1982-83 was my first year in grad school at Indiana University. Moving from a college with 2,000 students to a R1 Research University with 40,000, I went crazy. Who cared that I was supposed to be working toward a degree in English? Let's sign up for Mandarin Chinese, Arabic, Russian Folklore, and East Asian Anthropology.
August: The Beastmaster. Wouldn't you? Conan knockoff Mark Singer has a whole coterie of helpers, including a post-Good Times John Amos, a little boy, the Girl, and two ferrets who are good at biting through ropes.
August: Querelle: "Each man kills the thing he loves." An adaption of the novel by Jean Genet, promoting the myth that being gay (actually bisexual) disrupts your morality so severely that you are compelled to become a thief and a murderer, and betray everyone who loves you. But it was a real gay-themed movie with real gay-themed sex scenes, and Brad Davis (top photo) was cute. I was too closeted to see it in Bloomington, so I drove into Indianapolis.
September: Endangered Species. Indiana University was similar to Augustana College in one way: ever to mention even a passing interested in science fiction or fantasy marked you as an infantile, boorish Philistine. So I had to sneak around to see both gay-themed and science fiction-themed movies. This one wasn't worth it: Robert Ulrich of Vegas and The Girl investigate cattle mutilations.
October: Android. This one wasn't, either. Klaus Kinski and The Girl fight androids in deep space. I didn't go to another science fiction/fantasy movie until I was back in Rock Island for the summer.
November: Creepshow. A horror anthology meant to reflect the experience of reading those old EC horror comics, like Tales from the Crypt. Five stories, mostly about about transgressors who get an ironic comeuppance. The only one I remember stars Adrienne Barbeau as the abusive wife of milksop college professor Hal Holbrook.
December: The Year of Living Dangerously. "You're in graduate school. It's time to leave juvenile science fiction trash behind, and go to serious, artsy movies." Mel Gibson and The Girl live through the Indonesian Revolution of 1965 and, like, think deep thoughts and stuff. Notable for Linda Hunt playing Chinese-Australian photographer and voyeur Billy Kwan. A woman playing a man was shocking at the time.
December: Tootsie: although men playing women was not a problem. Tired of all of the discrimination men face in Hollywood, Dustin Hoffman becomes Dorothy, aka Tootsie, gets a cushy soap opera job, and teaches the women how to fight back against sexual harassment. A guy falls in love with him (as Tootsie), and he falls in love with the Girl, so of course he has to come out as a man. The Girl is ok with lesbians, but the guy..."The only reason you're alive is that I never kissed you." Intense homophobia presented as matter-of-fact.
January: None
February: None.
March: Spring Break. The poster shows guys climbing a "mountain" that turns out to be a girl in a bikini. The plot is about a guy falling in love with The Girl and saving his beloved spring break motel from his evil politician Dad. So why did I go?
I don't remember. Maybe I thought there would be some beefcake amid the wet t-shirt and mud-wrestling contests.
April: Liquid Sky: a weird, artsy, surreal, postmodern movie about drugs, murder, reality mediated through film, and maybe aliens.
April: Loosin' It: four guys in the 1960s including then-unknown Tom Cruise, trying to have sex with girls, including then-unknown Shelly Long . It tries to key into the 1950s nostalgia craze, the "Smokey and the Bandits" Southern sheriff craze, and the teen sex comedy craze, all at the same time. Again, I don't remember why I saw it: maybe looking for beefcake?
May: Return of the Jedi. The one with the teddy bears. And Darth Vader's death.
June: Wargames. Matthew Broderick and The Girl think that they're playing one of those newfangled video games, but actually they're starting a nuclear war. I saw this because I could go to science fiction movies again, and because of Matthew Broderick, the beefcake bonanza of the 1980s.
June: Twilight Zone: The Movie. An anthology remaking episodes of the classic ironic-horror series, which I had not yet seen. An anti-Semitic guy zaps into the Holocaust; elderly people get zapped into kids; a boy who can zap anything into anything has a bad temper; a man sees a gremlin on the wing of his airplane. No gay content.
July: Class: College boy Andrew McCarthy falls in love with roommate Rob Lowe, and accidentally sleeps with his mother. Strong gay subtext. For an added bonus, in the first scene, Andrew catches Rob wearing ladies' underwear, and assumes that he's...you know, before he explains that it's a prank.
July: Krull: another Conan the Barbarian ripoff, featuring another of Robert E. Howard's characters (he did write other things, you know). Except this Conan, Ken Marshall, is not exactly mighty-thewed, and doesn't bare his chest (there are beefcake photos online, but after the first 6 warned that I couldn't "download them safely," I gave up.)
I first became aware of Marc Singer from PBS production of "Taming of the Shrew" in which his bulge appeal was exploited . Iw had fallen in love with Brad Davis after "Midnight Express" - "Querelle' is very strange even with the gay sex. Linda Hunt was very convincing playing a man and won a well deserved Oscar for the role.
ReplyDeleteI guess it's harder to see in leather?
DeleteI never understood how that loincloth is supposed to work. The flaps on a loincloth are just excess material. Here he has these leather strips instead? And his belt has a very modern-looking clasp.
I saw Beastmaster on TBS. What's interesting is how two of the cast, per you, have a gay connection at least. John Amos (which I knew about) and Josh Milrad (which I didn't, but since he wouldn't even be 18 until a few years after the movie came out, my error was the standard "child actors after their careers are over" one. But my big issue is how rapey some of the scenes between Dar and Kiri are. (An aside: These barbarian movies are on the "How I Knew I Was Bi" list. Before Marc Singer became a fivehead)
ReplyDeleteQuerelle must be from Hollywood's "gays and lesbians are cool, but if you're bi or trans, something's wrong with you" era.
Why not gay-themed science fiction? I like how Star Trek clearly used wrestling as a sexual metaphor in "Amok Time". So much that in the early days of Steven Universe, when we all thought there was an all-male counterpart to gems called metals (wide speculation based on Bismuth), I imagined a more masculine fusion as wrestling. (Also a motif of order versus chaos. Wrestling is improvised; dancing is choreographed.)
I've had to explain to comic book Twitter/Tumblr that the 80s were all about straight guys getting laid as much as possible. 80s censorship was mostly anti-gay, even before AIDS.
Liquid Sky is, don't expect a psychedelic movie to make sense.
Losin It is pretty funny, I knew a (now-deceased) judge who wrote about going to a brothel in the early 60s. What's amazing is how, while the more stereotypically repressive periods are awful for women, there were still plenty of options for dudes, either jerking off with friends, or going to a brothel, and both were seen as quote-unquote "normal". And he was from Texas. (Reminder that the religious right really only cares about Bob Jones accreditation.)
Vader says "No, I am your father." In Empire.
Wargames is fun, just because I wonder how? Internet was Usenet, and mostly academic. At the time, viruses, backdoors, fork bombs, and other malware were primarily transferred by 5¼" floppy. Or just entering rm-r* or the equivalent.
I mean, originally Conan wasn't that burly, and he dressed appropriate to the climate. Conan got the bodybuilding treatment because of Frank Frazetta.
One of my friends in West Hollywood told a story about hooking up with John Amos in the shower, but it was probably exaggerated. My go-to story was a passionate three-way with Michael J. Fox, but we actually just had lunch. I'm not familiar with Josh Milrad outside the "Beastmaster" movie.
Delete"Querelle" was a European production directed by gay film maker Rainer Werner Fassbinder
DeleteI knew an older gay guy who claimed to have booked up with him in 1989. Milrad would be 21. Amos himself has discussed leather parties he got invited to because of Beastmaster.
DeleteBut gay men are men. It's just a bizarre choice to brag about.
Darth Vader tells Luke he is his father at the end of Empire Strikes Back, not in Return Of the Jedi. That's the one with the teddy bears (aka: ewoks) and Princess Leia in the slave girl outfit.
ReplyDelete