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"Scenes of a Sexual Nature": Saturday in the Park with a Gay Couple
Scenes of a Sexual Nature just appeared on my Amazon Prime "movies we think you'll like list." The trailer showed a gay couple amid the scenes, so I turned it on. I watched about ten minutes and...
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In Praise of the Sitcom
If you ever admit to watching television, you will get heavily ridiculed in both gay and academic communities: "How can you watch that mindless trash?" And if you admit to watching sitcoms, the...
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WKRP in Cincinnati
During the late 1970s, there was a fad of hip, urban workplace sitcoms that were very popular but had little to offer gay teens. The office setting meant no shirtless scenes, the business plots meant...
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Summer 1981: Male Nudity in English Class: The Canterbury Tales
During the summer of 1981, just after my junior year in college. I saw a dozen movies with gay subtexts: Clash of the Titans, Wolfen, Arthur, American Werewolf in London, Hell Night, The Chosen. And...
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Watching Monty Python's Flying Circus
When PBS came to Rock Island in the 1970s, it brought us a full-fledged British invasion. Sitcoms (Father Dear Father, Good Neighbors), science fiction (The Prisoner, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the...
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Green Acres: Gay Siblings on 1960s TV
One of the hayseed comedies of the 1960s, Green Acres (1965-71) was nearly as bereft of beefcake and bonding as Petticoat Junction. It was a fish-out-of-water sitcom about a big city lawyer, Oliver...
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"For the Love of Jason": Does Jason Have Any Gay Loves?
Amazon Prime has pulled out a lot of black-oriented movies and tv shows for Black History Month. For the Love of Jason, advertised as a six-episode comedy (we'll see), drew my attention because it...
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The Key to Ultimate Happiness is the Back End of a Car
I've seen this commercial a dozen times while watching tv on Amazon Prime. I don't understand it at all.A lot of extremely delighted people are walking out of their houses and into the streets, and...
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"Mall Rats": Not as Homophobic as You Think
For movie night this week, we saw Mallrats (1995), the second movie set in Kevin Smith's View Askew universe. I wasn't pleased with it -- too many gross-out moments, not enough beefcake, a...
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"1917": Laughable Torture Porn with a Final Heterosexist Dig
I went to a church once where the pastor was obsessed with death and dying. It was in every sermon, regardless of the topic. Every reading. Most of the prayers. It got ridiculously obsessive....
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"Riverdale" Time Jumps 7 Years to Archie and the Gang in their 40s
For four years, Riverdale has had the 16- and 17-year olds of Archie comics acting like they're in their 30s. Veronica runs a nightclub where alcohol flows freely. Cheryl runs a maple syrup empire....
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Searching for Non-Heterosexist Movies on Amazon Prime, Part 3: When is a Drag...
Time for another search through the "movies we think you'll like" on Amazon Prime. The rules: if I can get through the cover blurb without a "to win the Girl of His Dreams", "After the Death of His...
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The Wizard of Id
During the early 1950s, Brant Parker, a political cartoonist living in Binghamton, New York, befriended high school student Johnny Hart, and encouraged him to submit his cartoons to magazines. Hart...
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Robert Ellis: Gay Best Friend of the 1950s
This rather buffed young man looking rather unhappy at being hugged by a girl is Robert Ellis. He was famous during the 1950s as Dexter Franklin on Meet Corliss Archer (1951-52), the first of many...
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"Millenials": Are Any of the Argentine "Friends" LGBT?
MIllenials is an Argentine series about six young adults negotiating jobs and romances in modern-day Buenos Aires. Like Friends, but with serious plotlines, a lot of people developing apps, and...
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"The Boarding School: Las Cumbres": Pallid Supernatural Goings-On at Boarding...
This morning Amazon Prime is flashing El Internado: Las Cumbres, with some young adults in high school uniforms arguing and being scared in the woods. I could use another Spanish paranormal high...
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"The Last Gay Black Man in San Francisco"
Bob usually orders science fiction, superhero, or post-Apocalyptic horror for Movie Night, so when I saw the Blu-Ray title The Last Black Man in San Francisco, I thought "future dystopian world". The...
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Was Elisa Lam Gay?
The Elisa Lam case has some undeniable fascination. In January 2013, a 21 year old Canadian college student on a tour of California checks into the sleazy Hotel Cecil in downtown L.A. (why would...
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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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"My Dead Ex Boyfriend", aka "I Was a Teenage Zombie"
My Dead Ex-Boyfriend, on Netflix, sounds like one of those classic 1960s "my secret" sitcoms, where a "normal" has to hide a magical being -- genie, ghost, witch, or Martian -- from the outside world....
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