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Goetz George: A Gay Dad with a Chest
This Chest belongs to Goetz George, playing a rancher trying to find his father's killer in Treasure of the Silver Lake (1962), a German Western that tried to introduce famous boys' book characters...
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The Heterosexual Gay Kid of "Ugly Betty"
Feminine boys on tv are usually ridiculed, made objects of jokes ("He's into fashion! He's not a real man! Isn't that hilarious?"), and in the end heterosexualized ("You were worried for a moment, but...
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Top 16 Public Penises of the Cowboy States
I'm afraid of the Cowboy States, that swath of ranches, grassland, and mountains west of Minnesota and east of California. I've driven through them four times, and they are very pretty, with the amber...
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The Secret Message at Washington Junior High
One Saturday in the summer of 1974, just after eighth grade, the sky was clear and bright, the air smelled like new lilacs, and the grass was sprinkled with dandelions. Darry had the flu and was too...
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Top 15 Public Penises of Texas
Long ago, before I moved to West Hollywood, I spent a terrible year teaching at Hell-fer-Sartain State College, the worst place on Earth. Houston had some very nice shops, museums, and restaurants,...
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What Does "Brian Gives Free LBJs" Mean?
After reading my posts on "The Secret Message at Washington Junior High" and "I Catch Cousin Joe in the Act," you probably thought that the graffiti "Brian gives free LBJs" referred to some sort of...
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Homophobic Moments in Music #35: My Girl, Bill
In the spring of 1974, while I was arguing about Freedom to Marry in Mrs. Dunn's class at Washington Junior High, a ballad-style song by Jim Stafford called "My Girl, Bill" began playing on KSTT...
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Summer 1973: Two Boys Kissing at the Longview Park Pool
I don't remember much of what happened on that day in the summer of 1973, about a month before we visited my Kentucky kinfolk and I met the Teenage Indian God. I don't know why practically everybody I...
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Homophobic Moments in Music #683: It's a Man's World
From the moment I turned 13 to the moment I moved to Texas at age 24, my life consisted of a nonstop interrogation of girls! girls! girls!From parents, teachers, Sunday school teachers, bosses,...
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The Middle: Axl in Underwear
I've been watching The Middlesince it premiered in 2009. It's a striking contrast to Modern Family, which comes on ABC shortly afterwards: two "family sitcoms," but the families are rich/poor, big...
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Be an Athletic Supporter
When I was a kid, I hated sports -- who would willingly submit to having hard round projectiles hurled at them? -- but my parents wouldn't believe me. "You're a boy! Boys like sports!" they kept...
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Max & Shred: Nickelodeon's New Drake and Josh
Nickelodeon has always been very good at gay-subtext teencoms, from Salute Your Shorts in the 1990s to Ned's Declassified School Survival Guide in the 2000s to the contemporary Henry Danger. Max...
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Let's Get Physical
I heard Olivia Newton-John a lot during the 1970s. Her easy-listening, feelings-drenched songs appealed mostly to girls. "If Not for You" (1971) and "I Honestly Love You" (1974) didn't specify...
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Walk on the Wild Side
The gay world is always hidden, flickering on the edge of our vision, invisible to the average person. Merely a shadow to us. But then one day something happens. By accident or design, we go down...
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Fall 1985: Watching Brothers in the Hollywood Hills
When I first moved to West Hollywood in 1985, every Wednesday night my friend Mark, who introduced me to Michael J. Fox, drove me up to a house in the Hollywood Hills, where there were about twenty...
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R. Crumb: From Fritz the Cat to Gay Marriage (Sort of)
Growing up in 1950s Philadelphia, Robert Crumb was a sissy -- he hated sports; he was scrawny; he liked comic books, especially girls' comics like Little Lulu. According to a 1998 sketch, he "almost...
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10 Stage Plays with Unexpected Beefcake
You should go to the theater as often as possible, even to productions that don't seem to have any gay content. If you can't get to the great theater capitals of New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago,...
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My Grandmother's Surprising Gay Connection
My Grandma Dennis was an ultra-devout fundamentalist Christian who always carried her worn study Bible, corresponded with a dozen missionaries, and got angry at the "hippies and radicals" she saw on...
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The Halloween Homophobe
When I was growing up, my church deemed alcohol the worst possible sin, worse than murder or reading the Sunday newspaper or talking to a Catholic. We couldn't eat food that once contained alcohol,...
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Why Is Bomba the Jungle Boy Always Tied Up?
Johnny Sheffield (1931-2010) spent the first 24 years of his life being filmed in a loincloth cut to the thigh, first as "Boy," son of Tarzan Johnny Weissmuller in 8 movies (1939-1947), and then as the...
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