Millions of Baby Boomer kids got their first glimpse of beefcake on Star Trek (1966-69) where, week after week, Captain Kirk would take his shirt off to fight alien monsters or kiss alien babes. I didn't find him attractive -- he was too smug, too leery, and way too hetero.
Shatner continued to play Kirk in movies and parodies for 40 years, but he also appeared in a wide variety of movies and tv series, including starring roles in T. J. Hooker, Boston Legal, and Sh** My Dad Says.
Married four times, with a notorious eye for the ladies, Shatner has no gay rumors, that I know of. George Takei, who played Sulu on Star Trek, reveals that the entire cast and crew knew that he was gay, except Shatner: "it went right over his head." For him, gay people simply did not exist.
But in his early days, Shatner was quite different.
Wilton was 16 years old (model is over 18), a sophomore at West Hill High School in Montreal, and an aspiring journalist -- he had already published a poem about the War.
Physically, he was not so hot -- a tall stringbean, pushing through puberty with oversized hands and feet, oily skin, and constant horniness.
He didn't know that gay people were defined as "criminal psychopaths" in the Canadian penal code. He didn't even know that gay people exist.
But he knew that Johnny Sheffield in a loincloth in Tarzan and the Huntress made him feel all hot and flushed.
And he had a picture of Alan Ladd with his shirt off hidden in a desk drawer in his room.
And he liked looking at the football players. Some of them were nice, saying "hello" to him in the hallway and collaborating with him on class assignments, but many of them were jerks.
Bill Shatner was a jerk.
Wilton had to admit that he was cute, with that curly reddish-brown hair and that bright Pepsodent smile. But he was a money-hungry, mercenary, soulless cog in the Cold War machine. He wasn't interested in acting then, although he had done some children's theater. He was all about money and getting rich -- offensive to Wilt's artistic sensibility. He planned to get a football scholarship to McGill, major in economics, then start his own business.
But it wasn't just our difference in temperament. He strutted around like he owned the place. He wasn't even a star...he played an offensive end -- that's a minor position, but it made him a regular Jim Thorpe, in his own mind anyway. Wilton had him in bio and French together, but you'd never know it.
When he was in a good mood, he ignored Wilton, walked right past like he was a ghost. And God forbid he was in a bad mood -- he'd make with the nonstop jokes about Wilton's height, his acne, calling him ugly and a fruit, asking if he had pubic hair yet.
The full story, with nude photos and explicit sexual situations, is on Tales of West Hollywood.