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The Mysterious Cabinet Photo of Jasper Redfern
I found this photo on the internet. An extremely muscular man, with a modern bodybuilder's physique, with his hands behind his back. The caption said "Jasper Redfern...Sheffield." Obviously the...
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Searching for Beefcake at the Kosice Peace Marathon
I spent the summer of 2005 in Levoča, Slovakia, teaching "food service management" to sullen Slovak high schoolers. But at least there were a lot of opportunities for seeing beefcake, like side trips...
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Summer 1980: Are You the Boy or the Girl?
In the summer of 1980, during my sophomore year at Augustana, my boyfriend Fred landed a pulpit in Gretna, Nebraska, a tiny town about 20 miles south of Omaha. So, being bright-eyed and naive, I moved...
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Hello, Dolly!: The First Gay Diva
In 1964, Jerry Herman, the gay composer who gave us the anthem "I Am What I Am," and Michael Stewart, the gay playwright who gave us Bye, Bye Birdie, sat down to write a musical comedy adaption of The...
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Thornton Wilder: Gay People Can Write Depressing Novels, Too
I have no time for Great Literature. It's not only heterosexist, it's usually terribly depressing.Heterosexuals aren't alone in insisting that Great Literature must be terribly depressing. When gay...
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James Shigeta and His Gay Buddies
Asian male actors have been underrepresented in American media, and when they appear at all, they are typecast as computer nerds and wise purveyors of inscrutable wisdom, never as hetero-romantic...
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Oh, Calcutta!: The First Nudie Musical
The sexual liberation of the hippie generation led to a number of plays with momentary nudity and casual references to sex, but Oh! Calcutta! was all-sex, all-nude. It debuted off-Broadway in 1969 and...
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Spring 1992: The Worst Date in West Hollywood History
I have always been attracted to guys who are shorter, the shorter the better. And muscular. So in the spring of 1992, when I got the number of the muscular, 4'0" Ryan at the Faultline, it was a major...
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Pierre Perrier: Bisexual Nudity a la Francais
Pierre Perrier (great name!) has made a career of playing guys involved with men and women.Beginning with Douches froids (Cold Showers, 2005), about a tragic three-way romance between teenagers...
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Super Mario Brothers
When I was a kid, there were no video games. In college we played Asteroids, in which your space ship shoots asteroids and flying saucers.Mario Brothers appeared in arcades in 1983, and the Nintendo...
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Spring 2004: The Worst Date in Florida History
My day with Ryan in the spring of 1992 has won awards as the Worst Date in West Hollywood History because everything that could go wrong, did. But 12 years later, when I was living in Florida, I had...
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Searching for Beefcake in Shakespeare's Hamlet
Hamlet (1603) is one of my favorite Shakespearean plays. It's heavy-laden with gay subtexts, from the tortured Hamlet's buddy-bond with Horatio to the backstage chumminess of Rosencrantz and...
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Breaker, Breaker: Truckers. Kung Fu, and Men Who Hug
When I was in high school, there were two major fads going on.1. Martial arts. Bruce Lee in Enter the Dragon (1973), the song "Kung Fu Fighting" (1974), the tv series Kung Fu (1972-75).2. Truckers....
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Spring 2004: The Surprise in Comic Book Guy's Bedroom
I like lost souls: shy, uncertain, newly-out. I like to draw them out of their shell, show them the sights and sounds of the gay community, find the jewel in the rough. Of course, sometimes it...
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King Tut's Tomb Was Discovered by Two Gay Men
Everybody has heard about Howard Carter (1874-1939), the Egyptologist who was excavating in the Valley of the Kings in Egypt in 1922, when he discovered a tomb that had somehow escaped three thousand...
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Night Court
In West Hollywood, tv was suspect, heterosexist propaganda beamed in from outside. We didn't watch much; in 1987-1988, maybe Married..with Children, Kate & Allie, Throb, and on Friday nights, if...
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Perfect Strangers: Gay Couple Turns Straight
For many years, tv has disguised gay couples as heterosexuals with some other reason for being together -- they work in the same office, or share an apartment, or are brothers. So censors, skittish...
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Sidekicks: Gay Kid Meets His Crush
One day in the early 1990s, Jim McIngvale, "Mattress Mack," flamboyant owner of the Gallery Furniture chain in Houston, was talking to his BFF, man-mountain Chuck Norris, who sometimes appeared on his...
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The Surprising Gay Origin of Pogo's "Deck Us All"
Every Christmas from 1949 to 1975, and then again in the 1980s and 1990s, the comic strip Pogo had the hayseed denizens of Okefenokee Swamp singing a mangled version of "Deck the Halls":Deck us all...
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Top 10 Public Penises of Bratislava
During my summer in Levoča, Slovakia, Doc and I didn't spend much time in Bratislava. It didn't have much of a gay life, and Vienna, one of the greatest cities in the world, was only an hour away.But...
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