Don Stroud: Robert Conrad's Buddy

My church taught that going to a movie was the worst sin imaginable -- God would strike you dead if you even set foot in a theater.  So my brother and I saw almost none during our childhood, only when an oblivious babysitting uncle took us or when a sleepover involved a movie as entertainment.  In high school, my friend Darry and I occasionally took the bus downtown to "study at the library," and went to a matinee at the Fort Armstrong Theater.

We always looked for "good" movies.  We couldn't exactly articulate what "good" meant, but posters with two guys together always caught our eye.  Especially if the two guys were muscular and shirtless.  A surprising number starred Don Stroud:

1975: Murf the Surf.  A surfer (Don) and his buddy Allan (real life buddy Robert Conrad) plot a jewel heist. They like girls, but they also like each other.  A lot

1977: Sudden Death, with Robert Conrad.  Buddies who like girls go to the Philippines to investigate a series of murders by an evil sugar company, and end up rescuing each other with their shirts off.  This is the first R-rated movie I ever saw.

1978: The Buddy Holly Story.  The rock and roll legend (Gary Busey) and his gay-vague best buddy, drummer Jesse (Don).

1979: Search and Destroy, with Perry King (then known for playing gay and gay-vague characters).  Buddies investigate a murder.

Don Stroud got his start as a world-class surfer hired as Troy Donahue's stunt double on Hawaiian Eye; he would return to surfing later as the Big Kahuna in the recasts of the Gidget series (1985, 1988).

During the 1980s and 1990s he moved into television, appearing in over 175 episodes of a huge number of tv series, including Chips, Knight Rider, The Powers of Matthew Star, and The A-Team.  Most recently he played the evil sheriff  most recently in Django Unchained (2012).

Always a beefcake star, Don took off his shirt in most performances, and appeared nude in Playgirl in 1973.

He had many gay friends and moved in the same circles as Robert Conrad, Robert Wagner, and Nick Adams, yet oddly he was never the subject of any gay rumors.

Married three times, he has retired to his native Hawaii.

Jinx's Mom Comes Out: The First Lesbian in Children's Comics

If you read Archie comics as a kid, you probably remember the backup feature Li'l Jinx, which first appeared in 1947 and continued through the 1980s.  A seven or eight year old with blond pigtails, L'il Jinx was a distaff Dennis the Menace who always caused catastrophes for her single Dad (I don't remember her Mom ever appearing).  She was a tomboy, strong and athletic, particularly interested in baseball.

Her coterie of friends included the fat Charlie Hawse, the nerdish Greg, the snobbish Gigi, and the token black kids Russ and Roz.

In 2011, the Life with Archie series, about young-adult versions of Archie and Company, printed a story about a teenage Jinx.  The teenage version spun-off into her own comic book series, reprinted as graphic novels by J. Torres and Terry Austin.  The first, Jinx, appeared in April 2012.

The second, Little Mis-Steps, came out this week.  It solves the problem of the missing Mother:

She's not missing, she's just not around a lot.  Jinx's parents are divorced.  Her Mom, Merry, is a Emergency Room nurse, always on call, so it seemed more practical for her to live with her Dad.  Oh, and she has something to tell Jinx:

She's a lesbian.

Jinx wonders: does that explain why I'm into boy stuff like baseball, not girly stuff like makeup and dresses?

No: liking baseball has nothing to do with liking boys.

Coming a couple of years after Kevin Keller became the first gay character in children's comics,  this is another breakthrough with only one misstep: Mom is portrayed as borderline neglectful, too busy with her career to spend time with Jinx.

Kings of Summer: Three Boys Alone

Most boys-alone movies isolate the kids through a tragic accident -- a plane crash in Lord of the Flies, a terrorist attack in Toy Soldiers.  But in The Kings of Summer (2013) aka Toy's House, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and is now in limited release, the boys head out into the wilderness by design.

Tiring of the oppression of adult society, nerdish teen Joe Toy (Nick Robinson) and his muscular best friend Patrick (Gabriel Basso, below) build a house in the woods near their home and vanish, hoping for one last summer of freedom before high school.  Tagging along is Biaggio (Moises Arias, right), an eccentric outsider who claims to have no gender.

These are affluent kids, so they outfit their retreat with furniture, a boombox, and video games, and sneak into town for groceries, but they still bring a sense of wildness to their adventure, and homoromantic freedom with many scenes of the three swimming, dancing, slicing watermelons with swords, and hitting each other in the shoulder to demonstrate their affection.  Soon they have formed an alternative family.

Unfortunately, there is some homophobia that cast a shadow on the gay subtext. Biaggio worries that he's gay because he coughs a lot and gets sinusitis. Turns out he actually has the debilitating disease cystic fibrosis.  That's not nearly as bad!

Also some racism, sexism, and a lot of profanity, including the f-bomb every five seconds.

And the summer ends with the boys acquiescing to their heterosexual destiny: a girl shows up, and both Joe and Patrick like her.

But for awhile, they had each other, and a summer that could have lasted forever.

Seattle native Nick Robinson is currently starring in Melissa and Joey (2010-) with Melissa Joan Hart (formerly Sabrina the Teenage Witch) and Joey Lawrence.

Gabriel Basso (left) has starred in Alabama Moon with Uriah Shelton and Super 8 with Joel Courtney, and on the tv series The Big C (2010-2013), as the son of a woman with cancer.  He also appears in the music video Kyle and Donny: The Anatomy of Tide, which is mostly devoted to close-up shot of the two semi-nude musclemen.

Zoey 101: Your Big Brother's Gay Subtexts

The teencom, like the teen idol, has a short life expectancy.  It bursts onto the scene and becomes an instant Saturday-night must-see for millions of junior high students.  They memorize favorite scenes, fantasize about the teen hunks, buy the tie-in novels and trapper keepers.  But they grow older, go to high school, get drivers' licenses, make plans on Saturday night.  The stars grow older, too, and yearn for mature roles.  So, after two or three years, rarely more, the teencom fades away, replaced by a new one that has the new class of junior high students gushing.

Between 2005 and 2008, this face and physique was intimately familiar to teens, when Zoey 101 ruled Nickelodeon, with 65 episodes and four made-for-tv movies.  It starred Jamie Lynn Spears (younger sister of the pop diva Brittney Spears) as Zoey Brooks, a student at an elite oceanside boarding school in California, and her coterie of friends and friendly enemies.  The boys included:

1. Logan (Matthew Underwood, above), a handsome but self-absorbed rich kid who doesn't own a shirt.

2. Dustin (Paul Butcher, left), Zoey's younger brother, who has bulked up and now stars on the webseries MyMusic.

3. Chase (Sean Flynn, right), a nerd with a crush on Zoey.  The grandson of film great Errol Flynn, and nephew of actor and photojournalist Sean Flynn, Sean has starred in several movies since, including Bad Blood (2012), about the Hatfield-McCoy feud.

4. Michael (Christopher Massey), the token black guy.  The older brother of Kyle Massey of That's So Raven and Cory in the House, Michael previously starred in the parodic "instructional training video" Color Me Gay (2000).

5. James (Austin Butler), Zoey's on-off boyfriend.



Aside from the beefcake, there were hints about same-sex desire or practice in nearly every episode.

A computer dating service mistakenly pairs two boys for a school dance, and they decide to go through with it.

Trying to wrangle an invitation to join a campus fraternity, it-boy Reese gives the president a gift and says “This is just to let you know I’m interested.” The other boy replies, “Thanks, but I’m seeing someone.”

When nerdish Logan displays an expertise in comic book trivia, another boy sighs, “He’s handsome and knowledgeable!”  Later, he challenges Logan to a trivia contest with “Let’s see what you got, Hot Shorts,” a Freudian slip on “hotshot.”

Enough hints and signals to challenge Drake and Josh, or even Ned's Declassified School Survival Guide.

Looking for Muscles on The Andy Griffith Show

On a 1960 episode of Make Room for Daddy: nightclub entertainer Danny Williams (Danny Thomas), traveling through the rural South, is arrested by corrupt sheriff Andy Taylor (comedian Andy Griffith).  His sponsor liked the episode so much that they spun Andy off into his own hayseed comedy, The Andy Griffith Show (1960-1968).  Now the slow-talking but wise sheriff of Mayberry, North Carolina, Andy rarely did any police work; he was a single dad, busy with the humorous catastrophes of his friends and family.

I know we watched; my parents were big fans of hayseed comedies, and it was sandwiched between some of their other favorites, Family Affair, and Carol Burnett.  But I don't remember a single episode.  I must have been rolling my eyes and saying "Can't we watch Felony Squad, starring former Physique Pictorial model Davis Cole (left) instead?"

When Andy Griffith left the show in 1968, it was renamed Mayberry RFD (RFD stands for "Rural Free Delivery," a mail service).  Most of the other regulars stayed on board, and the focus became single dad Sam Jones (Carol Burnett Show regular Ken Berry, right).  It lasted until 1971.

I've watched a few episodes recently for research. No shirtless shots, not a lot of beefcake (although Ken Berry has some beneath-the-belt things going on in some scenes).  But quite a substantial gay connection, for a hayseed comedy:

1. Andy Griffith played a gay villain in Rustler's Rhapsody (1985).

2. Ron Howard (his son Opie) went on to the gay-subtext Happy Days, and then became one of the more homophobic directors in Hollywood, heterosexualizing gay characters and adding homophobic jokes.

3. Jim Nabors (gas station attendant Gomer Pyle), spun off into his own gay-subtext series) and is gay in real life.

4. Buddy Foster (Sam Jones' son) is the brother of lesbian actress Jodie Foster, and played several gay-vague roles, including episodes of Chips and The Mighty Isis, before he retired from acting.














Here he shows some muscles as a feral Wild Boy on a 1975 episode of The Six Million Dollar Man. 

5. Don Knotts (deputy sheriff Barney Fife) later played Ralph Furley, landlord to pretending-to-be-gay Jack Tripper on Three's Company.

6. The character of Howard Sprague (Jack Dodson) was a gay-stereotyped mother-obsessed milquetoast with an interest in music and art and no interest in women, one of the few gay-coded characters in hayseed comedies (or in any 1960s comedy, for that matter).