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What Kind of Flower are You: Queer Boys of the 1920s
Before World War II, teenage boys were not expected to like girls. At Everett High School in Washington, most of the boys in the graduating class in 1925 are memorialized in their yearbook with manly...
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Sean and the World of Gay Leathermen
During the 1960s and 1970s, gay men carved niches for themselves, separate neighborhoods where they could be free from homophobic harassment, separate social institutions to replace those they were...
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Grit: Beefcake and Bonding in an Attic in Rural Indiana
Every summer, and sometimes at Christmas, we visited my Grandma Davis in Indiana. She had an attic full of old magazines, and my brother and I used to spend rainy afternoons there, leafing through...
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Mark-Paul Gosselaar: Saved by the Bell
Mario Lopez has been unfailingly pro-gay (except for a tweet proclaiming his love for love for Chick-Fil-A, which was quickly removed). But what about his Saved by the Bell buddy Mark-Paul...
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Grandpa Is Hit On by a High School Boy
Castro Street, July 2014I'm back in San Francisco, Gay Heaven, visiting my friend David for a week.When I met David in 1996, he was 43 years old, newly out, with a wife and children back home. He had...
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The Homophobic Small-Town Manhattan of "Friends"
Friends (1994-2004) was set in the same intimate, "small town" Manhattan as Seinfeld. But it lacked the New York color -- it could have been set in any big city -- not to mention the witty dialogue,...
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Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike
Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike is a 2012 comedy by Christopher Durang that brings Chekhov and beefcake to rural Bucks County, Pennsylvania.If you need to know the plot:Vanya and Sonia are a middle...
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Dierich Bouts: Medieval Beefcake Painter
A scary monster is carrying away a naked guy. I guess we're supposed to feel terror, but when I was a kid and saw this painting in my friend Greg's house, the only thing I could think of was "I can...
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Grandpa Hooks Up with Witch of the Lake of the Woods
Rome City, Indiana, December 1975My Grandma Davis died last month. We're back in Indiana, staying with Aunt Nora while the family works on settling her estate. My brother and I are going through a box...
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A Sausage Sighting of a Straight Elitist Professor
Plains, May 20168:45 am. I go to a seminar on teaching writing, led by a philosophy professor named Taylor. There's no space left at the conference table, so I have to sit all by myself in a little...
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St. Florian, the Patron Saint of Firefighters and Beefcake Fans
I'm not much for the veneration of the saints -- Nazarenes abhored such "idolatry." But I could get behind St. Florian, usually portrayed shirtless, with a massive, sculpted chest.Here his chest is ink...
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Laocoon and His Sons: Beefcake Through the Ages
Laocoön was a priest who angered Apollo or Poseidon during the Trojan War, and as punishment the god sent sea serpents to kill him and his two sons. Variations of his story, with different plots, were...
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Jean the Violinist of the Bains d'Odessa
In the spring of 2004, I went to Europe for my usual Paris-Brussels-Amsterdam circuit, and dropped in to the Bains d'Odessa, near the Luxembourg Gardens.There wasn't much activity going on in the late...
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The Indus River Civilization of Ancient Pakistan
The Indus Valley Civilization was lost until 1912, when British archaeologists stumbled upon seals in an unknown language from the village of Harappa, now in Pakistan.Excavations revealed two huge...
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The Beefcake Art of Velazquez
In school, when you learned about Diego Velazquez (1599-1660), the great painter of the Spanish Golden Age, your teacher probably talked about how he introduced realism into the heavily stylized world...
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The Unbearable Movie about the Unbearable Lightness of Being
When hetero literature majors start gushing that a book is a masterpiece, the best thing ever written, you know you're in for heterosexist "boy meets girl as the meaning of life!" drivel. When I was in...
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The Rich Kid and the Muscle Bear
Louisville, Kentucky, April 1984I was at Indiana University to get my M.A. in English, but on a campus that offered Elementary Lithuanian, Sufi Poets, Mongolian Civilization, and Serbo-Croatian Epics,...
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The Florida Cowboy with the Footlong
Sebring, Florida, February, 2004A Saturday morning. Yuri bursts into my room at 6:00 am."Time to get up!" he exclaims. "We must go soon. Jake has many plans for us today.""Jake...what? Who?" I...
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Yuri and I Share the Boy Toy and His Daddy
Wilton Manors, February 2004The main rule about sharing boyfriends and hookups was: a couple brought in a third person. During the 1980s, it was always romantic partners bringing in a close friend or...
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Shane Haboucha
Shane Haboucha got off to a bad start. In the music video "Stacey's Mom," the 13-year old played a kid obsessed with the breasts of his school friend's mother.Nothing for gay boys to like in that,...
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