If It's Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium

 If It's Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium (1969) was advertised as a hilarious comedy about a group of Ugly Americans on a whirlwind tour of Europe, but I found it heartbreaking.  In fact, I was hesitant about revisiting it after forty years, for fear that it would bring back the intense feelings of longing and loss that had me almost in  tears as a kid.

When you find something heartbreaking that the rest of the world thinks is hilarious, there must be a subtext somewhere.

There was beefcake.  Lots of it.  Ian McShane, the Swinging Sixties Bachelor who herds the tourists around Europe, displays his body frequently as he falls for and loses prim librarian Suzanne Pleshette.

Luke Halpin, formerly a teenage hunk on Flipper (1964-67), wanders around Europe as a hippie in painted-on jeans as he falls for and loses apathetic teen Hilary Thompson.

Even the hunky Sandy Baron, fresh from his odd-couple sitcom Hey, Landlord (1966-67), displays a toned hairy chest as he rips his shirt off and dives into a Venetian canal to avoid a marriage-crazy relative.  (Incidentally, Sandy Baron would become famous thirty years later on Seinfeld, as the doddering oldster Jack Klompus).

But beefcake doesn't make for poignancy.

Sandy Baron's character doesn't seem to be interested in girls, but otherwise I find no significant gay content.  No male bonding, no same-sex rescues.

So why was it heartbreaking?

Maybe it was the metaphor of escape. Dozens of Boomer movies and tv programs were about people trapped in a dangerous alien world -- Gilligan's Island, My Favorite Martian, Danger Island,  H.R. Pufnstuf, Lost in Space.  They are desperate to get home, to return to their conventional lives, to their jobs and houses and husbands and wives and stark heterosexist conformity.  But If It's Tuesday has it backwards -- the alien world is a Paradise, an escape from their conventional lives to a world of light and color and infinite possibility.

At the end of the movie they all reject the romantic partners they've fallen in love with and go home -- you can't stay in Oz forever -- as the theme song says, "Can't wait to tell the folks back home."  But for a nine-year old in a dull factory town, it was heartbreaking to know -- or to suspect -- that Oz existed, that there was a good place out there somewhere.

More Small Town Swimmers

I didn't quite finish with my last post on 

interesting pictures of small-town swimmers.

1. Annandale, near Washington, DC.  I've never seen swimmers wearing Santa Claus hats before.  Their swim trunks look like gift packages.

2.  A surprising number of Austin, Texas swimmers are destined for careers in modeling.

3. Bismarck, North Dakota.  You rarely see chubby guys on the team.

4. Creekside High School is either in Florida or Georgia.

5. Decorah, Iowa, an old Lutheran town.  I have lots of stories about Decorah, but none involving these guys with interesting hair.

6. The photo is labeled Great Falls, Montana.  So why is someone wearing a "Langley Swim Team" shirt?  Langley is in northern Virginia.

More after the break.

Enrico Natali: Accidental Beefcake

Enrico Natali was born in Utica, New York in 1933, and moved to New York in 1954.  His photographs of people on the New York Subway were published in 1960.  During the next decade, he traveled to several cities in the U.S. to photograph real people engaging in their daily activities, producing moments frozen in time.  His most acclaimed, Detroit 1968, was recently republished.

His world depicts the heterosexual male gaze, with women outnumbering the men, and the men mostly in couples.  There is no one obviously gay, except maybe this short-short and bulge number.

But male beauty leaks through anyway, as if it is impossible to keep it hidden, regardless of what the artist intends or hopes for.

It's accidental beefcake.

And who's to say which of the pairs living their lives in the dark days of 1968 didn't care for each other like that?


In the 1970s Natali gave up photography to concentrate on Zen Buddhist meditation. In 1990s he and his wife moved to the Matilija Canyon, in Ojai, California, where they opened a Zen meditation center (the Blue Heron Zen Center

His oldest son Vincenzo Natali is a writer and director known for horror movies and tv series such as  Cube and Darknet.  His Splice is about a genetically-modified being who changes gender.

In 2000, his youngest son Andrei suggested that they go on a photography tour together.   Andrei died in an auto accident in 2005, but Enrico continued the project, and in 2015, presented Just Looking: Photographs of the American Landscape.

Small Town Swimmers

I'm getting tired of looking for small-town beefcake.  It's always the same: some high school swimmers and wrestlers, and if I'm lucky, some bodybuilders down at the local gym.  Time to move on to other things, but first, some interesting photos of swimmers.

1. Cape May, New Jersey.  I like the French-bordello-red pants.

2. Corvallis, Oregon.  I knew a straight guy from Corvallis.  Homophobic to the max.  But I like these guys posing underwater,

3.  Fargo.  I'm wondering how the swim trunks stay on.

4. Flint.  You'd never know that Flint is 80% black, but it is interesting that the black guy is the only one with someone's arm around his shoulders.

5. Fort Smith, Arkansas.  Another underwater posing pic.

6. Fort Wayne, Indiana, the nearest big city to my parents' home town.  A lot of nicely shaped abs.

More after the break.

Devon Sawa

I wasn't happy when Casper (1995) made the Harvey Comics character into a real ghost -- a dead boy -- rather than a magical being, and then eliminated the gay subtext by giving him a girlfriend.   So, by implication, I wasn't happy with the star, 16-year old Devon Sawa.













But I forgave him when he starred in a string of homoromantic buddy-bonding movies (most required extensive shirtless and underwear shots and skinny-dipping scenes for teenage fans to gaze at):

1. Night of the Twisters (1996), based on the novel by Ivy Ruckman.  Nebraska teens Dan (Devon) and Arthur (Amos Crawley) try to find their families during a spate of tornados.  Unfortunately, there's a fade-out-kiss conclusion.

2. The Boys Club (1997).   Ontario teens Eric (Devon),  his boyfriend Kyle (Dominic Zamprogna), and their friend Brad (Stuart Stone), who seem too old for a clubhouse, are terrorized by an escaped con (Chris Penn).

3. Wild America (1997).  Three "brothers" (Devon, Jonathan Taylor Thomas, Scott Bairstow) head out into the wilderness to make a movie.

Meanwhile Devon was getting the full teen-idol treatment, with dozens of photo shoots in teen idol magazines and interviewers asking such probing questions as "What kind of girls do you like?"

His teen idol career lasted for only a few years.  Then he was relegated to sleazy horror films like Idle Hands  (1999), Final Destination (1999), and Devil's Den (2006), or sleazy teen sex comedies like Slackers (2002).

More recently Devon has re-invented himself as an action hero, the heavily-muscled, heavily-tattooed assassin Owen in Nikita (2010-2013), or the unscrupulous cop-turned-detective Nico in Somewhere Between (2017). 

Mostly the kind, sympathetic women and rough, aggressive men bit.  Not a lot of buddy bonding.

There's a sausage sighting story on Tales of West Hollywood

The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina

Sabrina the Teenage Witch first appeared in the anthology series Archie's Madhouse in 1962, as a glamorous although rather malevolent witch perhaps inspired by the movie Bell, Book, and Candle (1958). 

During the last fifty years, she has appeared occasionally in the Archie universe as a student at Riverdale High, generally in stories where she tries to use her magic to help one of the gang, with disastrous consequences.  But magic doesn't fit in well with the usual naturalistic Riverdale, so Sabrina appears most often in completely separate stories, living in an unnamed town (later called Greendale) with her own supporting cast: her aunts Hilda and Zelda, an older cousin Ambrose, and her doofus boyfriend Harvey.  Her cat Salem is sometimes just a cat, sometimes a familiar with magical powers of his own.

Sabrina has had four comic book series:

1. From 1971 to 1983, in conjuction with the tv cartoon Sabrina and the Groovy Ghoulies (a pack of Universal Studios monsters)

2. From 1997 to 1999, in conjunction with the TGIF tv series starring Melissa Joan Hart (who appeared on several covers).

3. From 2003 to 2009, in conjunction with a new animated series.

4. Her most recent comic book series, The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (2014-), is set in the 1960s, with witches as Satan-worshipping cannibals.  But you're also born a witch; there are strict rules about witch-mortal "miscegenation" to "protect the blood line."

So is being a witch a religion or an ethnicity?

Heterosexual romances abound, but there are no gay characters -- although Cousin Ambrose comes across as a bit fey, and head witch Aleister Crowley is criticized for breaking the Satanic Bible's rule against men lying with men.

Nor is there any beefcake.  There are nude females everywhere in boob-heavy detail, but no men with their shirts off, ever.  Not even Harvey, who in this rendition is a football-captain-mega-hunk rather than a nebbish.

So I don't hold out a lot of hope for the Chilling Adventures tv series premiering in 2018.  It will be set in modern times, a cognate to Riverdale.

Ross Lynch (top photo) has signed on to play Harvey.  He always looks good naked, but will he be allowed to fumble with a button on the show?

Chance Perdomo, who will be playing Cousin Ambrose, looks like Diana Ross.  One article says that he'll be making his character pansexual, so he'll be like the gay best buddy of the female lead stereotype.  But Ambrose is "under house arrest," forbidden from leaving Sabrina's house, so he won't be doing much dating.

Other beefcake possibilities include Richard Coyle as Father Blackwood, who I assume is the head of Sabrina's coven.

And maybe some of the boys at the school.


See also: Riverdale

Totalitarian Television: Underdog and Friends

When I was a kid, all of the grown-up men I knew worked in the great smoking factory that my Dad called "the goddam hellhole."  And all of the grown-up women were their wives, cooking and cleaning and raising their kids in the small square houses that stretched out to infinity in all directions.  Everyone assumed that this was my destiny, too.  When I grew up, I would spend every day in the goddam hellhole, and come home every night dog-tired and cursing to my small square house, where my wife and kids would be waiting.  

Most of the tv programs I watched offered an escape: Gilligan and the Skipper didn't work in a goddam hellhole, they were sailors, and Robbie Douglas' Dad and Uncle Charlie lived happily together without wives.  But if I got up too early on Saturday morning, or dared to watch tv on Sunday, a series of badly animated cartoons pushed obedience to Big Brother:

Tooter Turtle longs to escape his dreary pond in the woods, so he asks Mr. Wizard to hook him up with a new job: firefighter, lumberjack, pilot, astronaut, college student.  Catastrophe strikes, and Mr. Wizard returns him to reality with his chant: "Twizzle, twozzle, twozzle, twome, time for this one to come home."

Tennessee Tuxedo, a penguin voiced by Don Adams of Get Smart, thinks he is just as good as any human, so he and his friend Chumley get jobs as weathermen or movie producers, or start a rock band.  Catastrophe strikes.  Inevitably.  The theme song tells us: "He will fail, as he vies for fame and glory."  (Later it was changed to the less depressing "he may fail").

The message was clear: don't dream, don't aspire.  Conform.  No escape is possible.

Commander McBragg, a retired British army officer, told an unwilling visitor about his adventures in India, Africa, China.  But was he telling the truth, or making it all up?

At least they didn't have wives.  But the superhero Underdog (voiced by Wally Cox)  had a girlfriend, Sweet Polly Purebread.  And his alter ego wasn't a cool journalist, like Clark Kent, or a millionaire, like Bruce Wayne -- he was a shoe shine boy!

The cartoons were produced by Total Television.  Some originally appeared on King Leonardo and His Short Subjects (1960), and some on Tennessee Tuxedo and His Tales (1963) or Underdog (1964), but by the time I was watching, they were relegated to the ghetto of early Saturday or Sunday mornings.

At least they were better than Rocky and Bullwinkle.

Nazarene College Beefcake

When I was growing up in the Nazarene Church, higher education was frowned up.  Secular universities were full of atheists and Catholics who would brainwash you.  Besides, what did you need a college degree for?  Your job was to win souls for Christ.  Studying for four years would be just a distraction.

The only legitimate reason to go to college was if God had called you into the ministry.  For that purpose, the church set up seven colleges, one for each region of the U.S..  They had other majors, too (for backslidden Nazarenes or members of other churches), but 90% of the boys were majoring in religion (to become ministers or evangelists), missions, or music, and 90% of the girls were majoring in education or music (to become their wives).

I'm going to go through each of the Nazarene colleges, looking for studly student.

1. Olivet Nazarene College, in eastern Illinois, was the biggest and most prestigious Nazarene college.  Today there are 5,000 students, including 2,000 in graduate programs.  But you still don't get to teach evolution in biology class, and of course all discussion of gay people is forbidden (the Nazarene manual decrees "the depth of perversion that leads to homosexuality."

So look carefully at these representatives of the Olivet Tigers swim team.

2. Eastern Nazarene College in Quincy, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston.  There aren't a lot of Nazarenes anywhere, but they are especially rare in predominantly Catholic New England. Eastern has less than a thousand undergraduate students, mostly theology majors, although there are graduate degrees in business and psychology.  At least it's more inclusive than Olivet, prohibiting sexual behavior of all sorts, not just the "homosexual lifestyle."

I couldn't find a single beefcake photo, so here's a wrestler from a Jesuit high school in Boston.

3.Midamerica Nazarene College is in Olathe, Kansas, right outside the Nazarene General Headquarters, soyou'd think it would be the flagship school.  But it's not.  It was founded relatively recently, in 1966, and it has less than 2,000 students.

I found a wrestler among them.

4. Mount Vernon Nazarene College is in Mount Vernon, Ohio, about 50 miles from Columbus.  It opened in 1966 also.  Only a third of the students are male (at Nazarene colleges, future wives outnumber future preachers two to one), so beefcake was impossible to find.  Here's the golf team.

5. Point Loma Nazarene College, in a suburb of San Diego, a venerable Nazarene institution founded in 1902 (the church itself was only established in 1895).

I don't know what these Point Loma athletes are dong, but they have their shirts off.

6. Southern Nazarene College  is in Bethany, Oklahoma.  That strikes me as more west than south.  It was Oklahoma Holiness College before the holiness community of the area converted en masse to Nazarene.  Today there are less than 2,000 students, mostly training to become ministers or their wives.

This looks like a football player, not a wrestler.

7. Trevecca Nazarene College, founded in 1901, is in Nashville, home of the general headquarters of the United Methodist Church.  It was originally Pentecostal, named after Trefeca, Wales, site of the Welsh holiness movement.

3,000 students, but no beefcake photos, so how about a wrestler from Notre Dame?  (Nazarenes are notoriously anti-Catholic,or at least they were in my childhood).

Asian Muscle #1: Central Asia

This post hasbeen moved to Small Town Beefcake

Michael Seater: Buddy for Life

Born in 1987, Canadian actor Michael Seater was on tv nonstop from 2000 to 2010, with a series of homoromantic buddy-bonding roles.

Spencer Sharpe, boyfriend of paranormal investigator Zack (Robert Clarke, left) on The Zack Files (2000-2002).

Paranormal investigator Lucas in Strange Days at Blake Holsey High (2002-2006), who has a love-hate relationship with school bully Vaughn (Robert Clarke again).

Homeless teenager Owen on Regenesis (2006-2007), who moves in with paranormal investigator David (Peter Outerbridge), but ends up mentally damaged after an experimental treatment to cure his drug addiction (I haven't seen it).

Derek Venturi on Life with Derek (2005-2009), who has a sibling rivalry with his adopted sister Casey (Ashley Leggat) and, in the first season, an intense, passionate, joined-at-the-hip best buddy, Sam (Kit Weyman).

As usual, his adult roles have involved fewer subtexts:

18 to Life (2010-2011): newlyweds move in with their parents.

The "virgin getting laid" comedy Sin Bin (2012).

Bomb Girls (2013): women work in a munitions factory during World War II. Engineer Ivan Buchinsky (Michael) is dating one of them.

He's written and directed two movies, People Hold On (2015) and Sadie's Last Days on Earth (2016), both of which deal with friends having relationships.

Michael is rumored to be gay in real life.  He hasn't said anything specific, but his tweets have a lot of gay content, like watching RuPaul's Drag Race and a claims that a party will be "gayer than a straight bar but straighter than a gay bar," suggesting that he is familiar with bars of both varieties.