The Big Valley: Show me Tom Barkley's guts!

I never saw The Big Valley (1965-69); it was on past my bedtime, or we watched Carol Burnett instead.  But you could hardly miss the commercials crowded with musclemen poured into their slacks -- with obvious gifts beneath the belt -- set to a rousing theme song with an elderly lady saying "Show us what you inherited from your father!  Show us some of Tom Barkley's guts!"

The elderly lady was Victoria Barkley (lesbian actress Barbara Stanwyck, who starred in Double Indemnity with Fred MacMurray), owner of a large California ranch in the 1880s.  She had four sons and a daughter, whose squabbles formed most of the plots.

Barbara Stanwyck and Rock Hudson starred together in several movies during the 1950s, such as All I Desire (1953), and were still close friends.  Coincidentally, most of the other actors in the cast had a Rock Hudson connection.

1. Richard Long (right) played eldest son Jarrod, a calm, sensible attorney.  A friend of Rock Hudson (left) and a regular at gay talent agent Henry Willson's parties, he was long rumored to be gay.  He later played gay-vague on Nanny and the Professor.

2. Peter Breck played hot-headed Nick, who always wore black and was always getting into fistfights.

3. Linda Evans, who played Audra, who would go on to star on Dynasty.  In 1984, she made headlines when she kissed Rock Hudson on camera, and then discovered that he had AIDS (in those days people thought you could contract it by kissing).

4. Youngest son Eugene, studying medicine at Berkeley, appeared in eight first-season episodes and then was written out. He was played by Charles Briles, who starred with Rock Hudson in Send Me No Flowers. 

5. Heath, the illegitimate son of Victoria's late husband, who had to literally fight to be accepted by his half-siblings, was was played by Lee Majors, later the star of The Six Million Dollar Man and The Fall Guy.   Majors was discovered and mentored by Rock Hudson, but upon becoming a big star, cut off all contact.  When Rock was outed as gay, Lee's publicist insisted that the two never knew each other. 

Visiting Africa

With all of the teenage African and American boys pairing off, in A Visit to a Chief's Son (1974), African Journey (1989), and The Great Elephant Escape (1995), you'd think that sub-Saharan Africa would easily make my list of "good places," like India or the Pacific, but it didn't.  When I was a kid in the 1960s and 1970s, I heard about Africa mostly from Tarzan movies: steaming jungles occupied by hoards of gibbering natives who were semi-nude but not very muscular, and spent all of their time trying to kill white people.  Here they plan to burn Tarzan's Boy (Johnny Sheffield) at the stake.  He was also almost drowned, forced to drink poison, attacked by a giant spider, and tied up for no particular reason.

School wasn't much better.  Our few lessons about Africa mentioned the steaming jungles and naked natives living in grass huts, fighting crocodiles and waiting for Stanley and Livingston to discover them.  Although occasionally the pictures showed some muscles (and some of the nudity), and suggested the potential for homoromantic liaisons.

Jungle comic books occasionally showed natives who were "civilized," though still in loincloths, but they were always in the background.  The focus was on the white European or American leads.  Here the white Dan-El is in the foreground, and the black Natongo in the background.

There were also two tv series about Americans in a more modern Africa: Daktari (1966-69), starring Yale Summers (left) and Hari Rhodes (right), and Cowboy in Africa (1967-68), starring Chuck Connors.  I never saw them.

I heard about the real Africa some time later, but it didn't help much.  Sub-Saharan Africa today has some of the most repressively homophobic regimes on the planet.

Gay Friendship in "From Here to Eternity"

The 1953 movie "From Here to Eternity" is famous for the hetero-erotic scene of Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr smooching in the tide, but there's a lot more to it.  A lot of gay content censored from the original James Jones novel (1952), but a lot left in.

The plot strands contain a heavy dose of melodrama:  In Hawaii just before Pearl Harbor, Private Prewitt (Montgomery Clift, left) refuses to participate in his company's boxing tournament, so his commanding officer, Captain Dana Holmes (Philip Ober), lays on the harassment and extra assignments to break him.  Meanwhile Prewitt falls in love with a thinly-disguised prostitute named Lorena (Donna Reed), but she won't marry him because she's saving up for a "respectable" marriage.

Meanwhile, Sergeant Warden (Burt Lancaster) begins an affair with Dana's wife, Karen (Deborah Kerr), but she won't get a divorce and marry him because she's "spoiled" (which means, apparently, unable to have children).

What's gay in all that?

1. Dana's lack of interest in his wife; he has "affairs," and Karen states that they're with women, but we never see any.  Plus his intense interest in boxing in general, and Prewitt in particular. When his superiors discover that he is abusing Prewitt, he is fired, and sadly takes the photos of hunky boxers down from his office wall.

2. Though Prewitt and Warden are both involved with women, they have time for some rather physical buddy-bonding, with arms on shoulders and pressed against knees.  (By the way, they both have shirtless scenes, and Warden spends a lot of time in a swimsuit).

3. Maggio (Frank Sinatra) was gay in the original novel, and in the movie, he seems not particularly interested in women.  In fact, the only time he expresses interest, he's trying to horn in on Prewitt's evening with Lorena.

But he's very interested in Prewitt.  He goes AWOL in order to keep a date with Prewitt, punches a MP, and is sentenced to six months in the stockade.  There he antagonizes the guard Judson (Ernest Borgnine), who doesn't like gays. . .um, I mean Italians. . .and is severely beaten.  He escapes, seeks out Prewitt, and dies in his arms.

Prewitt is so distraught over Maggio's death that he kills Judson and then goes AWOL himself, only springing back into action when the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor.

4. The homoromantic bond between Prewitt and Maggio is intensified by Montgomery Clift's personal  conflict over being gay.  One biography of Clift suggests that he was cast precisely to add some "ambiguity" to the character.  Burt Lancaster was also rumored to be gay at the time.

Danny Bonaduce

Keith (David Cassidy) was the fave rave of The Partridge Family (1970-74), the Boomer sitcom about a family of pop stars driving around on a psychedelic bus.  But Danny (right) had a following among the younger gay kids.  Played by the carrot-top, freckle-faced Danny Bonaduce, he was a fast-talking operator who kept trying to get the family into bigger and better gigs.

Here's a "Where's Waldo" scene of Danny immersed in a sea of interracial hunks when he is drafted by mistake.

Boomers with fond memories of Danny Partridge are shocked by Danny Bonaduce today, craggy, gravelly-voiced, a shock jock, celebrity wrestler, and general rabble rouser with multiple arrests on his record (including an arrest for assaulting a transvestite prostitute)  Plus a shockingly muscular physique.

The shock may come from low exposure Danny had during his adolescence and young adulthood, so we seemed to jump directly from freckle-faced operator to craggy and gravelly.

But he wasn't entirely under the radar during the 1970s.  The teenager had guest spots on Shazam!, Fantasy Island, Chips, California Fever, and Eight is Enough, and performed in Murder on Flight 501 (1975), the buddy-bonding movie Corvette Summer (1978) with Mark Hamill, and the sexploitation H.O.T.S. (1979).  By 1980, however, Former Child Star Syndrome had taken its toll, leading Danny to drug addiction and a period of homelessness.

He began re-inventing himself in the early 2000s, with a radio career, a reality tv series, and lots of well-publicized celebrity stunts (in 2003, for instance, he boxed fellow teen idol Barry Williams)..  He's not exactly gay-friendly, but then he doesn't seem to be friendly to anyone in particular.