Dierich Bouts: Medieval Beefcake Painter

A scary monster is carrying away a naked guy.  I guess we're supposed to feel terror, but when I was a kid and saw this painting in my friend Greg's house, the only thing I could think of was "I can see his wiener!"

It was just a small painting in his father's study, so I didn't see it often, but it was memorable, probably because my reaction was so different from the one expected of me.

I just tracked it down: A segment of  La chute des damnes (The Fall of the Damned), paired with L'Ascension des élus (The Ascent of the Elect), painted between 1468 and 1470 by Dieric the Elder, now in the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Lille, France.

But don't get excited. There are a few butts, but no more wieners.

We don't know when Dieric Bouts was born (probably between 1410 and 1420), or where he studied (his work suggests the influence of Flemish painter Rogier van den Weyden).

We know only that he became the "official painter of Leuven" (now in Belgium) in 1458 or 1459, that he was commissioned to do a lot of portraits and religious art, that he married twice and had four children, and that he died on May 6th, 1475.

And that he was interested in muscular male bodies.








Check out The Martyrdom of St. Hippolyte, the center panel of a tryptich that Dierich painted for the altar of the Sint Salvator Kathedral in Brugge about 1470 (now in the Groningen Museum).

Looks like the same guy as the one being carried away by a demon.

His beefcake model got a monk's haircut in The Martyrdom of St. Erasmus, the central panel of a tryptich in the Sint-Pieterskerk in Leuven.

Dieric definitely had a type.

His two sons, Dieric the Younger and Aelbrecht, both became painters.

Run, Buddy, Run: My first crush

There were a few tv programs in the 1960s that I couldn't bear to miss, that I thought were "good beyond hope": That Girl, Maya, Dark Shadows.   Revisiting them after 40 years, it's sometimes hard to figure out why.  But the appeal of Run, Buddy, Run (1966-67) is obvious.

The plot was ok: mild-mannered nebbish learns a terrible secret about organized crime, and must run from the baddies who want him dead.

But said nebbish, Buddy Overstreet, played by Jack Sheldon, was very cute, hirsute, and muscular, and couldn't keep his clothes on.  In every episode, the writers found some reason show him shirtless or in his underwear.  He's in a steam room, in bed, at the beach. His shirt gets ripped off when he tries to flee. Or there is no reason; he's just shirtless.

Head gangster Mr. D, played by Bruce Gordon, had a passion for shirtless muscle-bear shots also.

This is an extremely rare phenomenon in 1960's sitcoms.  You never saw Donald Hollinger, Darren Stevens, or Major Healey in their underwear.

Jack Sheldon has appeared in some other tv series, including a starring role in The Girl with Something Extra. He was the voice of "The Bill" on Schoolhouse Rock (1975), a bit which has been parodied on both The Simpsons and Family Guy.  But he is primarily a a jazz musician -- trumpeter and vocalist -- who has worked with every great in the business, from Dizzy Gillespie to Lena Horne. He is apparently heterosexual, with a wife and four kids, but he was certainly a gay icon in 1966.

Balkan Ghosts: A Lost Gay World

When I was a kid in the 1960s and 1970s, teachers and textbooks never mentioned the Balkans, except for a few guarded references to the Soviet Bloc.  So in my earliest childhood, my information was scattered and spotty, dreamlike, whispering that the countries of the Balkan Peninsula -- especially Yugoslavia -- constituted a "good place."

1. My Village in Yugoslavia (1957), one of the Sonia and Tim Village Books, about a shepherd boy named Marco, from the mountains of Macedonia, who had muscles and hugged his best buddy with joyful abandon.

2. A Cold War tv commercial displayed a boy with a rusty iron cage around his head, while the narrator intoned a list of countries enslaved by evil: Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and finally Yugoslavia!  I ignored the message to concentrate on the enslaved boy, his dreamy angelic face and the promise of a muscular physique.

3. A Serbian folktale about a young prince who stumbles across a secret room in the castle, and inside a naked man, Bash Tchelik ("True Steel") bound with chains.  Bas Celik begs for water, and when the prince accidentally spills it on the chains, he breaks loose, develops enormous muscles, and flies away.  He turns out to be the villain of the story, but I was busy thinking about a naked man with enormous muscles.

4. A Serbian story about a boy named Biberice, who remains very small while his peers grow big, but when his village needs him, develops superhuman strength (picture is from a Serbian comic book).

5. One summer at a music festival at a small Lutheran college in Iowa, I came across a book of Serbo-Croatian poems in English translation. One depicted the ache of desire the poet felt as he accidentally watched a beautiful youth, or maybe a nature spirit, swimming at night, his body glowing in the moonlight. I never found the book again, and I don't remember the poet's name.

 6. Skanderbeg, the national hero of Albania, who fought for freedom from the Turks, is commemorated in this beefcake-heavy statue in Debar, Macedonia.

7. Le Feu aux Poudres (The Day the Earth Shook), by Jacqueline Cervon (1969). Four French cousins, vacationing in Yugoslavia, offer the Macedonian Filip a ride to Skopje.  Tragedy strikes when Filip is bitten by a snake, and Eric offers first aid.  Then an earthquake strikes, and Eric goes missing.  Filip goes off in search of his "breath brother."  They finally find each other and fade out into each other's arms.

This was before I moved to West Hollywood and dated the insanely jealous Bulgarian bodybuilder, before discussions of Bosnia and Kosovo became commonplace, before we learned of the war and terrorism and genocide, and the staunch homophobia of the Balkan governments.  When boys with muscles could still hug their best friends, and poets could still write about the ache of same-sex desire.