Indiana Jones: White Heterosexual Male Adventure

During the famous summer of 1981, when I went to an Italian Film Festival, moved into my own apartment, and learned about  gay German literature, The Canterbury Tales, and the Beat Generation, I saw a dozen movies with gay subtexts, including  Clash of the Titans, American Werewolf in London, Hell Night, The Chosen.  

Raiders of the Lost Ark was not among them. It hit  #1 at the box office that year by thrashing 1980s conservative anxieties about gay people and gender roles (and race and imperialism).

You know the plot:

1.  Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford), whip-wielding archaeologist, is trying to steal a valuable artifact from a lost temple in Peru.  He seems to be buddy-bonding with his guide, Satipo (Alfred Molina), and even grabs his crotch to pull him out of a dangerous situation. But then Satipo betrays him and leaves him to die.

It's not just Raiders of the Lost Ark.  Indy is betrayed by Walter Donovan in the sequel, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and by Mac in Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull.  Men are duplitious, underhanded; male friendships not to be trusted.

As a consequence, Indy has allies but no buddies.  He has an 11-year old ward, Short Round (Jonathan Ke Quan), in Temple, and in Crystal, he mentors young greaser Mutt Williams (Shia LaBeouf), who turns out to be his son.

One of his allies, the Egyptian Sallah (Jonathan Rhys-Davies) could be read as gay-vague, as he dislikes receiving a gratitude-kiss from The Girl, and spends a lot of time hugging, kissing, and fondling men. But the gay reading is minimized by making him a heterosexual father with about a dozen kids.

2. After bringing the artifact back home, Indy teaches a class in archaeology to a classroom full of female students mooning over him.  Apparently he's incredibly dreamy, swoon-worthy to the max -- but only to girls.  Heterosexism in full force.

3. Indy gets a new assignment: to track down the Ark of the Covenant that the ancient Hebrews used to destroy the Egyptian army.  (Wait -- didn't the Egyptians destroy them?).  So it's off to the Middle East, or in Temple, to India; or in The Last Crusade, Italy; or in Crystal Skull, Peru.  Unlike most archaeologists, Indy doesn't specialize in one geographic region, and he's fluent in every language ever spoken, even the Mayan language spoken 3,000 years ago in Peru!  Not heterosexist, just stupid.

4. En route  to the Middle East, Indy stops in Tibet (yeah, that's on the way) to look up Marian, a girl that he broke up with, ostensibly to get an amulet that shows the location of the Ark, but actually to get back together with her.  The most hackneyed trick in the book for getting The Girl into the plot. Indy also hooks up with The Girl in Temple (a nightclub performer who accidentally tags along) and in Last Crusade (a Nazi who falls for him and changes alliances); in Crystal Skull, Marian returns so they can reconcile. Fade out kiss. Yawn.

5. After a few more betrayals by male friends, Indy and Marian run up against the creepy, foppish Nazi Arnold Toht (Ronald Lacey), who always carries a specially-designed hanger in a black case to keep his coat from getting wrinkled.  Gay vague villains abound in the series.  Perhaps the most egregious is the swaying, jewelry-encrusted young boy, Maharaja Salim Singh (Raj Singh), who tortures Indy with a voodoo doll in Temple (yes, a Hindu with a Sikh name uses an Afro-Caribbean device).

Or maybe the butch lesbian stereotype, Nazi. .. um, I mean Commie. . .Irina Spalko (Kate Blanchette) in Crystal Skull.

6.  Turns out the the Ark of the Covenant contains spirits, who kill the evil Nazis but spare Indy and his friends.  Same thing happens in each of the sequels; the spiritual world, the laws of the universe side with Truth, Right, Masculinity, and Heterosexism.  The gay-vague, the gender-transgressive, the Nazi/Commie must perish.



Harrison Ford is not exactly a gay ally, although he seems ok on gay marriage. Still, I'll stick with the Die Hard series.

Jason Marsden, the Pocket Gay

Jason Marsden is often mixed up with fellow teen idol James Marsden.  James has the muscles, but Jason has the smile.  And he's a stronger gay ally.

An active child star, Jason got his start at age 11, playing A. J. Quartermaine on General Hospital (1986-88) and werewolf-boy Eddie Munster on the remake of the classic 1960s tv series The Munsters (1988-91).

As a teenager and young adult, he occasionally played a girl's boyfriend, but more often, a boy's homoromantic best buddy: his characters bonded with Omri Katz in the paranormal-investigator series Eerie Indiana (1992), Perry King in Almost Home (1993), Brandon Call (left) on Step by Step (1993-98), Will Friedle on Boy Meets World (1994-95), Jeff Bridges in White Squall (1996), and Robert Downey Jr. on Allie McBeal (1997).

In a 2002 episode of Will and Grace, he plays "the pocket gay," who is rejected by Will for being too short but eventually wins him over.

Jason has been doing cartoon voice work since 1990.  He may be best known as the voice of Chester McBadBat, working-class boyfriend of the elite A.J. on Fairly Oddparents (2003-2011); and Max Goof, surly teenage son of Disney's Goofy in Goof Troop (1992-3), two movies (1995, 2002), and House of Mouse (2001-2002), for some reason a gay fan favorite and the subject of lots of homoerotic slash fiction.

His only significant beefcake shots were in Return to the Batcave (2003), an adventure involving the real life Adam West and Burt Ward, Batman and Robin from the 1960s tv series.  As the young Burt Ward, Jason displayed an impressive muscular physique.

He also looked impressive beneath the belt, but that may have been necessary to the plot, which devotes a great deal of time to the censors' fretting over Burt Ward's massive endowment. 

On the Road: The Gay Beat Generation

On June 21st, 1985, I drove cross-country 1860 miles from my parents' house in Rock Island, Illinois to West Hollywood, my 10-year old Dodge Dart packed with bedding, dishes, clothes, and mementos.  There was only room for one box of books, so I took an Italian-English dictionary, a world atlas, Death in Venice, Les fleurs du mal, Earthfasts, Alice in Wonderland, The Gayellow Pages, Pidgin to da Max, a complete Edgar Allen Poe, a guide to old movies, three Alix and Enak comics, three books from the Green Library, The Lord of the Rings trilogy -- and On the Road, by Jack Kerouac.

My heterosexist Modern American Literature professor mentioned the Beat Generation, briefly, as a literary literary movement that rebelled against 1950s conformity with drugs, jazz music, Eastern mysticism, and free love.  He didn't mention that the "free love" was often gay.  In fact, the main poem he assigned was: "Woman woman woman woman woman woman woman woman woman woman."

But when I looked more closely into the movement during the famous summer of 1981, I discovered lots of gay content:

William S. Burroughs, who wrote weird impenetrable "cut up" novel (where he tore the pages up and reassembled them at random), but the heroes were gay junkie outsiders.

Paul Bowles (right), who moved to Morocco in 1947, drawn by the Muslim nonchalance to same-sex practices.  In 1960 he met a young Berber named Mohammed Mrabet (left), and translated his autobiographical novel about rent-boys, Love with a Few Hairs. 

Allen Ginsberg (played by James Franco, top photo, in 2010), whose long poem Howl (1957) was about his alienation from materialist, heterosexist American society. It was tried for obscenity due to the overt references to gay sex.

Ginsberg's long-time lover Peter Orlovsky (right, with his brother), whose poetry was even more overtly homoerotic.

And the counterculture classic that every hipster at Augustana College read, or claimed to: On the Road (1957), by bisexual Beat Generation guru Jack Kerouac (right), about his mostly unrequited love for Neal Cassidy.  In the novel, Sal Paradise is in love with Dean Moriarity (played by Sam Riley and Garrett Hedlund in the 2012 movie), who keeps talking him into leaving The Girl for wild homerotic jaunts across American.  They like sex with both men and women (they disapprove of "fags," who like only men), but are suspicious of women, who lead to marriage, settling down, domesticity, and conformity, a loss of something essential and noble.  Men represent freedom, adventure, nonconformity, being true to yourself.  In the end Sal chooses domesticity and rejects homoromance as "selfishness."  But on the way they are obviously lovers, and that in itself was freedom enough in the dull furrowed Midwest in 1981.