Children of Eden: A Beefcake-Free Adam and Eve

The musical Children of Eden is not the beefcake-fest you might imagine, with a retelling of the story of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, and Noah. 

1. The actor playing Adam is rarely nude.  He wears heavy Patriarch robes, or a modern costume.   They can wear heavy Patriarch robes, or modern costumes.

2. So there is no reason to cast anyone particularly hunky.

What do you expect from something originally written in 1986 for a group called Youth Sing Praise? 

The Adam and Eve plot is relatively faithful to the two Biblical accounts, but it ups the heterosexism: love! love! love! is the key to everything.  Always choose love over power, regardless of what the Serpent says.















Cain's story is different.  He wants to leave the family, and bring Abel with him, but Adam forbids it.  They fight, Abel takes Adam's side, and Cain in a rage beats him to death.  Then, heartbroken, Cain says it should have been him who died and leaves.

Ok, there's a little homoerotic buddy-bonding there, but it's drowned out by the Second Act, a forbidden romance between Noah's son Japheth and Yonah, who belongs to the wrong race (it's as uncomfortable as it sounds).

I suggest that you wait around for the Community Theater's next production of Tarzan.

That Girl: Will and Grace for the 1960s

Why did That Girl (1966-71) made my childhood list of tv programs “good beyond hope"? The tale of Ann Marie (Marlo Thomas), madcap wannabe actress on the loose in a bright, effervescent New York City, had  some beefcake -- hunky guest stars and Don Hollinger (Ted Bessell) in extra-revealing 1960s pants.  But there were no same-sex plotlines, no same-sex romances. It's about a boy and a girl.

But still, Marlo Thomas and Ted Bessell were both gay allies.  Ted previously costarred with gay actor Jim Nabors on Gomer Pyle and bisexual Glenn Corbett on  It's a Man's World.  Today Marlo Thomas writes a column on gay and women's history for The Huffington Post.

And they do not portray Don and Ann as in love. Indeed, they rarely even kiss. Instead, depictions of their evenings together often fade out with Don wisecracking and Ann laughing, like warm and caring friends enjoying each other’s company (in the third season, ABC helpfully added a kissing scene to the closing credits, to remind us that they were to be taken as a romantic couple).

Instead, they often treated the romantic reading of their relationship as a joke: in “The Good Skate” (September 1967), when Don presents Ann with a small jewelry box, she concludes that it contains an engagement ring and gapes in horror: she doesn’t want to get married. But it really contains a skate key.

Surely most lovers would consider such a joke rather cruel, but Ann laughs it off as mischievous fun.







ABC wanted the couple to marry in the last episode, but they refused. The series ended with Ann and Don trapped in an elevator en route to a Women’s Liberation meeting.

Two decades later, when Marlo Thomas and Ted Bessell discussed a reunion movie, they agreed that Ann and Don had remained close friends, but never married.

They wanted fans to be free to explore their own feelings, instead of believing that their destiny necessarily lay in a cookie-cutter, assembly-line heterosexual romance. She and

Bessell took pains, therefore, to ensure that their characters could be read in any of the many ways that women and men might approach each other as equals: perhaps as romantic partners, but perhaps as friends. In that last category it is easy to read Don as a gay man.

F is for Family: Gay Characters and Beefcake circa 1974

Comedian Bill Burr specializes in "the absurdity of political correctness," which usually means "the absurdity of not telling homophobic jokes," but I don't find his bits at all homophobic.  Gross maybe, but not homophobic:

When two dudes get married, how will their arguments differ from a man and a woman?  No punching the wall just above their heads.  You go for the liver shot.

His animated F is For Family is likewise utterly lacking in homophobia.  Instead, it reminds me of Married...with Children.  15 years ago, as a recent high school graduate, Frank (Bill Burr) found his dreams shattered when his girlfriend became pregnant.

Now it's 1974, he's lost hair and gained some pounds, and he hates his life: a dumpy house in a working-class Catholic neighborhood, a horrible job as a baggage handler at an airline, a nagging wife, three crazy kids.  He watches sports, drinks beer, and says "f..." a lot.

Through two seasons, each member of the family survives individual catastrophes.

1. Frank is promoted to manager, then fired on Christmas  Day.  He deals with the "humiliation" of his wife going to work, schemes to get his job back by sabotaging a coworker, changes his mind, and gets embroiled in a hostage crisis.

2. Sue (Laura Dern) gets a job selling Plasta-ware, and invents a salad-spinner.  But the company president takes credit for it.

3. Surly 15-year old Kevin (Justin Long) dreams of rock stardom, and gets his big break when his record producer neighbor, Vic(Sam Rockell), hires him for a birthday-party gig.  But things fall apart when Kevin has sex with Vic's girlfriend (and Vic, incidentally, is fired.  The girlfriend doesn't have any consequences).

4. Wimpy 11-year old Bill (Haley Reinhart) deals with the psychotic bully Jimmy.  After a stint at military school fails to reform him, Bill and his friends try the ultimate prank, which backfires and sends Jimmy to the hospital.

5. Sarcastic 8-year old Maureen wants to join the Computer Club at school, but Frank forbids it because computers are for boys.  She suffers an eye injury in a sledding accident.

As a child of the 1970s, I enjoy the 1970s references, especially the parody versions of some of the horrible commercials and tv shows of the era.

There is a surprising amount of beefcake for an animated program, with several characters who like to display their biceps and baskets.

And a surprising lack of homophobia.  Even the bullies don't seem particularly homophobic.  "F" never stands for "fag."

There are several gay-subtext characters, probably intentionally.  Kevin has two friends, Bolo and Lex, who constantly make jokes about their attraction to men:

Discussing a cute girl: "I'd give a thousand guys hand jobs just to see her boob."

Neighbor Babe Bonfiglio is obviously into Vic.  His son, Philip, is obviously in love with Bill, and doesn't blanch at being called his "girlfriend."

Plus two "secretly gay" characters, which makes sense, given that this is the homophobic 1970s, only five years after Stonewall.

Louis Gagliardi, the head of Frank's union, is sleeping with his chauffeur.

Greg Throater (pun intended), who dresses and acts like a Castro Clone, constantly makes jokes implying that he likes sex with men.  Eventually he realizes that he actually is gay.  He tries to come out to his wife several times, but she won't believe him.  Which also makes sense, given that this is the 1970s.

F is for Family has been renewed for a third season, which airs November 30th, 2018.