Jean-Claude Brialy: Gay Actor in 1960s France

Gay actor Jean-Claude Brialy (1933-2007) lived in the days when LGBT people had to spend their lives hiding, so he hid, coming out only in his autobiography  Le Ruisseau des singes (The River of Monkeys).  But he managed to include a substantial number of gay-coded characters in his long film career.

Les Garcons (La Notte Brava, 1959), an adaption of Pasolini's novel Ragazzi di vita, follows the exploits of a gay-vague criminal couple (Brialy, Laurent Terzieff).







Une femme est une femme (A Woman is a Woman, 1961):  Brialy's girlfriend wants a baby, but he isn't ready, so he enlists the aid of his best buddy (Jean-Paul Belmondo).

Cheri (1962): The bisexual male prostitute from the Colette novel.

L'oiseau rare (The Rare Bird, 1973): a gay-vague waiter gets involved with the problems of his customers.

Robert et Robert (1978).  The two Roberts form a bromance while trying to find heterosexual partners through a computer dating service run by the gay-vague Brialy.

La nuit de Varennes (1982): during the French Revolution, a gay-vague hairdresser encounters the legendary lover Casanova (Marcello Mastroianni) and American patriot Thomas Paine (Harvey Keitel).

The Innocents (1987):  In his most overtly gay role, Brialy plays a German composer whose son is having an affair with his favorite male prostitute.

By the way, he's written several interesting books available on Amazon France, such as Les Pensées les plus drôles des acteurs.

See also: Colette's Cheri: A Male Prostitute Finds Love.

Samson Burke: the Villain of 1960s Bodybuilding Movies

If you saw The Three Stooges Meet Hercules (1962) -- and every Boomer kid did -- you probably that Joe DeRita, the most flamboyantly feminine of the Stooges, was trying his best to appear afraid rather than excited during his scenes with the super-muscular Hercules.

This was a rare example of a villainous Hercules, played by 6'6", 275 lbs Samson Burke (born Samuel Burke), a Canadian-born Olympic athlete, bodybuilder (a former Mr. Canada), pro wrestler, and budding peplum star whose Vengeance of Ursus had just been released (1961).

He went on to specialize in more rare examples of villainous bodybuilders: King Blo-Edin in the German Nibelungen series, Khemal in Three Green Dogs (1967), and Polyphemus the Cyclops in an Italian tv version of The Odyssey.  After a minor role in the Italian comedy Satiricosissimo (1970), he retired from acting.

He moved to Hawaii to pursue his interest in fitness (and incidentally joined the crew of Magnum P.I. when it was filming in Hawaii during the 1980s).  The Three Stooges film brought him his greatest popularity, and he still appears at fan conventions, where his bicep is still capable of crushing heads.

On his personal website, he advises: "once you're finished browsing, get out from behind your computer and exercise!  Taking care of your body is something you will benefit from for the rest of your life."

Good advice from a 84 year old bodybuilder.

Burke  has never married.  I don't know if he's gay or not, but on Hollywood Teen Movies, the interview keeps feeding him openings like "that actress you worked with was very beautiful" and "that actress was very attractive," but Burke won't own up to any heterosexual interest, limiting himself to evaluations of her physical fitness:  "yes, she was fit and healthy."

See also: The Three Stooges; Sword and Sandal.

Weeds: Gay and Gay-Vague Drug Dealers

You're probably wondering what Alexander Gould has been up to since he played David Collins, the young heir to the Collins fortune, in the 2005 reboot of the vampire soap opera Dark Shadows.

He's done some voice over work and guest starred on several dramas, such as Supernatural and Pushing Daisies.

He starred in How to Eat Fried Worms (2006) and the short Ties (2011), about a man (Jacob Grodnik) who gets stuck in a junkyard while taking his father's ashes to a memorial service, and bonds with the teenage Evan (Alexander Gould).

But he's most famous for Weeds (2005-2012), about suburban housewife Nancy Botwin (Mary-Louise Parker), who begins selling marijuana to support her family after her husband dies, and eventually rises through the ranks of an international drug syndicate.  Her oldest son Silas (Hunter Parrish, left) assists her.

Alexander played Shane, her youngest son, a sensitive, often-bullied boy with a violent, unpredictable side.  After several seasons of out-of-control behavior, he settled down, went to the police academy and became a LAPD cop.

Shane expressed little heterosexual interest, except when he was goaded on by his friends or his uncle, leading fans to wonder if he was gay.  Not to worry: in Season 6, the writers took care of that little "problem" by giving him a girlfriend.

There were a couple of "real" gay characters on the show: Sanjay (gay actor Maulik Pancholy), one of Nancy's dealers, who was gay for a few seasons then turned straight and married a woman; and Josh (Justin Chatwin), who was selling marijuana to kids, breaking Nancy's cardinal rule, until she discovered that he was gay and blackmailed him.

Sounds rather homophobic.

Oh well, at least there was ample beefcake.  And Alexander is a gay ally.  He wore a white knot to the 2009 Emmy Awards to symbolize his commitment to marriage equality.

See also: David Collins, Gay Heir to the Throne