.

7. Birmingham is an island of (relative) sophistication in the heart of red-state Alabama. It has an opera company, a nice used bookstore, and a very good Chinese restaurant, Mr. Chen's. Also this 56-foot tall statue of Vulcan, the smith of the gods, to symbolize the city's iron-mine origins (in the Vulcan Park, on Red Mountain). He's got a semi-bare chest and a bare butt.

8. If you have any particular reason to go to Lafayette, Alabama, about 20 miles from Auburn, look for this life-sized statue of boxer Joe Louis outside the Chambers County Museum.

9. The Seafarer Memorial in Mobile, Alabama

10.New Orleans, Louisiana really deserves a separate entry, but just to whet your appetite, check out these naked men in the City Park

I only made it as far as New Orleans. The whole Southeast, is left, from Virginia to Georgia to the Carolinas to Florida.

See also: Dating a country-western star; and Ten More Public Penises of the South

I don't really have an age preference, but it seems that when I was in my 20s and 30s, I usually ended up with guys 5-10 years older, and when I hit 40, guys 10 or more years younger. I'm over 50 now, but I still get cruised by practically every twink I meet, even those who say "no older guys" on their profiles.

Dating younger guys has some advantages: they're cute, they have boundless energy and enthusiasm, and they are constantly surprised by your stories of life in the 1980s.

But there are disadvantages: they go out too often and stay up too late, they don't fit in with your friends, and even after extensive research, you still can't understand their pop culture references.

Here are my favorite teenage (or twink) boyfriends and hookups who were 10+ years younger than me. Don't worry, they were all over 18.

New York

1. Conrad, the 20 year old who came to my room Upstate to fix my computer, said "I'm not into older guys," and grabbed. 17 years.

2. Mario, a teenage model studying at Columbia University. 20 years.

3. Sibu, the hottest guy in the world, a seminary student met at a conference in South Africa. Dark room hookup, and then "I'm not into older guys." 15 years

4. Liam, who waited until the exact moment he turned 18 to give me a birthday present. 21 years

5. Jermaine, the Biggest Guy on My Sausage List. A Harvard undergrad studying political science, and planning to go to law school, we met when I was on a job interview in Boston. 18 years.

6. The Pizza Boy, an undergrad theater major in Rock Island. My friend Dick actually started dating him, but we shared at Christmastime. 18 years

Florida

7. Victor, the Brazilian twink who turned out to be a drag queen, Miss Chita Taboo. 16 years.

8. The Young Republican, one of my ex-students who invited me to a Christmas party at his parents' country club. We dated a few times in spite of his politics. 20 years.

9. The college freshman hitchhiking to Key West who David and I picked up. 20 years

10. Jean in Paris, the violist who wouldn't let me touch his instrument. 22 years

The rest of the list, with nude photos, is on Tales of West Hollywood.

When I was a kid in the 1970s, Chuck Acri's Creature Feature broadcast a lot of very loose adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe stories: The House of Usher, The Pit and the Pendulum, Tales of Terror, The Raven, The Masque of the Red Death, The Tomb of Ligeia. They were all terribly cheesy.

I loved them.

And the original short stories, which I first encountered in a Scholastic Book Club edition of Ten Great Mysteries by Edgar Allan Poe, edited by Groff Conklin, with a drawing of a naked man (by Irv Doktor) illustrating "Metzengerstein."

It's about a man killed by a ghost horse. The nudity was completely unnecessary, but certainly welcome.

Even without the nudity, the stories were amazingly homoerotic, male narrators visiting male friends to hear their tales of murder and madness, with few or no women around, except for a few husbands who hate their wives.

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838). Pym and his boyfriend Augustus stow away about a whaling ship and have adventures. After Augustus dies, Pym hooks up with Richard Parker. The two have more adventures.

"The Fall of the House of Usher" (1839). Roderick Usher and his sister are killed by the evil house. His sister, not his wife!

"The Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841). The narrator and his buddy solve a murder.

"The Pit and the Pendulum" (1842). The narrator is tortured by the pit and the pendulum, but rescued by the strong arm of a French soldier.

(Left: New ABC series with Edgar Allan Poe as a paranormal investigator.)

"The Tell-Tale Heart" (1843). The narrator (played on film by Stephen Brockway) "loves the old man," but kills him anyway.

"The Gold-Bug." (1843). The narrator, his buddy, and their servant search for buried treasure.

"The Cask of Amontillado" (1846) Montresor gets revenge on Fortunato by walling him up. But why is he so upset?

No wonder he was not mentioned in my class in American Renaissance Literature at Augustana, though he lived at the same time as Melville, Hawthorne, and Emerson.

But why was so much of Poe's poetry -- "Annabel Lee,""To Helen,""Lenore,""The Raven" -- about men mourning dead girlfriends? (Left, Jeremy Renner in The Raven).

Maybe because if the women are dead, the men don't have to worry about any of that icky hetero-romance.

Poe certainly spent a lot of time courting women through his life, but usually they were sickly or dying, like his 13-year old cousin Virginia Clemm, whom he married in 1836, when he was 27.

Maybe he found some solace in glimmers of same-sex desire.

See also: The Gay American Renaissance.

A Sausage Sighting is a glimpse of a guy's beneath-the-belt gifts that doesn't go anywhere else -- no dating, no romance, no hooking up, not even a few minutes in the dark room at the Duplex Bar in Paris.

Sometimes just looking is enough -- a good sausage sighting can be more memorable than a dozen nights of passion, especially when it's unexpected.

You can't count glimpses of strangers in the locker room or at the urinal, or actors getting excited during movie love scenes. It's only a valid Sausage Sighting if you know the guy, if he's a relative, friend, co-worker, or acquaintance.

I'll use the same scale as in my Sausage List (the list of gigantic endowments belonging to guys I actually dated):

Bratwurst: memorable.
Kielbasa: super-sized.
Mortadella: the stuff of dreams.
Kovbasa: Are you kidding?

Childhood

1. Cousin Joe. When I was 7 1/2 years old, we stayed with my Aunt Nora, and I caught a glimpse of Cousin Joe's Kielbasa+ in the bathroom. It was the first I ever saw --many later ones were disappointingly small by comparison. Kovbasa, probably.

2. The Sanderson Brothers, a gospel group that worked as counselors at Nazarene summer camp. I got to see one of them relieving himself. Kielbasa.

3. Brother Dino, my Sunday school teacher, and also a counselor at Nazarene summer camp when I was in junior high. I saw him taking a shower. Easily a Mortadella.

4. Verne, the preacher's son. We "dated" in eleventh grade. We didn't identify the relationship as romantic, and nothing physical happened, but I did see him nude. Bratwurst.

The uncensored list is on Tales of West Hollywood.

One of the poems parodied on Rocky and Bullwinkle was "The Village Smithy," by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1840):

Under a spreading chestnut-tree the village smithy stands.
The smith, a mighty man is he, with large and sinewy hands;
And the muscles of his brawny arms are strong as iron bands.

Actually, it was parodied everywhere, in cartoons and comedy sketches throughout my childhood. It must have been a recitation assignment for generations of squirming schoolkids, and a hated memory for comedy writers of the 1960s.

If you read the entire poem, you find that the smithy has a wife and kids, but I only ever heard the part about how the village children come around every day to gawk at his muscles.

I could relate.

Although the poem doesn't really have a plot -- the blacksmith flexes his muscles, children gawk, he goes to church -- it was spun into movies in 1897, 1908, 1913, 1922, and 1936.

In the days before factories, the blacksmith had the job of forging tools and other instruments from iron. There were several blacksmith gods, including Vulcan in Graeco-Roman mythology and Ilmarinen in the Finnish Kalevala.

Unfortunately, they rarely worked shirtless -- too many sparks.

But early cinematographer Eadweard Muybridge filmed two naked blacksmiths for his study of Animal Locomotion.

There are still blacksmiths today. They even have World Championships. 40 blacksmiths from the United States, Canada, Australia, and Britain competed in the 2014 Horseshoeing Contest in Eureka, Nevada. Trey Green of Lakeside, California was the winner.

Looks like they still have "large and sinewy hands."

See also: James Whitcomb Riley: Even a Dull, Depressing Poet Can Be Gay

I grew up around Native Americans, at the annual pow wow and through visiting relatives (my Cousin Joe is half Potawatomie). But I was never with a Native American guy, through all my years in college and in West Hollywood, except for the Inuit that Lee and I hooked up with.

When I visited Larry in New Mexico in 2004, I was determined to find a Native American guy.

Cruising in Santa Fe proved fruitless -- well, I brought home a cute college boy, but he was Anglo.

Albuquerque and Taos, the same. Lots of Hispanic guys, but not a lot of Native Americans.

So I decided to go to the heartland -- the Navajo Nation.

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

When I was growing up in Rock Island, almost every kid had a "homeland": their grandparents or great-grandparents came from Sweden, Germany, or Belgium, or less commonly Greece, Poland, France, Italy, or Estonia.

Except me: As one of the few plain generic Americans, with ancestors from Indiana and Kentucky as far back as anyone kept records, I was always left out.

Teachers were constantly assigning us reports on our homeland.

We had to bring food from our homeland to club meetings and church socials.

We had to learn the song of our homeland for pageants.

Every new acquaintance asked "Where are you from?", and wouldn't take "Indiana" for an answer. "No, where are you from? What's your homeland?"

One day in the spring of fifth grade, my boyfriend Bill said "Why don't you just pick a country? You can be adopted!"

That was a great idea -- I could adopt a country!

I was already making a list of "good places," where boys could hug and kiss openly and grown-up men could live together without wives. I could be from a good place.

During recess Bill, Joel, and I went to the school library to look for a place. We sorted through all of the My Village books, by Sonia and Tim Gidal, photo stories of real boys in villages in Germany, Ireland, France, Switzerland, and so on.

Bill liked Yugoslavia, because there was a picture of two boys hugging.

Joel voted for Finland, because there was a picture of the boy naked in the sauna.

I liked Italy, because the boy had a lot of hunky adult friends.

But wait -- why did it have to be a European country?

I knew where the men were always naked!

I took Joel and Bill into our house, down to the basement, where my mother's old set of Collier's Encyclopedias sat on a lonely shelf.

"These books have all kinds of naked guys in them," I said, handing them the pertinent volumes.

We leafed through old black-and-white photos of naked men.

Bill liked some Indonesian athletes, because they were holding hands.

Joel liked African tribes, because they were muscular and naked.

I liked the Philippines, because the guys were cute.

"Wait -- I know where we can get pictures in color!" Joel exclaimed.

We ran over to his house. In his basement there were shelves of old National Geographic magazines -- his older brother once had a subscription.

The guys were never naked, but there were lots of shirtless pictures.

Cambodian boys splashing in the ocean.

Dour Amazonian men carrying blowguns.

Pygmies of the "Belgian Congo."

Japanese athletes in singlets with noticeable bulges.

"We shouldn't decide just on a couple of pictures," I said. "We should do research."

Through the spring semester, and into the summer, we worked on our project, reading geography books like The Land and People of Israel and Come with me to India, looking up old magazine articles on Switzerland, New Guinea, Ethiopia, Bolivia, and Spain.

When we had sleepovers, we interrogated the Fifth Boy about his homeland, the food, the costumes, the songs.

For my birthday trip in May, we went to the Putnam museum (with Randy the Golden Boy tagging along) and got a whole new revelation: why did it have to be a modern country?

Why not the Aztecs, or the ancient Egyptians?

Or ancient Greece, where they worshiped naked musclemen?

For that matter, why did it have to be a place in the real world?

Soon we were looking at Leonard Wibberly's Encounter Near Venus, the Basidium of The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet, and the oxygen-rich canals of Robert Silverberg's Lost Race of Mars.

It was time to reel it in, get back to the basics of men with muscles.

One day in Joel's basement I leafed through the December 11th, 1970 issue of Life Magazine, and found an article: "The Samurai Who Committed Hara Kiri."

It was about the ritual suicide of Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima (without mentioning that he was gay, or that his novels were infused by gay themes).

I was already taking judo lessons. My sensei, Sammy, turned out to be married, but I was reasonably sure that he liked boys, not girls.

Mishima's gleaming, muscular physique and suggestively packed fudoshi settled it.

"I'm from Japan," I announced.

When sixth grade began, and our teacher assigned yet another essay on "our homeland," Bill wrote on Indonesia, Joel wrote on Ethiopia, and I wrote on Japan (without mentioning the suggestively packed fudoshi). She gave us all B+'s, with the comment "very imaginative!"

See also:; 6000 Ways to Say Penis; and Ten Ethnic Groups on My Bucket List.

In Driving Lessons (2006), Julie Walters plays a free spirit actress who takes an interest in shy teenager Rupert Grint. She originally thinks that her protege is gay, so she knows that gay teenagers exist. But still, on the DVD commentary, she exclaims: "Those biceps! The girls will go mad!" She no longer believes that there is a single teenage boy in the world who might go mad over Rupert Grint's enormous biceps.

Heterosexism aside, in the Harry Pottermovies, Rupert Grint was well aware of the homoerotic undertones in the original novel between his character, Ron Weasley, and teen wizard Harry Potter. So in the movie series, he imbued his character with a tenderness, a vulnerability, and an eye-bulging desire that was not mitigated by the scripted romance with Hermione.

And after Harry Potter, he has chosen a number of buddy-bonding projects (as well as projects that allow him to display his respectably buffed physique and Burt Ward-sized package). Cherrybomb (2009), for instance, involves a sex-and-crime triangulation between Rupert's Malachy and Robert Sheehan's Luke.

In Wild Target (2009), a middle-aged hitman (Bill Nighy) takes on a young apprentice (Rupert) and a hostage (Emily Blunt), and proceeds to fall in love with both.

In Into the White (2012), Rupert plays a British pilot shot down over Norway during World War II. In order to survive, he must share an isolated mountain cabin with a German pilot. I haven't seen it, but it sounds like it's tailor-made for homoerotic buddy-bonding.

Rupert has not addressed the usual gay rumors, but there is no doubt that, like his Harry Potter costar Daniel Radcliffe, he is a gay ally.

In the grim industrial town of Sheffield, ne'er do wells Gaz (Robert Carlyle, center) and Dave (Mark Addy) come up with an innovative way to make money -- they'll perform as male strippers, and make up for their less-than-spectacular physiques by offering "the full Monty," full frontal nudity. They recruit shy, skinny Lomper (Steve Huison, left), their former boss Gerald (Tom Wilkinson), elderly dancer Horse (Paul Barber, right), and well-hung Guy (Hugo Speer, below).

The plan brings relationship problems, trouble with the police, ridicule from their mates, and concerns over their physical inadequacies and lack of talent, but in the end they rally together, and the whole town cheers as they strip to Tom Jones'"You Can Leave Your Hat On."

The buddy-bonding of the guys and the frequent underwear and jockstrap shots would be more than enough to make the movie a gay must-see, but there's also an explicit romance between Lomper and Guy. No one knew that they were gay before. Maybe they didn't know themselves. But they escape from a police raid together, run across the housetops of Sheffield in their underwear, and take refuge in Lomper's house. After that they are a couple, a fact casually recognized by their mates.

In 2000, The Full Monty premiered as a stage musical with an American setting. The Lomper and Guy characters, renamed Malcolm and Ethan, get a love song, "You Walk with Me." There are also Danish, Czech, Japanese, Korean, Mexican, and Icelandic versions, and it is increasingly becoming a favorite of American college and community theaters.

Of course, the actors are expected to have unspectacular physiques, but their camaraderie and casual acceptance of same-sex romance -- and the jockstraps --more than makes up for it.

Besides, you never see the physiques of real, ordinary, everyday guys on stage. Isn't that more interesting than a parade of muscle gods?

Dad always claimed that he was a quarter Indian, from the Potawatomi tribe of southern Michigan. But he we didn't mean by blood: when his big sister Nora married a Potawatomi man (my Uncle Henry), he was sort of adopted by the family. When I was a kid, we occasionally drove to Dowagiac, Michigan, about four hours from Rock Island, to visit Grandma Rani, a small, brown, wrinkled woman who always said "You've grown as big as a beanstalk!"

One day in fifth grade, he told me "We're going out to Michigan for your Grandma Rani's 90th birthday. All of your uncles and aunts and cousins are throwing her a big party."

Cousins? Potawatomi boys my own age?

I remembered the naked Indian boy that Bill and I saw at the Pow Wow last summer -- huge beneath the belt.

And Cousin Joe, half Indian -- huge.

Suddenly I was very interested in meeting my Indian cousins.

The rest of the story, with uncensored photos, is on Tales of West Hollywood.

Of the three major juvenile tv networks, The Disney Channel has nearly sewn up the beefcake. But Nickelodeon has its share, too, gleefully displaying spectacular pecs and abs not only of the main cast, but of the pesky kid brothers, fey antagonists, and bespectacled nerds.

1. David Cade as Jett Stetson, a snobbish, arrogant actor who bedevils the down-to-earth boy band on Big Time Rush. David previously starred in the gay-themed Steam Room Stories.

2. Former model Jordan Nichols (left) as spoiled rich kid Cameron Vanhauser, who bedevils the teenage martial artists on Supah Ninjas.

3. Gay actor Lucas Cruikshank as Marvin Marvin, an alien hiding out with a Earth family, whose impressive physique belies his goofball character. Plus Angel Amaral (left) as his goofy best friend Ben.

4. Raja Penske of Unfabulous.

5. Avan Jogia (left) as Beck Oliver, an artsy, somewhat feminine student at the Los Angeles High School for the Performing Arts on Victorious.

6. Nathan Kress as Freddie, the nerdy camera operator for the teen-produced webshow ICarly. Though his biceps began to swell to epic proportions as the years passed, he steadfastly refused to appear shirtless on camera.

7. Glenn McCuen (left) as Aloe, yet another snobbish bully, in the buddy comedy Bucket & Skinner's Epic Adventures.

8. Another former model, Eugene Simon, as the abrasive, manipulative Jerome Clark on House of Anubis.

9. On Grachi,the Nickelodeon Latin America series about a teenage witch, oddball outsider Tony Gordillo wears nerd horn-rimmed glasses and garishly unfashionable clothing, but when the nerd costume comes off, he's supermodel Mauricio Henao (left).

10. Miles Szanto, who previously fell in love with Xavier Samuel in Drowning on Australian tv, as the devoted servant of teenage Alex, The Elephant Princess.

11. Sebastian Gregory as JB, Alex's best friend.

12. Jack Griffo (left) as Max Thunderman, a 14-year old who shares superpowers with his twin sister, on The Thundermans (upcoming).

I don't hook up in public, period. No parks, no nature preserves, no secluded hotel restrooms, no booths at the Pleasure Palace. No way, no how.

But back in college in the Midwest in the 1980s, I didn't know much about gay culture and history, and I thought that the only possible way for gay people to meet was in bars and public places. So I wasn't so picky.

January 30th, 1982, my senior year at Augustana College. I applied to the Ph.D. program in Spanish at Tulane University in New Orleans. They flew me in for an interview, and now I was on my way back to Rock Island.

The three hour flight to St. Louis was uneventful; we flew above the clouds in brilliant sunlight. Our descent was a little bumpy, but we landed at Lambert Airport right on schedule, at 5;15 pm.

I went to the monitor to check on my connection, a 6:30 flight.

Cancelled.

The board was lit with dozens of flickering "cancelled" lights.

I had never flown alone before -- my flights to Switzerland, Colombia, and Germany were in supervised groups. What was I supposed to do?

Finally I found the American Airlines help desk. The line was endless. Forget it!

I called the American Airlines telephone number. On hold for half an hour. Forget it!

The uncensored story, with photos, is on Tales of West Hollywood

Before World War II, teenage boys were expected to be concerned with the gang, or with one special pal, and think of girls as "poison." Those boys who expressed an interest in girls prior to graduating from high school were ridiculed by their peers as pansies and Percies, evaluated by school psychologists, and subjected to tense heart-to-heart talks with their parents.

But after the War, the image of the adolescent masculinity shifted from "woman-hating" to "girl-crazy," and some of the long-running radio teenagers who had previously been concerned solely with paper routes and bad report cards suddenly began casting longing glances at their female schoolmates. You can find the exact date: Chester Riley’s son Junior (Scotty Beckett) on Life of Riley in January 1948; The Great Gildersleeve’s wisecracking nephew Leroy (Walter Tetley) in March 1949; and Ozzie and Harriet’s eldest son David Nelson in November 1951

Left and below: in 1948, MGM arranged for Scotty Beckett (later Corky of Gasoline Alley) and his friend Roddy McDowall to go on a "see, they're not gay!" double date with Elizabeth Taylor and Jane Powell, but they seem to have ended up cuddling with each other.

The teenage boy had to be bullied, cajoled, and if necessary forced into girl-craziness; it could not be taken for granted.

In the January 1948 episode of The Life of Riley, for instance, blustering working-class family man Chester (William Bendix) is horrified to discover that his fifteen-year old son, Junior, plans to bring a boy to the big New Year’s Eve dance.

He tries to explain about “the birds and bees,” sexual difference, but Junior insists that he already knows about “all that jazz.”

So Chester puts his foot down: there are “boy people” and “girl people,” he argues, and “boy people” should only take “girl people” to dances. “Don’t you like girls?” he asks in a timid, hesitant voice, afraid of the possible answer.

When Junior admits that he likes girls “sometimes,” Chester takes charge, forcing the boy to break his same-sex date and telephone the boss’s daughter. She is noncommital, so Chester forces him to call the offspring of another VIP (resulting, of course, in two dates for the dance, both impossible to break). He is as hysterical in his insistence that Junior should like girls as fathers of the pre-War generation were hysterical in their insistence that their teenage sons should not.

Chester continued trying to "encourage" his son into girl-craziness when the show moved onto television, and Scotty Beckett was replaced by Lanny Reese (above) and even the obviously-grown up Wesley Morgan (left).

When I was a kid in the 1960s, the Mean Boys made fun of everybody's name, but a few made them downright apoplectic: Clyde, Abner, Dewey. Especially Dewey, since that was the name of the proprietor of the candy store across the street from Denkmann School, a fat elderly man who kept muttering about "longhaired hippie freaks." Any kid named Dewey had better find a new name, pronto!

So I was surprised to discover that there was a screen hunk named Dewey Martin, a Texas boy who got his start in the gay-subtext Knock on Any Door (1949) as a young boxing tough.

He immediately got the starring role in The Golden Gloves Story (1950), playing a boxer who is sparring with his competitor (Kevin Morrison) for the affection of a girl.

And The Big Sky (1952), about two cowboys (Dewey Martin, Kirk Douglas) making a perilous cross-country journey and sparring for the affection of a girl.

And Tennessee Champ (1954), reprising the plot of an old Kane Richmond movie of the 1930s, except when Dewey goes on the lam after believing that he's killed someone, he falls in love with a girl, not Frankie Darro.

Plus Westerns, sci fi, war, an ancient Egyptian epic, anything that would allow him to shed his shirt and display his tight, rugged physique, back in the days when shirtless men were practically unheard-of on screen.

They may have had gay subtexts, too; I haven't seen them.

Later in the 1950s, though he continued to work steadily, starring roles became increasingly rare. Dewey played Dean Martin's buddy in the comedy Ten Thousand Bedrooms (1957), several different roles on the anthology series Climax! (1956-58), a Daniel Boone knockoff on The Wonderful World of Disney (1960-61), and Lester White, gay-vague "partner" of Uncle Beck (Brian Keith) in Savage Sam (1963), with Tommy Kirk.

In the 1960s he moved into television, becoming a familiar character actor. His last starring role was in Seven Alone (1974), as the head of a family crossing the wilderness during the 1870s.

Dewey was married for three years to singer Peggy Lee ("If that's all there is, then let's keep dancing....").

He's still alive, retired, age 89, mostly forgotten by both Boomers and the modern generation. But the photos, glimpses of beefcake past, remain intact.

I have always been attracted to religious guys. There's something about a devotion to the spiritual world that makes your presence in the physical world especially erotic. Maybe the paradoxical juxtaposition of muscles and Bibles, penises and prayer.

Or maybe it's because God has blessed them with exceptional beneath-the-belt gifts.

I've dated or hooked up with members of most of the major world religions. Here are the most interesting and memorable:

During my junior year, Corey was a follower of the Maharashi Mahesh Yogi, and wanted to learn to fly. When I brought up the subject of gay people, he claimed to be opposed to "perversion." But years later I ran into him at the French Quarter in West Hollywood. He was living in San Francisco with his partner. Transcendental Meditation

My most embarrassing hookup was with Warren, a shy, middle-aged guy who thought I was a hustler. We didn't discuss religion, so I didn't know he was Mormon until later, when I recognized his "temple garments," the special underclothes worn upon your "endowment." Latter-day Saints.

It's not easy to find Mongolians anywhere outside of Mongolia, and only about 2% practice the traditional, pre-Buddhist religion, so it was quite a stroke of luck to find Tomor at a gay bar in Paris, of all places. He told me that Mongolian shamans are all bisexual, since they see beyond male and female to the beauty of the soul.

And he turned out to be gifted beneath the belt, with a Bratwurst+. Mongolian Folk Religion.

My friend Andre, who was straight but celibate, belonged to a "traditional Catholic" spiritual community that disapproved of Pope John Paul and practiced only the Latin Mass, but supported female priests and gay rights. One day he invited me to the exorcism of a young recruit named Barry. The demon turned out to be homophobic, Barry turned out to be gay, and I ended up with a date. Traditional Catholicism

The rest of the list, with uncensored photos, is on Tales of West Hollywood.

The Biggest Bodybuilder on My Sausage Sighting List

Cruising Waiters in West Hollywood, Florida, and New York

Three's Company

Best Friends

The Top 10 Public Penises of Islam

Top 10 Public Penises of the South

Top Teenage and Twink Boyfriends

The Homoerotic Horror of Edgar Allan Poe

My Top Sausage Sightings

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and the Blacksmiths with Brawny Arms

Cruising in the Navajo Nation

The Day I Turned Japanese

Rupert Grint's Biceps Drive Boys Mad

The Full Monty

My First Indian Sausage Sighting

12 Unexpected Nickelodeon Teen Hunks

36 Hours of Cruising at Lambert International Airport

The Life of Riley: Bullying Boys into Girl-Craziness

Dewey Martin: Forgotten Screen Hunk

20 Preachers, Priests, and Religious Guys on My Dating List