"Everyone is Doing Great": Gay Couple or Gay Tease? You Have Just Eight Episodes to Find Out

 

Everyone Is Doing Great: Seth and Jeremy were the stars of a vampire drama.  Five years after the show ended, "they lean on each other as they awkwardly navigate the perils of life and love in a late coming-of-age."

"Leaning on each other" is what boyfriends do.  So are they a gay couple, or is the blurb just a tease?

Evidence for the tease:

1. Three of the five stars listed are women.  

2. Seth and Jeremy are played by creators . James Lafferty (left) and Stephen Colletti (below), who starred on the teen soap One Tree Hill (2003-2012).   I never actually watched, but apparently it was a big deal, back in the day.  There was one minor LGBTQ character, Anna, who comes to One Tree Hill to escape rumors that she's gay, dates a boy, kisses a girl, gets called a "dyke," comes out, and leaves town.  Sounds retro, like those "very special episodes" of the 1980s.

3. No doubt Doing Great is autobiographical., based on the experience of being ultra-famous and then not.  But neither of the two creators/stars have any contemporary photos without their arms around a lady, so either they're both heterosexual, or trying hard to demonstrate that they are.  Maybe Seth and Jeremy are "leaning on each other" as placeholders to pass the time until the Girls of Their Dreams show up.

4. I did a key word search on the title and "gay," and found an article on "The Ten Worst Episodes" of the series, with the phrase "Always unfunny British and gay people LOL."  However, the article itself contained no text, just a title.

5. Decider spilled the beans: One of the guys is married to a woman; the other has lots of sex with female hotties.  They both get drunk, snort coke, throw up, and bemoan their current lack of work.  

Verdict: A tease

Wait -- only eight episodes were produced?  What kind of tv series is that?  You need at least 30 if there's an ongoing plot arc, or at least 60 if it's a problem-of-the-week.  How else are you going to get to know the characters and make them a part of your life?  Eight episodes is not even worth bothering with.

I spent almost as much time trying to find out if the show was about gay partners than it would have taken to watch it.

Doc Savage: The First Gay Superhero

When I was a kid, I never cared much for Marvel comics, other than the gay-subtext heavy Werewolf by Night, but in the summer of 1972, my eyes were drawn to the gleaming hard-muscle physique on the cover of Doc Savage #1, "the first superhero of them all!"

How was that possible?  We already had Superman, Batman, Spiderman....

Turns out that Doc Savage got his start as a pulp hero, first created by Lester Dent in 1933 (5 years before Superman). His adventures have been reprinted in paperback form from the 1960s through the 1990s.  There have been comic books, two radio series, and a 1975 movie starring Ron Ely of Tarzan fame.

Like Batman, Doc has no superpowers; he relies on his superb physique, scientific gadgets, and medical training to fight evil (when he catches villains, he gives them brain operations to cure them of their criminal tendencies).

Unlike Batman and every other superhero, he doesn't wear a spandex costume; he appears shirtless and bronze and gleaming.

He lives and works on the 86th floor of the Empire State Building in New York City, accompanied by his team, "The Fabulous Five."
1.-2. Chemist Monk (who has the build of a gorilla) and attorney Ham, who feud with each other.
3. Renny, an engineer with a massive physique of his own.
4. Long Tom, a long, thin engineer.
5. The egghead archaeologist Johnny.

The only regular female character was Doc's cousin Pat, who tagged along on adventures in spite of being told to "wait here where it's safe."

Here are some of the plotlines:

Johnny finds a prehistoric egg that may have hatched into a dinosaur.
Monk runs afoul of the mind-controlling Lucky Napoleon.
Ham witnesses "the rustling death" that drops men out of airplanes.
A naked man is fished out of the Atlantic and hailed as a prophet.

Quite a lot of captures and nick-of-time rescues going on, and not a lot of hetero-romance.

Other members of the team occasionally get girlfriends, but as Monk explains, "There won't be any women in Doc's life."  He has a female companion in the 1975 movie, but doesn't kiss her.  Many rescued damsels-in-distress have tried to snare him, but he tactfully rebuffs their advances.  He has, you see, "no time for women."

Yeah, right, no time.

Philip Jose Farmer's A Feast Unknown (1969) gives Doc Savage and Tarzan an abusive sexual relationship.

Heterosexual fans have faced the "accusation" of Doc's gayness for many years, usually with shrieks of "No way is Doc gay!"  But a surprising number of gay kids found a role model in the Doc

.

R. Crumb: From Fritz the Cat to Gay Marriage (Sort of)

Growing up in 1950s Philadelphia, Robert Crumb was a sissy -- he hated sports; he was scrawny; he liked comic books, especially girls' comics like Little Lulu.  According to a 1998 sketch, he "almost turned into a f*g."  The only thing that saved him from "turning" gay was his interest in women.   He liked big women -- tall, broad-shouldered, with muscular legs.  He wanted to ravish a giantess.

In an era when women were expected to be frail and petite, this interest in Big Women marked Robert as "queer," as a sexual outsider. His autobiographical comics read like a gay coming out story.

But he was heterosexual, just too shy and overcome by self-loathing to fit in.  Even when he moved to San Francisco and made a name for himself as an underground comic artist, he was an outsider, observing the sit-ins and love-ins and acid trips from a distance.



When I was in high school, the older kids passed around his underground comics, Zap!, Head!, Home Grown Funnies, and Snoid!  When I was in college, they were a fixture at Adam's Bookstore, but hidden under the counter, away from those who wouldn't understand.

Later I found copies of Fritz the Cat, which became an X-rated cartoon in 1972, and Mr. Natural, about a cynical guru.

R. Crumb's comics were a minefield, grotesquely drawn, full of profanity, sex, and drugs.

And extreme racism. A black female character who speaks with a racist drawl and is named Angelfood McSpade? Really?

And extreme homophobia, grotesque caricatures of Gay Liberation pioneers.

And extreme sexism -- Big Women desire nothing more than complete subjugation by scrawny men.  To be slapped, beaten up, ridden like horses.

There was a lot of male nudity -- mostly scrawny men, but with very long penises.  In the 1970s, just seeing a penis in a comic strip was a cause for celebration.

But any beefcake interest was completely overwhelmed by the female nudity -- Big Women, naked, gyrating, shoving their breasts and buttocks and other parts savagely into every spare inch of the frame.

Yet there was something fascinating about the comics, something almost endearing about R. Crumb's constant self-exploration: castration anxiety, sadomasochistic fantasies, paranoia, weird fetishes, cranky old-man rants about everyday hassles....

And gay subtexts. Pairs of men, or anthropomorphic animals, often set out together to find meaning in a bizarre, meaningless world.  They got laid, of course -- usually sharing the same Big Woman -- but in the end the heterosexual shenanigans could not assuage their elemental loneliness. They found glimmers of happiness only with each other.

Although he submitted a comic to AARGH (Artists Against Rampant Government Homophobia) in 1988, R. Crumb is still quite homophobic.  In 2009, The New Yorker commissioned him to draw a cover on gay marriage. Whose crazy idea was that?

He submitted this grotesque parody of a gay couple, and stated that he approves of gay marriage because "How are you supposed to tell what gender anyone is if they're bending it around?"

Um...Robert, did you know that most gay people have a conventional gender presentation?  

He was actually surprised when the cover was rejected!

See also: Gay Comix of the 1980s; Here at the New Yorker

"The Tender Bar": Gay Tease Hides a Homophobic Exterior

 

Speaking of gay teases, The Tender Bar, on Amazon Prime,claims to be about a man works on his professional and romantic life at his uncle's bar, while the 5-second long icon trailer displays two guys crusiing each other at said bar.  Obviously the man is gay, right?  

I was a little suspicious, so I did some background research.

Wikipedia doesn't give a plot synopsis, but it does list Ben Affleck as the star -- although his relationship with Matt Damon led to a lot of speculation that he was gay during the 1980s, he's actually homophobic.  Back in 1997, he said "A man kissing another man is the greatest challenge an actor can face."  I assume he meant heterosexual male actor.  So kissing a guy is much more challenging than acting in scenes where, say, you are raped or murdered.  

What if a hetero man has to kiss a woman he's not attracted to?  Wouldn't that be a challenge, too?  

Another star is Tye Sheridan, who I thought played Phil Dunphy on Modern Family, but that's Ty Burrell. Tye Sheridan played Cyclops in X-Men: Apocalypse.  Is Cyclops the one who developed a brief gay-subtext romance before his boyfriend was exploded?  No, that's Banshee.

Google Images claims that this is Tye Sheridan, but when you click on the link, it turns out to be Ben Hardy.  So I give up.

I watched the full trailer on IMDB:

1. Sometime in the 1940s or 1950s, a woman with an Andrews Sisters hairstyle and a 1940s-style car takes her son to live with a crotchety old man.  She tells her son: "You're going to law school," although he's only about ten.  He starts hanging out in the bar.  

2. Heterosexist moment: A bartender asks a patron, "Which sister?  The hot one or the crazy one?"  So it's not a gay bar.   Of course, it wouldn't be in the 1940s, at least not openly.

3. Another guy, maybe the Uncle, takes the boy in, shows him some books, and encourages him to become a writer. He starts banging away on an old Selectric.  (invented in 1961, so Mom must have dropped him off in the late 1950s; she just dressed 10 years out of date).  

 4. Uncle also gives the boy life advice, like: "Never hit a woman." So he's heterosexual, and he assumes the kid is, too, and the trailer wants us to be very certain of that.

5. The boy, all grown up, is entering Yale, class of 1986.  So he graduated high school in 1982.  But if he was 10 in 1959, he'd be going to college in 1967.  So Mom must have dropped him off around 1974.  Why the 1940s costume?  She must be the crazy one, not the hot one.    

6. He  meets a girl, and they have sex (by minute 1.33).  I don't need to watch anymore.

Out gay actor Ivan Leung has a handful of lines as Jimmy, the boy's classmate at Yale, but I doubt that his character is gay.  

All in all, a tease.  The two guys at the bar are apparently Uncle and Boy, just pretending that they are into each other.

And why is the bar tender?  I keep thinking Tender Trap, a 1955 movie about a man who accidentally proposes to two women at the same time.  I read an article specifically entitled "What is the meaning of The Tender Bar title?", but it just said that the boy liked it.

It's based upon a "memoir" by J. R. Moehringer, who, like every writer, debotes his first book to the story of a young man who wants to become a writer (it sounds claustrophobic, but they all do it).  

The word "gay" does not appear in the novel, but in one scene, Uncle Charlie tells a patron that if he finds Sigourney Weaver attractive, he must be "a homosexual."  Huh?  But she's a woman.  

So the memoir is homophobic.  

By the way, Moehringer was born in 1964, so Mom actually did drop him off at Grandpa's in 1974.  She just like to dress like the Andrews Sisters.