Rob Lowe got his start as an androgynous prettyboy in Brat Pack classics like The Outsiders (1983), The Hotel New Hampshire (1984), and St. Elmo's Fire (1985).
He played a teenage operator who buddy-bonds with the naive Andrew McCarthy in Class (1983).
He did the "Yank skewers the pretentions of stuffy Brits" thing in Oxford Blues (1984).
In Youngblood (1986), he gave us not only a butt shot, but a revealing near-frontal.
We all figured that Rob was gay. Why else would he infuse his movies with so much buddy-bonding amid the 1980s homophobic slurs? Why else would half the guys in West Hollywood, including my friend Mario, claim to have dated him?
Why else would he show his butt so often?
Then something happened that changed Rob Lowe's life and career forever. During the Democratic National Convention in 1988, Rob and his friend Justin Morrow filmed themselves having sex with two women. It was blurry and grainy, but you could see Rob fully aroused.
The scandal marked him as dangerous, deviant, and overtly sexual. You knew things about him that you didn't about any other celebrity.
Hollywood insiders figured that his career was over, but Rob managed to capitalize on his new aura of danger in Bad Influence (1990), luring a yuppie (James Spader) onto the Dark Side while showing us his butt again. And in
The Dark Backward (1991), a dark comedy about a pair of garbage collectors who want to become standup comics.
He starred in a BBC adaption of Tennessee Williams' Suddenly Last Summer, about a decadent gay guy whose "perversion" leads to a gruesome and ridiculous death.
By 1994, Rob had bounced back enough to play Nick Andros, one of the "good guy" survivors of a plague that destroys the world, in an adaption of Stephen King's The Stand (1994). He appeared in comedies like Wayne's World and Austin Powers, murder mysteries (often as the murderer), and tragedies. But he kept his infamous penis under wraps, except for a nude scene in I Melt with You (2011).
Today Rob is a fixture on television, for audiences who never heard of his sex tape, or don't care. He has starred in The Grinder, Code Black, Wild Bill, and 911 Lone Star. No gay characters, but we still can see an occasional butt.
The infamous dick photos, plus about a dozen Rob Lowe butt shots, are on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends
I am ten years older than Rob Lowe, but I have fantasized about him since "The Outsiders"
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