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14 Childhood Experiences That Are More Fiction Than Fact
Someone was asking which of my autobiographical stories were fiction, and which were fact. All of the characters are real, but I change some names and biographical details to make them harder to...
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Trailer Park Boys: Gay Characters in the Hood
Trailer Park Boys is a Canadian pop culture sensation. It started as a movie (1999), then spun off into an immensely popular sitcom (2001-2014), three more movies (2006, 2009, 2014), and a live stage...
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Mikey Likes It
The blog "Mikey Likes It" is maintained by a gay college student who wasn't even born when the enduring catch phrase was created.It was the fall of 1972, and Quaker Oats was trying to expand out from...
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Carl Sandburg's Two Gay References
Carl Sandburg (1878-1967) was from Galesburg, 60 miles south of Rock Island, so my teachers loved him. I didn't.Although he does look nice naked.It seems that every English, language arts, writing, and...
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Cousin Buster: Growing Up a Stranger
When I was a kid, I wasn't close to most of my cousins. They were mostly teenagers or grownups, like my Cousin Joe (who I saw naked when I was 7). Or little kids, like my Cousin Tracy (born when I...
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Here's Johnny: The Gay Snark of the Tonight Show
One night when I was 10 or 11 years old, I woke up to the sound of the tv in the other room. I looked at the clock by my bedside -- 11:30! What could my parents be watching? There was nothing on tv...
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Beefcake and Grammatical Atrocities in Hidden Valley
Have you heard the buzz for Hidden Valley: The Awakening? It's being advertised as the greatest horror movie of this generation. But it sounds utterly putrid. A cliche plot, stereotyped characters,...
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Summer Cruising at the Bookmobile
Other kids spent the summer waiting anxiously for the ice cream truck. I spent the summer waiting anxiously for the bookmobile.Back in the 1960s and 1970s, there were hundreds of bookmobiles, vans...
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Kieron Richardson: Questioning His Sexuality
Kieron Richardson was starring as the teenage bad boy Steven Hays on the long-running British soap Hollyoaks. His character was involved in domestic violence, drugs, and various scandalous behaviors,...
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15 Simple Rules for Cruising Straight Guys
In West Hollywood many people believed that there was no such thing as a straight man. Exclusive same-sex desire was a universal of human experience. Men who called themselves straight were just too...
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Summer 1984: A Bodybuilding Contest in India
The 1997 episode of Seinfeld where the gang goes to India for a wedding always gives me a weird nostalgic vibe. In 1984, just after my second year at Indiana University, I traveled to India for a...
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College Beefcake: The German Choirboy
During my freshman year at Augustana College, I declared a major in English and Modern Languages and registered for advanced Spanish and French. So when I had the opportunity to spend a quarter abroad...
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Gotham, 2014: Can We Expect Gay Subtexts?
On the treadmill at the gym, I've been seeing commercials about Gotham (2014-), the upcoming Fox series about a young cop named James Gordon (Ben McKenzie).He encounters a young boy named Bruce Wayne...
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Top 10 Public Penises of Africa
In South Africa in 2000, I met the Hottest Man in the World, and investigated the mystery of the Bushman penis. I'm not sure I want to visit anywhere else in the subcontinent. Rampant poverty, a...
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Fall 1985: Dating a Pentecostal Porn Star
When I moved to West Hollywood in 1985, I began to attend the All Saints Metropolitan Community Church, a gay-specific church. It wasn't very big. The MCC tends to thrive in communities where...
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Indiana Jones: White Heterosexual Male Adventure
During the famous summer of 1981, when I went to an Italian Film Festival, moved into my own apartment, and learned about gay German literature, The Canterbury Tales, and the Beat Generation, I saw a...
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10 More Public Penises of Africa
Tired of African muscle yet?I didn't think so.This time we'll work our way through the countries of East and South Africa.1. In Ethiopia most of the population speaks Amharic, an Afro-Asiatic language...
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Drake and Josh and Craig and Eric
Drake and Josh (2004-2007) was a Nickelodeon teencom about two high school stepbrothers.The scheming underachiever, Drake (Drake Bell).And the shy intellectual, Josh (Josh Peck). He only started...
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Summer 1971: Donald Duck's Double Life
When I was a kid in the 1960s, my favorite comics were the Harveys (Casper, Richie Rich), followed by Gold Key jungle heroes (Tarzan, Korak, Brothers of the Spear), and then Archie, and maybe some...
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Love Boat/Fantasy Island: Love Won't Hurt Anymore
During the decade that began on September 24th, 1977 and ended on February 27th, 1987, I graduated from high school and college, got my M.A. in English, spent a year teaching at Hell-fer-Sartain State...
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