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Beefcake and bonding in "Bringing Up Father"
When I was a kid, all of the good comic strips -- Peanuts, the Wizard of Id, Doonesbury -- were in the Moline Dispatch. In Rock Island, all we got were bargain-basement knockoffs and doddering relics...
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A Hippie to the Rescue: My First Date
My first date was in October 1968, when I was in third grade. One day a boy named Gary pushed through the recess crowds to the blacktop where we were playing army men, and asked “Wanna go to a movie...
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The 12 Most Homophobic, Heterosexist, and Horrible Songs
Heterosexism is commonplace in the "girl! girl! girl!' banter of popular music. But some songs are so heterosexist, homophobic, or otherwise horrible that I literally can't stand to hear them. If...
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Spring 2006: Me and the Chinese Food Delivery Guy
After the wealth of Asian guys available in California -- Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Korean, Vietnamese, Cambodian, Burmese, Malaysian, Filipino -- I felt deprived when I moved to New York -- during...
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Ned's Declassified School Survival Guide
Nickelodeon may be somewhat less beefcake-heavy than the Disney Channel, but it makes up for it with lots of gay subtexts. ICarly, Zoey 101, Drake and Josh, and today's Marvin Marvinand Supah Ninjas...
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My Wild Night: Pancakes, Muscles, and a Wiener
One day in the winter of 5th grade, when I was ten years old, a cute boy named Mark approached me after school. "Wanna go out to eat?" he asked.That was an odd dating request. Boys usually just...
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Journey to the Beginning of Time
During the late 1960s, our local afternoon kid's show, Captain Ernie's Cartoon Showboat, played a serial called Journey to the Beginning of Time, about four boys on a field trip to the Museum of...
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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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The 10 Worst Drives in America, and Why They're Worth It
I hate driving: the congestion, the rude drivers, the lack of parking. I try to live in a gay neighborhood, where everything is in walking distance, or barring that, at least walking distance from...
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Fall 2002: Cruised by a Young Republican
When I was a teenager, I could get away with any stupid mistake by claiming that I had been trying to meet girls or impress a girl. Actually, everyone assumed that the reason every boy did anything,...
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Paul Anka: The Gay Next Door
Paul Anka was the first teen idol to be known for his physique as well as his music. Other teen idols of the 1950s -- Bobby Rydell, Bobby Darin, Ricky Nelson, Pat Boone -- may have been dreamy, but...
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Summer 2002: Getting the Shy Boy in the Third Row into my Bed
When I moved to West Hollywood in 1985, I joined the All Saints Metropolitan Community Church, and I saw John there every Sunday. He always sat by himself in the third row. Eventually he joined the...
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Dream of the Red Chamber: Gay Chinese Literature
When I was a kid in the 1960s, China didn't seem likely as a "good place." There was a My Village in Japan, but no My Village in China. Chinese art involved vast natural landscapes rather than the...
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The Day I Turned Japanese
When I was growing up in Rock Island, almost every kid had a "homeland": their grandparents or great-grandparents came from Sweden, Germany, or Belgium, or less commonly Greece, Poland, France, Italy,...
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The Gay Origin of Yankee Doodle
When I was a kid in the 1960s, we had to sing "Yankee Doodle" in music class every five minutes. They told us "It's a great patriotic song, nearly as great as our national anthem! It celebrates rugged...
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Bomba the Jungle Boy
Johnny Sheffield began playing Boy, adopted son to Johnny Weissmuller's iconic Tarzan, in 1939, when he eight years old, and finished in 1947, when he had grown bigger, taller, and far more muscular...
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The Worst TV Series Finales in History
If you watch every episode of a 100-episode sitcom, you've spend 2300 minutes, not including reruns. That's the equivalent of 19 feature-length movies or 11 novels (at the average adult reading...
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Summer 1975: Finding a Place to Invite Boys and their Baseball Bats
Sometime in 7th grade:I start to hear that guys' beneath-the-belt equipment turns into a gigantic baseball bat at random moments, with no prior warning.The process is called "getting a boner," or...
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A Beefcake Tour of Cleveland
That's right, Cleveland.Since flying became such an ordeal, I've been driving back home every year to visit my parents in Indiana, and Cleveland, Ohio is about halfway. It has the Flex Spa, one of the...
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Jimmy Olsen, Superman's First Boyfriend
Many gay boys growing up in the 1950s and 1960s dreamed of dating Superman. In 1954, Daily Planet reporter Jimmy Olsen got his chance: he began to appear in his own comic book title, as Superman's...
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