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Pretending to be Gay in "Head Count"
Head Count (2018) just showed up on my Netflix recommendations, and I had an hour to kill, so:College student Evan (Isaac Jay) rejects an invitation to go away for the weekend with his friends. "I...
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The Most Boring, Stupid, and Heterosexist State Songs
At every school assembly when I was a kid in Rock Island, we had to sing the state song. You were also forced to sing it at football games, wrestling matches, and political rallies:By thy rivers...
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The Last Straight Kids on Earth
42 days after a zombie AND giant monster apocalypse destroys their town and probably the world, teenage video-game addict Jack (Nick Wolfhard, left) seems to be coping well. The monsters and zombies...
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"Welcome to Wanderland": Beyond Gay-Inclusive
Welcome to Wanderland, a 4-issue limited series by Jackie Ball and Maddie Gonzalez, is set in a Disney-style theme park that has fallen on hard times. Middle schooler Bel has practically grown up...
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Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: Boldly Going Where No Heterosexual Has Gone Before
Science fiction has been notorious for promoting an exclusively heterosexual future, insisting over and over again that gay people do not exist. The Star Trek tv series have been the worse offenders,...
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The Top 8 Gay Hunks "American Horror Story: 1984"
The 9th season of American Horror Story is set in the summer of 1984 (a year before I moved to Los Angeles), when a group of aerobic-studio friends get jobs as counselors at a remote woodland camp....
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What's Wrong with the Word "Homosexual"?
Some people who comment on this blog actually use the term "homosexual." I delete their comments. The word makes my ears hurt. I will not permit it to be said in my classrooms. I never use it in my...
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"Cloud 9": Gay Couples in 1879 and 1979
Caryl Churchill is an avant-garde playwright in the mold of Ionesco and Samuel Beckett; her plays challenge your notions of plot, characters, and narrative structure itself. Actually, most of her...
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The Ritual: Unpleasant Buddy-Bonding and Human Sacrifice
When American filmmakers want to set their horror movies in someplace remote and scary, they choose Appalachia. Apparently the British choose Sweden. First I saw Midsommer (2019), where some...
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Searching for Gay Characters in Comics in 2019
Heartened by the gay-friendiness of Welcome to Wanderland, I went to my local comic book store and picked up a pile ...um, I mean went to Comixology and downloaded the digital versions of six comic...
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Duke Kahanamoku: A Life Devoted to Surfing and Men
Born in 1890, Duke Kahanamoku was "the fastest swimmer alive," who popularized the sport of surfing, and to a great extent popularized Hawaii. He won gold medals for swimming at the Olympics in 1912...
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The Gay Tease of "Bixler High Private Eye"
Bixler High Private Eye (2019), no comma, appears on my Vudu and Amazon Prime recommedations. Doesn't this guy look gay?I've got a free hour, and maybe he's gay, so why not?It's one of those pieces...
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"The Politician": Gay-Light Sociopaths in a Hunk-Infested High School
In The Politician on Netflix, Payton Hobart (how's that for a 1% name?) lives with his absent dad, clinging "I love you so much" mother, and psycho older brothers in a ridiculously elegant mansion in...
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Mac Comes Out on "Beaver Falls"
Beaver Falls (2011-2012), streaming on Amazon Prime, is a British sitcom in the "Aren't Americans wacky?" genre, about three graduates of Oxford Brookes University (Oxford Brookes, not Oxford) who get...
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Corey Haim
What gay boy in the 1980s didn't thinking of Corey Haim as a kindred spirit? His cute lopsided smile, his metrosexual fondness for hair care products, his slight-but-firm physique, his well-publicized...
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Howard Cruse: The World's Most Depressing Gay Comic Artist
I first heard of "Howard Cruise" in the early 1980s, when the Advocate featured his comic strip Wendel. I thought that it was a nom-de-plume, a play on "cruising." Turns out that it's really his...
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"Wet Hot American Summer": Gross Kissing, a Gay Wedding, and Time Passages
I didn't see the 2001 movie Wet Hot American Summer. I assumed from the trailers that it was all about girls in bikinis.Besides, it was a bomb -- it made $295,000 on a budget of $5,000,000. And...
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Burr Tillstrom: The Gay Puppeteer of 1950s Children's Television
Before The Cartoon Network, before Sesame Street, even before The Mickey Mouse Club,in the earliest days of television, kids (and adults) rushed home every afternoon to see the adventures of Kukla,...
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"Wet Hot American Summer": The Prequel
Wet Hot American Summer (2001) was the endlessly panned parody of summer-camp-sex movies. It was set during the last day of camp in the summer of 1981, when ludicrously over-aged actors played out...
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"Wet Hot American Summer: Ten Years Later"
It's 1991, ten years since Camp Firewood, and the gang is pushing 30, and with real ages past 50, still pushing credulity.Victor, shirtless, muscular, and bulgy, but with a ridiculous toupee, works as...
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