Denny Miller: Gilligan's Island, Tarzan, Quark, n*de dudes, and moments of gay promise

Link to the n*de photos

Picture it: a blustery October day sometime in the 7th or 8th grade. I am sitting in the living room after school with my brother and sister, drinking hot chocolate and watching a rerun of Gilligan's Island (1964-67), the sitcom about "seven stranded castaways" on a tropical island.  Visitors from the outside world drop by in almost every episode, and promise to help, but something always goes wrong.  This time, in the episode "Big Man on Little Stick" (February 20, 1965), the visitor is Duke Williams, a blond muscleman in bulging cut-off jeans -- he was caught in a tsunami and surfed the 250 miles from Hawaii (just go with it).  

I am overwhelmed by joy.  I have seen shirtless men in comic books, and in Tarzan movies, but never on tv, and Duke Williams is beautiful!  I can't take my eyes off him.

It gets better: Duke could surf back to Hawaii and send help, but he doesn't want to, because he likes the girls, Ginger and Mary Anne.  So the castaways have to convince him that they already have boyfriends.  The Professor has no trouble kissing Ginger, but Gilligan doesn't like girls; Mary Anne has to grab him by the ears to force a kiss.    

(Spoiler alert: when he gets back to Hawaii, Duke hits his head on a rock and forgets about the castaways, so they're still stranded.)

Wait -- my parents, teacher, Sunday school teacher, everyone tells me again and again that someday soon, I will "discover" girls, drop my same-sex pals and pictures of musclemen instantly and without hesitation, and devote the rest of my life to the pursuit of feminine curves and smiles.  It happens to every boy.  There is no escape. Yet Gilligan -- played by Bob Denver, a thirty year old man -- has escaped.  (Interestingly, Bob Denver's earlier character, Maynard G. Krebs on The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, was also "allergic to girls").

Duke Williams, played by Denny Miller, becomes an icon of hope.

I don't remember seeing Denny Miller in anything else, but I probably did.  He has a very full biography on the IMDB: Born in Bloomington, Indiana in 1934 as Scott Miller, grew up in Silver Spring, Maryland and Baldwin, New York, and Los Angeles.  He received a full scholarship to play basketball for UCLA.  He was discovered by a talent scout during his senior year (1956), and cast in Some Came Running (1958) with Dean Martin.

Next came a modern, up-to-date beach boy Tarzan, the Ape Man (1959). It was apparently a poor knockoff that he filmed in eight weeks, with most of the jungle scenes grabbed from Johnny Weissmuller movies.  Still, he bragged that he was the sixth in the grand tradition of movie Tarzans.

Including the silent era, it's Elmo Lincoln (1918), Gene Pollar ( 1920), Dempsey Tablar (1920), James Pierce (1927), Frank Merrill (1928-29), Johnny Weissmuller (1932-1948), Lex Barker (1949-1953), and Gordon Scott (1955-1960), so Denny was #9.

At some point he changed his name to Denny Miller, and got a string of guest spots, mostly in tv Westerns:  Overland Trail, Have Gun -- Will Travel, Riverboat, Laramie, The Rifleman. He may have also made ends meet with physique photography in the burgeoning early 1960s gay subculture (n*de photos on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends).

More after the break.

In 1961 Denny was cast as scout Duke Shannon on another Western, Wagon Train, the #1 show in America at the time. He stayed through 106 episodes.

He became close to stuntman Terry Wilson and star Robert Fuller, who recalls him as "delightful...sweet and pleasant to everybody." 

Denny returned to the island in "Our Vines Have Tender Apes (January 30, 1967) as an actor preparing for a Tarzan-like jungle role. The castaways think he's legit (don't they wonder why they haven't encountered him during the last three years?).

 

He had only one starring role after Wagon Train:  the husband of famous actress Mona McCluskey (1965-66), who insisted that they live on his small salary rather than her millions (sort of like Bewitched).  But he guest starred on everything: a list of his credits sounds like a list of what was on from the 1960s through the 1980s: I Dream of Jeannie, Mission: Impossible, Gunsmoke, The Brady Bunch, The Streets of San Francisco, Alice, Wonder Woman, Barnaby Jones, The Rockford Files, Fantasy Island...

Plus some roles that didn't make it onto the IMDB, like this alien on the short-lived sci-fi comedy Quark (1977).

He only began slowing down the guest spots in the 1990s, when he devoted his time and energy to playing the Gorton's Fisherman (selling Gorton's fish sticks and such).  And going to fan conventions.

Denny died in 2014, at the age of 80.  He was married twice and had two children, so presumably he was heterosexual.  The character of Duke Williams was aggressively heterosexual, too.  So it seems ironic that he became an icon of gay potential on that blustery October day.

See also: Joe Canoli's canoli: frontal n*dity and gay promise from the groovy 1960s

Hunter Revealed: Does Fred Dryer, the epitome of 1980s macho muscle, have gay photos in his past?

Gilligan's Island: Gilligan and the Skipper, a gay couple? The Professor asexual? Ginger a drag queen?