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African Muscle #3: Southern Africa
Time for more appreciation of the masculine beauty of sub-Saharan Africa, this time the south. 1. Angola, on the south west coast, is a former Portuguese colony, and Portuguese is still the first...
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42: Shower Scenes and Gay Symbolism, but No Doug Adams
I was drawn to a movie entitled 42, because it's the answer to "life, the universe, and everything" in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I figured it was new adaption of Hitchhiker's Guide, or a...
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Black Lightning is Back
Black Lightning is back.That's the premise of the new Netflix series based on an obscure DC comics character from the 1970s. The only problem is, Black Lightning has never appeared on screen before,...
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Searching for Beefcake in the Nazarene Vatican City
I grew up in the Church of the Nazarene, a hardcore fundamentalist denomination: no movies, dancing, mixed swimming, alcohol, eating in restaurants that served alcohol, eating out on Sunday, working on...
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Bomba the Jungle Boy
Johnny Sheffield began playing Boy, adopted son to Johnny Weissmuller's iconic Tarzan, in 1939, when he eight years old, and finished in 1947, when he had grown bigger, taller, and far more muscular...
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Andrew Stevens, Teen Idol
No teen idol of the 1970s was better at re-inventing himself than Andrew Stevens. 1. A cute teenager, subtly muscular, with shaggy hair and a goofy smile, for "heartwarming" roles as cute or wounded...
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Richard Sandrak, the Strongest Boy in the World
Born in 1992 in the Ukraine, to fitness enthusiasts Pavel and Lena Sandrak, Richard Sandrak began working out at age three. By 2000, when he was eight years old, he had a personal trainer, and was...
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Modern Tarzans
Tarzan, Edgar Rice Burroughs' literary creation, was wildly popular in the 1930s and 1940s, appearing on the radio, in comic strips, and in now-classic movies, and inspiring a host of imitations. His...
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Not Wearing a Sign
"How dare you say that Tony Danza on Taxi was gay? Or the guys in Orange County or Jaws? Or Yogi Bear and Boo Boo? You're reading too much into it! The authors never intended that!"I hear...
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The Tarzan Twins
Edgar Rice Burroughs gave Tarzan a son, Korak, but he grew up in the fourth novel, The Son of Tarzan (1915).To cater to the kid market, he came up with a new duo, The Tarzan Twins.Dick and Doc were not...
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Dodge City: The Ghosts of the Past
Dodge City, Kansas doesn't sound like a wild west town. It's 150 miles from Wichita, with Nebraska directly north. But it was a center of the cattle trade, and it had more gunslingers per capita than...
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Asian Muscle #2: The Middle East
When I was a kid, National Geographic published a map of "Peoples and Cultures of the Middle East." It was on my bedroom wall for years -- hearing nothing on tv except sheiks with white robes and...
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Bunduki: A Tarzan Clone in Zillikian
If you're a Tarzan purist, trying to collect everything about the Lord of the Junble, you might want to pick up (but not read) Bunduki, a series about "the fearless lord of the jungle" by J.T. Edson...
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The Beefcake of Batesville
Batesville, about an hour's drive southeast of Indianapolis, has always given me a weird ghoulish vibe, maybe because of the Bates Motel in Psycho (which was actually in California).And because of the...
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Superman: You'll Believe a Man Can Fly
Superman first flew in 1938, and for the next 40 years he had comic books, movie serials, cartoons, and radio and tv series, but no feature films. Nor, for that matter, did any superhero except for...
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10 Swim Team Mysteries
In my quest for small-town beefcake, I've accumulated a lot of photos of small-town high school and college swim teams posing for the camera. Most of them are straightforward, a row of guys in speedos...
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Scappoose, Oregon: Not a Beefcake Bonanza
Scappoose is on the Columbia River about 20 miles north of Portland, Oregon. It has a good view of Mount St. Helens, about 40 miles away. There aren't many jobs, so most people live there and work in...
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Searching for Moroccan Beefcake
Who isn't fascinated by Morocco? Rabat, Fez, Tangiers, Marrakesh, the Beat Generation, Mohamed Choukri, the Berber language, Darija (a dialect of Arabic so distinct from Standard that it's not even...
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The Adamites: No Private Property, Marriage, or Clothes
The Adamites were an early Christian sect that tried to restore the innocence of Adam and Eve by not wearing clothes, especially during their religious services, and by abolishing marriage and having...
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The Bodybuilders of the Eastern Edge of the Universe
When I was growing up in Rock Island, the western edge of my world was Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and the eastern edge was Lasalle-Peru, about 90 miles away. I knew Interstate 80 east to Chicago, of course,...
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