James Shigeta and His Gay Buddies

Asian male actors have been underrepresented in American media, and when they appear at all, they are typecast as computer nerds and wise purveyors of inscrutable wisdom, never as hetero-romantic leads.  Even when they are action heroes, they never "get the girl."

Except for James Shigeta, who died a few days ago at the age of 85.   When he first started out in Hollywood in the 1950s, he broke through the racial barriers to land hetero-romantic roles.  One was even interracial, which scandalized audiences in the 1960s.

Generally the pursuit of The Girl was mediated by a competitor or buddy, giving Shigeta's movies a number of pleasant gay subtexts.

The Crimson Kimono (1959): Two L.A. detectives (Shigeta, bisexual actor Glenn Corbett) fall in love with the same girl.

Flower Drum Song (1961): Two Chinese-American men, a nightclub owner (Jack Soo) and a college student (Shigeta) fall in love with the same girl.

Paradise, Hawaiian Style (1966): Elvis starts a helicopter service in Hawaii, and bonds with Dan Kohana (James Shigeta) and his ten-year old daughter.

Nobody's Perfect (1968): In Japan, an American soldier (Physique Pictorial star Doug McClure) falls in love with a Japanese woman who is betrothed to a traditional man (Shigeta).

Shigeta received fewer starring roles after the Swinging Sixties ended, but he appeared on tv in Medical Center, Mission: Impossible, The Young Lawyers, The Streets of San Francisco, and Hawaii Five-O, playing both idealistic young heroes and villains.

I remember him in Samurai (1979), a silly tv pilot with Joe Penny (then rumored to be gay) as a lawyer who goes undercover as a samurai warrior (which the producers thought was some kind of superhero).  Shigeta played Takeo, his Asian-wisdom-spouting sensei.

In Cage (1989) and Cage 2 (1994), two buddy-bonding man-mountains (Lou Ferrigno, Reb Brown) open a bar, and run afoul of the gang lord Tin Lum Yin (Shigeta) and his illegal "cage matches."

His last role was in The People I've Slept With (2009), about a woman who has had many lovers.  When she finds herself pregnant, she goes on a quest to find the father, accompanied by her gay BFF (Wilson Cruz). Shigeta plays her hip dad.

No wife is mentioned in his wikipedia article.  Maybe he was gay.

See also: What Happened to the Asian Beefcake?

Thornton Wilder: Gay People Can Write Depressing Novels, Too

I have no time for Great Literature.  It's not only heterosexist, it's usually terribly depressing.

Heterosexuals aren't alone in insisting that Great Literature must be terribly depressing.  When gay people write Great Literature, it's usually terribly depressing.

Like Thornton Wilder.  I've been force to read (or pretend to read) his stuff three times.

1. People fall to their deaths.  

When we were in junior high, we were too young for Great Literature like Ulysses and As I Lay Dying, so our English teacher substituted The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927), by Thornton Wilder.

"This is Great Literature," she said.  "It won a Pulitzer Prize because it's so great.  Read it, and you'll see."

I read the back cover blurb.  A group of people fall to their deaths when a rope bridge in the Andes collapses.

"Why on Earth would anybody write about something so terrible?" I wondered.  "I'm certainly not going to read it."

When the teacher asked us to "Explain the theme of this book," I wrote: "Everybody dies."

 I got a C-.

2. People die of various ailments. 

In high school, my English teacher assigned Wilder's Our Town (1938), which also won a Pulitzer Prize because it's so Great.

It's about small-town teenagers George and Emily fall in love and get married. Emily dies in childbirth.  The last act has her in the cemetery, talking to the other people who have died since Act I.

"Why would Thornton Wilder sit down and write this stuff?" I wondered.  "And why would people actually pay to see it performed?"

When the teacher asked us to "Explain the theme of this play," I wrote: "Everybody dies." again.  I got a D.  I guess she wanted detailed analysis.

I should have written "Emily and everybody else dies."

3. The world comes to an end three times.

When I was in grad school at the University of Southern California, my Modern Drama professor insisted that we read Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth (1942), which also won a Pulitzer Prize because it's so Great.

I was leery, but also curious.  How could Wilder up the ante of depressing Great Literature?

Easy:  it's about a New England family, George and Maggie Antrobus, who are also Adam and Eve, and their two children, Henry and Gladys.  They live through the destruction of the human race three times.

In the First Act, by an Ice Age.
In the Second Act, by a Flood.
In the Third Act, by a cataclysmic war.

But every time they just start over again, and things go back to being exactly the way they were.

Talk about depression!  It's an endless cycle of death and despair!

When the professor asked us to "Explain the theme of this play," I wrote "It replicates the Hindu cycle of samsara, death and rebirth."  I got a C+.

And, by the way, none of the three works contain any gay characters, themes, plots, or subplots.  Nil.

Who was this Thornton Wilder who spent his life writing depressing, heterosexist Great Literature that I couldn't read, so I had to fudge, with the result of low grades?

He was a celebrity writer,a bon vivant, who traveled in famous circles and knew everyone in the Jazz Age.  He was gay, but so tortured by self-hatred that he didn't do much about it.

Even with his close friend, the very hot Samuel Stewart, who later became famous as the novelist Phil Andros (top photo).  Stewart said that they had a relationship, but their sexual encounters were skittish, furtive, momentary, and never discussed.

Wilder wrote in journal:

 "I am more and more willing to agree with certain authorities that homosexuality is negative — that it is, even when apparently aggressive, a submission to solicitations."

Ok, that sounds homophobic, until you remember that in Thornton Wilder's world, everything is negative.  There is no meaning, no hope, just suffering and the inevitability of death, no matter if you are gay.

See also: Why I am Not a Novelist.

The Mysterious Cabinet Photo of Jasper Redfern

I found this photo on the internet.  An extremely muscular man, with a modern bodybuilder's physique, with his hands behind his back.  The caption said "Jasper Redfern...Sheffield."  Obviously the photographer.

Who was this Jasper Redfern who was taking photos of naked men at the turn of the last century?  Was he gay?

According to Who's Who of Victorian Cinema, Jasper Redfern (1872-1928) was a photographer and exhibitor for Lumière Cinématographe, an early film producer.

In 1899 he began to photograph sports matches, including Sheffield's football games, and in 1900 he took a tour of North Africa, making motion picture travelogues along the way.

North Africa seems promising.  The "Lure of the Mediterranean" was very strong.  Gay men from Andre Gide to William Burroughs traveled there in search of homoerotic freedom.

Upon his return, Redfern became a full-time moviemaker, directing films like Uncle Podger's Mishaps and Kick Me, I'm Bill Bailey.  He opened the Jasper Redfern Palace by the Sea at Westcliffe, which offered offered a variety of Vaudeville acts in addition to film.

Later he devoted himself to medical research, experimenting with the use of X-Rays to cure cancer.  Ironically, he died of cancer caused by over-exposure to X-Rays.

No mention of a wife and kids, but he may have had some.

So why the muscleman?

It's a cabinet photo from the 1880s, when Redfern was still a teenager, still thinking about his life's work.

Often the photos were sold to painters as a cheap alternative to hiring models.  Maybe Redfern sold it to a student at the Sheffield Institute of the Arts.

Or maybe he kept it, as a model for his own destiny.

Herman Brix: Almost the First Tarzan

The iconic Tarzan has always been Johnny Weissmuller, who took Edgar Rice Burroughs' sophisticated, multilingual Lord Greystoke and embued him with  "me Tarzan" jargon, the fake-African "Umgawa," the chimp companion, and the vine-swinging.  But for a trick of fate, Herman Brix would have become the Ape Man.

Like Weissmuller, Herman Brix was an Olympic athlete. He won a silver medal for the shot-put in 1928.  He moved to Los Angeles in 1929 and went to work in the movies.  In 1931, MGM chose him to star in the new talkie, Tarzan the Ape Man, but he broke his shoulder before filming could begin, and Johnny Weissmuller took his place.

But a few years later Brix had another opportunity to play Tarzan, in a movie serial, The New Adventures of Tarzan (1935).  

It was so popular that Brix became typecast as Tarzan, and found it difficult to get other work.

He de-Germanized his name into Bruce Bennett, and appeared in many more movie serials, Westerns, and detective movies.  After serving in the Navy during World War II, he continued to work, mostly in B-movies.

In 1961, he wrote and played the villain in The Fiend of Dope Island.  The "dope" is marijuana, which whip-wielding Charlie Davis (Bennett) forces innocent Caribbean natives to grow for him, until David (Robert Bray) shows up.

He died in 2006, at the age of 100.

Spike Island: Manchester Boys Bond at a Rock Concert

It seems that every year in the U.S., we see yet another movie about a group of high school friends facing the prospect of Growing Up: a heterosexist myth in which one abandons the exuberant buddy-bonding of high school for heterosexual romance, careers, houses, kids, and domesticity.

Usually it's set at an iconic moment in the filmmakers' life.

The British have their own versions, most recently Spike Island (2013), set during the heyday of The Stone Roses.  Yeah, I never heard of them either, but apparently they gave a famous "final concert" in May 1990 on Spike Island in Cheshire, and five working-class Manchester lads are desperate to go.

Not just for the music; they have their own band, so they have to get to the concert to give their demo tape to Ian Brown.  It's their only chance of escaping from their dismal working-class, married-with-children futures.

But they have no tickets, no money, and the concert's sold out. So they steal a florist's van and head out on the highway.

The main couple are Tits (Elliott Tittensor) and Dodge (Nico Mirallegro), who dread the upcoming end of their long-term friendship while competing over the same girl.

There's a lot more soap opera crammed into the weekend.  A dying father; an abusive father; a confrontation between brothers; a boy who doesn't want to follow in his father's footsteps; etc., etc.  The characters are broadly-drawn cliches that we've seen a thousand times before: the jock, the nerd, the ineffective girl-chaser, the kid brother.

But there's also a lot of gay connection.  Both Tittensor and Mirallegro have played gay characters before, and they add a nice gay subtext.  Plus there's a lot of physicality in the boys' relationship, hugging, holding, hanging over each other.

And some semi-nudity.  Recommended.

See also: I Wanna Hold Your Hand

Serge Lifar: Gay Masculine Beauty during the Jazz Age

During the 1920s, the go-to guy for masculine beauty was a Russian ballet dancer named Serge or Sergei Lifar.

Born in Kiev, Russia in 1905, Lifar went to Paris in 1923 and joined the Ballet Russes as Sergei Diaghilev's newest protege-lover.  In 1925, he became lead dancer, to the consternation of previous protege-lovers who were no longer getting the best roles.

Ballet was big during the Jazz Age, maybe because it was the only art form that allowed audiences to see masculine biceps and bulges, and Diaghilev showed off Lifar's every chance he got.  In La Chatte (1927), Lifar entered the stage riding in a "chariot" formed entirely of men.

That didn't sit well with the other members of the ballet company.

In 1929, Diaghilev died, and Lifar moved on to become the director of the Paris Opera Company, where he staged and danced in his own creations, including a renovation of The Afternoon of a Faun in 1935, and Icare (1935), his masterpiece, about the Greek boy who flew too close to the sun.

But Lifar was famous far beyond the world of ballet.  He was photographed in newspapers and magazines. He was painted and sculpted.  He was on a stamp in the Ukraine.

He cavorted with artists, writers, and film stars, many involved in the gay culture of Paris Between the Wars, like Salvador Dali, Paul Valery, Jean Cocteau, Gertrude Stein, and Paul Robeson.

In 1944, during World War II, Lifar's collaboration with the Nazis got him "banned for life" from the Paris Opera.  He claimed that he was working as a secret agent (he returned in 1947).

And don't forget the "duel" he fought in 1958 with equally flamboyant ballet producer George de Cuevas.

Lifar was not openly gay, but his many liaisons with men were well known in the ballet world.  He also sought out the attention of wealthy women who served as his benefactors.

He died in 1986.

See also: The Chilean Bad Boy

The Red Band Society: Buddy-Bonding Teens in a Barcelona Hospital

The Red Band Society (Polseres vermelles) is a Catalan tv drama, based on the novel  The Yellow World (El mundo amarillo), about six residents of a children's hospital (where they wear red hospital ids on their wrists).  There have been two seasons so far, two years apart, and creator and writer Alberto Espinoza intends to wait a few more years for the third, so the characters can grow into adulthood.

In the first episode, Jordi arrives at the hospital after being diagnosed with cancer.  An older man tells him that every group of friends has six players, and his task is to find them.  Soon he gathers a group:

1. The Leader: cancer patient Lleó (Àlex Monner, left), who has lived in the hospital for two years.

2. His Sidekick:  Jordi (Igor Szpakowski).

3. The Girl: Christina (Joana Vilapuig), suffering from anorexia.

4. The Handsome One: Ignasi (Mikel Iglesias, left), who has a mysterious ailment.


5. The Smart One: Toni (Marc Balaguer), who is recovering from a motorcycle accident.

6. The Essential (without whom the group could not exist): Roc (Nil Cardoner), who has been in a coma for two years after a swimming accident.  He can communicate with Toni in a dream state.

Now they are ready to bond, support each other, and survive.

Aside from the life-threatening issues that one would expect in a hospital series, there are growing-up issues involving parents, school, friendships, and romances, both heterosexual and gay.

A boy named Roger (Marcel Borras) gets a crush on  Lleó, and tries to kiss him;  Lleó rebuffs the kiss, but the two remain friends.  There is also a subdued romance between Toni and Roc.

It is a popular throughout Europe and Latin America. An American version starred Griffin Gluck, Nolan Sotillo, Charlie Rowe, Brian Bradley, and Ciara Bravo. I imagine that the gay content will be obliterated for American audiences, although gay actor Wilson Cruz plays one of the doctors, and E! calls it "Breakfast Club meets Glee."

I Spent a Month in Cleveland One Night

I just had the world's worst night in Cleveland.

1. We were delayed, so we arrived during rush hour.

2. At the Thai restaurant, they brought my partner's food but not mine.  Some investigation revealed that the server put my food on another table and forgot about it.

3. The club was completely deserted, on a Friday night.

4. The Flexx Spa was completely deserted, on a Friday night.

5. Except for a weird guy walking around asking people to pull his....hard!  HARDER!  HARDER!!!

6. They wouldn't let me leave.  They kept stalling and putzing around, waiting on other people first, stalling some more, until I yelled "Let me out of here!!!"

7. The only way to the highway was past railroad tracks, where a 1,000 car train was going by slowly. All of those movies you've seen where a car races a train?  Bosh!  You could easily outrace it on foot.

8.  The hotel LITERALLY changed location.  It was on a different highway from when we left.  We drove 10 miles out of the way before thinking "This isn't right" and plugging in the GPS.

It took 10 minutes to get from the hotel to downtown Cleveland, and 45 minutes to get back.

9. Let's not even talk about the hotel room....

10. No, I didn't see either of these two guys.  Not even close.

See also: a Beefcake Tour of Cleveland. 

The Andy Warhol Museums: Erasing the Gay

You probably know that Andy Warhol, the gay-yet-homophobic pop artist, was the son of immigrants from Miková, a small town in Slovakia, near the Polish and Ukrainian borders.
 
You probably don't know that the nearby town of Medzilaborce features the Andy Warhol Museum of Modern Art, established in 1991 to celebrate Andy's Slovak heritage.

It was a tough sell to the locals, who worried that the museum would glorify the "homosexual aspects of the drug parties." So it tried to make him a good Slovak communist (later, a good Slovak Catholic).  There are paintings of butterflies, flowers, and a Russian hammer and sickle.  His gayness is not mentioned.

To emphasize his loving (and presumably heterosexual) family connections, there are also works by his mother (a drawing of the Annunciation of our Lord), his brother Paul Warhol and nephew James Warhola.

But no beefcake.  Not even this cover that James drew for Robert Heinlein's sci-fi novel Stranger in a Strange Land.

Still, locals stay away, and parents won't even allow their children to attend the art classes held on the site, for fear that the gayness will rub off on them.

There's another Andy Warhol museum in his native Pittsburgh, considerably larger, with 17 galleries and 900 paintings.  Is it any better at acknowledging Warhol's gayness?

They do a little better.

True, you can walk through the entire permanent exhibits of giant Campbell's Soup cans and silkscreens of Marilyn Monroe without ever suspecting.

And the biography page on the website discusses his college career, his Catholicism, the Factory, his celebrity interviews, his visits to Studio 54, but not his gayness.

But the gay-themed work is available for those willing to dig, like the short film, Tarzan and Jane Regained, Sort Of (1963), starring Davis Hopper and Taylor Mead (top photo).

And some of the special events are gay-inclusive. In 2012 there was a book signing and reception for Lance Out Loud, a biography of the gay icon by his mother, Pat Loud.

So, like the "outsiders" of Howard Becker's classic sociological study, it's invisible to most people, but you can find it if you're "in the know."

See also: Andy Warhol; Lance Loud

Ray Mala: Eskimo Sex Symbol of the 1930s

In an era where nonwhite actors were typically portrayed as sexless sidekicks and villians, Inuit actor Mala, aka Ray Mala (1906-1952) found himself a sex symbol.

Which is a problem.

It's easy to find gay subtexts in the work of Sabu the Elephant Boy, the Indian actor spent the 1930s and 1940s playing androgynous teens in love with white male leads; or Keye Luke, the Chinese actor who spent World War II walking onto the set, waiting for the gasps of horror to subside, and explaining that he was Chinese, not Japanese; or even in Yul Brynner, who played a variety of "ethnic," that is, "asexual" types.

But Mala was somewhat different.

After working as a cinematographer in his native Alaska (then still a territory), and appearing in the ethnographic film Igloo, he came to Hollywood in 1925 and got a job as a cameraman.  In 1933 he starred in Eskimo, aka Mala the Magnificent, about an Eskimo and his wife who run afoul of treacherous Americans.

The film was a box office success and propelled Mala to stardom.  He went to the South Pacific for Last of the Pagans (1935), about a man and his wife fighting off evil Europeans and a volcano.

Robinson Crusoe of Clipper Isle (1936) was a movie serial starring Mala as an American secret agent investigating foul play in the South Pacific, and incidentally falling in love with a woman.

But at least he took off his shirt a lot, a rarity in the 1930s.

In Hawk of the Wilderness (1938) Mala finally got a gay-subtext vehicle. Herman Brix as a Tarzan clone raised on a tropical island in the Artic (don't ask). Mala plays his sidekick, who unfortunately dies at the end, so there's no "walking arm in arm into the sunset" scene.

Mala continued to act during the 1940s, playing a variety of servants and sidekicks, but none that I am aware of have the intensity, passion, or exclusivity of homoromance.  He also worked as a cinematographer.

He died of a heart attack at age 52.

According to wikipedia, his grandson, Ted Mala Jr., is also an actor.

Alcestis: A God and his Boyfriend in Ancient Greece

During my freshman year at Augustana, I took a course in Greek Literature.  We had to read The Iliad, The Homeric Hymns, and plays by Aeschylus, Aristophanes, Sophocles, and Euripides.

Of course, the professor tried his best to eliminate all traces of same-sex desire, presenting the ancient Greeks as rampaging heterosexuals.

He wasn't successful with Alcestis (438 BCE) by Euripides.

The plot synopsis makes it seem entirely heterosexist: Apollo offers to let King Admentus live past his allotted life span, if he can find someone to die in his place.  His devoted wife Alcestis offers to go.

But what actually happens is: Apollo offers Admentus immortality because he likes him. A lot.

In Greek mythology, Apollo lives with Admentus for several year before this story takes place. The lyric poet Callimachus says that they were lovers.  Thanatos (Death) even taunts Apollo about wasting his time on short-lived mortals.

Admentus has a human admirer in Hercules, who arrives without realizing that Alcestis is about to die.  Admentus is supposed to be in mourning, but he's so happy to see his friend that they spend the night carousing.

In the morning, apprised of the situation, Hercules rushes off and wrestles with Thanatos in order to bring Alcestis back to life (this is a rather a buffed Alcestis).

So it's not about hetero-romance spanning life and death after all.  It's about a man turning over Heaven and Hell to help his friend.

I never thought that Greek dramas could be staged well.  They're too alien to modern sentiments. But Alcestis has been staged several times recently, usually with Ted Hughes' 1999 translation that avoids the homoerotic subtext -- text, actually -- to concentrate on the romance between devoted husband and wife.

Here the Ted Hughes version is performed at Bates College in 2009.

There's also an opera version, Alceste, by  Gluck (1767).

In 2013, a Cuban-American troupe performed Alcestis Ascending in New York, with script by University of Alabama professor Seth Panitch. It's in Spanish and English.

See also: Greek Mythology.