Clik here to view.
Easy Bake Ovens and Gay Identity
In response to a 13-year old boy's video that went viral, Hasbro has just announced that it will begin selling Easy-Bake Ovens in neutral colors, with ads showing boys as well as girls. This is a...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Physique-Watching at the County Fair
I've been to three county fairs in the last month. Not that I'm complaining -- they're a major source of summertime beefcake, as well as a fascinating glimpse into a different world.Fairs originated...
View ArticleClik here to view.
More Beefcake Photos of Tony Dow
Tony Dow (1945-) who played big brother Wally on the iconic 1950s sitcom Leave It to Beaver, was one of the few teen idols of the period to regularly be photographed shirtless. He was already an...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Bowery Billy and his Boyfriend Lulu
I knew that boys' adventure series of the 1920s (such as the Hardy Boys) usually involved teenage same-sex pairs with a passion, exclusivity, and domesticity you would never see today: gay partners in...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Philip Jose Farmer: Gay Sci-Fi with Muscles
When I was in college, you couldn't walk into Adam's Bookstore at the Augustana Student Union or Readmore Book World downtown without seeing a dozen sci-fi novels by Philip Jose Farmer (1918-2009) on...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Beverly Hillbillies
The Beverly Hillbillies, one of the 1960s line of hayseed comedies (others included Petticoat Junction, Green Acres, Gomer Pyle, and The Andy Griffith Show), slogged on from 1962 to 1971, and your...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Hogan Family
During the 1980s, the buzzword was "family values," which meant that only people who had heterosexual nuclear families had value. We heard again and again that the only life worth living involved...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Duke University Beefcake
Duke University in Durham, North Carolina is the Harvard of the South, with an 11% acceptance rate and tuition of $53,000. The Duke University Press publishes impenetrable, jargon-heavy books with...
View ArticleClik here to view.
"Open Up the Closet Door": The Theme Song of 300 Nights in a Leather Bar
In West Hollywood, gay bars always had a theme song that you would hear over and over, at least once an hour, every time you visited.From 1985 to 1993, I went to Mugi, the Asian bar in Hollywood,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Small Town Swim-Team Twins
After posting on the four twins wrestling for Duke University, I started looking for more twins who competed on wrestling or swim teams together.Turns out that twins often choose the same activities...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Kim's Convenience: Gay People are the Problem of the Week
Kim's Convenience (2016-) which just appeared on Netflix, is a popular Canadian sitcom adaption of a play that has run since 2011. It's about a Korean-Canadian family running a convenience store in a...
View ArticleClik here to view.
High School and College Wrestling Twins
I had so much success with swim team twins that I tried it out with wrestlers: twins on the same wrestling team in high school or college, preferably posed together in their singlets.There are quite a...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Top 10 Physiques at a Travel Plaza on the Toll Road
In Illinois and Iowa, highway rest stops have trees and grass, and sometimes hiking trails. In Indiana and Ohio, they have a different idea: travel plazas. No trees, no grass, nowhere to walk except...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Martin Spanjers: 8 Simple Rules for Playing Gay
In case you're wondering who this boy is who showers wearing a towel and seems very happy to be looking at the muscular adult hunk, his name is Martin Spanjers, and he was playing the teenage Rory on...
View ArticleClik here to view.
"Play by Play": Girls are the Meaning of Life, Yet Again
We've had nostalgia-trip tv series about the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, so I guess it's about time for a "coming of age" tv series about a heterosexual guy looking back on his childhood in the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Spring 1973: My Date Must Be a Boy
When I was growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, heterosexual desire was assumed a constant, a universal of human experience. Same-sex desire was not only never mentioned, it could not be mentioned.It...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Top 10 Teen Idols in the World
I grew up in the golden age of teen idols: David Cassidy, Shaun Cassidy, Robbie Benson, Bobby Sherman, Leif Garrett. Top rated tv shows, #1 songs, gushing articles in teen magazines ("Find out what...
View ArticleClik here to view.
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,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
"Rick and Morty": More Homophobic than"Family Guy"?
I watched part of the first episode of the Cartoon Network's Rick and Morty (2013-) a couple of years ago, and turned it off, bored. But people kept telling me how great it was, so I bought the entire...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Dom Deluise and Sons: Gay Stereotypes Were a Step Forward
The most flamboyantly feminine actor in the 1970s was not Paul Lynde or Charles Nelson Reilly: it was Dom Deluise (below), who played gay-coded roles in many of his buddy Burt Reynold's movies (Smokey...
View Article