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Edward and Jacob: Twilight's Power Couple
The Twilight novels and movie series have taken the media vampire to a whole new level. There were lots of sexy, tortured bad-boy vampires before, on Dark Shadows and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, in the...
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Sam & Cat: The Gayest Show on Children's TV
Nickelodeon has been rather skimpy in the gay subtext department for the past few years, after the glory days of Ned's Declassified School Survival Guide, Fairly Oddparents, and Drake and Josh. Other...
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Cameron Monaghan: Being Not-Gay is a Choice
I've never seen Shameless, the long-running British series (2004-) or its American counterpart (2011-), about the antiheroic Frank Gallagher and his sociopathic brood. One of his "problems" is a gay...
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The Boy Band Project: Homophobia and Beefcake
The Boy Band Project, previous Invasion, is, according to their tumblr site: "ready to invade the hearts of screaming Girls all over the World." Later it says: "Ladies and gentlemen, boys and...
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A Secret Message at Washington Junior High
One Saturday in the summer of 1974, just after eighth grade, the sky was clear and bright, the air smelled like new lilacs, and the grass was sprinkled with dandelions. Darry had the flu and was too...
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Richard Denning: The Hunk from the Black Lagoon
I stumbled across this photo on the internet -- a blond hunk in a leopard skin loincloth, carrying a phallic knife. I thought I knew all of the Tarzans and Tarzan clones who swung from the trees...
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Beerfest: Gay-Positive Guys Behaving Badly
The first thing you notice about Beerfest (2006) is the lack of emphasis on female breasts. The DVD cover zeroes in on the breasts of a fraulein serving beer, but in the movie itself, the frauleins...
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Kidz Bop: Teaching Kids Homophobia since 2000
Have you seen those commercials for Kidz Bop? They're an ever-changing group of preteens who have been covering contemporary pop songs in albums sold via tv commercials and box stores. For instance,...
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Cody Simpson and His Gay Crew
When I was little, I thought of Australia as a "good place," where same-sex desire was open and accepted. Visiting Australia in the summer of 1986 didn't change my mind. But I might have to change it...
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The Pajama Game: 1950s Beefcake
There once was a man who loved a womanShe was the one he slew a dragon for.The American musical has traditionally been a vehicle for unvarnished heterosexism, two interspliced boy-meets-girl plotlines...
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What the Graffiti Meant
After reading my post on "The Secret Message at Washington Junior High," you probably thought that the graffiti "Brian gives free LBJs" referred to some sort of sexual act. I turned it into a sexual...
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Richard Bennett: The Unknown Bodybulder
During the Golden Age of Bodybuilding, when Physique Pictorial and many other magazines were distributing semi-nude (and nude) photos of musclemen to a worldwide, mostly gay male audiences, a...
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Kissing a Boy Under the Mistletoe
In junior high, Brian was on the outer edges of my social circle, really one of my brother's friends.. We never hung out. And when I was in high school, he moved with his parents to Bettendorf,...
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Adam Irigoyen: Disney Teen Operator
Adam Irigoyen, #10 on my list of Unexpected Disney Channel Teen Hunks, plays Deuce Martinez on Shake It Up (2010-2013), about a group of aspiring dancers. Deuce is a teen operator who works at the...
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The Anita Bryant Spectacular: A Hate-Fest That Nobody Watched
Singer Anita Bryant was never a superstar in the mainstream market: only two songs in the Billboard Top 10, half a dozen in the top 100, a few appearances on Ed Sullivan, Red Skelton, Art Linkletter,...
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My Celebrity Boyfriend
When I moved to West Hollywood in 1985, I found that half of the residents were aspiring actors, directors, writers, models, dancers, or singers. Most of my friends and acquaintances had been in...
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Criminal Lovers: Heterosexist Postmodern Fairy Tale
Criminal Lovers, or Les Amants Criminels (1999), directed by Francois Ozon, was advertised heavily in gay publications and in the gay-specific TLA Video. But it's an aggressively, unabashedly...
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Dick York: Bewitching Beefcake
I imagine that most gay male and heterosexual female Baby Boomers have been desperate to see Dick York with his shirt off ever since their diaper days, when they saw him eye-bulge as Darren Stephens,...
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Meeting a Boy in the Girls' Locker Room
Bill and I began to drift apart in junior high, when we took different classes and joined different clubs. We still hung out, but we never slept over, and I think both of us were actively looking for...
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Summer 1965: The Bodybuilder on the Beach
Heterosexuals are allowed to just "be," their glancing at girls or boys presumed instinctive, universal, unquestionable, as inevitable as sunrise, unworthy of comment but worthy of constant praise....
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