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More Homophobia on "Friends": This Time It's Serious
March 9, 1995, a Thursday night. I always watch Seinfeld at 9:00, and then at 9:30 occasionally the Seinfeld knockoff Friends, about a group of younger, less cynical friends negotiating small-town...
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Perils of Life in the Village: My Roommate Tries to "Make" My New Boyfriend
I thought apartments in the Castro were difficult to come by, but when I moved to New York in 1997, Manhattan turned out to be a hundred times worse.Not just the gay neighborhoods. Anywhere in...
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Robby Benson's Six Pack
Was there any 1970s teen idol more dreamy than Robby Benson? Sure, David Cassidy, Donny Osmond, and Leif Garrett were cute, but Robby's blue eyes, coiffed hair, and soulful pout could cause thousands...
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King of the Golden River: Boy Meets Dwarf
Shortly after I was born, my parents bought a set of Colliers Encyclopedia and The Junior Classics, an anthology of mostly Victorian-era stories like Alice in Wonderlandand Jackanapes. During my...
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Peter McEnery: The First Gay Teenager
In Victim (1961), 21-year old Peter McEnery played the first explicitly identified gay teenager in film, a working class boy named Boy who commits suicide in prison. His affluent, middle-aged lover,...
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Your Grandfather's Beefcake: Circus Strongmen
Today every gym is crowded with guys with 60-inch chests and 20-inch biceps, but 130 years ago, they were rare. Poor nutrition, poor hygiene, and a lack of understanding of kinesiology limited the...
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The Face of Pure Evil
This is the Face of Pure Evil. And the House Where Evil Dwells.When I was a kid, it was painted grey, and that attic window had bars on it.I lived on the the north side of Denkmann Elementary School,...
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Scott Grimes: a Band of Brothers
For a few years in the mid-1980s, Scott Grimes was as famous as Scott Baio or Matthew Broderick.His red hair and boyish smile drew the interest of teen magazines, and his muscles and penchant for...
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December 1979: Fred, Gay Liberation, and "All That Jazz"
December 1979, about a month after my 19th birthday. I'm having a very busy Holiday Season. Back from a semester abroad in Germany, my last date with a girl, the Chinese Restaurant Incident ("Don't...
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Fall 1996: The Preacher and the Homeless Teenager
David was 43 years old, but an honorary twink. He grew up in an ultra-conservative household in Arkansas, got married, and became a Baptist preacher -- then, on his 40th birthday, had his first...
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Ryan Pinkston and Sterling Knight: BFFs or Power Couple?
No relation to Rob Pinkston of Ned's Declassified School Survival Guide, Ryan Pinkston got his start in martial arts: he received his black belt in Wushu Kung Fu at age nine and has won championships...
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My Boyfriend's Lesbian Grandmother
You're probably wondering about my "boyfriend" Nick who saved me from The Killer one summer (I'm guessing the summer after 3rd grade, when I was eight years old).The muscular, redheaded law student...
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The Gay Enchanted Forest of Spooky the Tuff Little Ghost
When I was a kid in the 1960s, my favorite comics by far were the Harvey supernatural titles: ghosts, witches, and devils roaming an oddly-Medieval Enchanted Forest where same-sex desire was...
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Damn Yankees
When I was a kid, I kept away from the movie Damn Yankees (1958) and its various live versions. It was about baseball -- yawn -- there was a lady in her underwear on the poster -- and the word damn...
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Who Killed Cock Robin: The Only Gay Nursery Rhyme
When I was a kid in the 1960s, I liked science fiction, like The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet and The Spaceship Under the Apple Tree, but I hated fairy tales, and I especially hated nursery...
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Fall 2006: Outed in the Locker Room of a Jewish High School
One day when I was living in San Francisco, Kevin the Vampire showed me the want ad section of the San Francisco Chronicle with a job circled: a man to teach English and Spanish at a Jewish high...
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Adventures of Pete and Pete
Juvenile tv programs of the 1950s and 1960s, such as Captain Kangaroo, Shari Lewis, and Andy's Gang, were dedicated to socializing kids into the norms of adult society. The rules may seem odd, the...
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The Naked Man at the Crossroads
Mary Prater was only 16 when her parents announced that they had arranged for her to be married to 33-year old Ell Hicks.She didn't mind: he was a good catch. He had a nice farm near Pyramid,...
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The Bizarro Jerry: Tim DeKay's Gay Work
I like Seinfeld -- I own DVD sets of the entire series -- but the characters are constantly making heterosexist comments, and often they are downright homophobic. It seems strange, therefore, to find...
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The Beverly Hillbillies
The Beverly Hillbillies, one of the 1960s line of hayseed comedies (others included Petticoat Junction, Green Acres, Gomer Pyle, and The Andy Griffith Show), slogged on from 1962 to 1971, and your...
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