Dennis the Menace

Newspaper comics aren't for kids.  They never have been.  We couldn't understand Blondie and Dagwood or Hi and Lois; if the husbands and wives hated each other so much, why didn't they just leave?  Comics starring kids, like Peanuts,  were even worse; references to contemporary sports and politics that we knew nothing about, using words that no real-life kid would even think of.

Dennis the Menace was an exception, a single-panel strip detailing the adventures of Boomer kid Dennis Mitchell, drawn as about five years old but enjoying the freedoms of someone much older.  Hank Ketchum's single panel strips first appeared in 1951, and could be seen in thousands of newspapers through the sixties, as well as an iconic sitcom and a featue film, as millions of parents of Boomer kids saw a reflection of their own lives.

 I encountered Dennis through the series of cheap paperback reprints that appeared regularly in garage sales and library book sales every summer: Dennis the Menace...Teacher's Threat, Dennis the Menace -- Nonstop Nuisance, almost thirty titles in all.




I noticed 3 things right away:

1. Dennis was my exact opposite.  I was quiet, mild-mannered, and didn't like to play outside.  He was rambunctious, aggressive, destructive, uninhibited, a “little savage."

I was occasionally scared, and I cried when I was upset, but Dennis never waivered from his hypermasculinity. He displayed not a moment of weakness.  He was, as adult characters kept saying, "all boy."

2. His foil, Margaret, was an absurdly exaggerated "girl."  Although extremely intelligent, she pushed a doll carriage, jumped rope, played “dress up,” and could think of no possible future except as a housewife, or maybe an airline stewardess.  She was not shy about her intentions: first civilizing Dennis, teaching him manners and fashions, and then marrying him.

But Dennis would have none of it:

He slugged Margaret in a Tunnel of Love because he thought she was trying to kissing him.

At a party, he anticipated that Margaret would want to play “post office,” a kissing game, so he brought a stamp to put on her nose.

3. Dennis was not only uninterested, he couldn't even recognize heterosexual desire when he saw it.

When he saw an adult couple kissing, he concluded that “They’re fighting.”

 A sailor kissing his girlfriend: “Makes you wonder what kinda guys they got protecting our country."

A cowboy with a woman on his arm: “She must be his sister.”


His Dad and neighbor Mr. Wilson ogling a cheesecake calendar: “They’re talking about football. 40-23-36 is signals.”

It didn't last.  Sometime during the 1970s, the reprint books introduced Italian immigrant Gina, tall and slim, in a mod outfit.  No prissy girl-stereotype, she liked skateboarding and soccer, didn’t disapprove of dirt and bugs, and could beat up any boy. Dennis was entranced. Maybe he never met a girl that he had anything in common with before.

"Gina makes me feel all funny inside," he announced to his parents.  And met his heterosexual destiny.

But in the 1960s, Dennis gave gay kids the freedom to not to be interested in "the opposite sex," in spite of what parents, teachers, and peers kept telling us.

 

Better Nate Than Ever: Gay Kids, Wacky Aunts, and Beefcake

Big Nate is a comic strip character who first appeared in 1990.  Since then, there have been many collections, a series of chapter books  with pun titles, some activity books, a musical, and an animated tv series (with Nate voiced by Ben Giroux).  A live action movie, Better Nate Than Ever, js set to appear in April 2022.  Creator Lincoln Peirce writes that in the original chapter book (2013), he included a subplot about a boy coming out, which caused homophobic schools to cancel his speaking engagements and libraries to ban all of his books.  But he also got "a lot of support" and won a Lambda Literary Award.  

I didn't want to wait for the movie, so I bought the book.  

Nate, age 13, lives with his working-class parents and older brother Anthony in a suburb of Pittsburg.  He loves musicals, and acts out various scenes with his friend Libby, who has a crush on him.  However, when she moves in for a kiss, he backs away.  He states that his sexual identity is unknown: "I'm 13.  Macaroni and cheese is my favorite dish.  How do I know who I want to hook up with?"

You generally know who you're attracted to at a very young age, even if you're not thinking in sexual terms yet.   But let's go with it.

The other chapter books and the tv series portray Nate as aspiring artist and chess player, never mention a musical, and give him friends named Francis and Teddy but not Libby.  He concocts wild plans to meet girls,  has had three girlfriends,  and dissolves into a slurry of hormones when he sees Jenny, the Girl of His Dreams.  

In the comic strip, we see the same characters and hetero-horny hijinks.  Nate is currently accusing his buddy Francis of being a jinx who caused their favorite sports team to lose.  

What's going on?   

Better Nate Than Ever is not included in the list of Big Nate novels, nor are its sequels, Five Six Seven Nate (2014) and Nate Expectations (2018), "wonderful evocations of what it's like to be a theater kid."

Turns out that this is a new evocation of the character, written by Tim Federle (with Lincoln Peirce's permission, one assumes).

Nate's interest in musicals, and singing and dancing in general, gets him a lot of homophobic harassment.  His older brother calls him a "homo" and asks if he's practicing Gays and Dolls.  His father disapproves of his goal of becoming an actor and "hanging out with a bunch of queers."  Even his mother complains that the neighbors can see him prancing around in the back yard "like a fairy." 

He and Libby see a call for open auditions for the role of Elliott in E.T.: The Musical, to be held in New York City.  The day his parents happen to be going out of town.  They come up with a plan: Nate will "borrow" his mother's ATM card, take the bus five hours into New York, audition, then get back on the bus and home before Mom and Dad notice.  

The book details Nate's very funny adventures on the bus and at the audition, with some subplot involving his freespirited Aunt Heidi.  Nate tries to get a guy to ask her out, but he states that he "only dates men."  Nate is shocked for a moment, but then says "Hey, that's great!"   No subplots about boys coming out.  Could I have gotten the wrong book?

The 2022 live action movie will star Rueby Wood as Nate,  Lisa Kudrow as his wacky Aunt Heidi, and Joshua Bassett as older brother Anthony.

Joshua Bassett came out as gay while starring in High School Musical: The Musical: The Series (actually he said that he identifies as LGBTQ+, but there are many letters in the alphabet, and it's ok to still be figuring out which applies to you).  His Anthony  plays a bigger role than in the novel, as an ally rather than an antagonist (and he gets a shirtless shot in the trailer).  

Joshua promises that there will be "gay kids" in the movie, but I don't see any likely prospects on the IMDB cast list.  Unless it's Nate himself.   

See also: The Better Nate Than Ever Series

A Fashion Photographer Tied to a Merry-go-round in his Underwear

David Anthony was a fashion photographer on Swinging Sixties Carnaby Street, who had a brief career as a singer, under the name "Charles Dickens."

Apparently Mr. Dickens released three singles: "That's the Way Love Goes" (1965), "I Stand Alone" (1966), and "So Much in Love" (1966).

In 1968, he was cast in the film The Touchables (1968), a take on the gangster tv series The Untouchables (1959-63).

The plot is minimal, just an excuse for some "hush-hush wink-wink" British naughtiness.  Pop star Christian is kidnapped by four girls, who take him to a Buckmeister Fuller geodesic dome and then a merry-go-round, tie him up, and have sex with him.  Meanwhile his friends are trying to rescue him, and there are some gangsters.

It was directed by Robert Freeman, the Beatles' favorite photographer during the 1960s.  The song "Norwegian Wood" was based on John Lennon's affair with Freeman's wife.

This was his only directorial credit.

  Other performers include Harry Baird as a gangster named Lily white, and professional wrestler Ricky Starr, who also took his shirt off for an episode of the American sitcom Mr. Ed.

No gay content in the movie, and I can't find anything else out about David Anthony: there's another photographer AND another musician named David Anthony active now, plus celebrities named David Anthony Higgins, David Anthony Kennedy, and so on.

But this post is really about the fashion photographer turned actor stripped to his underwear and tied spreadeagle to a merry-go-round.