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Escaping to West Hollywood 2: On the Road
After spending a year at Hell-fer-Sartain State College, I managed to escape by being admitted to the graduate program in Comparative Literature at USC: so I would be moving to West Hollywood. My...
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Cliff Richard: The Britsh Elvis Presley Supports Gay Marriage
The "British Elvis Presley," Cliff Richard hit #1 on the British charts quite often in the late 1950s and 1960s, with songs and albums like "The Young Ones,""21 Today,""Summer Holiday." He didn't take...
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Fall 1976: A Kiss from the Italian Exchange Student
I was very busy during my the fall of my junior year in high school, trying to "get with" Todd (who I spent the night with at music camp) by dating his girlfriend. Not to mention working as an...
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10 Reasons Why Playboy was a Gay Boy's Best Friend
That's right, Playboy, the first mainstream magazine featuring female nudes, launched in 1953.It reaching its height of popularity in the early 1970s, when 7.1 million hetero men bought it every month...
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The President's Council on Physical Fitness
When I was a kid in the 1960s and 1970s, I hated gym class.1. Trying to catch a projectile aimed at your head.2. Not catching it, and being jeered by your classmates.3. Or catching it, not knowing what...
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Fall 2006: The Nude Car Wash
At the end of every semester, students fill out a Teaching Evaluation, answering questions about how much they liked the class. They should like it a lot. The Evaluations are used to decide whether...
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Will Estes: Teen Idol
Born in 1978, Will Nipper became one of the biggest child stars of the 1990s (no, Nipper wasn't a stage name), with a starring role on The New Lassie, a retread of the 1950s dog-and-boy classic...
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Fall 1971: Cousin George: Only Fools Wear Pajamas
My Cousin George, son of my father's older brother, was just my age, tall and blond, with a hard chest, a thin belly, and a Southern drawl. He lived in Walterboro, South Carolina, a thousand miles...
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The Middle: Axl in Underwear, No Gay People
I've been watching The Middlesince it premiered in 2009. It's a striking contrast to Modern Family, which comes on ABC shortly afterwards: two "family sitcoms," but the families are rich/poor, big...
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Bob Newhart, Homophobia, and a Gay Childhood
I just heard that soft-spoken comedian Bob Newhart signed on as the headliner at a conference sponsored by the ultra-homophobic Legatus organization. I knew he wasn't exactly a gay ally, but it's...
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Bugs and Porky meet a Drag King: Warner Brothers Comics
When I was a kid in the 1960s, my favorite comic titles were Harvey (gay-vague Casper the Friendly Ghost), Disney, Archie, and the Gold Key jungle adventures. Comics featuring Warner Brothers cartoon...
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Summer 1985: Tracking Down my High School Crush
I spent my year at Hell-fer-Sartain State College (1984-85) studying Italian and reading books on Italy, so naturally before escaping to West Hollywood, I had to visit.I had been to Europe three times...
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Danny Pintauro: Gay Child Star Comes Out, Gets Engaged
We can roughly divide actors coming out into B.E. and A.E., before and after Ellen Degeneres said "Yep, I'm gay" in big red letters on the cover of Time Magazine (April 14, 1997).B.E.: You may be out...
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Summer 1985: Nearly Stabbed by Michael J. Fox's Ex Lover
I arrived in Los Angeles on July 3rd, 1985, and stayed with my friend Tom in Van Nuys while looking for an apartment. Things fell into place very quickly: by July 10th, I was working two days a week a...
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Peter Falk: When Columbo Played Gay
Boomers remember Peter Falk as Columbo, the rumpled, disorganized detective who feigns cluelessness to catch the culprits off-guard; my friend Aaron in high school called him Clod-Dumbo. After...
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My Grandmother's Surprising Gay Connection
My Grandma Dennis was an ultra-devout fundamentalist Christian who always carried her worn study Bible, corresponded with a dozen missionaries, and got angry at the "hippies and radicals" she saw on...
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The Last Picture Show: Small Town Melodrama with Nudity and Gay Subtexts
I saw The Last Picture Show (1971) when I was trapped in Hell-fer-Sartain State College in far, far north Houston, and found it immeasurably depressing, in spite of the infinite number of gay...
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5 Heterosexist and 5 Gay-Inclusive Christmas Specials
Have you ever noticed that most Christmas specials are annoyingly heterosexist. Here are the worst examples:1. Mr. Magoo's Christmas Carol (1962): Why is Magoo/Scrooge so miserable? He was so...
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Living Hell: Gay Symbolism, Nudity, and Gore
I don't have much interest in the Japanese "guro" genre, which isn't about scaring you so much as displaying blood spurting out of disembowled people. But some of them, like Shugo Fujii's Living Hell...
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David Faustino: Deliberate Gay Subtexts
David Faustino is best known for the acerbic Married..with Children(1987-1997), which skewered the Reagan-Bush Era obsession with "family values" by presenting a heterosexual nuclear family in the most...
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