Michael Strogoff: Jules Verne's Gay Couple

Jules Verne is most famous today for his science fiction novels, like 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and The Mysterious Island, but during his lifetime his biggest fame came for a romance, Michel Strogoff, or Michael Strogoff: Courier for the Czar (1876).  

It was translated into a dozen languages, and there are film versions in English, Spanish, French, Italian, and Turkish. The 1970 French-Italian version starred counterculture beefcake icon John Phillip Law (the nude angel in Barbarella), and the 1975 German version rugged bear Raimund Harmstorf (left).

The plot sounds unrelentingly heterosexist:  In "contemporary" Russia, Tartar rebels have taken control of Siberia, and the governor, brother of Tsar Alexander II, is trapped in the besieged city of Irkutsk.  Michael Strogoff is assigned the task of traveling across enemy-occupied territory to warn him of a plot to blow up Irkutsk.

On the way he meets and falls in love with Nadia, who is traveling to meet her exiled father.  They are captured by the Tartars, who decree that Michael be blinded (in a shirtless scene that appears on almost every book cover and movie poster).

But the blinding doesn't work, and Michael and Nadia escape and continue on to Irkutsk to save the day.  Then they are married. The end.

But there is also a gay-subtext couple, French and English reporters Alcide Jolivet and Harry Blount (played by Donatello Castallaneta and Christian Marin in the 1970 version), who accompany Michael on his journey.

They meet as jealous rivals for the same "scoop," but then they must work together.  They help Michael fight off a giant bear.  Harry is shot, and Alcide tends to him.  They are captured by the Tartars, and escape together.

At the end of the novel, they attend Michael and Nadia's wedding, with an exchange that sounds very much like a marriage proposal:

"And doesn't it make you wish to imitate them?" asked Alcide of his friend.

"Pooh!" said Blount. "Now if I had a cousin like you—"

"My cousin isn't to be married!" answered Alcide, laughing.

"So much the better," returned Blount, "for they speak of difficulties arising between London and Pekin. Have you no wish to go and see what is going on there?"

"By Jove, my dear Blount!" exclaimed Alcide Jolivet, "I was just going to make the same proposal to you."

And that was how the two inseparables set off for China.

Walt Whitman, The Good Gay Poet

When I was in high school and college it was customary to closet gay writers.  The professor might have known, but it was assumed unseemly (at best) to tell a class full of "impressionable youth" that gay people exist  So Oscar Wilde was arrested on "scandalous charges," and Shakespeare's rhapsodies over the "fair youth" of the Sonnets was a "poetic convention of the day."

And Walt Whitman (1819-1892), whose Leaves of Grass includes exceptionally open lines like "we boys together clinging, one the other never leaving"?

"Oh...um...he's talking about his brother."

In my junior year, my American Renaissance professor, Dr. Ames, brought Whitman a little farther out of the closet: "He loved women -- he scattered illegitimate children up and down the Eastern Seaboard -- but he also had a bit of the fruit in him."

Thirty years later, Walt Whitman the "good gay poet," and his magnum opus, Leaves of Grass, are still usually closeted by English professors.  I often give my students this list of famous writers, and ask them to guess which ones were gay or bisexual:

1. Herman Melville (Moby Dick)
2. Charles Dickens (Tale of Two Cities)
3. Walt Whitman (Leaves of Grass)
4. William Shakespeare (Romeo and Juliet)
5. Emily Dickinson (Final Harvest)
6. Lewis Carroll (Alice in Wonderland)
7. Oscar Wilde (The Importance of Being Earnest)
8. F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby)
9. Edgar Allen Poe (The Raven)
10. Kenneth Grahame (The Wind in the Willows)

Answers: #1, #3, #4, #5, #7, #10.
They're always the most surprised to find out that Whitman was gay, and Dickens was not.

So let's make things clear:  Walt Whitman, the greatest poet in American history, was definitely, undeniably gay.

There is no evidence that he had any erotic interest in women: the illegitimate children story was a screen, made up during the 1920s to "save" the poet's image.

Before there was a vocabulary for same-sex desire, Whitman was all about inventing one:
"the manly love of comrades" and "adhesive friendships."

Near the end of his life, when the word "homosexual" was coined, and same-sex desire defined as a symptom of a dangerous psychosis, he backtracked a bit, claiming that he meant only spiritual comrades, nothing physical.

But he had many "physical" comrades through his life, and his journals describes cruising in detail.  He picked up men on streetcars, at the docks, in the park.

Jerry Taylor, slept with me last night, heavenly.

Traverce Hedgeman, young, slight, fair, feminine, conductor.

Howard Atkinson, tall, sandy, country-fied.

Thin, smooth, and slightly feminine were his favorite traits. In West Hollywood, we called them Cute Young Things.

His long-term lover, Peter Doyle, went against type.

He also spent time with early gay rights pioneer Edward Carpenter (1844-1929), and, perhaps, artist Thomas Eakins (1844-1916), who painted a famous portrait of him, and may have photographed him nude.

Labeled only "Old Man, Seven Photographs," they are today housed in the Getty Museum.

But not on exhibit; you have to ask for them.

Even today, Walt Whitman is closeted.

See also: Gay American Renaissance

The Man on the Flying Trapeze: William Saroyan

During my first year in college, the drama club performed The Time of Your Life (1939), William Saroyan's Pulitzer-prize winning play about the lost and wounded denizens of a seedy San Francisco bar.  Every one of them expressed some type of heterosexual interest, with one exception: Willie, a teenage pinball player.  During the 1970s, all teenagers in mass media were portrayed as churning cauldrons of heterosexual horniness, but Willie never once looked at or mentioned a girl.

I didn't usually care for the heterosexism of Modern American Literature, but I tentatively sought out the other works of William Saroyan (1908-1981), and found melancholy stories about working-class Armenian immigrants in California, mostly with crushed dreams or memories of past glory.

And endless homoromantic subtexts.

My Name is Aram (1940). Aram grows from age 9 to young adulthood without ever falling for a girl, though he is drawn to many men and boys, including his best friend Panko and his beautiful cousin Dikran.

There is even a veiled reference to gay people. In one story, his Uncle Melik, about to travel by train from Fresno to New York, receives advice from his own uncle:  "An amiable young man will offer you a cigarette.   It will be doped." On the train, Melik waits for the cigarette offer, but it never comes, so he takes the initiative and offers a young man a cigarette.  They become friends.

The Human Comedy (1943).  Teenage Homer has a job delivering telegrams during the War, mostly about soldiers who have died; but he doesn't have to deliver the telegram about his older brother Marcus, because Tobey arrives, who knew Marcus "better than anyone in the world," to tell the family.

Meanwhile, though Homer gazes at a "beautiful girl," he finds solace in the eyes of men.

In the 1943 movie version, the actors who portrayed Marcus and Tobey, Van Johnson (left) and John Craven, were both gay.

"The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze" (1935): he doesn't really fly on a trapeze.  He is dying, with no women among his dying thoughts.  Instead : he remembered the young Italian in a Brooklyn hospital, a small sick clerk named Mollica, who had said desperately, I would like to see California once before I die."

On and on, a world where coming of age does not mean "sex with an older woman," where death does not mean "letting go of the faces of women," where life is big and dangerous and sad and lived among men.

Saroyan, by the way, had some ties to the post-War gay community.  He frequented the Black Cat Bar in San Francisco, became friends with gay director Vicente Minelli (they collaborated on a musical together), and in 1955, a radio biography starred gay actor Sal Mineo.

Trans and Nonbinary Inclusivity on Nickelodeon's "Danger Force"

 

I reviewed the Nickelodeon teencom Henry Danger, about a teenage superhero-in-training, back in 2014, and called it a "gay subtext classic."  It stayed on for five seasons and 121 episodes, but I didn't watch, in spite of Cooper Barnes' physique and Jace Norman's transformation from skinny kid to hunky 21-year old: the laugh track was too annoying and the plotlines a bit infantile.  Besides, I gave up television in favor of Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, and Disney Plus.  It's not on any of them.  

I understand that the gay subtext never turned into a text.  Michael D. Cohen, who plays the wacky inventor Schwoz, revealed that he is transgender in 2019, but his character is apparently cisgender heterosexual.

The lack of LGBTQ representation may be alleviated, to an extent, in the spin-off Danger Force (2020-), which is also unavailable on any of my streaming services. The premise has Captain Man (Cooper Barnes) and Schwoz training a new cohort of kid superheroes:

From left to right:

1. Mika, whose superpower is sonic screams.

2. Chapa, whose superpower is electrokinesis.

3. Bose, whose superpower is telekinesis.

4. Miles, whose superpower is teleportation.

Two girls, two boys aged 14-15.  No beefcake potential there, but look carefully at the cast. #2 is a girl, and #4 is a boy, both gender atypical.  They are cast as heterosexual: Chapa gets a crush on Creston (played by Jax Kemp, left), and Miles dates a girl.  But being gender-atypical is a good start.

Bose and Miles get crushes on Creston, too, but I'm not sure how the episode plays out.

Two episodes have LGBT guest stars.  In "Say My Name," the team reunites a lost boy with his parents, who turn out to be two dads.  Captain Man is unclear on the concept, and asks where the mother is, but he soon comes around.  "Oh, you adopted him!"

Michael D. Cohen runs the Trans Youth Acting Challenge, to help trans and nonbinary actors break into the business -- he received 200 applications for 15 spots.  One of the participants, 13-year old Sasha A. Cohen (no relation), was cast in the episode "Manlee Men" as a teenage reporter who helps save the day.  I don't know if the character is identified as trans or not.

Not bad for Nickelodeon.  But I'm still waiting for a gay regular character.

  

Enlisted: "Gomer Pyle" meets "MASH," with Beefcake

 

Last night Bob wanted to check out the show on Hulu that stars "Kevin Keller (Casey Cott) from Riverdale and the guy from Imposters."  He meant Enlisted, which originally aired on Fox in the spring of 2014: a military comedy starring Geoff Stultz (7th Heaven),  Parker Young (Imposters), and Casey Cott lookalike Chris Lowell (Veronica Mars).

A military comedy?  In 2014?

The premise: War hero Pete Hill (Stultz), who has led 100 missions in Afghanistan, punches his commanding officer and is demoted (not court-martialed?).  He must train a ragtag bunch of misfits (fat, skinny, female) at Fort McGee, Florida, a base dedicated to cleaning equipment and taking care of military families.

The episode I watched was devoted to Pete meeting his "you're arrogant!" love interest, Sgt. Jill Perez, and getting assigned two tasks by his cliche commanding officer: 

1. Finding the lost dog of a military family (who explain that it's an important reminder of their husband/father overseas, as if you need to justify wanting to find your dog).

2. Playing in war games against the Italians, who are extremely muscular and therefore despicable.

The two tasks interfere with each other, requiring Pete to choose.

The ragtag band of misfits happens to include Pete's two brothers (so why does he resist the assignment so vociferously?  Doesn't he like them?).

1. The sarcastic Derrick (Chris Lowell), who hates the military (so why did he enlist?).   He also seems to hate his brothers.  Actually, he doesn't like anything.  He really belongs on MASH, not a No Time for Sergeants homage.

2. Randy (Parker Young), a dumb jock who is extremely emotionally unstable.  When he thinks he has let his brother down, he cries while doing jumping jacks for hours.  When he becomes agitated, the only thing that will calm him down is his brother Pete's hand on his head (which must have been a problem while Pete was in Afghanistan).  No way this guy should get anywhere near a gun.

Beefcake: The guys are hot.

Gay Characters:  No.

Heterosexism: According to the plot synopses, all of the brothers get girlfriends or have plots involving ex-girlfriends showing up.

Is it Worth It:   Fox has the habit of moving shows around, so you can't find them, then yanking them if the ratings aren't spectacular immediately. The 2013-2014 season also featured American Dad in two time slots, American Idol in three time slots, I Wanna Marry Harry (8 episodes), and Murder Police (1 episode).  Enlisted was cancelled after nine episodes, with an additional four "burnt off" in June 2014.  That's not enough time to get invested in the characters, particularly when they are so unlikeable.  I suggest watching Gomer Pyle instead,