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The New People: Gay Hippies After Stonewall
Another attempt to cash in on the hippies, The New People premiered on September 29, 1969, three months after the Stonewall Riots and the beginning of the Gay Liberation Movement. It was heavily...
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The Life of Riley: Bullying Boys into Girl-Craziness
Before World War II, teenage boys were expected to be concerned with the gang, or with one special pal, and think of girls as "poison." Those boys who expressed an interest in girls prior to...
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John Hamill: The First Nude Physique Model
Born in 1947, the boyish, good-natured John Hamill began his career as a physique model, one of the first to pose fully nude. Sometimes he even had a partner, in explicitly homoerotic scenes aimed at...
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Robert Goulet: 1950s Gay Icon
You may not recognize the name Robert Goulet, but he was an icon to the gay generation who survived the pre-Stonewall Dark Ages (1950-1969).During those years, he was a fixture on Broadway, starring in...
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Fifty Ways of Saying Fabulous: A Gay Kiwi Boyhood
The gay-themed New Zealand movie Kawa(2010) was terrible, all about closets and angst and parents who fall to the ground screaming when they discover that their kid is gay. But Fifty Ways of Saying...
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Coy and Vance: Good Ol Boy Bromance
In 1978 John Schneider and his life-long friend, fellow Georgia boy Byron Cherry, both auditioned for the role of Bo Duke in the good-old-boy dramedy Dukes of Hazard. John got the part, and Byron had...
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Geography Club: Gay and Straight High Schoolers
Juvenile lit with gay characters almost invariably is about straight juveniles coming to terms with the gay adults in their lives. So I was intrigued by the premise of Brent Harlinger's Geography Club...
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Dancer from the Dance
When I started grad school in Bloomington, Indiana in 1982, I had no trouble finding gay books. There were no gay sections in the campus bookstore or the White Rabbit downtown, but you could just scan...
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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 Bookstore Gang watches Kermit the Frog
When I was in college in the late 1970s and early 1980s, I spent most of my free time in a little bookstore off the Student Union lobby that looked and felt like an old-fashioned living room, with a...
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Francois Goeske: Searching for Gay Subtexts
Robert Louis Stevenson's books are sacred, memories of childhoods past where boys conjured up lavish adventures with each other. Especially Treasure Island,written specifically upon a request from his...
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Aaron Stone: Superhero and Android
The Disney Channel is famous for its teencoms, light comedies about teenagers in real-life situations, sometimes with a paranormal element. But Aaron Stone (2009-2010) was action-adventure, with...
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Matt Bush: The Gay Best Friend
I like guys who are on the shorter side -- 5'5, 5'4, shorter if I can find them. So the main appeal of Glory Daze (2010-2011), about fratboys parading around in their underwear in the 1980s, was not...
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Next Friday: Homophobes Create an Interracial Gay Romance
So I'm channel surfing, when I see a white slacker, carrying an enormous dog, an enormous grin on his face, about to leave a house. Inside, a black slacker coyly says "Call me!" He replies "You know...
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Lance Loud: The First Gay Celebrity
Many people believe that the first person to come out on national tv was Lance Loud of the reality series An American Family (1973). Cameras followed Bill and Pat Loud and their five children,...
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Tim Robbins: New Sensitive Man
Speaking of Tim Robbins, he was one of the most recognizable faces of the 1980s, appearing on tv in Amazing Stories, Hill Street Blues, Love Boat, and Santa Barbara; in teen sex comedies, horror...
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Dog Pound: Unpleasant, Violent, Homoerotic
Most "boys alone" movies are about boys sticking together to overcome adversity. The grim, gritty Canadian movie Dog Pound (2010) is about brutality and chaos.A group of juvenile delinquents are sent...
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Fred MacMurray's Gay Career
I saw Fred MacMurray's career backwards.When I was very little, he was on My Three Sons (1960-1972). I paid most attention to the college-age son Robbie Douglas (Don Grady, left), who like boys, but...
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Nickelodeon's Gay Programming Blocks
Nickelodeon's teencoms and animated series are usually broadcast in programming blocks, with introductions, game shows, interviews, and interstitial comments by teen hosts, some hunks in their own...
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Little People, Straight World
On a 2006 episode of the reality tv series The Surreal Life, little person actor Vern Troyer got drunk, and the uber-muscular Christopher Knight (the reason I was watching) carried him to his room....
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