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Spring 1982: 36 Hours of Cruising at Lambert International Airport
I don't hook up in public, period. No parks, no nature preserves, no secluded hotel restrooms, no booths at the Pleasure Palace. No way, no how.But back in college in the Midwest in the 1980s, I...
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The King and I: Bare Chests and Shaved Heads
The King and I, the 1951 Rogers & Hammerstein musical, can be played as a heterosexual romance, like the 1956 movie version:Young widow Anna Leonowens goes to Thailand in 1861 to tutor the many...
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Scary, Heterosexist Ads of the 1960s
I hate tv commercials where women take a bite of yogurt, cereal, or chocolate, and then roll their heads back and stiffen in orgiastic ecstasy. Or kids see the cereal, macaroni and cheese, or hot dogs...
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Richard Simmons: Fitness Guru Who Has Never Said the Word "Gay"
The Liberace of the 1980s was Richard Simmons, a fey elf in an Afro who led millions of overweight middle-aged women in energetic dance-style aerobics.Growing up obese, Richard was dissatisfied with...
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Maxwell Caulfield: Responding to Gay Rumors with Homophobia
Have you heard of Maxwell Caulfield? During my senior year in college, he was being hailed the Next Big Thing.Born in Scotland, Caulfield moved to London at age 15 and became a nude dancer at the...
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Sausage Sighting #6: the Homophobic Student in the Shower
At Stony Brook University in New York, the first-year grad students were a "cohort" who shared an office and took classes together. One was a lesbian, and most of others were nonchalant about the...
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I Spent My High School Years with Barry Manilow
Speaking of singers that you couldn't avoid hearing during the 1970s, I spent my entire high school career running in the other direction while Barry Manilow's syrupy love! love! love! love! crooning...
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My Fair Lady: A Gay Couple in Edwardian England
My Fair Lady (1956) is one of my all-time favorite musicals, but there is no beefcake, so I'll illustrate it with some nude shots of actors who have played Henry Higgins in their other roles..It's...
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Spring 1964: Two Men Hugging
In an old science fiction story by Robert Heinlein, a man discovers that the world is a lie. Every building in every city is a movie-set fake, constructed for his benefit and disassembled when he...
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Ren and Stimpy: Nickelodeon's Disgusting Gay Couple
In the early 1990s, everyone in West Hollywood was watching the Nickelodeon cartoon series Ren and Stimpy (1991-1995), a parody of the idiotic animated cartoons of the 1960s.Including the puerile...
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Fall 1994: Marshall the Virgin
When I was living in West Hollywood in the 1990s, I used to work out at the Hollywood Spa with a ex-soldier named Marshall -- mid-twenties, shorter than me, very pale, with a military haircut and a...
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Spring 1973: My Date Must Be a Boy
When I was growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, heterosexual desire was assumed a constant, a universal of human experience. Same-sex desire was not only never mentioned, it could not be mentioned.It...
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Why I Read "Pearls before Swine," Homophobia and All
As social media makes everyone's life a fishbowl, an ongoing issue becomes: should I read this book or comic strip or see this movie after the author or director has made a homophobic comment?There are...
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Tarzan, the Stage Musical: Major Loincloth-Clad Hunkage
With all of the movies, tv series, books, comic books, and toys surrounding Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan since his first appearance in the October 1912 issue of All Story Magazine, it makes sense that...
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The Gaithers: The Gay Connection in Christian Gospel Music
When I was growing up in the Nazarene Church, I hated the hymns even more than the screaming, Bible-pounding sermons: we sang three during every service, nine per week, all chosen from the same 40 or...
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Summer 1987: Notre Dame, a Catholic Boy, and a Summer Night
Ok, my last hookup in a public place. Seriously.Summer 1987: 26 years old, in grad school at the University of Southern California, I had a paper on "Boccacio and the Jews" accepted at a Medieval...
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The Original Jungle Boy and His Boyfriend
An orphan, the son of a mahout, Sabu Dastigir was riding a real elephant around Mysore when he was signed to star in Elephant Boy (1937), an adaptation of the Kipling tale "Toomai of the Jungle."...
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10 Easy Steps to Getting Any Guy
We've all had this problem:You see the Man of Your Dreams at the gym or sitting by the pool, or at a cruise bar, standing by himself and glaring out at the world. Physical perfection! Exactly your...
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Totalitarian Television: Underdog and Friends
When I was a kid, all of the grown-up men I knew worked in the great smoking factory that my Dad called "the goddam hellhole." And all of the grown-up women were their wives, cooking and cleaning and...
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Dean Paul Martin: Bisexual Rat Pack Kid
The Desi in the1960s boy band Dino, Desi, and Billy was Desi Arnaz Jr., of course, and the Dino was Dean Paul Martin (left), the 13-year old son of Rat Packer Dean Martin. Dino was very rich, very...
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