Duke Kahanamoku: A Life Devoted to Surfing and Men

Born in 1890, Duke Kahanamoku was "the fastest swimmer alive," who popularized the sport of surfing, and to a great extent popularized Hawaii.  He won gold medals for swimming at the Olympics in 1912 and 1920, and a silver in 1924 (Johnny Weissmuller won the gold).

In 1925, he won even more international fame when he rescued eight drowning men from a sinking ship off Newport Beach, California, using only his surfboard.

He divided his time between Honolulu and Hollywood, where he appeared in 14 movies, playing a lifeguard, an Indian chief, an Arab, a pirate, and a "devil-ape," most notably as a Pacific Island chief in Mister Roberts (1955).  Later in life he appeared in the surfing documentaries Free and Easy (1967) and Surfari (1967).  He died in 1968.

He married Nadine Alexander rather late in life, at age 50. Although they apparently enjoyed ballroom dancing together, he spent most of his time with men, and surrounded himself with both Hollywood hunks and Speedo-clad beach boys.

He knew all of the athletes and beefcake stars of the day, including Buster Crabbe (top center), Wallace Beery, and Tyrone Power.  He was a particularly close friend of fellow Olympian and 1930s Tarzan Johnny Weissmuller (left, the one with the bulge).

The punk group The Queers has a song about him:

It ain't the waves you catch
It ain't the drugs you do
You'll never be as cool as Duke Kahanamoku

More conventionally, he has been honored with a statue in Waikiki (where the Oahu Gay Surfing Club meets) and a postage stamp.

See also: Jack London and the Gay Surfers.

Bix Beiderbecke: First Gay Jazz Musician

If you grew up in the Quad Cities, you couldn't help but hear about Davenport, Iowa native Bix Beiderbecke (1903-1931).  We listened to him in music class, and researched him in Mr. Manary's American history class.  Scott, the cornetist who died, was a fan.

There was a  Bix Beiderbecke Jazz Festival every year.  There was a bust of him in Leclair Park in Davenport. (My Grandma Davis wasn't from Rock Island, but she had some of his records.)

 But no one told us, or no one knew, that he was gay.

Beiderbecke was one of the pioneers of jazz, playing and composing for the cornet and piano. He performed with the legendary Paul Whiteman's Band in New York. He influenced Hoagy Carmichael, Bing Crosby, and the "cool jazz" of the 1950s.  But he had a tortured personal life, became an alcoholic, and died of pneumonia brought on by exhaustion in 1931, only 28 years old.

His first biographies, and the teachers in Rock Island, never suggested for a moment that he might be gay.  

But in Remembering Bix: A Memoir of the Jazz Age (2000), Ralph Berton writes that his brother Eugene, a gay opera singer, took Bix  to a gay sex party in 1920s New York.  Bix kept exclaiming "Iowa has nothing like this!"

In Bix: The Definitive Biography of a Jazz Legend (2005), by Jean-Pierre Lion, Eugene and Bix have a brief romantic escapade.  But, Eugene complains, "It meant absolutely nothing to him. His attitude toward sex, with men or women, was 'What the hell?'"

What women?  His biographies try to pair him up with this or that woman, but with limited success and lots of conjecture.  But it's not hard to find Bix talking to men, working with men, spending his life with men.  His roommates include Eddie Lang,  a young Bing Crosby, and gay musician Jimmy McPartland (left, with his future wife Marian, who knew that he was gay and didn't care).

Of course, the "accusation" has some jazz fans up in arms.  Even more than country-western music, the world of jazz is known for its homophobia.  There have been some lesbian jazz singers, but very, very few gay men, and even fewer open gay men, especially in instrumental "pure" jazz, where macho men in smoky rooms refer to non-aggressive musical styles as "faggy."


 "I don't even know one jazz musician who is [gay]," Dizzy Gillespie said.

I know one.

Bowery Billy and his Boyfriend Lulu

I knew that boys' adventure series of the 1920s (such as the Hardy Boys) usually involved teenage same-sex pairs with a passion, exclusivity, and domesticity you would never see today: gay partners in all but the name.

But I didn't know how far back the fad extended until the Scans Daily website posted some cover scans of Bowery Billy, a teen sleuth from the mean streets of New York.  His adventures appeared in Bowery Boy Weekly, one of the illustrated story papers called "penny dreadfuls" because they cost a penny, and they were "dreadful."

A precursor of the working-class East Side Kids of 1930s movies, Billy was, according to the blurb, "an adventurous little Street Arab (homeless kid.)"  He  talks like this:

"Green bananers!  So dis pair is layin' for Bernard Gildersleeve, der millionaire that's jest come, from Chicago to show der fellers in New York how to blow in their boodle!"

Billy was tied up and threatened as much as Robin the Boy Wonder and other superhero sidekicks of 1940s comics.  This contraption seems designed to zero in on his manhood.

But who was rescuing him?  Did he have a boyfriend?  A girlfriend?  An adult benefacator?

After a diligent search, I managed to track down and read a story -- really a short novel, over 50 pages long.  And it turns out that Billy lives with a boy named Lulu.

Really Louis, but Billy gave him a girl's name because he originally thought he was a sissy:  he is "pale and delicate-looking," but with an inner resourcefulness. He knows how to use his fists.

The two live together, go out on adventures together, and rescue -- and then ignore -- girls together.  Of course, Billy needs rescuing quite often as well, and here Lulu is about to be drowned by evil cultists as Billy rushes in.

At the end of the story I read, "Bowery Billy became the millionaire's guest on board of the beautiful yacht.  Lulu Drexel remained with him for the night."

I'm reminded of the line in The Well of Loneliness (1928) which caused it to be judged obscene.  The lesbians meet, talk of love, "and that night they were not parted."

A gay teenage romance in 1904.

Ralph N. Chubb: The Mythology of the Teenage Boy

If you're familiar with Romantic poet William Blake, you know he's not just about "Tyger, tyger, burning bright."  Through many complex poems and drawings, he spins a vast mythology: Albion the primeval man, whose fall from grace results in the four zoas: Urizen (law), Tharmas (emotion), Luvah (rebellion), Urthona (creativity), each of which has a "fallen" form: Urthona's fallen form, for instance, is Los the Prophet, who creates the city of Golgonooza, where he and his female consort create the spirit of discord, Orc, who is actual an emanation of Luvah.

Got all that?  It goes on and on.

Ralph N. Chubb (1892-1960) created a similar canvass of poems and paintings evoking a vast mythology, except that his were overtly homoerotic.









He had a conventional childhood and education and served in World War I, but upon his return, he became involved with the occult community of 1920s Britain, as well as the underground gay movement.  For awhile he produced conventional paintings, but after spending some time with the gypsies of the New Forest, he moved to the village of Curridge, in Berkshire (with his brother Lawrence, who would be his benefactor and guardian for the rest of his life), and let his imagination roam freely.

Chubb self-published his illustrated poems on a home-made printing press, and sent copies privately to friends and correspondents: Manhood, The Sacrifice of Youth, The Book of God's Madness, The Sun Spirit, The Heavenly Cupid, Water Cherubs, the Secret Country.

They are heavy reading, full of obscure references to personal events in Chubb's life and symbols that only he understands, but we get the idea that a series of boy-messiahs has arisen throughout history, with one still to come, the redeemer of Albion,  the boy-god Ra-el-phaos, of whom Chubb was the prophet.

Many of the boys and men who he had met during his life were various emanations of Ra-el-phaos.












Although he drew his inspiration from Blake, Chubb was not a very good poet, as you can see from this description of an encounter between mortal man and boy god:

He a fully form’d human being in his way,
Myself a fully form’d human being in my way;
No patronage between us, mutual respect, two equal persons;
He knowing the universe, I knowing the universe, equal together;
I having every whit as much to learn from him as he from me;
From him to me, from me to him, reciprocal sexual spiritual love.

And later on:

O burning tongue and hot lips of me exploring my love!
Lave his throat with the bubbling fountain of my verse!
Drench him! Slake his loins with it, most eloquent!
Leave no part, no crevice unexplored; delve deep, my minstrel tongue!
Let our juices flood and mingle! Let the prophetic lava flow!

I want to yell "You had an orgasm.  Everybody has them.  Get over it!"

Chubb's paintings, which he usually sent to galleries without expecting payment, depict the past and future paradise of Albion, a world populated almost entirely by naked boys.

I'm surprised that his family (brother Lawrence, sisters Olive and Muriel) indulged his homoerotic and ephebophiliac interests.  I can only imagine how scandalous they would have been, if anyone outside of his circle of occult fellow-travelers actually read the poems and figured out what they meant.














None of his books have been published, but some of the poems and a lot of the artwork is available online.  After his death, his papers were donated to Cambridge University, to wait for some future scholar.

Tony Sansone: Jazz Age Bodybuilder and Gay Icon

Born in 1905 in New York City, son of Sicilian immigrants, Tony Sansone began working out at age 14, and drew the attention of physical culturalist Bernar McFadden and early strength-and-health advocate Charles Atlas.  This was before the days of professional bodybuilding, but still, Tony was entranced by the "rags to riches" stories of the Jazz Age, and found a way to make money from his physique:  he began modeling for photographs and selling them via mail order.

Who was interested in photos of a muscular man in a posing strap, or fully nude?  Mostly gay men.







How did he get around the Comstock Act?  Apparently his body was so perfectly symmetrical that it looked like a sculpture.  Works of art could be nude.


He became nearly as famous as Charles Atlas himself, sought out by artists like Arthur Lee ("Rhythm," 1930), praised as "the most beautiful man in America," compared to film star Rudolph Valentino.

In the late 1920s, Tony began expanding his enterprises, publishing photo books like Nudleafs and Modern Classics.  He also performed in films and on stage and opened his own gyms, but his first love was always modeling, displaying his body for aesthetic and erotic appreciation.

He lived through the "man-mountain" era of bodybuilding in the 1940s and 1950s, but continued to pose in the old-fashioned lithe, limber style, to be admired for his beauty rather than his bulk.

He lived through the Gay Liberation Era of the 1970s, and into the age of AIDS, knowing that most of the men who collected his photographs were gay.

No hint of Tony's own sexual identity, although he did have a wife and two kids.

Later in life he moved to St. Louis to be close to his son.  He died in 1987.

There are nude photos on Tales of West Hollywood.

The Gay Weird Tales of H.P. Lovecraft

When I was in high school in the 1970s, a series of paperbacks appeared at Readmore Book World with weird, evocative titles: The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath; The Doom that Came to Sarnath; At the Mountains of Madness.

They weren't actually heroic fantasy, they were "weird tales," dark fantasies by H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) originally published in the 1920s and 1930s, mostly about slithering, tentacled things that lurk just beneath the surface of idyllic small towns.

Such as Azazoth, "who gnaws hungrily in inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time and space amidst the muffled, maddening beating of vile drums and the thin monotonous whine of accursed flutes."

That's the way he wrote.

And "unspeakable knowledge" uncovered in long-forgotten grimoires: De Vermis Mysteriis, the Book of Eibon, Unaussprechlichen Kulten.... and, of course, the Necronomicon, written by the "mad Arab Abdul Alhazred."

I loved that sort of thing.  Especially because there was:

No heterosexual romance anywhere.
Lots of descriptions of masculine beauty.
Lots of male bonding.
Lots of muscular men discovering the horror behind the  heteronormative job-wife-house trajectory.

In "Beyond the Wall of Sleep" (1919), the narrator hears a disembodied voice speaking from a sleeping man: "I am your brother of light, and have floated with you in the effulgent valleys.  You have been my friend in the cosmos  We shall meet again -- perhaps in the shining mists of Orion's Sword, perhaps in some other form an aeon hence, when the solar system shall have been swept away."

Talk about soul mates!

In “The Quest of Iranon”(1921), a man wanders a stern, unfriendly world in search of the city of Aira, where there are “men to whom songs and dreams. . .bring pleasure.”  He meets “a young boy with sad eyes” who also dreams of escape.    They travel together, happy in a way yet always longing.  They grow old together and finally die, never finding their true home.

Might I suggest West Hollywood?

Randolph Carter, Lovecraft's most famous hero, has been played on screen by Mark Kinsey Stephenson, Art Kitching, Toren Atkinson, Adam Fozard, and Conor Timmis.

In real life, Lovecraft was rather a jerk.  He was even more racist than most in his era, loudly criticizing the "decadent, half-ape" immigrants who were "overrunning" New England.  He particularly disliked Jews, although he married a Jewish woman (his frequent anti-Semitic ranting was the cause of their breakup).

And he was even more homophobic than most, loudly criticizing gay people as "effeminate" and a danger to civilization.  Yet he had many gay friends, such as Hart Crane (author of The Bridge), Samuel Loveman (author of Hermaphrodite and Other Poems), and Robert Hayward Barlow (who became executor of his estate).

In fact, one might say that he found his strongest emotional bonds among gay men.

The Gay Erotic Postcards of Pops Pullum

Born in 1887, William A. Pullum grew up in Camberwell, a poor neighborhood of south London.  He was a slim, sickly boy, suffering from tuberculosis and a host of other ailments.  As part of his therapy, he took up weight lifting, and soon he was starring in strength exhibitions across Britain .  In 1911 he joined the British Amateur Weight Lifting Association, and during the next five years, broke 200 weightlifting records.  He was most famous for his "Plan Feat," in which he lifted 14 men with his arms and leg -- 2000 pounds -- all the more remarkable because he was a featherweight, weighing about 120 pounds

.

He wrote two instructional books which are still in print: Weight Lifting Made Easy and Interesting (1922) and How to Use a Barbell (1922).

As the president of the Camberwell Weight Lifting Club in England, Pullum trained many future weight lifting greats.

But he did more than train.  He offered a full range of photos of his most buffed pupils, naked except for their shoes and loincloths or skimpy posing straps, under the series "Pullum's Popular Pupils"

 C. F. Attenborough became a 1924 Olympic champion.

T. W. Cranfield was named "Britain's Strongest Youth" (I don't know by whom; I suspect by Pullum).

William Beattie was known as  "The Scottish Apollo."  Mostly by Pullum.

 And A. A. Verge was "The British Hercules."  Hercules is more powerful than Apollo, right?

The postcards were immensely popular for amateur weight lifters to use as inspiration. 

And for gay men. During the 1920s and 1930s, every gay man had a stash of muscleman postcards, used for erotic appreciation, but also for identifying each other.

"Would you like to see my postcard collection?" was a standard pickup line.  You would display some ordinary postcards, then throw in some musclemen and decide, from his reaction, whether to make a move.

Although "Pops" Pullum retired in 1929, he remained one of the most respected elder statesmen of the weight lifting sport for generations.  When he died in 1960, he was mourned by thousands of amateur weight lifters.

And gay men.

Fernando Pessoa, the Gay Poet, Novelist, and Flaneur of 1920s Lisbon

If you're like me, you know Spanish literature inside-and-out, but Portuguese is an undiscovered country.

Maybe you've heard of Jorge Amado, and  Luis de Camoes, who wrote the first epic poem in Portuguese.  But not Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935), even though he is lauded as the greatest novelist in modern Portugal.

Born in Lisbon, Pessoa grew up in South Africa, where his stepfather was a diplomat.  He began writing poetry at age six ("To My Beloved Mother"), and published short stories in English while still in high school.

In 1905 he returned to Lisbon and immersed himself in the modernist movement, the new world of literary and artistic experimentation spearheaded by James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Ruben Dario, and Miguel de Unamuno.  He published literary magazines and literary criticism, translated English novels and poetry, and produced 25,000 pages of his own creative work.

A short, slight, sickly-looking person who didn't draw much attention in the gay bars and bathhouses of 1920s Lisbon, Pessoa had no romantic relationships during his life, and may not have had sex with anyone; a friend noted that he was embarrassed by the smallness of his penis.  Yet he immersed himself in the gay subculture; he had many gay friends, and published the works of two of them, Raul Leal and Antonio Botto (author of the first explicit homoerotic verse in Portuguese).

And he created a lively interior world of men, mostly gay men, who established strong same-sex bonds through art.

Heteronoms are fictional characters who write their own stories, poems, and essays, using their distinctive backgrounds and voices, and who interact with each other and comment each other's works.  By the end of his life, Pessoa had developed more than 70 characters with complicated geneologies and relationships to each other:

Albert Caiero, author of O guardador de Rebanhos, is critiqued by Ricardo Reis, whose brother Federico writes about him.

Claude Pasteur comments on Cadernos de reconstrução pagã, written by Antonio Mora, a student of Caiero.

Pero Botelho creates a character, Abilio Quaresma, who writes stories of his own.

Dr. Gaudencio Turnips edits a journal, O Palrador, which publishes the work of José Rodrigues do Valle, Dr. Caloiro, Gabriel Keene, and Diablo Azul.

A mysterious being named Ibis accompanied Pessoa through his life, and published poems of its own.



The voluminous interrelations of the many different people living in his head were mostly for the benefit of Pessoa and his friends; during his lifetime he published only four books in English and one in Portuguese, a symbolist poetic epic called Mensagem (The Message).

Many more books have been gleaned from his manuscripts since. The Book of Disquiet (Livro do Desassossego), published in 1985 (English translation 1991), is a semi-autobiographical novel/diary/ commonplace book by heteronom Bernardo Soares, a compendium of life in 1920s Lisbon by a gay man writing in the voice of another gay man.

N.C. Wyeth: Keeping Gay Desire Hidden

During the first half of the twentieth century, kids who got adventure books as presents, or checked them out of the library, were sure to find beautiful illustrations by N.C. Wyeth (1882-1945), like this naked warrior in a biography of Charlemagne.

The American regionalist illustrated over 100 books, including The Last of the Mohicans, Treasure Island, Kidnapped, Robinson Crusoe, The Yearling -- just about everything that boys read for pleasure during that era, making him as famous as Norman Rockwell or J.C. Leyendecker.

He also drew hundreds of magazine covers, advertisements, patriotic images, and murals, as well as a repertoire of 1,000 paintings.

N.C. (Newell) Wyeth belonged to the Brandywine School, known for its dependence on bright, vivid colors, realism to the point of grotesqueness, and serious, ponderous themes.  He frequently offered beefcake images -- two or three pictures in nearly every book display the interplay of muscles on a bare torso or nude backside.  But with two odd quirks:

1. N.C.'s nude men are almost always obscured, their faces hidden or their bodies engulfed in shadow, as in the illustrations from The White Company (left) or The Mysterious Island (below). It's as if displaying the face and physique together would be too dangerous, give too much voice to secret desires.

2. They are almost always in conflict, wrestling, fighting, attacking, subduing or being subdued, as in this illustration from Drums. It's as if he feared what would happen if two men approached each other in respect, friendship, or love.

In real life, N.C. was nothing like his stolid, stable, respectable illustrations would suggest.  He was an aesthete, a gourmand and a bon vivant, who held court in his house in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania and summer home in Maine, partying with all of the greats of the Jazz Age, including Lillian Gish, Charlie Chaplin, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and gay novelist Hugh Walpole.  

There is no evidence that N.C. was gay, but lots of evidence that he worried about sexual identity. In those days people thought that gayness was an inversion, and he was "inverted," with a blustering machismo deliberately affected as a remedy to a "sissy" childhood, with refined, "feminine" tastes in literature, art, and music, and with many intense, passionate friendships with men. 

You mustn't paint the nude men directly -- they must always be obscured.  Or else who knows what feelings might be stirred up?

N.C.'s older brother Nat, who was gay, suffered a series of nervous breakdowns, was institutionalized off and on, and attempted suicide several times. 

Is that the end result of men loving men?  Better show them always in conflict.

By all accounts, N.C. and his wife provided a happy home for their five children, bright with art and music. Three -- Andrew, Henriette, and Carolyn -- became well-respected artists in their own right. Nathaniel became an inventor.

But N.C. constantly struggled with his demons. Self-recrimination because he was "merely" an illustrator instead of a great painter.  And something else...a nagging doubt.  

His oldest son Nathaniel, called "Nat" after his uncle, was also gay.

From father to son...

 N.C. sublimated through eating heavily, finally tipping the scale at over 300 pounds.  And  through frequent extramarital romances, most notably a long-term affair with his daughter-in-law Caroline, Nat's wife.  There were rumors that her fifth child -- named Newell, after his grandfather -- was actually his "love child."  

On October 19, 1945, a few days before his 63rd birthday, N.C. Wyeth and 4-year old Newell were killed when their car stalled on some railroad tracks.

He left just one illustration of a semi-nude man who is not obscured or in conflict.  Chasing a woman.

N.C.'s son, Andrew Wyeth, was more nonchalant about gay identity, and his grandson Jamie, also an artist, is a gay ally.

See also: N.C., Andrew, and Jamie: 3 Generations of Gay Art.

Whoops, My Dear: The Evolution of a Homophobic Slur

When you research the pop culture of the past, you occasionally come across a mystery.

In an Archie comic book story from the 1960s, Archie has to hold Veronica's purse.  Reggie see him, flashes a limp wrist, and says "Whoops, my dear!"  Obviously he is implying that Archie is gay, but how?

In another comic strip, Mickey Mouse decides to put up flowered wallpaper.  His friend then "accuses" him of being gay by dancing around and saying "Whoops, my dear!"

The phrase appears on The Carol Burnett Show (1970s), on the Burns and Allen radio program (1940s), in popular novels (1950s), in stand-up comedy routines (1960s).   But what exactly does it mean, and how did it come to be an anti-gay slur?

The earliest use I have found is in a 1910 song by Bert F. Grant and Billy J. Morrisey:

Georgie was a dainty youth, well known for miles around.
Up on the street both night and day, he always could be found.
With his natty little cane and flaming crimson tie
When he'd come strolling down the lane, you'd loudly hear him cry, "Whoops, my dear."

H's a turn-of-the-century dandy, his cane and red tie symbolic of gayness, although in this song, he's courting women.

A Dictionary Criminal Slang  (1913) lists it as a "jovial expression of fairies and theatrical characters"

In a 1915 story by Elinor Maxwell, we read that Mr. Clarkson Porter is "not much on hair, or a slim waistline, but when it comes to a bank account, whoops, my dear!"

Sounds like a mild expression of surprise.

"What Do We Care for Kaiser Bill", a World War I song (1917):
Now Percy left his home one day to join the flying corps
He said I'll make those horrid boys and girls feel very sore
The first time that they took him up, it made him feel so queer
When in the clouds they looped the loop, he yelled out "Whoops, my dear."

Percy (a gay-coded name of the era) yells out the phrase because he's feeling dizzy.  He's probably been turned gay ("queer").

In the 1920s, tourists to Paris could go to the Petite Chaumiere at 2 Rue Berthe, where the "men dressed as women...cavort around and swish their skirts and sing in falsetto and shout 'Whoops, my dear."



"I Wish't I was in Peoria" (Billy Rose and Mort Dixon, 1925), tells us
They're yelling "Whoops my dear" in Peoria tonight.
They've got a big red-blooded warrior, he wears a red tie in Peoria,
Oh, how I wish't I was in Peoria tonight.

The song is about how the "hick town" of Peoria, Illinois is far more sophisticated than Manhattan.  For instance, they have gay people there.  Red ties still signified gay identity.


In 1932, the Green Street Theater in San Francisco was playing "the continental spicy musical cocktail Whoops, My Dear.", aka Die Guckloch (peephole).  Mild expression of surprise at sexual shenanigans.

In the 1930s, a gay couple named Frankie and Johnny performed at the Ballyhoo Club on North Halsted in Chicago.  Among their numbers was:

Whoops, my dear, even the chief of police is queer.
When the sailors come to town, lots of brown
Holy by Jesus, everybody's got pareses in Fairytown

A mild expression of surprise at the existence of gay people.  I can't even guess what "lots of brown" means, but "pareses" is an inflammation of the brain that occurs in the late stages of syphillis.

In 1946, the Cocktail Guide and Ladies’ Companion by Crosby Gage, a theatrical producer and president of the New York Wine and Food Society, included such drinks as Euthanasia, Whoops My Dear, and Psychopathia Sexualis.

(Shown: Gage Crosby, no relation, a University of Arizona swimmer).

Lucille Ball sang the phrase in "Hey, Look Me Over" in Wildcat (1960), about an attempt to strike oil in Texas (top photo: her costar, Keith Andes):

We're hitting the road
Loud as a Shanta Clare but jittery as hen
The road to glory running a "whoops my dear,"
but here we go again. Yeah!

We see here the final evolution of the phrase, from "I'm gay" to "I'm surprised that gay people exist" to "I'm surprised."