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Jorge Rivero Dates a Drag Queen
Speaking of Hispanic beefcake, we find very few bodybuilders in Mexican movies before the 1980s. Even the luchadores enmascarados, masked wrestler-superheroes like Santo and el Demonio Azul, had beefy...
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Homophobia in College #4: Trapper John
January 11, 1981: a Sunday night, my junior year at Augustana. So far it's been rather heterosexist. Last semester I had a gay-free class in Modern American Literature; this semester I will read...
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Rad Daly: Almost a Teen Idol
During the late 1970s and early 1980s, kid actors were everywhere, and Willie Aames was at the top of the heap. So producers tried to find a Willie Aames lookalike. They found a likely candidate in...
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September 1977: The Preacher Discovers Homa-Sekshuls
When I was growing up, every Preacher had a hobby-horse, some sin or social problem that he screamed about in every sermon, regardless of the topic: working on the Sabbath, playing cards, liberal...
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Beach Movies 2: The Duds
Between 1963 and 1967, AIP churned out a dozen Frankie-and-Annette beach movies that emphasized biceps over bikinis and buddy-bonding over hetero-romance. Other studios followed suit, but they were...
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Captains Courageous: Boys Alone on a Boat
Literature is full of poor little rich boys, kids raised in unutterable wealth who nevertheless are missing something essential, something elemental -- and find it, either by design or by fortuitous...
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Chris Galya: Actor Slash Model
David DeCoteau directs horrible closet-gay movies in which lots of cute guys lounge around in their underwear while awaiting monsters or psycho-killers. But none of them are gay. Like Playgirl,...
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Looking for Muscles on The Andy Griffith Show
On a 1960 episode of Make Room for Daddy: nightclub entertainer Danny Williams (Danny Thomas), traveling through the rural South, is arrested by corrupt sheriff Andy Taylor (comedian Andy Griffith)....
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Zoey 101: Your Big Brother's Gay Subtexts
The teencom, like the teen idol, has a short life expectancy. It bursts onto the scene and becomes an instant Saturday-night must-see for millions of junior high students. They memorize favorite...
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Homophobia in College #5: Cruising
February 1980: My sophomore year at Augustana College. I've seen many movies with gay subtexts, but only three with gay characters: Rocky Horror, with the pansexual Doctor Frank-N-Furter; Tommy, with...
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Mackenzie Astin: Bisexual-Inclusive
In 2011, Mackenzie Astin starred in Caught at the Zephyr Theater in Los Angeles. He played a gay man blissfully planning a wedding with his partner (Will Beinbrink), when suddenly his Bible-thumping...
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White Frog: Gay Asian Teen and His Brother
During the 1970s and 1980s, dozens of After School Specials and Schoolbreak Specials provided teenagers with dramas like The Skating Rink (1974), about a boy with a stuttering problem who wants to...
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Days of Our Lives: Will Horton's Big Gay Kiss
I never got into soap operas, except Dark Shadows, but I remember a thousand summer days when my mother called us in from play, sat us down at the formica table in the kitchen for a lunch of fried...
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Jinx: The First Lesbian in Children's Comics
If you read Archie comics as a kid, you probably remember the backup feature Li'l Jinx, which first appeared in 1947 and continued through the 1980s. A seven or eight year old with blond pigtails,...
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Gays Next Door in 1972: The Doris Day Show
In 1972, we watched a sitcom called The Doris Day Show, mainly because it was squeezed between the beefcake-heavy Here's Lucy and Sonny and Cher. It was a Mary Tyler Moore clone, a workplace comedy...
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Kings of Summer: Three Boys Alone
Most boys-alone movies isolate the kids through a tragic accident -- a plane crash in Lord of the Flies, a terrorist attack inToy Soldiers. But in The Kings of Summer (2013) aka Toy's House, which...
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Cary Grant: Hints and Closets in the 1930s
On November 29, 1986, Cary Grant died in Davenport, Iowa, right across the river from my home town of Rock Island. I was living in West Hollywood at the time, but still, it felt weird to know that a...
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Zachery Ty Bryan: Home Improvement Also-Ran
Born in Colorado in 1981, Zachery Ty Bryan was hired to play the oldest brother on the TGIF sitcom Home Improvement (1991-1999). As he grew into adolescence, he became more and more muscular, but his...
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Dennis Cole
Most heterosexuals go about their daily lives as if they are alone in the universe. If asked, they will say "Sure, some men are gay, which means they're into men, not women," but in the next moment,...
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Don Stroud: Robert Conrad's Buddy
My church taught that going to a movie was the worst sin imaginable -- God would strike you dead if you even set foot in a theater. So my brother and I saw almost none during our childhood, only when...
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