"Alex Rider": A Teenage James Bond, His Goofy Best Friend, and Exquisite Victorian Stickers

 I have seen the first episode of Alex Rider, about a teenage James Bond.

Scene 1:  Establishing shots of New York.  Scruffy Scary Guy drives to a parking garage, takes out a sinister satchel, and does something scary with a hologram.  Meanwhile Parker (George Sear) is just putting on his tie.  He tells his Dad he's going to an exhibition at the Rubin, but they'll get lunch later.

 Whoops, I thought Parker was the main character.  Turns out it's Dad (Michael, played by Steven Brand).  He cancels his lunch with Parker and appointment with the Senator, and calls someone named Brandt: "I need to talk to you about Parker.  It's urgent."  

Then he steps into an elevator and plunges to his death!

Turns out that Scruffy Scary guy has projected a holographic image of an elevator car onto an empty shaft, in order to kill Michael!  Much easier than shooting him!

Parker looks out the window, smiling.  He was in on it!

Five minutes of commercials.  Since when does a streaming service have commercials?

Scene 2: London.  A ritzy school.  Alex (Otto Farrantm left) and Tom (Brenock O'Connor) have stepped out of a 1980s movie, where teenage boys can think of nothing except girls.

Tom: Girls!  There's a party tonight!  Girls will be there!  We just need Jahit to text us the address.  Girls!

Alex: Girls!  Will the Girl of My Dreams be there?  Girls!

Which seems odd, since Otto Farrant starred as a gay teenager in Spool, and Brenock O'Connor played a teenager whose bully has a secret crush on him in Sing Street.  Plus it's 2020.  

The teacher confiscates Tom's phone before they can get the address, so after class Alex does some remarkable acrobatic work to break into school and retrieve it.  He's got the spy skills already!

Unfortunatly, he's caught.

Scene 3: Uncle Ian (Andrew Buchan) is driving Alex home and yelling at him for being a screw-up.  He confiscates Alex's phone and grounds him.

Scene 4: At home, Alex complains to Jack that there's no food in the house.  Not to worry, she got take-out (don't tell your Uncle).  

I don't understand Jack's role in the family: an African woman about Alex's age, responsible for the cooking, so housekeeper?  Adopted sister?  But Uncle Ian consults her about how to deal with Alex, so  his wife?  

At dinner, Uncle Ian watches a news story about Michael's death. "He was...um...a client at...um...the bank where I work."  Dude, I could tell in 30 seconds that you are a spy.  Why hasn't Alex figured it out?

Turns out that Alex knows Michael's son Parker from his youtube prank videos.  He used to be fun-loving and outrageous, until his dad sent him to a special school in France (uh-oh, a Stepford son).

Scene 5:  In his office, Uncle Ian investigates Parker to find out the name of that special school (uh-oh, he wants Alex to become a Stepford nephew!).

It's Pointe Blanc.

Jack states that she's completed her degree, so she won't be working for him anymore.  Aha, a housekeeper who became close to the family..  That absolutely was not clear in Scene 4.

Scene 6:  Their parents didn't confiscate their laptops, so Tom and Alex get the address of the party via email and sneak out of their houses to go.

It's a standard teen party from the 1980s, full of booze and girls! girls! girls!.  Alex gets tongue-tied while talking to the Girl of His Dreams.  Tom tries to pick up a girl by pointing out that the X-Men are metaphors for the LGBTQ experience.  I like how he says LGBTQ instead of gay.  A modern touch in a tv show with extremely retro norms.

Scene 7:  Uncle Ian in a car with his colleague Martin (Liam Garrigan),  Apparently Martin mentioned the Pointe Blanc school to their Russian friend, and he got all weird and paranoid, and refused to say anything over the phone.  He wants to meet in a deserted parking garage instead.

Scene 8: Whoops, the "Russian friend" is the Scruffy Scary Guy who orchestrated the elevator trick, aka Yassen (Thomas Levin, left). 

He admits to killing Michael, so they're going to arrest him.  But Martin turns out to be a double agent!  They kill Uncle Ian!

Scene 9:  The Agency has cleaned up and explained Uncle Ian's death as an auto accident. Two Suits discuss what to do "about the boy."

They interview Martin, who says that Uncle Ian called him with new information on The Varna File. But the Varna File was a cyber-attack. "People like that don't carry guns." Uh-oh, his story has holes in it.

They review the case of another agent whose son went to the Pointe Blanc school, and who then died.  There must be a connection!  Pointe Blanc is brainwashing agents' sons to kill them.

Are there that many agents with teenage sons?

Scene 10: Alex is investigating Uncle Ian's death.  No hospital records, no mortuary records.  Why not?  And  Uncle Ian never drove over the speed limit.   It couldn't have been an auto accident.

Wait -- his confiscated cell phone is still in the glove box!  They can use a GPS tracker and locate the car,

Another five-minute long commercial break.  Now I remember how annoying it was to watch network tv.

Scene 11: Alex and Tom track the cell phone to a scary warehouse.  The car is being "printed" and disposed of, with the "usual cover story."  A goon rushes out and attacks them, and Alex beats him up.  Wow, the boy has skills!

Scene 12: The Suits (Ace Bhatti, left, and a short-haired butch woman) summon Alex and tell him the whole story.  His uncle was a spy working for a secret subset of M16: "M16 gathers information.  We act on it."   So they're rather shady and unethical.  And they want Alex to do a job for them.

They don't say what it is, but I assume it's to infiltrate the Pointe Blanc School and find out how the boys are being brainwashed.

Alex wants nothing to do with them.

Five minute commercial break, and you can't fast-forward through it.  They are selling a book of "exquisite Victorian stickers" for you to decorate your diary entries with.  Who keeps a hand-written diary anymore?

Scene 13: Child Protective Services shows up to take Alex to a foster home.  At the same moment, Immigration shows up to deport Jack.  Frustrated, Alex runs into the bedroom and calls the Agency: "Ok, I'll do it.  Call off your dogs!"  The CPS and Immigration agents instantly get phone calls and leave.  That's power.  Very sinister power....

Alex gets into a limo while sinister music plays.  The end.

Beefcake: No.

Gay Characters:  Hard to say. Uncle Ian doesn't seem to be interested in ladies (he's dead, but appears in flashbacks in most episodes).  Tom and Alex may have a buddy-bonding romance.

Anachronisms:  Fighting the Russians -- the Cold War is over.  1980s Girls! Girls! Girls! rhetoric.

Stupid Names:  Lots.  Jack Starbright, Dr. Grief, Sir David Friend.  Not as bad as the original novels, where there are characters named Sabine Pleasure, Magnus Payne, and Mr. Grin.  

Homophobic Horowitz.  I can't figure out if Horowitz, the author of the original books, is homophobic or not.  He says "I have many gay friends and support same-sex marriage," and he gave James Bond an "outspoken gay friend" in one of his novels. But another novel has a homophobic protagonist -- written in the first person -- and he got in trouble for "defending Christians who don't approve of gay marriage."

Will I Keep Watching:  Probably.  There may be some buddy-bonding at the special school.  But those five-minute commercial breaks about exquisite Victorian stickers -- a big turn-off.

Was Garry Shandling the World's Greatest Comedian, Bisexual, or Both?

I have fond memories of It's Garry Shandling's Show (1986-1990), but I think it's mostly nostalgia for those heady halcyon days, when I first moved to West Hollywood and verything was fresh and new: brunch at the French Quarter, buying books at the Different Light, cruising at Mugi, Sunday beer-and-soda busts at the Faultline, seeing celebrities at the gym, watching It's Garry Shandling Show at someone's house in the Hollywood Hills.  

It was mildly pleasant, nothing remarkable, one of many standup-comic-gets-a-sitcom vehicles from the era.  Garry played himself, an ugly but likeable comedian, with various job and romantic problems.  Sometimes he broke the fourth wall to comment on the situation.   

 Like Seinfeld,  he had a "will they or won't they?" love interest and a dumb sidekick, cute next door neighbor  Pete (Michael Tucci).  We all assumed that Pete's teenage son Grant (Scott Nemes) was gay.

The only episode I actually recall involved Grant squashing our gay reading by getting a crush on a girl named Shelby Woo, and serenading her with a song parodying the lyrics of "Hooray for Hollywood."  That character does not appear in the IMDB cast list, so I don't know which episode it was.

No beefcake, no gay characters.  It would have been instantly forgetable, except that it happened to be airing at just the right moment in my life.

After the show ended, I didn't hear anything about Garry Shandling for many years, until word of his death came in 2016.  I assumed that he moved back into stand-up obscurity.

In 2020,  the It's Garry Shandling Book appeared on Amazon.  Oh boy, a small paperback with interesting trivia about the show!  I clicked on "one-click ordering" withou investigating any further. 

Wow, I was wrong.  It's a massive scrapbook with full-page photos, memorials from every comedian you ever heard of  and many you haven't, ticket stubs, pages from scripts, newspaper articles, and lots of Gerry's handwritten notes to himself and others:

Being professional is making a commitment to work -- to try your best each time you perform.  Being professional is not giving up, quitting, or not caring...remaining unattached yet working and giving and  committed all together into one solid continuing performance and non-performance

Everyone interviewed agrees that Garry was the greatest comedian who ever lived, and the greatest guy, witty, erudite, personable, amiable, someone who would make you smile just by entering the room, someone who could cure depression with a hug and turn water into wine.  Basically everyone he met wanted to have sex with him,, and he wanted to have sex with most of them.

Strangely, for an "intimate biography,"  Garry's bisexuality is just hinted at.  Actually, there are few references to romances of any sort, in spite of full-page shirtless pics trying to prove that he was handsome, athletic, and generally droolworthy. 

I guess a long list of romantic entanglements would clash with his standup routine, which was mostly about how he was too ugly to get women, and too incompetent in bed to keep the few who agreed to date him.

Author Judd Apatow goes overboard trying to convince us that Garry was a famous comedian long before It's Garry Shandling's Show.  

He wrote two episodes of Welcome Back, Kotter; obviously his superlative scripts are the sole reason for John Travolta's success.  

And four episodes of Sanford and Son!  Obviously his superlative scripts are the sole reason for Redd Foxx's success.  

He was...um...on the Tonight Show! He had a tv special! Well, they were both great appearances, and won 110% of the viewing audience in their time slots.

In 1977, Michael Hart published The 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential People in History.  The Prophet Mohammed got the #1 slot.  One gets the impression that Apatow thinks it should have been Garry Shandling.  

And It's Garry Shandling's Show -- not a quiet, cute comedian-playing-himself sitcom.  It was a work of pure genius.  According to the book, it revolutionalized comedy.  Garry single-handedly invented the concept of breaking the fourth wall (gee, I thought they were doing that back in Shakespeare's day) and the mockumentary, the basis of every modern sitcom.  Without that show, there would be no comedy today.  And no documentaries, either.  

Let's face it, without that show, there would be no arts at all.

Afterwards, Garry didn't fade into stand-up obscurity.  As the most famous comedian in the world, he enjoyed a string of critically-acclaimed masterpieces.  He hosted the Grammies -- three times!  

He wrote, produced, directed, starred in, did the camera work, and cooked meals for all of the cast and crew of The Larry Sanders Show (1992-98), the second most popular tv series in history.  

He starred in the comedic masterpiece What Planet are You From (2000)!

Plus he was a champion of gay rights.  In 1993, he was the first person ever to write an openly gay character into a tv series. (gee, I thought that was Soap in 1977).

Apparently there was a gay character on an episode of It's Garry Shandling's Show, also.  David Duchovny (later of The X-Files) played "himself" as gay and interested in Garry.

Later in his life, Garry became immersed in Zen Buddhism, and achieved enlightenment.  No longer the most famous person in the world, now he was a Boddhisattva, a god.

Garry Shandling is a body-name.  A false identity.  Let it all go.  Be willing to reside ins stillness, needing nothing, wanting nothing, being nothing. All anger and attitudes are false self.  Stay in presence.  Stay in energy of body.  Develop mindful patience.  Let go.  

Seems a bit incongruous for a guy whose jokes were mostly about getting laid.

Did I mention that I found the book a bit hyperbolic?  I'd rather have my memories of a quiet, cute sitcom that I watched at someone's house in the Hollywood Hills during those golden years.  

"The Magicians": Hogwarts Plus Narnia Plus Bisexual Menages-a-Trois

 

The Magicians has a 97% rating on Netflix, and it's already in Season 5, so here goes Season 1, Episode 1:

Scene 1: Elegant man and woman are arguing on a park bench. The woman: "You have to get them to Brakebills before HE finds them.  They're infants!  They know nothing!"  The man promises to try.  But...he's lost the boy.

Scene 2: Statue of Liberty pas out to the Midtown Mental Health Clinic.  Urm...the Statue of Liberty is nowhere near Midtown Manhattan.   A psychiatrist or social worker gets all sarcastic at a patient, a surly long-haired guy (Jason Ralph).  He admits that he's feeling better, no longer out-of-place, "the most useless person on the planet."

He's about to graduate from college (wow, he looks really old for 22!), and he has some interviews set up for grad school at Harvard, Yale, Princeton -- the standard Ivy Leagues.

Switch to a close-up of a gyrating girl butt.  Gross!  It's a gyrating party.  Surly Long-haired guy is sitting by himself.  Back to the girl butt.  She turns around to show us her boobs.  Gross again!. Surly tries not to look.

We intersplice the interview and the party scene. Surly impresses girls with a magic trick, discusses Danish cinema, and ignores Gyrating Butt's attempts to engage with him.  He goes to his room, which is full of books on stage magic, plus the Fillory and Feathers series of children's books.  He begins to read one.

Scene 3:  The story: The Chatwin Twins (Jane and Martin) and their older brother Rupert(who was wounded in the War) are staying in the country house of an elderly professor, where they discover that an old grandfather clock is a portal to Fillory (Narnia without the copyright issues).

Back in New York, Julia comes into Surly's room and asks why he didn't try to pick up Gyrating Butt.  "Not my type."  "But she was wearing a unicorn t-shirt.  She was clearly into all of that fantasy stuff you read.  But you wouldn't know because you never interact with anyone.  You're too busy with that Fillory crap."

She climbs onto the bed next to him.  James (Michael Cassidy) comes in and pretends to be upset: "My girlfriend and my friend together! Have you no decency?"  He piles on, yelling "Three way!"  

Scene 4: Julia is escorting Surly (we finally get his name -- Quentin) to his Yale interview.  Piece of cake -- Yale is so desperate for philosopy majors that they'll take anyone.   

The interview is being held in an elegant house in midtown Manhattan.  No one answers the door, so they go in.  In the drawing room, they see the Fillory and Feathers grandfather clock!  The admissions counselor must be a super fan.  Ahh -- he's lying on a chair, dead!

Scene 5:  The Admissions Counselor left a package for Quentin: the manuscript of Book 6 of the Fillory series.  But there were only five books.  This one was unpublished!  It will turn the fantasy world upside down! 

 "Nonsense!" Julia  snipes. "You said you were a super-fan on your application, so he thought he'd share his fan fiction."

"You used to be a fan."

"Yes, but then I grew up.  You should, too.  Start living life in the real world."

Scene 6: Quentin walking down the street at night, reading the unbound pages (not worried that they will blow away?)  Whoops, a page does blow away.  He chases it through a mysterious gate and into the woods.  Suddenly it's daytime, and he's on the lawn of an elegant old manor house.  Uh-oh, Quent is having a psychotic breakdown!

Meanwhile, Julia gets on an elevator, but instead of going up, it goes down -- way, way down, past P1, P2, and P3.  To a floor that is above the ground.  A corridor.  A sign reading "To exam."

Quent heads for the building -- Brakebridge Hall.  An Edwardian dandy with a nice basket eyes him.  "I'm Elliot.  You're late.  Follow me."  

Hey, his name is Elliot Waugh, a homage to Evelyn Waugh who wrote the queer classic Brideshead Revisited.  

I'm not going to watch anymore.  This sounds like the setup for yet another complex mythology featuring the Chosen One, and I don't have time for it.  But some research reveals that practically everyone on the show engages in same-sex activity at one point or another, although the main romances are heterosexual.

1. Elliot is more into guys than girls.  

2. Quentin is more into girls, but ends up with Elliot in Season 4. 

3. Penny (Arjun Gupta, left) is more into girls.

4. Rupert Chatwin (from the Fillory stories, which are real) is more into guys.

5. Josh Hoberman (Trevor Einhorn) is more into girls.

"I Love Dick": Things Were Gayer in the Old Days

 

Amazon Prime recommends a tv series called I Love Dick.

Well, sure, who doesn't love dick?

I assume that the double-entendre is intentional.

It's about a married couple, Chris (a girl) and Sylvere (a boy), who become obsessed with a hunky professor (Kevin Bacon).  So, bisexual three-way?  

Kevin Bacon used to be quite a hunk, but I haven't seen him in anything since Sleepers (1995).  I wonder what he looks like now.

Sylvere is played by Griffin Dunne, who had a buddy-bonding homoromance in American Werewolf in London (1981).  I wonder if he will bring the same gay sensibility to L Love Dick.

 One of the episode descriptions mentions a relationship between Trevor and Devon.  A gay male couple, unless of course one of them is a girl with a boy's name.

Ok, I'm in.

Prologue: Big bold letters fill the sccreen: "Dear Dick, every letter is a love letter."

Scene 1:  New York.  Chris and Sylvere are packing ("Where's my copy of Sisyphus?").  

Griffin Dunne used to be a hunk.  The years have not been kind.

They explain to the subletter that Sylvere got a job at a think tank in Marfa, Texas:  "People get invited to read, and write, and think." Chris is going to drop him off and then head to Italy for a film festival.

Ever since my horrirble year in Hell-fer-Sartain, any day when I'm not in...ugh...Texas is a good day.  I'm not sure I want to watch a tv series set in the worst place in the world.

Scene 2: They're driving through the sagebrush and sunburn of Middle America, insulting each other: "I'd like to stop at Dollywood, but they don't let you in unless you have enormous tits."

I haven't heard that term for many years.  It seems rather old-fashioned.  But how would I know -- I don't discuss women's breasts very often.

Scene 3: Establishing montage of Marfai, ugh...Texas.  Train, chair in front yard, Spanish adobe architecture, a cowboy riding his horse down Main Street.  Huh?

They arrive at a tiny, rundown house with no air conditioning and a vew of run-down trailers.  Get back in your car and high-tail it out of...ugh...Texas!  

But they unpack. "Where's the lapsang souchong tea?" is a funny line when said amid the squalor.

Uh-oh.  Chris geta a text: They are pulling her film from the festival, so she can't go to Venice after all (couldn't she go as a spectator?).  So she's stuck in squalor in Marfa...ugh, Texas!

Scene 4: Morning in Marfa.  The gas stove doesn't work, so no lapsang souchong tea for breakfast. Chris meets Devon, the young butch woman who lives in the trailer next door and works as a caretaker for the institute.  She promises to fix the stove and refrigerator, and advises Chris to wear boots, not sandals.  "We got scorpions and rattlers."  

Darn, a girl with a boy's name.  So Trevor and Devon will be a heterosexual couple.

Scene 5: They walk down the horrible rustic road to the institute, a horrible flat-roofed concrete building with smudged walls.  There are a lot of artsy types schmoozing in the courtyard.  Chris meets Sookie and Geoff (Adhir Kalyan) a black-South Asian couple, and the only people of color around. 

Whoops, they're not a couple.  The institute doesn't allow wives/ partners to come with the residents -- too much distraction from the reading, writing, and thinking.  

Uh-oh, Chris is in trouble (just go to Italy! Who cares if your film is in the festival?).

Meanwhile, Sylvere starts flirting with a hippie chick bathing her feet in the koi pond.  The world's worst pick-up line: "I find too much beatuy anxiety-provoking."  

I take that back.  His next line is worse: "I came her to write about the Holocaust.  There's something new afoot."

Meanwhile, Chris wanders amid the conversations about fracking, poverty, and zumba class, and suddenly sees Dick (Kevin Bacon) sitting by himself, rolling a marijuana cigarette.

The years have kinder to Kevin Bacon than they have to the painful-to-look-at Griffin Dunne, but still, o tempora, o mores!

Chris and Dick make eye contact. 

"Dear Dick," she writes, "This is about OBSESSION!"

She approaches and tries an even worse pick-up line than her husband's: "It's interesting that you go by Dick. Most people would stick with Richard.  Or Rich, Rick, Richie, Ricky..."

He discovers that she is married and hastily walks away, but she invites him to dinner at 8:00.

Girl, this isn't New York.  Dinnertime is at 5:00 pm!  

Scene 6:  Dressing for dinner.  Chris in her underwear, twice!  Gross! Sylvere is fully clothed.  Heterosexual male gaze double standard.! 

They argue about something that I don't understand. "Let's just...I thought we...But...we have to...You don't have to..."  Maybe only heterosexual couples get it.

"Dear Dick: There has to be something to look forward to.  Otherwise I can't go on living."

Scene 7:  The restaurant, which is surprisingly elegant for a horrible small town in...ugh...Texas.   I was expecting a Beef and Burp, or an Appleby's.  

Chris stares slack-jawed at Dick and tries one stuttering, nervous pick-up line after another, while Sylvere discusses his Holocaust project: "how does the materiality of death transfer to the living, like an airborne contaminant."  

Dick then explains why some artists are successful, and others are not: you get what you want.  If you don't succeed, you didn't want it badly enough. Right, Chris?  

Chris is upset by this, and storms off, leaving Sylvere and Dick to discuss why women filmakers always produce such awful movies.

"Dear Dick," she writes. "Game on!"

Chris returns from the bathroom and announces that she's going to sign up for Dick's class.  I didn't know that the institute had classes.  I thought they just thought deep thoughts.  Ok, but there's no syllabus.  Dick doesn't read books: "I'm post idea."

Scene 8:  In bed later, Chris thinks about Dick (I'm thinking about dick myself, right now). She gets out her laptop.  Sylvere wants to know what she's doing. "Nothing.  A short story. A letter.  I'm just fucking around."  "Read it to me," he demands.

"Dear Dick, I never understood until tonight how one chance meeting can alter the course of someone's life."

But..he insulted your work.  He was arrogant.  Oh, right, "arrogant" is tv for "sexy."

"When I went into the bathroom, I was waiting for you to follow me, so we could do it."

I would personally be less than thrilled to hear about my partner's obsession with a guy they just met, but Sylvere responds by dropping his pants (butt shot!) and screwing her.  

Scene 9: Morning.  Dick wakes up alone in his bed (shirtless shot).  He sits on his porch and smokes pot.  Meanwhile, Chris prints out her "Dear Dick" letter.  Dick goes to his pool, takes off his pants (butt shot), and climbs in.

My Verdict: There is no hint of romantic or erotic attraction between Dick and Sylvere. And Devon and Toby are going to be a boy-girl couple.  There are no gay or bisexual people here.  

But it was more than mere exclusion.  I was peering into an alien world, with norms and conventions that I didn't understand.  What was the argument in Scene 6 about?  Why did Chris continue to like Dick after he insulted her?  Why was Sylvere pleased with his wife's interest in another man?  

I don't know what's going on, but I know that I'm not in the target audience.  This is a show by, for, and about middle-aged married heterosexuals. The 1980s may have been more homophobic, bu they were also allowed for a lot more buddy-bonding gay subtexts.

O tempora, o mores, o crap.

See also: American Werewolf in London

They Had Faces Then: TV Hunks Before Beefcake

During the 1950s, male tv stars rarely took their shirts off, even in Westerns and adventure series (Ty Hardin, top photos, was never displayed nude or semi nude on Bronco).  And when they did, there was usually little of interest underneath except chest hair. So gay kids of the first Boomer generation couldn't depend on pecs and abs.  They had to concentrate on the faces.

Take Richard Greene, who starred in The Adventures of Robin Hood (1955-59).  Which photo would you prefer to tape to your bedroom wall?

Or Eddie Fisher, popular crooner who hosted Coke Time with Eddie Fisher (1953-57), and along the way married Debbie Reynolds, Elizabeth Taylor, and Connie Stevens.  Which photo is dreamiest?

There's something to be said for leaving your clothes on (well, maybe not if you're Robert Goulet).  With the raw erotic energy of the naked body obscured, the star looks suave, sophisticated, ready for romance, leading you to fantasies about holding hands and kissing on the doorstep rather than what might happen in the bedroom.  And at age eight, who cares about what happens in the bedroom?

See also: Beefcake Dads of 1950s Sitcoms

Nanny and the Professor

There are two kinds of servants on tv.

1. The world-weary, laconic observer of the lunacy (Hazel, Beulah, Geoffrey on Fresh Prince of Bel Air, Florence on The Jeffersons, Benson on Soap).

2. The "breath of fresh air" whose joie de vivre revitalizes a failing family (Mr. Belvedere, Charles on Charles in Charge, Tony on Who's the Boss, Fran on The Nanny).

Nanny and the Professor (1970-71), which became a must-see when I was in fifth grade because it aired between The Brady Bunch and The Partridge Family, was an early example of the "breath of fresh air" type.

Phoebe Figalilly (Juliet Mills), a proper British nanny, complete with deerstalker cap and Inverness cape,  sweeps in like Mary Poppins to take control of the household of stuffy English professor Everett (Richard Long of The Big Valley, top photo, shown working out with gay icon Rock Hudson).

His kids:

1.Intellectual teen Hal (David Doremus), seen here trying to meditate.

2. Athletic preteen Butch (Trent Lehman)

3. Baby of the family Prudence (Kim Richards).

Nanny draws from the "I've got a secret" genre by teasing at having magical powers, though nothing is ever stated openly.

For instance, in "Spring, Sweet Spring," Nanny thinks a family picnic would foster togetherness, but everyone has other plans.  Then a series of humorous accidents and coincidences push them, one by one, to the park, where the picnic is set out for them.

When Nanny and the Professor first aired, I was in fifth grade.  I was drawn to Nanny's independence, courage, and penchant for deflating masculine egos.  But there were several points of interest for gay boys.

1. The opening song sounded distinctly like the two boys were attracted to the Nanny ("soft and sweet, warm and wonderful...oohh, our magical mystical Nanny!").  But heterosexual desire was at a minimum: Hal liked a girl in one episode, and Butch, never.

 From the title, one expects a romance between Phoebe and Professor Everett, but that is never even hinted at.  In fact, the Professor fled from several girls anxious to snare him.  He could easily be read as gay.

2. Hal was a shy, intellectual, gay-vague outsider, like Peter on The Brady Bunch.

3. There was no beefcake, but my friends thought that Hal was cute, and there were several dreamy guest stars, including Van Williams and Vincent Van Patten.

4. Richard Long (1927-1974) was rumored to be gay or bi (married to women twice).

After Nanny, David Doremus continued acting until 1981, then retired to work in electronics.  He is married to a woman, and has four children.

Trent Lehman committed suicide in 1982, at the age of 20.  No info on whether he was gay.

Juliet Mills has been very active in movies and on tv, most recently playing Dottie on the gay sitcom From Here on OUT (2014).  Her husband, Maxwell Caulfield, was a gay icon of the 1980s.


See also: Maxwell Caulfield

Francis Lewis High School: Over-Achievers in the Heart of Flushing, Queens

 

This post was supposed to be on A Gay Guide to Small Town Beefcake

"Parallels": Not Many Parallel Worlds, a Lot of Heterosexual Angst

 

For Christmas this year, there was no travel, no shopping except online, no eating out in restaurants, and no parties.  The up-side: I usually hear the horribly depressing, soul-destroying, pit-of-despair-inducingt "Haaaave youuuurself" song about 20 times (well, the first few words, as i drop whatever I'm doing and run away).  This year, just once!  That's what I call a Merry Christmas!

The down-side: lots of movies.  And Bob and I have different tastes.  If I have to sit through one more Marvel superhero feeling angst....

For Christmas, we each got to choose a movie.  Bob chose Logan  (Wolverine from the X-Men feeling angst and finally dying, along with just about everybody on the cast list, including people introduced and given a back story for no other reason than to be killed).  I chose Parallel (2020), about "four friends who discover a doorway to parallel worlds."

Oh, boy, parallel worlds!  Maybe they'll find one where the British won the Revolutionary War, or the South won the Civil War, or there was no Industrial Revolution, or Hillary won the 2016 election.

Or maybe they'll find a whole community of parallel-world-hoppers, and have to stop the Big Bad who is causing havoc across the multiverse.

No such luck.  The differences are tiny.  A children's book has character names spelled differently.  Ryan Gosling starred in Frankenstein.  

Boo!  But it was my Christmas choice, and I paid to rent it, so we kept watching.  Maybe there would be a gay subtext, or == dare I hope -- a gay character.

We start off with an intriguing scene:  A middle-aged photographer is accosted in her house by a masked stranger, who kills her, then takes off the mask: it's her!  Then the doppelganger climbs into bed next to her husband.

Then things go downhill.  

We are introduced to the four friends, app developers -- their latest project, Meter Maid, allows you to sell your primo parking space to other people who are driving around looking (in big cities where you spend 45 minutes looking and end up parking two miles away, that would be a godsend).  They discover a magic mirror leading to almost-identical parallel worlds, and use it to their advantage.

1. Leena (Georgia King) looks exactly like a younger version of the middle-aged photographer from Scene 1, and she's an artist, so I assumed that we were looking into her future.  But no such luck -- they just look identical and have similar jobs to be confusing.  She copies the grotesque, disgusting work of a famous artist in the parallel world and becomes famous, but feels bad because it's not her own ceative vision.

2. Noel (Martin Wahlstrom) brings over the technology from a parallel world and passes himself off as the developer, thereby becoming rich and famous.  He also terrorizes a rival's parallel world doppelganger.  Spoiler alert: things go terribly wrong

3. Josh (Mark O'Brien) has a gay-subtext buddy-bond with Noel, but it is overwhelmed by his goal: he has sex with the parallel-world Girl Next Door.  (He couldn't have sex with her counterpart in his own world because of her jealous boyfriend). Spoiler alert: Things go terribly wrong.

4. Devin (Ami Ameen) looks for a parallel world where his father is still alive.  He doesn't express any heterosexual interest, so I figured he must be gay.  But no, in the last scene he hooks up with Leena, whom he has barely spoken to throughout the movie.  You have to end with a boy-girl kiss, no matter how contrived.

Beefcake: No

Gay Characters: No

Heterosexism: They discuss the bodaciousness of ladies quite often, and the last-scene falling-in-love comes out of nowhere.  

Merry Christmas: Any movie that comes out in December with no "Haave youuurself" in the soundtrack is a good movie. 

The Crosby Kids

Bing Crosby (1903-1977), roommate of gay jazz legend Bix Beiderbecke, grew up to be the laid-back crooner that had 1940s teenyboppers swooning, starred in White Christmas, and had six sons. Growing up as celebrity kids took its toll on them, as did Bing's harsh, authoritarian parenting style, and his insistence that they follow in his footsteps.  None of them became famous, but they had some success in the early 1960s performing as the Crosby Boys, and some of them were familiar to the Boomer generation as actors.

1. Gary (1933-1995), left, starred in some lightweight romantic comedies, such as Mardi Gras (1958) and Two Tickets to Paris (1962), and guest starred on many tv series.  In middle age he played authority figures on Adam-12 and Emergency.

2. Davis (1934-1991) acted only occasionally, notably with his brothers and the Rat Pack gang in Sergeants Three (1962).

3. Philip (1934-2004), Davis's twin brother, had two buddy bonding roles, in Robin and the Seven Hoods (1964)  and None But the Brave (1965).  Coincidentally, he buddied with Rat Packer Frank Sinatra in both.

4. Lindsay (1938-1989) starred in several outlaw-biker movies, including The Glory Stompers (1967) and Bigfoot (1970).

5. Harry (born 1958), left, was best known to the Boomer Generation, playing Bill, the camp counselor who plays strip Monopoly and gets slashed in Friday the 13th (1980). He had small roles in several other movies. Today he is an investment banker.

6. Nathaniel (born 1961) (left, hugging Harry) stayed out of acting, and coincidentally the only one who has any gay rumors.  He's a professional golfer.

Steven Ford: from President's Son to Soap Hunk

Born in 1956, Steven Ford was the youngest son of Gerald Ford, President of the United States from 1974 to 1977.  By that time he was in college far from the White House, studying ranching at Utah State University.  But the acting bug bit, and he started making the rounds.

With or without the cachet of having a famous Dad, he got lots of two-fisted roles in Escape from New York, The Eleventh Commandment, and Body Count.  

But his blond hair, square jaw, and chiseled physique got Steve more attention as a heartthrob.  From 1981 to 1987, he starred on the soap The Young and the Restless as private detective Andy Richards (right), where he buddy-bonded with fellow p.i. Paul Williams (Doug Davidson, left).  The extremely girlish-looking bottom guy is Michael Damian, who played singer Danny Romalotti.

Afterwards Steve hosted the tv series Secret Service and continued to act, with roles opposite action heroes like Al Pacino in Heat, Richard Griego in Against the Law, and Casper Van Dien in Starship Troopers. Today he spends most of his time on his ranch and giving motivational speeches about alcoholism.

Steve has never married, so he's been the subject of lots of gay rumors.His Mom, former First Lady Betty Ford, was a proponent of gay marriage.

"Cougar Town": Can A Rich White Heterosexual Get Laid at Age 40?

Gay men in their 40s and 50s are twink magnets.  By the time you reach your 60s (which I did last month), you are at the pinnacle of hotness; you have to swat them away.  It's considered perfectly normal in gay communities for a couple to differ in age by 20 or even 30 years.  Apparently straight men in their 40s and 50s have sorority girls lining up to have sex with them.  But heterosexual women over 40 are perceived of as "gross."  If they manage to get a younger guy interested, they are ridiculed: "What's wrong with you?  You're not a sexual being!  Act your age!"

That's the premise of Cougar Town (2009-2015), which Bob and I just started watching on Amazon Prime.  Jules (Courtney Coxm who had just finished playing a young adult on Friends) is in her 40s and recently divorced , though I'm not sure why:  her ex-husband Bobby (Brian Van Holt, above) is her best friend, always stopping over to offer advice on the crisis du jour.  

She lives in a palatial McMansion on a cul-de-sac on South Florida with her teenage son Travis (Dan Byrd), who is embarrassed by everything she says or does. 

She has a great job as a high-power realtor, selling McMansions to noveau-riche Florida couples.  

Her best friend (Christa Miller), who lives next door with her husband (Ian Gomez) and new baby, is constantly inviting her over for "wine and Scrabble."  

Sounds like a perfect life.  So, if this were a musical, what would Jules' "I want" song be about?  Sex.

I want to get laid today, or next week, or sometime before May.

But I'm 40 -- yuck!  And gross!  And all the men my age are broken, married, or gay.

So, why not date guys in their 20s?  Because then everybody will make fun of her.  She makes fun of the "cougars," who date guys young enough to be their sons.  

But why the double standard?  Both Bobby and her cul-de-sac neighbor BJ (Chris Zylka, left) bring home a different young girl every night.  Plus she gets encouragement from her party-girl coworker (Busy Phillips), who is in her 30s, and man-hungry boss (Carolyn Hennesy), who is in her 60s; both of them bring home guys in their 20s every night.  

So Jules gets out there and scores a hookup with the hunky Matt (David Clayton Rogers).  

Complications ensue: ex-husband and son catch her giving Matt a blow job by the pool (ex: "Hey, you told me you didn't like that!")..  

So when they begin a relationship, Jules insists that they sneak around: Matt hides until after her son leaves for the night  with his friend Ryan (Lil J McDaniel), and has to leave himself at 5:00 am, before any of the neighbors wake up and see him.

In the second episode, Jules is upset because she has no "war stories" about her wild 20s: she got pregnant and married at age 22 (no wild college days)?  So she goes out for a wild night, only to find that she's too old to stay up until 3:00 am, she gets drunk on two beers, and trying an athletic sexual position throws her back out.  

So, is it ok for people in their 40s to play Scrabble, watch tv, and go to bed by 9:00 pm, or are you supposed to be hanging out at the bars into your 60s?  I don't understand what this show is getting at.

In a subplot, Jules accidentally used a sexy picture for her realtor signs, and a junior high kid (Tyler Steelman) keeps stealing them to masturbate to (why does he need a roomful?).  Jules finds this extremely embarrassing, and tracks him down to yell at him.  What's the problem?  She has no control over who finds her attractive.

Rich People:  These people are all so affluent that their problems seem trivial, but that may be the pandemic talking.

White People:  The map in the opening seems to be zeroing in on Fort Myers, Florida, where 34% of the population is white, but here, Hispanic people do not exist. Two minor characters are black: Travis's best friend and the bouncer at the club (Gregory Hinton), to whom Jules says "Wow, you are really black!"

Gay People:  No. Several cast members have played gay characters in other series, but here, everyone seems obsessed with heterosexual sex except Travis.  But his main job is to be embarrassed by his mother, so he didn't really have time in the two episodes I watched.

Beefcake: Tons.  There are two shots of Courtney Cox in bikini underwear, but other than that, it's all shirtless and underwear-clad men all the time.

My Grade: The problems of rich white heterosexuals in 2009, which seems like ages ago. I would have put up the lack of gay and ethnic minority representation back in the day, but not anymore.   Meh.