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Fall 1982: A Porn Film for Halloween
I've seen a heterosexual porn film.Just before Halloween in 1982, when I was a 21-year old grad student in English at Indiana University, Deep Throat (1972) was shown in the Student Union. I don't...
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What's Gay about "Married with Children"
One day in 1988, I was at the gym in West Hollywood, and I saw someone wearing a t-shirt reading "Married...with Children Fan Club."I knew about Married...with Children. On Sunday nights, my roommate...
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Top 7 Halloween Movies for Gay Kids
When I was a kid, Halloween was my favorite holiday -- no gifts of football equipment, no hanging out with boring relatives, no Judy Garland singing "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas." Instead,...
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Beefcake and Bonding in Movies about Slavery
Movies about slavery in the antebellum South are very popular, and not entirely because people want to know more about that shameful period in American history. Because of the opportunity to gawk at...
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The Naked Man in the Peat Bog
Most of my autobiographical posts have been about my father's family, Grandma Dennis, Aunt Nora, and Cousin Joe, because I have more memories of them: we stayed with them on holidays, and they took me...
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"La Belle Vie": Boy Meets Girl, Yet Again
Jean Denizot's La Belle Vie (The Good Life) is the winner in the Venice Film Festival's Europa Cinemas Label and is getting reviews like: "a masterpiece!"Sigh. Here we go again.Brothers Sylvain and...
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Big River: They Couldn't Get Rid of Gay People
The homoerotic import of Huckleberry Finn and Jim the escaped slave rafting down the Mississippi has been well-known for many years. Even homophobes notice. In 1961, Leslie Fiedler wrote "Come Back to...
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The Sea Monster in the Club House
The Krofft animatronic Saturday morning shows like Pufnstuf and Land of the Lost usually involved boys trapped far from home, but the 1973-1975 entry, Sigmund and the Sea Monsters, used the "I've got a...
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15 Reasons You Should Go to A Bathhouse
There are only about 30 gay bath houses left in the United States, down from the hundreds in the 1970s -- they have fallen prey to homophobic health regulations, a puritanical culture, and hook-up apps...
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The Cowboy Cop in My Bedroom
You probably know the type of guys I find attractive:1. Short, the shorter the better.2. Muscular or husky. Fat is good. Bodybuilder too.3. Dark-skinned. Black, Asian, Hispanic. If you're...
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The West Hollywood Halloween Carnival
Life in West Hollywood in the 1980s and 1990s was cyclical. There were no seasons -- it was warm and sunny every day -- but you were always planning on the next event.The social calendar began in...
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The Flash: Gay Characters and Subtexts in a DC Comics Reboot
The Flash is one of the primal characters of the Golden Age of Comics, appearing in 1940 and rebooted several times as DC consolidated universes. Flashes include Jay Garrick, who gained super-speed...
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Uncle Tom's Cabin: The Slave as Object of Desire
In the first years of the twentieth century, everyone read Uncle Tom's Cabin, the novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe (1852) that, in Abraham Lincoln's famous joke, "started the Civil War."Or they went to...
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Spring 2004: My Kentucky Kinfolk Grow Up
My mother's family moved to Indiana when she was seven years old. She was born in Magoffin County, Kentucky, in the Appalachians, where the Hatfields and McCoys feuded, where ultra-fundamentalist...
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Fall 1982: I Discover Tom of Finland
When I was in grad school in Bloomington, Indiana in the early 1980s, I used to buy a gay porn magazine at College Avenue Books: In Touch for Men, which featured not only pictures of naked men, but...
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Harry Houdini and the Gay Ghost
Born in 1874 in Budapest, Harry Houdini was a magician, escape artist, and showman. And one of the few men of his generation for whom we have beefcake photos. One of his favorite tricks was the...
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My Careers as an Actor, Tour Guide, Chemist, Stand-up Comedian, Translator,...
I returned to West Hollywood after my semester in Nashville completely discouraged. I had spent 6 1/2 years in three graduate programs, and what did I have to show for it? A lot of useless knowledge,...
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Johnathan Schaech: Playing to His Gay Fans
This is one of the iconic images of the 1990s, a bodybuilder with a Superman hairdo oiled up and flexing against an indeterminate background. It burst onto the scene in 1994, and suddenly appeared on...
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Watching Monty Python's Flying Circus
When PBS came to Rock Island in the 1970s, it brought us a full-fledged British invasion. Sitcoms (Father Dear Father, Good Neighbors), science fiction (The Prisoner, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the...
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Dad Explains the Facts of Life (Except the Most Important One)
There are several rites of passage between a boy and his Dad:When he teaches you to shave.When he lets you drive for the first time.When you can beat him at arm wrestling.But the biggest is The Talk,...
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