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Triangles Turn You Gay: The Teletubbies
The Big Bad of the 1980s and 1990s was Rev. Jerry Falwell, who founded the Moral Majority in 1979 with a fundamentalist Christian agenda: they were against liberalism, modernism, minority religions,...
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The Boys of Rebelde
Rebelde (2011-2012) is a teen telenovela modeled on the Argentine Rebelde Way (with Benjamin Rojas), about teenagers in an exclusive private school who form a band. But it upped the beefcake and the...
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David Macklin: 1960s Teen with Something Extra
I don't remember much from 1965, but I remember my dismal, depressing 5th birthday on November 19th. My mother and I were both sick -- she was actually pregnant, and gave birth to my sister two days...
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Josh Hutcherson: Straight but Not Narrow
In April 2012, 19-year old Josh Hutcherson became the youngest person ever to win the GLAAD Vanguard Award for his "Straight but Not Narrow" anti-bullying campaign.Paradoxically, his on-screen...
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Roddy McDowall: Hiding in Plain Sight
Gay male actors born before Stonewall pretended to be heterosexual as a matter of survival. They had "Hollywood marriages." They brought heterosexual dates to events, and gave interviews about the...
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Student of the Year: Bollywood Gay Romance
A South Asian news story can't overcome its hilarity. When Varun Dhawan was promoting his new movie, Student of the Year (2012), in Ahmedabad, he never imagined that he would have to face the...
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Josh Zuckerman: No Gay Men Exist
Josh Zuckerman spend his adolescence in buddy-bonding roles, mostly with other men. For instance, in the Disney Channel movie Twas the Night (2001), irresponsible Nick Wrigley (Bryan Cranston of...
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Henry Willson: The Man Who Invented Beefcake
During the Cold War of the 1950s, the Clark Gable-Cary Grant model of American masculinity, the suave, sophisticated bon-vivants who sipped champaign at El Crocadero, fell into disfavor. Movies began...
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Floating Skyscrapers: Guns Don't Kill, Gay People Do
In April 2013, the Tribeca Film Festival in New York screened the "First LGBT Film in Poland," Floating Skyscrapers. It's slow, claustrophobic, and creepy, presenting gay people as abnormal, mentally...
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Clay O'Brien: No Girls Allowed
Clay O'Brien (no relation to Western star Hugh O'Brian) probably wins the award for the most tv and movie appearances without any displays of heterosexual interest. His characters display none at...
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Hugh O'Brian and the Gay 1950s
Hugh O'Brian (no relation to the child star Clay O'Brien) was one of the few beefcake actors of the 1950s not discovered by gaydar-proficient talent agent Henry Willson -- although he was rumored to be...
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The Mod Squad: Buddy-Bonding Hippies
During the 1960s, the establishment made many attempts to cash in on the counterculture, often with little success. But The Mod Squad was a hit. It lasted for five years (1968-73), won Emmies and...
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Homophobic Moments in College #6: The Who's Tommy
November, 1978, my freshman year at Augustana College. Student Union Movie Night is showing Tommy, the 1975 rock musical starring Roger Daltrey of The Who!"Um...does he, like, take his shirt off?" I...
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Prince Valiant
During the 1960s, the Rock Island Argus printed mostly depressing 50-year old comic strips with jokes about husbands hating their wives or friends betraying each other, with little bonding (Out Our Way...
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Dean and Logan: Romance or Bromance?
23-year old Dean Collins is best known for The War at Home (2005-2007), a sitcom about a lovable bigot (Michael Rappaport), his nearly-gay son (Kyle Sullivan), and the gay Iranian teenager next door...
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Most Homophobic Moments in College #5: Blazing Saddles
March 1979: my first year at Augustana College. The Student Union is showing Blazing Saddles (1974), directed by Mel Brooks.I've never heard of him.It's a spoof of the Western genre, about a black...
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A Catholic Priest in Love: The Little World of Don Camillo
In high school, shortly after I saw Brother Sun, Sister Moonand got the idea that the Roman Catholic Church might be a "good place," I found The Little World of Don Camillo (1950) at the St. Pius...
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Parker Stevenson and the Big One
In the fall of 1977, the question most gay boys were asking was: "Shaun or Parker?"Most chose Shaun Cassidy, the fey, impestuous Joe on The Hardy Boys Mysteries (1977-79), the legendary gay-subtext tv...
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Most Homophobic Moments in College #4: Les on the Ledge
May 1979: my first year at Augustana College. I'm working on the college radio station, WKRP, broadcasting "The International Pop Hour" on Monday nights: Lorenzo Santamaria (Spanish), Claude Francois...
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Ricardo Montalban: What Happened to the Hispanic Beefcake
One of the most iconic beefcake images of the Boomer generation appeared on February 16, 1967, in the Star Trek episode "Space Seed": The Enterprise picks up the frozen survivors of a long-ago eugenics...
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