Geraldo Rivera Bares It All

The blogosphere is going wild over Geraldo Rivera's semi-nude photo that got tweeted to all his followers earlier this week.  Mostly with outrage: "how dare a 70 year old display his body, and disgust everyone?"

Everyone?

I've been told my whole life that "everyone" finds some bodies (ones with breasts) beautiful and others (ones with pecs) disgusting, so I'm leery of people trying to dictate what I find attractive. No matter what your body type is, someone thinks you're hot, and you should have the right to display your physique without ridicule.

Geraldo was a gay ally during the 1980s, when most commentators were cool, at best.  He was rumored to be gay due to his Castro Clone moustache, fey mannerisms, and semi-nude photos in Playgirl.  

In his 1991 tell-all autobiography, amid endless discussions of bedding every woman on Earth, Geraldo  describes a wild night in 1972 with Rudolph Nureyev and Mick Jagger -- but cautions that the festivities fell short of sexual contact.

He regularly topped the list of "hottest talk show hosts," and some classic moments made him an unforgettable 1980s icon.

Like his ill-fated 1986 tv special The Mystery of Al Capone's Vault. live, on national tv, with millions of people watching, his crew broke into the secret vault of gangster Al Capone.  He expected to find corpses, treasure, or maybe priceless historical documents.  He found broken bottles.

In 1988, he invited some white supremacists onto his talk show, and in the resulting melee, his nose was broken.

Later in 1988, he hosted a tv special about Satanic Ritual Abuse, breathlessly claiming that there were millions of Satanists in the U.S. kidnapping thousands of kids every day for ritual sacrifice and murder.  Except he had no evidence.

Today Geraldo continues to make outrageous and often unfounded claims from his desk at Fox News.  But he's still a gay ally.