More Gay Plotlines at Degrassi High

If you were a fan of Degrassi Junior High in the 1980s or Degrassi: The Next Generation in the 2000s, you will be interested in knowing that the Toronto high school full of teen drama is going strong on Nickelodeon's subsidiary Teen Nick. The latest generation includes
Good guy with a mysterious past Drew Torres (Luke Bilyik), and his bff Jake (Justin Kelly)

Class clown Zig Novak (Ricardo Hoyos)

Zane (Shannon Kook-Chun, right), a gay athlete, and his bff, artistic intellectual Eli (Munro Chambers, left).

 Dave (Jahmil French), who is cast as a gay Romeo in the school play, and doesn't think he can pull it off, until he gets lessons from Eli.

Flaming Kurt lookalike Tristran (Lyle O'Donohoe), who is teased about his weight, until his brother, hockey player Owen (Daniel Kelly), comes to his defense.

There's as much angst as ever, and the drama is not to everyone's taste, especially after a diet of giggly teencoms.  But since no American program aimed at a juvenile audience has ever yet featured a gay character or even used the word "gay," I'll take what I can get.

John Wesley Shipp: From Soap Hunk to Dawson's Dad

John Wesley Shipp got his start as the suave soap doctor on Guiding Light (1981) and never looked back.  His career is all about soaps, starring in them, writing them, directing them: Guiding Light, As the World Turns, All My Children, One Life to Live.  Along the way, he won two daytime Emmies, appeared in dozens of shirtless and underwear shots, and became the first crush of many gay boys and heterosexual girls.

Through the years, you could also see him as the superhero The Flash (1990-91), the boxer Lucky Williams on Sisters (1994-95), the father of two gay teenage boys in Starcrossed (2005), and the father of a teenage werewolf on Teen Wolf (2012).  

Fans of the moody evening soap Dawson's Creek know him for his three-year stint as the father of the moody titular character (1999-2002).  

Although he's apparently gay in real life, there's no evidence to the often-heard fan contention that he dated his tv son (James Van Der Beek) or Pacey (Joshua Jackson).

Runner for the King: A Dream of Hispanic Freedom

When I was little, I loved Runner for the King (Rowena Bennett 1944), about a boy named Roca who is part of a relay of runners in the Inca Empire of South America.  They deliver messages to and from the king in the form of knotted cords, or quipu.

But as Roca tries to deliver the latest message, things go wrong.  A relay station is abandoned, a rope bridge is cut; he must go through the jungle, where he is attacked by a jaguar.  He rescues his friend Cachi from the savages who are planning an attack, and they run together to deliver the message personally to the Inca.  

Cachi and Roca's perilous run entered my dreams.  My friend Bill and I were racing across a vast sandy desert beneath a midnight sky. In the distance I saw a city of sharp jagged towers, brightly lit with green lights. We ran for countless hours, for all our lives, never tiring, never stopping to rest.  The landscape never changed, the sun never rose, the city grew no closer. Yet we were content.


Sometimes as we ran, I glanced over, caught Bill's eye, and he smiled. It was the same smile that Chekhov and Sulu shared in their room on the Enterprise, and Rich and Sean at the inn in rural Ireland. It was the most important sight in the world

Later I read Temple of the Sun (Evelyn Sibley Lampman, 1964), about a 12-year old boy named Chimal, whose quiet life with his best friend in the ancient Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan is disrupted by the arrival of Cortez and his conquistadores.
















And I saw Royal Hunt of the Sun (1969), with the Conquistador Pizarro (Robert Shaw) capturing the extraordinarily muscular, semi-nude Atahualpa of the Incas (Christopher Plummer) and holding him for ransom.  But the plan becomes complicated as he develops feelings of respect, affection, and finally love for the god-king.

All I knew about Latin America at the time was Pre-Conquest, about vast empires rising from the jungles, Aztecs, Incas, and Mayas, who wore loincloths and built step-pyramids and worshipped the Feathered Serpent and validated same-sex love.

In the fifth grade, we had a choice of Spanish or French.  I took Spanish, and soon learned about Maximilian, Bolivar, Juarez, Santa Ana, and Zapata.  I soon read Los de Abajo, Don Segundo Sombra, the Ficciones of Jorge Luis Borges. I watched Santo, El Blue Demonio, La Gran Aventura, Papa soltero.  I dated Hispanic men. Eventually I learned about gay Latin American writers, like Arenas and Puig.

And I ran. Track in high school, cross-country in college, 5-Ks, 10-Ks, fun runs.  I've been running ever since.

Fire in the Sky: Heterosexism and Alien Abductions

On the evening of November 5, 1975, a 22-year old logger named Travis Walton, his foreman and close friend Mike Rogers, and five other crewmen were heading home from a wood-clearing project at the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest near Heber, Arizona.  Suddenly they saw a bright light, like "fire in the sky," coming from a disc-shaped craft.  They stopped to investigate.

The next thing anyone remembered was driving down the highway at breakneck speed.  Mike was crying uncontrollably.  Travis was missing.

They notified the sheriff, who suspected that they had murdered Travis and concocted a wild story to explain his disappearance.  But five days later, on the evening of November 10th, Travis re-appeared, naked, dehydrated, and disoriented, claiming that he had escaped from an alien spacecraft.

I used to love alien abduction stories, so I grabbed The Travis Walton Experience when it came out in 1978, during my first year of college.  It was great: the abductee was a hot lumberjack whose best friend cried uncontrollably over his disappearance. And who displayed no interest in women (Travis Walton later married Mike's sister Dana, but I didn't see any hetero-romance in the book). Could they be a gay couple?

So the movie version of his adventure, Fire in the Sky (1993), was a must-see.  D.B. Sweeney (top photo), who would play a gay character in The Weekend (1999), starred as Travis Walton, and Robert Patrick (left), then known for Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), played Mike Rogers.

There were lots of shots of a  nude D.B. Sweeney, much more buffed than he would be in his later work.

Unfortunately, the producers felt a pressing need to erase the gay subtext.  Travis' friendship with Mike turned into a barely-restrained antagonism, while his romance with Dana took center stage.

Bucket and Skinner's Epic Adventures: Two Gay Surfer Couples

Nickelodeon is not as good at gay subtexts as the Disney Channel, but every now and then it will air a teencom involving a hot-and-heavy bromance that shines through in spite of the requisite "girl! girls! girls!" obsessions.

Bucket and Skinner's Epic Adventures (2011-2013) pairs two modern day surfer dudes: "regular guy" Bucket (Taylor Gray, left) and outrageous, gay-vague Skinner (Dillon Lane).

They have an antagonist, the uber-muscular fellow surfer Aloe (Glenn McCuen, #7 on my list of Unexpected Nickelodeon Teen Hunks), who has a boyfriend of his own, Sven (D.C. Cody, far left, with Aloe's arm on his lap).  Bucket and Aloe are competing for the attention of The Girl, so in many ways the show is a throwback to the 1980s movie comedies: nerd tries to wrest The Girl from the obnoxious jock she's dating, with the help of a gay-vague best bud.

Not a lot of surfing goes on; the main sets are the high school and their Surf Shop hangout.  But there are plenty of muscle-shirts, and...um, other ways to display muscular physiques.

In addition to the gay subtext of Bucket and Skinner's bromance, there is some gender-bending.  Bucket and Skinner crash Aloe's party disguised as girls, and Sven hits on Skinner.  They become cheerleaders, and must convince Aloe to join them.

Due to scheduling conflicts and failure to find an audience, Bucket and Skinner was cancelled after 26 episodes; the last few have yet to be aired on TeenNick.

Glen McCuen (early photo) went on to star in the college comedy Dean Slater: Resident Advisor (2013). Dillon Lane will star with Luke Benward in the snowboarding drama Cloud 9 (2014).  Taylor Gray is mostly being photographed in the company of cute guys.