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Fall 1974: Finding a Way to Fondle Phil
Phil and FriendWhen I was a kid, most church services ended with an altar call, an invitation to come down to the front of the sanctuary, kneel at the long, low wooden rail, and ask God to forgive your...
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Cruising Preachers, Priests, Monks, and Rabbis
I have always been attracted to clergy. There's something about a devotion to the spiritual world that makes your presence in the physical world especially erotic. Maybe the paradoxical juxtaposition...
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Adam DeVine: Amazing Physique, Homophobic Past
If you've been watching Modern Family, you're probably wondering about Andy, the sweet, cheerful, ultra-feminine guy with a incredible -- repeat, incredible -- physique that Gloria hires as a nanny for...
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Knowing Your Straight Friends #2: Basketball
Maybe you're not in danger of assault, getting fired from your job, or stupid homophobic questions like "What do they think causes that now?", so you don't need to pretend that you're straight. But...
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Fall 2004: Yuri Steals My Boyfriend, Sort Of
Readers have been asking me about the custom of "sharing" one's boyfriends with friends, especially roommates, which was common in Florida and West Hollywood. Didn't it provoke hurt feelings, if the...
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David and Ricky Nelson: Teen Idols Show Off on the Flying Trapeze
Sons of bandleader Ozzie Nelson and his wife Harriet, David Nelson (born 1936) and his kid brother Ricky Nelson (born 1940) began their careers playing "themselves" on The Adventures of Ozzie and...
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The Swashbuckling Boyfriends of November
November is my favorite month. The colors are soft and muted, the sky is not too bright, the air is cool but not cold, it's festive but not overwhelming like December, and it contains my birthday and...
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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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Are You a Top or a Bottom?
People are always asking if you're a fan of masculine backsides or frontsides.Backsides have their allure. Glutes are pleasantly shapely, and hamstrings and calves have an appeal. Besides, you can...
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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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Just Shoot Me: Buddy Bonding and Snark
Beginning with The Mary Tyler Moore Show, many, many sitcom have featured a gung-ho female journalist paired with a stick-in-the-mud male boss. Usually a romance develops. But not in Just Shoot Me...
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Knowing Your Straight Friends #3: Baseball
Baseball may be the only third most important sport in the Straight Guy pantheon, but it's still more important than hockey, golf, tennis, wrestling, boxing, track and field, and gymnastics. Besides,...
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Spring 2005: The Boy Who Liked Green Day
I was always mature for my age, so I attracted guys a few years older than me. So it came as quite a shock when I hit 40, and things were reversed. The guys staring at me, approaching me at parties,...
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Peter MacNicol: Not a Teen Idol
Peter MacNicol was not related to Jimmy and Kristy McNichol -- notice the name is spelled differently -- but everyone thought he was. In fact, everyone at Augustana College went to Dragonslayer in...
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Lucas Black: Gay Subtexts in the South
In the movies, people from the South are homophobic even when they're not.Take this speech from Sling Blade (1996), in which 13-year old Frank (Lucas Black) explains why his mom's best friend (John...
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Turning a Straight Guy Gay in 10 Easy Steps
Ok, you can't turn an actual straight guy gay, or vice versa. Sexual orientation can't be changed. If he isn't into guys, he isn't into guys, period.But there are plenty of men who think they are...
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Alphonse and Gaston: Your Grandfather's Gay Couple
If I was living my last life during the 1890s, as Raphael the Gay Psychic Angel said, I would have been around for the first years of newspaper comic strips: The Yellow Kid, The Katzenjammer Kids,...
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Fall 1975: Dad Takes Me to See Naked Men
When I was growing up in Rock Island, the adults always asked "Is there any girl at school that you like?" but never "What do you want to be when you grow up?" That was already decided. I would go to...
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Gary Daniels: Man-Mountain with Gay Subtexts
During the brawny Old West of the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan was squaring off against the Evil Empire and Jerry Falwell was squaring off against the gays, we needed lots of man-mountains:Buffed...
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Fall 1968: A Teenager Doing Pushups on TV
Today you can go online and see 100,000,000 pictures and videos of naked bodybuilders and athletes flexing for selfies, and every actor with even minimal musculature takes off his shirt at the drop of...
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