NYSocBoy's Beefcake and Bonding

Andrew Keegan was one of the more popular teen stars of the 1990s. He played mostly operators, rebels, and scallawags, Zack Dell in Camp Nowhere (1994), and "bad boy" guest roles on TGIF sitcoms like Full House, Moesha, Step by Step, and Boy Meets World.

By the late 1990s, he was starting to bulk up, and the teen magazines started going wild. They specialized in shots of his bare chest peeking out from his shirt, as if he had been caught in the midst of getting dressed (or undressed).

Lots of gay content:

1. Gay-vague "not into girls" roles on Party of Five (1997-98) and Seventh Heaven (1997-2004)/

2. Broken Hearts Club (2000): Andrew played Kevin, one of a group of gay friends who hang out in West Hollywood (others include Timothy Olyphant, Dean Cain, and Zach Branff).

3. O (2001), an updating of Othello. His Michael Cassio, a high school basketball player, buddy-bonds with Odin (Mekhi James).

4. Teenage Caveman (2002) is actually about post-Apocalyptic teens. Andrew's David has a girlfriend, but he also buddy bonds with the handsome Neil (Richard Hillman), and he shows even more of his physique.

His teen idol star faded in the early 2000s, but Andrew has continued to perform, mostly in hetero-romances and straight-to-video actioners, like the Fast and Furious clone Kill Speed (2010). He has also produced several movies, including A Christmas Too Many (2007), which includes a gay stereotype son among the relatives that Mickey Rooney invites to Christmas dinner.

Andrew is rumored to be bisexual in real life, but he hasn't made any public statements.

Summer 1995, the Wild West

When Dad turned 62, he and Mom retired, sold their house in Rock Island, and moved back to their home state of Indiana. They told me that I had to come out by August to pick up any of my stuff that was still in the house, or it would go to Goodwill.

I wanted my desk, two chairs, a couple of books, two paintings, and some other mementos.

And Lane had never been out of California, except to visit me in the Midwest and once to Israel. Time for a road trip!

The only problem is, after a lifetime in Los Angeles and over 20 years in West Hollywood, even Ojai seemed intolerably homophobic to him. And we would be driving through some of the scariest, most conservative, most homophobic states in the country.

But we could see the sights, I told him. The Grand Canyon, Mount Rushmore...and Rednecks, hairy-chested guys with farm-hard muscles and gigantic Mortadellas, who didn't like gay people but on Saturday night, after a few beers....

"Well...I do like cute redneck farmboys."

"Why not make a game of it?" I suggested. "We'll see if we can hook up with a cowboy or redneck every day, bring a West Hollywood action to the straight world. How about it: 20 days, 20 naked men?"

Lane agreed to the Great Cowboy Roundup of 1995:

Day 1: Phoenix, Arizona

This one was easy. We stayed with a couple Lane knew, transplants from the gay Jewish community in Los Angeles, who took us on a tour of Phoenix's gay neighborhood. Sausage Count: 2

Day 2: Flagstaff, Arizona

After seeing the Grand Canyon, we drove down to Flagstaff to spend the night. At a gay-friendly bar, we hooked up with a young Hispanic guy who worked as a waiter. Sousage Count: 3

Day 3: Provo, Utah

The heart of the Mormon world. We were getting cocky, figuring that we could pick up a guy anywhere in Redneck Country, like on the campus of Brigham Young University. Bust.

Day 4: Laramie, Wyoming

In a few years, the murder of Matthew Shepherd would make Laramie famous as haven of homophobia, but in 1995, we were just thinking cowboys. We went to the campus of the University of Wyoming, visited the Art Museum, and the Museum of the Plains.

Nobody in Laramie, but on the road: when you go to a rest stop at dawn, there are always a lot of trucks parked, where the drivers spent the night. Curious, I walked among them. One of the doors was open, and the driver was sitting inside, legs spread, waiting for a passerby to strike up a conversation -- and be invited into the cab. He turned out to be from Chicago. Sausage Count: Boomer 4, Lane 3

Days 5-6: Denver, Colorado

After four days in the Straight World, it was a relief to get to Denver, with its strong, well-organized gay neighborhood. And meeting guys was easy. A South Asian guy named Ravi took us back to his apartment.

On Day 6, we toured the Museum of Decorative Arts and then met Ravi and his friend Jason for dinner. We all went to a ballet at the Opera House, and then back to Ravi's apartment again. Sausage Count: Boomer 6, Lane 5

Day 7: Omaha, Nebraska.

I wanted to see the old places I knew from my month in Omaha with Fred. And found that saying "I'm from West Hollywood" attracts guys as readily as saying "I have a gigantic penis." We hooked up with a Cornhuster, an extremely buffed former University of Nebraska football player who now worked as a college recruiter. Sausage Count: Boomer 7, Lane 6

Day 8: Des Moines, Iowa.

Thomas, the gay Episcopalian priest who took me to my first Gay Rights Rally in 1981, was still living in Des Moines, a Silver Daddy who still managed to attract Cute Young Things. We "shared" his latest boyfriend. Sausage Count: Boomer 9, Lane 8.

Days 9-11: Rock Island, Illinois

Along with visiting my parents and brother, packing up and shipping my stuff, and going to my old haunts, we had time to hang out with my old friend Dick and his partner. I also sent Lane out to JRs by himself, so we would be even. Sausage Count: 11

Day 12: Sioux Falls, South Dakota

We saw the famous Stave Church and went to a gay bar downtown, hoping to hook up with a Viking. Instead we hooked up with a black guy on the downlow, whose wife was an English professor at the University. Sausage Count: 12

Day 13: Rapid City, South Dakota

We were so tired from driving and seeing Mount Rushmore and the Crazy Horse Monument that we forgot to cruise. Bust.

Day 14: Billings, Montana

We ended up in Sturgis, South Dakota, during the famous Sturgis Bike Rally. Hundreds of hot motorcycle guys riding around shirtless, beer in hand. But there was no place to stay in town, so we had to drive on to Billings, Montana. Again, too tired to cruise. Bust.

Day 15: Missoula, Montana

We loved Missoula. A very nice art museum, historic churches, antique shops, bookstores. I saw one of the most beautiful men on Earth fishing off a bridge, a cut-off t-shirt revealing enormous biceps. Lane stayed at the hotel, saying I could hook up by myself, so I went to a country-Western bar and met Jared, a real, actual cowboy (or so he said). Sausage Count: Boomer 13, Lane 12

Day 17: Spokane, Washington

It was scary driving through Idaho, where the anti-sodomy law brought a maximum penalty of life in prison. But then we arrived in Spokane, Washington, a little gay mecca, drawing gay guys from all over the redneck states. They were low-key, closeted; no "real" gay bars, but lots of gay-friendly bars and restaurants, and a lot of "street cruising." But we didn't pick up anyone. Bust.

Day 18: Portland, Oregon

A gigantic gay mecca, with a bathhouse that took up nearly a city block and a nice country-western bar. We did some cruising separately at the bathhouse (3 guys for me, 4 for Lane so we would be even). Sausage Count: 16

Day 19: Redding, California

Two days left, 4 guys to go. We pulled into Redding, a town of 90,000 near the Oregon border and Mount Shasta, where Bigfoot has been sighted. There was only one, small gay bar, and it wasn't very active.

"We can pick up the rest in San Francisco," Lane pointed out.

"Sure, but we're supposed to be getting guys in the Straight World, cowboys and truckers and rednecks."

I went up to the bartender and asked "Do you know of any clubs where you could meet several guys tonight?"

He told me about a bear party going on that night in a place called Happy Valley, where we got our remaining four! Sausage Count: 20.

Day 20: San Francisco, California

When you drive into town from the north, you go over the Golden Gate Bridge, an iconic San Francisco moment. We were too overwhelmed by being home, in the heart of the gay world, to bother with cruising. But we had already had 8 dates or "sharing" experiences, 4 bar hookups, 1 public encounter, and 7 guys from bear parties, for a total of 20 guys in 20 days.

Oh, and we saw the Grand Canyon, too.

The uncensored post, with nude photos, is on Tales of West Hollywood.

When I was a kid, whenever we visited my relatives in Indiana, I spent the night with my Cousin Buster in the trailer in the dark woods, and we would squeeze into his narrow twin bed, our bodies pressed together, reading Harvey Comics. I read until long after he fell asleep, associating the tales of friendly ghosts and little devils with that warmth and affection.

Two boys together clinging, one the other never leaving....

In high school, I looked back on those moments of perfect happiness, and tried to get my hands on the Harvey Comics I read all those years ago (actually less than 10 years ago, but when you're 16, it seems like an eternity).

So I put an ad in the Rock Island Argus, and a very cute Augustana student named Clay answered with an offer of five Little Max comics from 1958-1959 for a dollar each.

I never heard of Little Max, they were from before I was born, and a dollar was four times what a comic cost on the newsstand. But I bought them anyway.

It was a weird type of deja vu, like looking at a photo of your parents before you were born: familiar, yet bizarre, with a story going on that you are not a part of and can't possibly understand. Readers were obviously expected to be familiar with these characters and their histories, but I had no idea who they were.

The star, Little Max, looks like Little Audrey in drag: he is drawn in the familiar Harvey style, cherubic-cute, with a big head and gigantic eyes. He doesn't speak, and his thought balloons are full of malapropisms that suggest a learning disorder: "They're both so kindly and generosity!"

His mentor, chum, adopted father, or something is Joe Palooka, a tall, very muscular guy with a weird toothless grin. Max calls him "Dear Joe."

Joe has also adopted or is mentoring an unnamed girl. Max calls her "Dear Her." "

She calls Max "Maxth" and Joe "Mith-ter Palooka."

In this Panel, she's looking at Max, not at Joe's swimsuit.

Most of adventures are slapstick, with Max trying to do a good deed that goes terribly wrong. Here he dresses at an Easter Bunny, is treed by a dog, and reflects on how "embarristing" it is to be "previously engagemented."

There are also fantasies, in which Joe reads Max a fairy tale, and he acts it out in his head, or Max writes his own version.

Sometimes Max appears a bit older, free to wander around without adult supervision. Although he still can't speak -- or use American Sign Language -- he makes himself understood adequately to interact with a group of friends.

Lots of stories are set on the beach, where Joe can wear a swimsuit and show off his physique, and Max can engage in some heroics (and, here, demonstrate a feminine limp wrist).

Other than the bizarre familiarity, I was attracted to the character of Max, heroic yet not macho, feminine yet never called a sissy.

And Joe Palooka, a single man who had adopted two children, but didn't have a wife or girlfriend.

I've done research since:

Joe Palooka was a naive immigrant boxer in a comic strip by Hal Fischer that premiered in 1921. He was immensely popular, spinning off into movies, a radio series, Big-Little Books, toys, games, and comic books. He was less popular by the 1950s, when his Harvey comic book series began, but Harvey in that era adapted several aging comic strip properties, including Terry and the Pirates and Blondie.

Little Max was a supporting character in the Palooka comic strip, a mute shoe-shine boy who Joe befriended. He had his own comic book series from 1949 to 1961.

And I discovered the origin of Little Max: Max Bartikowsky, a boy artist Hal Fischer knew during his childhood, who roamed around town in his mother's floppy hat. He became Big Max, owner of Bartikowsky Jewelry in downtown Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.

He never married.

See also: Joe Palooka

These stories are all based on real events, but I always take some artistic license, combine two events into one, make up conversations, change details.

Some changes are to protect people's identities. About 3/4ths of the names are made up.

Sometimes I can't remember everything. If I don't know the exact name of the restaurant I went to in Barcelona 20 years ago, I'll look one up.

Sometimes trying to include all the people and events would be too confusing.

And of course I have to make some changes, to turn an incident into an interesting story.

Can you figure out which story actually happened the way I wrote it, and which was modified?

Childhood

A, I visit my Indian cousins, and play a game where I get to tie the older one up and....

B. Two older boys teach me about oral sex in the church parking lot?

Answer. B. When I visited my cousin, I pulled down his pants, but his brothers intervened and "rescued" him before I got to do anything else.

High School

A. In Switzerland for a Nazarene conference, my friend and I sneak into town, and dance with a Swedish leatherboy at a bar?

B. A week after figuring "it" out, Dino the Golden Boy invites me to a 4th of July party involving naked guys sliding into each other?

Answer: B. We did go to the bar in Switzerland, but I met the Swedish leatherboy in another bar in London years later,

College

A. I trick the boss from hell into revealing his Trouser Snake, running out from the bathroom into the store, still....

B. My professor at a small religious college in the Midwest invites his advanced students to a handcuff party?

Answer: B. My boss did come running out of the bathroom, but he wasn't....

West Hollywood

A. A Ginger Boy for Christmas. Fred and I go to JRs in Rock Island and pick up a Ginger Boy, who ignores me, and a few years later Dick and I go to the same bar and pick up the same Ginger Boy, who gets ignored by Dick?

B. Gershom, the Orthodox Jewish guy who had never been with a Gentile before, and asked to practice on me, so we did it in the kitchen, with our boyfriends waiting out in the living room?

Answer: A. Gershom and I did practice before his big date, but in private.

San Francisco

A. I dated Kevin the Vampire, who had special powers, like you couldn't see him unless you wanted him to?

B. The Amazing Invisible Boy, who came back to my apartment, couldn't explain the brown stain on his shirt, didn't understand contemporary references, and vanished without going through the door?

Answer: B. Kevin was not nearly as vampire-like as the story suggests.

New York

A. I meet famous composer Andrew Lloyd Webber at a party, and he gives me a ride home in his limo, and we stop for tacos?

B. Visiting Rock Island for the holidays, my 14-year old nephew asks me "how gay guys have sex," and Yuri and I take him to the park and demonstrate gay kissing?

Answer: B. I talked to Andrew Lloyd Webber, but didn't get a ride home with him. That was Tom Wopat.

Florida

A. Janik the Frisian Bodybuilder, who I met in the Horseman's Club in Amsterdam, invited me back to his small town in Friesland?

B. When I was in Arizona, cruising in the Navajo Nation, I finally met a Native America guy, except he turned out to be white?

Answer: A. I didn't meet anyone in the Navajo Nation. The jogger pickup actually happened in Albuquerque.

Ohio

[Censored]

Upstate

[Censored]

Plains

A, At a comic book store, I pick up a boy with cerebral palsy who has Daddy issues and wants to rip my clothes off?

B. I go to a heterosexual dinner party, and hook up with my host's college-age son while everyone else is having dessert and coffee in the next room?

Answer: B, of course. In #A, I didn't pick up the boy with cerebral palsy at a comic book store, with his father standing right there. It was at a bar.

The uncensored post, with nude photos, is on Tales of West Hollywood.

One day in Levoča, Doc and some of the other faculty got saddled with the job of chaperoning 20 students on a day trip to Tatralandia, a water park about an hour's drive west of Levoča.and he invited me along.

"Couldn't we take them to a museum instead?" I asked. I'm not big on sliding down waterslides."

"It's got more than that. There's a Jungle Cove, a Wild West Town, an Adventure Cave."

"Like Disneyland? Gross! I lived in Los Angeles for 13 years, and only visited Disneyland once, and I hated it. Does a Slovak Mickey Mouse come out to shake your hand?"

"Tatralandia has something that I think you won't see in Disneyland," Doc said with a sly grin. "A thousand Eastern European men in Speedos."

I never thought of that! I had already gotten a glimpse of Slovakian endowments in Kosice. "Ok, I'm in."

Eastern Europeans love water parks. There are three in Slovakia, and AquaPark Tatralandia is the biggest, probably the biggest in the world.

You go in through a Wellness Center, like a well-equipped gym with hot and cold spas, 16 steam rooms, massage, exercise equipment. The ads showed muscular guys getting massages, but inside were mostly middle-aged women.

Next came water slides called The Galaxy, The Fire Slide, the Sun Slide, and the Splash, occupied entirely by children, while their parents, fawning heterosexual couples, lay on deck chairs at the Tropical Paradise.

"Um...hot guys in Speedos?" I asked.

"They are around. Keep looking."

The little kids were occupied in a castle with a dozen water slides protruding from it, a Safari Adventure, and an Old West Mining Town, where you could mine for "gold" (I did that as a kid, too, at Mother Goose Land in the Quad Cities).

So far I wasn't impressed. Lots of swimsuits, but little kids and dismally unattractive adults.

We pressed on past water slides called Amazonia and Niagara, a place where you could practice Free Falls, a Monkey Slide, an exhibition of paleolithic artifacts from a nearby museum, and lots of restaurants.

"Um..have you been here before? Did you know about the lack of beefcake?"

Doc shrugged. "Last year there were some muscular guys."

Then we turned onto a Sports Pool, where you could play water polo, and an entire university team was splashing around! Gems of Eastern European manhood everywhere!

The northern part of the park was devoted to non-water sports: archery, shooting, tomahawk throwing, soccer, oversized chess. And it was crowded with single men in their 20s.

It made sense: people in their 30s and 40s were often parents who had to supervise their kids, and by their 50s and 60s, they were ready for the Wellness Center. But the guys at the peak of muscularity just wanted to play Sports.

While wearing Speedos.

See also: I escape to the gay haven of Slovakia; and Jozin z Bazin, the Swamp Monster of Moravia

Summer 1995, Omaha

The Great Redneck Roundup of 1995 yielded 20 hookups in 20 days, but, surprisingly, few actual
"rednecks."

We were looking for country boys:
1. Heavy-set, not fat but thick around the belly
2. "Macho" jobs as truckers or factory workers.
3. Lived in small towns or on farms
4. Drove pick-up trucks
5. Listened to country-western music
6. Most important: were very, very, very well hung.

Instead, we met a slim smooth Hispanic guy who wanted to be a chef, and a South Asian medical technician who took us to the ballet.

Nice, but we could meet guys like that back in West Hollywood. Where were the cowboys, truckers, and farmboys of the Straight World?

On Day 7, we drove 10 hours from Denver to Omaha.

"We're bound to pick up a country boy here," I said.

The rest of the story, with nude photos and sexual situations, is on Tales of West Hollywood.

By the time I started watching TV in the 1960s, the Western was stale, outdated, staggeringly unhip; my friends and I could stomach only those few that involved a flashy new gimmick, like Wild Wild West or Alias Smith and Jones. But for the Boomers growing up in the 1950s, they were as iconic as Pinky Lee and Father Knows Best.

The Western heroes were usually the discovery of gay talent agent Henry Willson, so they were gay, bi, or at least gay-friendly. They usually wore full leather, buckskin, or other less-than-revealing garb, but they were not averse to revealing stunning physiques for the movie magazines, and even for the AMC’s proto-gay Physique Pictorial. Guy Madison (who went so far as to pose nude) in The Adventures of Wild Bill Hickock (1951-56)

Rugged movie star Hugh O’Brian in The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp (1955-61);

Clint Walker of Cheyenne (1955-63).

William Smith of Laredo

Plus:
Richard Boone of Have Gun, Will Travel (1957-63)
Robert Horton of Wagon Train (1957-65)
Rory Calhoun of The Texan (1958-60)
George Montgomery of Cimarron City (1958-60)
Scott Brady as Shotgun Slade (1959-61)

The Western hero traditionally displayed little heterosexual interest: dames were characteristic of an emasculating civilization, along with government, education, opera, and church. Instead, they had a “sidekick,” a life partner of the same sex, usually someone of inferior rank due to race, age, or socioeconomic class, who provided an emotional or spiritual energy. The sidekick is an essentially American phenomenon, and its homoerotic import has been noted for at least thirty years, since Love and Death in the American Novel.

Most of the sidekicks of the 1950s were elderly, corpulent, or buffoons, perhaps because clowns minimze the homoerotic impact of their devotion. The fat, hee-hawking Andy Devine, later on Andy's Gang, played “Jingles,” Guy Madison’s sidekick in The Adventures of Wild Bill Hickock.

Or they were father and son, as in The Rifleman.

But we can locate several same-sex partners whose homoerotic bond was not miminized:

Indian agent Tom Jeffords (future Days of Our Lives hunk John Lumpton), who fell in love with...um, I mean befriended...handsome, muscular Chief Cochise (Michael Ansara) in Broken Arrow (1956-57).

John Bromfield as The Sheriff of Cochise (1956-60) with Stan Jones his faithful deputy.

John Smith and Robert Fuller of Laramie.

Yancy Derringer (1958-59), an ex-Confederate soldier turned gambler played by Jock Mahoney, and X Brands as his Native American companion.

Have you watched Nickelodeon lately?

Me, neither.

In the 1990s and early 2000s, it produced high quality, creative teencoms, with interesting premises and witty dialogue. Things you could actually sit through for reasons other than research.

Now, research or not, I can't bear to sit through The Thundermans and Henry Danger. The laugh tracks are constant, the characters are stupid, and the situations dull.

Nicky, Ricky, Dicky, and Dawn is about...well, who knows? I can't stand it for even a few seconds.

But there may be a bright spot on the horizon: 100 Things To Do Before High School, created by Scott Fellows, who produced the gay-friendly Ned's Declassified School Survival Guide.

It sounds like Ned's Declassified, with the same three friends:
1. Central character C. J. (Isabela Moner)
2. Crispo (Owen Joyner), a mega-popular Golden Boy.
3. Fenwick (Jaheem King Tombs), the nerdish feminine black kid.

Except instead of rules for survival, each week they go through one item on a bucket list (their "bucket" is high school, not death). Some are sound advice (make a new friend, join a club), some are crazy:

1. Start a Garage Band
2. Run with Bears
3. Say "Yes" to Everything for a Day
4. Be a Fairy Godmother
5. Find Your Superpower

In the year since the pilot, they have already grown considerably. One sees major hunkage on the horizon for 15-year old Owen Joyner.

There is also the usual Nickelodeon attempt to provide tweens with as many hot guys as possible in the supporting cast:
1. The guidance counselor (Jack De Sena of All That).
2. Two big brothers (Max Ehrich, Garrett Clayton).
3. Chazz Nittolo, who is billed as Gorgeous Eighth Grade Boy

We'll see whether it lives up to the glory days of Nickelodeon's gay subtext teencoms.

See also: Ned's Declassified School Survival Guide.; Garrett Clayton

When I was in high school, the neopagans, anarchists, stoners, and dungeons-and-dragons players all read The Lord of the Rings. The fundamentalists, Young Republicans, cheerleaders, and Junior Achievers all read The Chronicles of Narnia.

C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien were friends, but Tolkien never let his Roman Catholicism intrude into Middle Earth, while Lewis was a conservative Christian apologist whose Chronicles of Narnia (1950-1956) was distinctly theological, even though it was set in a Medieval fantasy world with swords and dragons.

I liked the first four books of the series, which starred the Pevensie children, Peter, Edmund, Susan, Lucy, and eventually their cousin Eustace. They enter Narnia in various ways to deal with the crisis at hand -- usually an evil woman who has wrested the throne from its rightful male heir -- and on the way one or the other experiences a personal redemption.

The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe: the White Witch, who has made it "always winter and never Christmas"

Prince Caspian: Caspian's evil uncle.
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Caspian (played by Ben Barnes, left, in the movie version) leads a quest for the end of the world.
The Silver Chair: a witch with a subterranean lair, who tries to convince them that there is no world outside.

I didn't like the last three:
The Horse and His Boy: anti-Muslim prejudice.
The Magician's Nephew: a silly tale of the creation of Narnia
The Last Battle: everybody dies!

Unlike Tolkien, C.S. Lewis was aware that gay people exist. One of his works (I forget which) discusses the proliferation of "the third sex" as a problem of modern culture, and in another, he states that maybe they don't all, necessarily, choose their "disability."

Maybe for that reason, there is no buddy-bonding or male-male rescueing in Narnia. The adventurers come in boy-girl pairs, which effectively eliminated buddy-bonding. Edmund (played by Skandar Keynes, left, in the movie version) and maybe Eustace are gay-vague: soft, prissy, non-athletic, beset-upon by allergies and the other problems of modern culture -- but they are redeemed, and become exact replicas of the other boys in the series.

But there is no hetero-romance either. The children -- and most of the adults -- remain blissfully asexual, lacking romantic or erotic interests of any sort. Marriages sometimes occur in afterthoughts ("And later he got married"), but in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, the four Pevensie children grow into adults, and become co-rulers of Narnia, without ever experiencing or desiring romance.

Those few people who are attracted to someone are evil --in The Magician's Nephew, evil Uncle Andrew finds the Witch "a dem fine woman." Or doomed -- in The Last Battle, Susan's interest in dating and romance bars her from Paradise.

The first few of the Chronicles have been filmed twice. The 1988-89 BBC series starred Richard Dempsey, Jonathan R. Scott, David Thwaites, and Samuel West. I didn't see it.

The 2005-2010 movie series starred William Moseley (left), Skandar Keynes, Will Poulter, and Ben Barnes. Executive producer Perry Moore (who died in 2011) was gay, and added some buddy-bonding between Eustace and Caspian. Not enough to incite audience interest.

See also: Shocking the Nazarenes with C.S. Lewis

Paris, Spring 1989

During my terrible semester teaching in Ankara, Turkey, my friend Alan the Pentecostal Porn Star sent me a airplane ticket to visit him in Paris.

Alan was my best friend in West Hollywood, fun but exhausting, rushing headlong from wild scheme to wild scheme, his frenetic energy making him constantly "up." No quiet nights at home, no nice safe museums or art galleries: lights! colors! music!

Plus he had no sense of tact, decorum, or the consequences of his actions.

But, it was Paris, after all. And I was anxious to see Alan again after six months.

He had put on a few pounds -- actually about 20, a victim of French sauces and limited gym facilities. But he still had the same frenetic energy, the same fervor -- and the same unbrindled erotic desire.

On the way into town on the Metro, he kept pointing out cute lycee boys, burly working-class men, languid immigrants, and timid tourists. "It's like a candy store, isn't it? So many men, so little time!"

He had a tiny one-room apartment on the fifth floor of a building on rue Chapon, in the heart of Le Marais, about two blocks from the Pompidou Center, walking distance from Notre Dame and the Louvre.

He didn't mention the gay Pentecostal church, his ostensible reason for moving to Paris: he had a job teaching literature at the American School went to the American Church on the Quai d'Orsay, and had a circle of friends, mostly ex-patriots. He showed every intention of staying in France permanently.

During the daytime, I was on my own. I had only been to Paris once before, so I did all the tourist things -- the Louvre, the Luxembourg Gardens, Montmartre, even the Eiffel Tower.

At night we cruised. Bathhouses, bars with back rooms, video stores with glory holes. A different one every night.

"I'm in vacation mode," I told Alan one morning at breakfast in a patisserie -- which, as the name implies, offered no choices that weren't 98% sugar. "So the West Hollywood rule against tricking doesn't apply. But you've been here six months. Have you been tricking every night?"

"It's another world," he said, chomping on an eclair. "Sex isn't something shameful -- it's an ordinary part of life. Did you know gay sex has been legal here since 1805? Guys think nothing of going into a bar with a dark room on the way home from work. Even straight guys, with wives and girlfriends waiting at home."

"Straight guys? You're kidding!"

"Boomer, straight and gay don't apply here. I swear to you, 80% of the men in this city are available right now, and the other 20% you have to buy a drink first. Come on -- point out a guy, anyone you like, and I'll bring him home for you tonight."

Yeah, right -- an ex-porn star would have no trouble picking up someone in a gay-owned patisserie full of gay men in the heart of Le Marais. But what about a straight guy out on the street?

"Ok -- what about -- him?" I pointed out the window at a police officer watching us suspiciously, to make sure no one was having sex.

He was undoubtedly cute, a square face, short hair, muscular chest, meaty arms, big bulge. But in 1989 the police were not our friend.

They were homophobes, out to arrest us for solicitation for saying "hello," lewd conduct for holding hands, sodomy for kissing. They stood around outside gay bars, hoping to intimidate people from going in. Even crime victims weren't safe from jeers, name-calling, and assaults.

A vice cop almost arrested Alan in the early 1980s. No way was he going to risk another arrest!.

Alan paled a little, but gained fortitude from another bite of eclair. "Not a problem, no problem at all. I'll just go invite him over after work tonight."

While I stared open mouthed, he walked out the door, walked right up to the cop went over and struck up a conversation. He pointed me out. The gendarme smiled and waved at me, and a moment later walked away.

Alan returned. "Ok, his name is Antoine, he gets off at 6:00, so he'll be at the apartment a little after. You'll be going down on him by 6:30."

I stared, open-mouthed.

"We won't go out to dinner until afterwards, ok?"

Was he putting me on?

"I have to get to work. See you tonight."

I went to the gym, the Lachaise Cemetery to see Oscar Wilde's grave, the Shakespeare and Company bookstore, Luxembourg Gardens (again), and finished up wandering around the Sorbonne, looking at the cute guys and thinking about my upcoming "trick."

Was Alan putting me on? Or would he bait and switch, picking up a guy who looked sort of like Antoine.

At a little after 6:00, I returned to the apartment.

Alan had pulled the couch out into a bed, and was sitting next to Antoine the Cop!

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

I hope Alan isn't reading these stories in the afterlife, or I'm in for a major haunting. He would hate being called a Pentecostal Porn Star. He didn't like talking about his porn career.

Actually, he didn't like talking about his past at all. Most guys in West Hollywood loved swapping stories about coming out, seducing a straight man, or seeing a celebrity penis, but Alan generally kept mum: "Who cares about the past? It's dead and gone. We're alive, we're young, we're in the greatest place in the world. This is our time to LIVE!"

Still, when he was tired and loaded up on sugary snacks, he could tell a good story. Here are his top 20 boyfriends, hookups, and back room exploits.

Alan was born two days before Halloween, 1956, under another name, in a small town near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. When he was ten years old, he began going to a Pentecostal church, got saved and filled with the Spirit, and began speaking in tongues.

1. The Pentecostal Boy. His first sexual experience was at age 16, with one of his Pentecostal buddies. Neither of them had any idea that gay people existed.

2. The Preacher at the Bathhouse. After graduating from high school in 1974, Alan enrolled in the ultra-fundamentalist Waynesburg College. He majored in either English or History, and played football to become more "macho." He also began going to the bathhouses of Pittsburgh, where he ran into the minister of his hometown Pentecostal church.

After he got his degree in either English or history, he told his parents that he was gay. They had a big blowup, and didn't speak to him for year. He moved to Los Angeles, and got a job teaching ESL to new immigrants.

3. The Son of a Gilligan's Island Star. One of his first boyfriends was David Johnson, son of Russell Johnson, the Professor on Gilligan's Island.

4. The Star of Land of the Lost. Alan made the rounds of closeted and semi-closeted celebrities, including Wesley Eure, who played the teenage son on the Saturday morning live-action series Land of the Lost.

5. Porn Star Kip Noll. He also began going to the bathhouses and bars of pre-AIDS Los Angeles. One night he met someone who, impressed by his size, introduced him to porn director William Higgins, who cast him in a movie about a boy who wanders around West Hollywood picking up guys.

6. The Football Coach. Later that year Alan starred in a movie about a football player. The exteriors were filmed at UCLA. While doing research, he met and began dating the football coach of a L.A.-area university. He wouldn't say which one, although I'm quite the name would mean nothing to us.

In all, Alan appeared in five porn movies.

7. The High School Boy. He got a job teaching English at a Catholic school, and began seeing one of his students -- after class, right in the classroom.

8. A Drag Queen Fairy Godmother. After a series of crises in the early 1980s, including getting fired from his teaching job, the death of a close friend, and a sexual assault by a vice cop, Alan turned "ex gay," proclaimed that God had "cured" him, and joined Homosexuals Anonymous. To prove to himself that he was really straight, he went to one of the dive bars in Hollywood and picked up a "woman" -- who turned out to be a drag queen.

In the morning he realized that God loves gay people after all. He retired from porn, changed his name to Alan, turned blond, grew a beard, and joined the gay-positive Metropolitan Community Church. He became Student Clergy.

9. The Norwegian Con Artist. Alan and I met in the fall of 1985. We dated briefly, until he dumped me for a Norwegian con artist (the relationship didn't last long). Then we became friends, and roommates for about a year.

10. The Bed-Hopping College Boy. In the summer of 1986, Alan returned to his old idea of becoming a missionary, with a gay twist: he moved to Japan to start a gay Pentecostal church, but returned to West Hollywood at the end of the summer. When I went to visit him, he picked up a college boy named Minoru, who kept switching between our beds all night.

11. My Celebrity Boyfriend. In the spring of 1987, I dated the Celebrity, a still-closeted former teen idol. Alan asked him out immediately after we broke up -- or maybe before -- and they dated twice.

12. The Kept Boy. Alan found three in a bed distracting, so he didn't do much "sharing." Our first "sharing" experience was accidental, with a kept boy who we didn't realize was drunk

13. The Father and Son. Alan moved to Thailand to start another gay Pentecostal church, and backslid into "God hates gays" before being cured by a trip to Pattaya. Before returning to the states, he took a weekend trip to Hong Kong, and picked up a father and son -- a biological father and son!

14. The Parisian Cop. In the fall of 1989, Alan moved to Paris to...well, start a gay Pentecostal church. But soon he gave up that idea, and became a permanent Parisian. When I came to visit, he picked up a Parisian cop.

15. The Lapp. The nice thing about Paris is, everyone in the world eventually gets around to visiting, including a member of the Sami people, the nomads of northern Scandinavia.

16. The Hong Kong Hustler. Alan loved Hong Kong, and visited as often as he could. Unfortunately, it didn't have quite the sexual freedom as Paris. In the summer of 1992, feeling deprived, he hired a hustler, and didn't practice safe sex.

A few months later, Alan discovered that he was HIV positive. Deeply depressed, he moved in with his sister in Norfolk, Virginia, became "ex gay" again, and cut off all contact with his former "sinful associates."

17. Sandy. Soon Alan changed his mind -- God loved gay people after all. He started going to the Norfolk Metropolitan Community Church, where he met Sandy: middle-aged, African-American, rather feminine, also a recovering Pentecostal. They eventually moved to Washington, DC, where they stayed together until the end of his life.

18. The Substitute. I visited them twice in the early 1990s, once in Norfolk and once in DC. Since becoming HIV positive, Alan insisted on monogamy -- no "sharing," not even with safe sex. But when I spent the night with them, they brought in a substitute. Ok, that's my scene, not Alan's.

19. The Colonial Williamsburg Boy. In New York in 1998, I met Barry, who grew up in Colonial Williamsburg and went to Howard University in DC. Turns out that he had dated Sandy in Norfolk, Ok, that's mine, too.

20. The Male Nurse. We gradually lost contact in the 1990s, as friends who live across a continent from each other do. But one day in the 2000s, Sandy called to tell me that Alan had died of AIDS-related cancer. He was in good spirits during his last days, content with his life and certain of his place in heaven. Almost his last words were "Isn't that male nurse hot?"

Alan LIVED until the end.

The uncensored post, with nude photos, is on Tales of West Hollywood.

Who isn't fascinated by lost civilizations and ancient mysteries? Stonehenge, the Palace at Knossos, Mayan temples, Easter Island, the serpent mounds of Ohio. But the museums usually hide the gay connections, and the tour guides skip over them, insisting that everyone in ancient times was heterosexual.

Not with the Rude Man of Cerne Abbas: his gay connection is visible for miles.

He's is a chalk figure of a 180-foot tall giant carved into a hillside in Dorsetshire, England. His disproportionately small head and curvy arms lead some people to believe that he is modeled after aliens who visited the neolithic Britons.

Neopagans believe that he is the image of an ancient Celtic god, or a Roman depiction of Hercules.

Most historians believe that he was carved during the English Civil War as a parody of notoriously conservative Oliver Cromwell.

But they can all agree on his best feature: a penis that extends 31 feet up against his chest.

Double the average penis/height ratio! The Icelandic Museum of the Penis has nothing like this.

Heterosexuals traditionally spent the night on the penis to ensure fertility, and gay men, because it's fun to spend the night on a giant penis.

You're not allowed to walk up onto it anymore.

The Rude Man is unique. The only other male hillside figure in England, the Long Man of Wilmington, lacks a penis (though he was "vandalized" with a 6-foot tall one in 2010).

He has been the subject of several songs, and used for everything from condom ads to a PSA about testicular cancer. When The Simpsons Movie premiered in 2007, a chalk figure of Homer Simpson appeared next to him.

In the series finale of the bromance comedy Men Behaving Badly (1997), Gary and Tony (Martin Clunes, Neil Morissey) must give up the sofa on which they've had so many adventures, and somehow they end up with it on the Rude Man. There's something touching about the long-term partners saying farewell on a giant penis.

The village of Cerne Abbas is about 25 miles from Glastonbury and 40 miles from Stonehenge, so you can easily see all three in a weekend.

Growing up in the shadow of his brother David, Shaun Cassidy began singing at the age of fourteen, but no one took him seriously until, at eighteen, he landed a role as cleancut teen sleuth Joe Hardy in The Hardy Boys Mysteries (1977-79), alongside Parker Stevenson’s Frank. The plots were simple: sleuthing, a touch of danger, followed by jokes and dazzling smiles, with ample swimsuit and shirtless scenes and the camera lingering lovingly on the teenage bodies. Endless teen magazine pin-up spreads followed.

Joe was frequently thrust into peril, tied up in old barns, menaced by madmen, in need of rescuing and subsequent hugging by his older brother or some other hunk. In a two-parter, wealthy rescuer Jocco Halsey (Kevin Brophy), invites Joe to move in with him.

And Joe rarely expressed any interest in girls. In “Campus Terror” (May 1978), guest star Valerie Bertinelli says “I love you,” and Joe responds dryly: "You've had a long day.” What gay boy could afford to miss such a revelation?

Unlike many Tiger Beat fave raves, Shaun actually had a brief singing career; between 1977 and 1979, his albums went platinum, and his singles topped the charts. A surprising number of his songs were gender-ambiguous, and "You're Using Me" even alluded to a relationship with a boy.

The cover of the album Room Service (1979) shows Shaun in a hotel room, smiling invitingly at the voyeur who peers through the Venetian blinds. The voyeur's gender is ambiguous (though, if you look very carefully, you can see sharp fingernails). Shaun seems to be openly acknowledging the romantic interest of both male and female teens.

Teen idol careers are brief. Shaun tried reinventing himself as a hard rocker, complete with leather pants bulge, but still, his star faded by 1980, and he moved into writing and production. He’s been married to women three times, but he (like his brothers David, Patrick, and Ryan) remains a gay ally.

See also: Trying to Escape Church

Spanish class didn't offer a huge selection of teenage adventurers with boyfriends, or teen magazines featuring frontal nudity, but it did give gay students some spectacular beefcake and a Batman and Robin-like adult-juvenile relationship.

Kaliman, el Hombre Increible, an orphan adopted by Prince Abul Pasha of Kalimantan, Indonesia, grew up to immensely muscular, gifted with magical powers, and dedicated to fighting injustice.

He first appeared on Mexican radio in 1963 (where his program still runs), and soon moved into weekly comic books. Over 1,000 issues have been published to date. There is also a Colombian version read throughout Latin America.

Kaliman wears a turban emblazoned with a K and an all-white outfit, though he often takes his shirt off before fighting the bad guys.

He has antecedents in Mandrake the Magician and other magical superheroes of the pulps, but he is a distinctly Latin American creation, with the colorful enemies -- the vampires, aliens, mad scientists, and evil cultists -- that one would expect of a Santo or Blue Demon.

Sometimes he rescues attractive women, but he rarely expresses any romantic interest in any of them.

Most often he rescues his youthful companion, Solin, whom he picked up in ancient Egypt. Solin's age is not specified, but he looks 12-14. Because he is depicted with black curly hair and a cute girlish face, because he wears eyeliner and mascara, and because he becomes "the damsel in distress" nearly as often as Robin, fan fiction writers sometimes transform him into a girl.

But when he must rescue Kaliman or perform some other act of bravery, Solin proves more than capable. There are hints that he will take over the job of protecting the world from evil when Kaliman retires.

There have been two movies (1972, 1976), with a third in the works. Kaliman was played by the American Jeff Cooper, who unfortunately wasn't as buffed as his comic book counterpart.

Solin was played by Nino del Arco and Manuel Bravo.

You know my history with graphic novels -- growing up with comic books, I keep wanting to like them, but they always turn out to be the depressing angst-ridden memoirs of Millennials, and immensely heterosexist, with The Girl as the goal of every journey.

But I've heard so much about the Sandman series, by Neil Gaiman -- it's complex, woven in with mythologies, philosophical, cool -- “Expansive and atmospheric, jammed with brainy, contemplative moments and dry humor...stunning, gorgeous artwork."

And Joseph Gordon-Levitt is scheduled to play the Sandman in the movie version.

So when the "Overture" of the series came out recently, I bought it, figuring it would be a good introduction, plus something stunningly great. So I forked over my $15.00, got the hardcover, read the cover blurbs: "Gorgeous from start to finish": "A sweeping and extravagant prequel."

And opened it.

Remember, I have almost a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature. I speak three languages. I've read James Joyce, William Faulkner, T. S. Eliot. I know all about Derrida, Foucault, and Baudrillard.

I'm really, really smart.

So I opened it...and...

WTF?????

Terrible is not the right word. Terrible implies that there's something to evaluate. There's nothing here to read. I can't make out the meaning of a single one of the images --- and there are hundreds of every page. Or the self-important purple prose.

1. A planet full of sentient plants that never dream start dreaming of death.

2. In London in 1815, a businessman named Ian Stuart receives a mysterious visitor who tells him that he brings news, but not about his brother.

3. Destiny of the Endless (that's his name) gets a visit from his sister, who is worried about Dream, a hundred galaxies away.

4. George Portcullis, who has a portcullis instead of a face, gets a mysterious visitor, the Corinthian, who he sends to see the Master, who tells him that he won't get a trial.

5. Sigmund Freud talks to a pumpkin-headed man.

6. Lucien is pulled "halfway across the universe in the one fraction of forever." A group of people and a giant cat, who are all him, ask "What kept you."

And that's just the first ten pages. It goes on like that.

All I can figure out is, something bad is happening in the universe.

And the goal of every journey is Hugging Naked Ladies.

The Dream of the Endless, and a giant cat who is also the Dream of the Endless, plus the daughter of a dead blue guy, go on a journey to...somewhere.

Dream hugs and kisses a lady, whose name is Delight, and "makes a world" for another lady, who is also Delight.

Then a chapter happens with people talking.

Then Dream hugs another lady, named Dusk.

Then the giant cat talks to a giant bird lady.

And another lady, who is probably Desire and Delight and Dusk, discovers that "in the grand dance of creation and destruction, the worlds are ending and she is there for all of them."

Dream gets naked to roll around in agony in the endless night: rather skinny, with a good sized penis.

Then "there is nothing but the circle and the dark"

And a grey alien lies "deep beneath the ground, in a room lit by candles," and "it begins."

WTF?????

I'd rather read a 60-year old Tarzan comic.

Or James Joyce.

Norfolk, Virginia, Summer 1993

After our horrible trip to London for a gay Jewish conference on the Isle of Dogs, Lane flies back to West Hollywood. I stop in Norfolk, Virginia, to spend a few days with my old friend Alan.

As the plane crosses Chesapeake Bay and descended into Norfolk, I become very, very nervous.

We were best friends for years, in spite of his globetrotting, to Japan, Thailand, and France. Then last summer he sent a long letter detailing how he had "repented of his sinful lifestyle" and couldn't hang out with his old "sinful associates" anymore.

I figured we were through.

In December he sent me another letter, bright and cheery but very brief: "I'm living in Norfolk, Virginia. It's beautiful here -- I've never been happier. Can you come and visit? You can stay with me and Sandy."

Ok, I know Alan has an older sister -- is her name Sandy? I can't remember. Or is he still "ex gay," with a girlfriend? Or a beard?

Still, I hate losing friends. I promised to come after the Isle of Dogs conference. And reserved a hotel room, just in case.

What am I getting myself into? I wonder. Five days of homophobic Bible-thumping? Five days of hanging out with a gay guy trying to pretend that he's straight?

Alan meets me at the gate. Blue button-down shirt, white pants. His earring is gone. He's lost a lot of weight -- he's thin, almost gaunt, and old -- he is only 37, but he looks about 60. Yet I still see the vibrancy in his eyes the joie-de-vivre, in his bright smile.

He wraps his arms around me and hugs me. It feels like old times.

"Come on -- we'll go on a little tour of the town, and then I'll take you home. Sandy is cooking dinner."

Sandy is...cooking dinner? I get an image of a 1950s housewife in an apron and pearls, checking the potroast. Has Alan become Ward Cleaver?

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

No matter how you guard against it, if you live in the United States, sooner or later you will be forced to watch a football game.

It's a national obsession, especially among heterosexual men. It's all they think of from August through February, and they believe that it's all you think of, too. So you will be interrogated on favorite teams, favorite players, favorite plays, asked how the game went last night, and invited to watch.

Of course, there are reasons you may want to hang out with guys who watch football. They tend to be more muscular than your run-of-the-mill straight guy, and they like hugging and grabbing each other at every point.

The snacks are good, too.

If you go to or watch all of the available football games played from August to February, you will devote 12 hours a day, every day, to The Game. No one can do all of that, so straight guys usually confine themselves to one game per day, and read the newspaper or watch ESPN to find out the other scores, so they can discuss them incessantly with their friends.

1. Professional football is played by members of the NFL (National Football League), which is divided into two conference of 16 teams each. Each team will play 24 games during the season, plus a playoff to decide who is best in each conference.

That's a lot of games, but don't despair. You just need to memorize who won in the last few games played by teams from cities in your state (or, to be on the safe side, adjoining states). Unfortunately, the two conferences aren't divided by geography, so you'll just have to scan to find them.

For instance, when I lived in Dayton, masquerading as heterosexual only required me to know about the Cincinnati Bengals, the Cleveland Browns, and maybe, to be on the safe side, the Indianapolis Colts. Now I live on the Plains, so all I have to know about are the Minnesota Vikings, and to be on the safe side, the Green Bay Packers and the Chicago Bears.

Memorize the names of the some of main players -- called quarterbacks -- so you can ask "How did ___ do last night?" For the Minnesota Vikings, that's Teddy Bridgewater and Christian Pounder.

The Superbowl, in January or February, is the big event of the year, with the best teams of the two conferences squaring off. You should know who won for the last five years: Seattle Seahawks, Baltimore Ravens, New York Giants, Green Bay Packers, New Orleans Saints.

2. You should also know something about college football. Colleges are divided into four Divisions by the National College Athletic Association (NCAA). You only have to know about Division 1, the 128 biggest colleges, which is divided into 11 Conferences. Unfortunately, they're not divided by geography, either, so figure out the ones that are closest to you (in Minnesota, the Golden Gophers).

You also might want to know about the Big Ten, which actually has 15 members: Illinois, Iowa, Indiana, Michigan State, Minnesota, and so on.

Be careful around Christmastime: that's when the various conferences decide which team is better at "bowl" tournaments, and there are dozens of them, most with silly commercial names: The Hyundai Sun Bowl, the AutoZone Liberty Bowl, the Chick-fil-a Peach Bowl, etc.

Straight guys will be following all of them, but the only you really need to know about is the Rose Bowl (January 1st), in which the Big Ten and the Pacific-12 conferences pair off.

3. If you're ready for the advanced stuff, try showing off your knowledge of high school football! They are divided up into divisions and ranks, too.

Rock Island High School, my alma mater, is nationally ranked at 7120 and state ranked at 217. It's in the Western Big Six.

Do you have a headache yet?

Think of it this way: all of the statistics, rankings, divisions, and conferences boil down to a group of extremely muscular men piling up on each other, grabbing each other's butts, adjusting their crotches, and then getting naked in the locker room.

Almost makes it all worthwhile.

See also: Hating Sports.

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 to Pairs and Punks to Urinals.

The uncensored photos are on Tales of West Hollywood.

Both of my parents grew up on farms, and everybody who finds out that I'm from Illinois makes a crack about farming, so I've never found country boys particularly exciting. I was always into short, dark-skinned, muscular, not tall, chunky, and Anglo-pale.

Besides, I spent my childhood trying to avoid football, pick up trucks, country western music, hunting, fishing, and beer Why would I want to hang out with someone interested in those things?

Still, country boys are often attractive, perhaps due to their hard iconic masculinity.

And the gay ones are so unexpected. What causes someone to resist the siren call of West Hollywood and spend his life amid the vast fields?

Here are my top 12 country boys dates and hookups.

Texas

1. Tuscaloosa Two-Step. On my way south from Rock Island to my horrible year in Hell-fer-Sartain, Texas, I stopped in Oxford, Mississippi, and in one of my few experiences in street cruising, picked up a University of Mississippi undergrad named Elmer (really)

2. Carl the Cowboy Cop. Texas had fewer country boys than one would expect, though lots of guys pretended to be. Carl was 6'8, lanky, blond, and from a ranch near Abilene. On our first date, he bought me a pair of cowboy boots and took me country-western line dancing.

West Hollywood

3. The Cowboy of Sunset Boulevard was actually a college music major from the San Fernando Valley, but he pretended to be a cowboy, and hit it off on my Montana-born roommate, Derek.

4. Frozen Custard and Gay Bashing. During my semester in Nashville, I got a date with a country boy who wanted to go through my photo album, insisted that we didn't do it in the bed near the open window. And smoked.

5. The Country Western Singer, also in Nashville. At least, a singer. Adter I crammed Country-Western into my brain to impress him, he turned out to be into pop.

6. The Nebraska Cornhusker. In 1995, Lane and I took a road trip from West Hollywood to Rock Island: The Great Redneck Roundup, 20 hookups in 20 days. But few actual country boys. A highlight was the Nebraska Cornhusker, a former football player who now worked as a college recruiter, and had three of the six characteristics of Country Boys.

7. The Honest-to-Goodness Cowboy of Missoula, Montana, another highlight of our He made his living in rodeos.

New York

8. The Bear Who Wasn't into Sharing. My boyfriend Joe's ex, a carpenter who lived in rural Rhinebeck, New York. We thought he wasn't into sharing, and he thought Joe wasn't, until two of his friends convinced us otherwise.

9. The Football Player Who Got Unstuck In Time, Carey the Alabama Farm Boy who was going to the University of Alabama, and got lost on a field trip to New York, either in 1939 or 2000.

Florida

10. The Florida Cowboy. Did you know that there were ranches in Florida? The ranchers are called "cowhunters" or "crackers." But the tall, buffed guy that Yuri and I shared actually worked on an alpaca ranch. Fortunately, Yuri dated him long enough to be invited on a tour.

11. Tucumcari Two-Step. When I was visiting Larry in New Mexico, I met a guy from Tucumcari, on old Route 66. He had never heard of the tv series.

Ohio

Not a lot of country boys in Ohio.

Upstate

12. The French Canadian Farmboy. When I took Troy to Montreal to go to his first glory hole, he hooked up with Max. Troy was impressed that he was an actual, honest-to-goodness farmer.

Plains

13, The Dakota Boy. When I went to a Pow-Wow, I expected to meet a member of the Dakota Indian Nation, but instead I got a farmboy of German ancestry. Cute, though.

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

Norfolk, Virginia, Summer 1993

"Ok, time for my most memorable Hong Kong pickup," Alan says.

I'm visiting Alan and his partner and their friend Tarik in Norfolk. Today we drove out to Colonial Williamsburg. Now we're having a very healthy vegetarian dinner and swapping stories of sexual exploits in days gone by.

"Picture it: seven million people crammed into 426 square miles. 7 of the tallest buildings in the world. Over 50 shopping malls, including Harbor City, with over 700 stores."

"It sounds awful," I complain. "Everything I hate about big cities, the reason I prefer small-town gay neighborhoods."

"You don't know what you're missing. The lights, the color, the shopping. The 3.5 million Chinese men..."

"The 15 hour plane flight..." his partner Sandy continues..

"Not to mention the horrific anti-sodomy laws," Tarik adds. "Life imprison for gay sex, not repealed until last year."

Alan glares at him. "Need I remind you that your beloved state of Virginia still makes gay sex a felony? That doesn't stop the guys down on Granby Street from cruising everybody in sight."

Hong Kong, Summer 1990

Alan was living in Paris. Anxious to meet some Asian men, he spent his vacation in Hong Kong, shopping and sightseeing.

Gay culture in Hong Kong wasn't well developed -- very few organizations, only three gay bars, only one very unsatisfactory bathhouses. But street cruising was an art in itself. Beaches, malls, parks were teaming with men, Chinese and Western, gay and straight. Most were available, some for free, some for pay.

One day he went sunbathing at Middle Bay Beach, where a lot of local gays hung out. He saw a cute Chinese twink with an older white guy, who was pretending to be asleep.

The rest of the story is too explicit for Boomer Beefcake and Bonding. But it involves the older guy and his son.

You can read it on Tales of West Hollywood.

Andrew Keegan Breaks Boys' Hearts

The Great Redneck Roundup: 20 Days, 20 Hookups

Little Max: A Gay Father in 1950s Comic Books

Which Incident Happened without Exaggeration?

Summer 2005: Searching for Beefcake at a Slovak Waterpark

Country Boy Hookup #1: The Nebraska Football Player

From Muscle Beach to the Cimarron Strip: TV Westerns

100 Things To Do Before High School: New Nickelodeon Teencom with Major Hunkage

The Chronicles of Narnia

Spring 1989: Alan Cruises a Cop

The Top 20 Scenes of Alan the Pentecostal Porn Star

The Hillside Penis of Cerne Abbas

Shaun Cassidy: Not Just David Cassidy's Little Brother

Kaliman and Solin: Magician and Boy Pal

Neil Gaiman's Sandman: The Goal of Every Journey

Summer 1993: I visit Alan, his Partner, and his Boy Toy

How to Survive a Football Game

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

13 Country Boys, Cowboys, Farmboys, Truckers, and Rednecks

Alan Picks Up a Father and Son