"Halston": Too many dresses, not enough bulges

Before watching Halston, a 2021 mini-series starring Ewan McGregor, I thought Halston was the gay porn director of the 1980s.

There was a Halston pornographer, of course, but this Halston (1932-1990) was a  fashion designer who dressed celebrities like Elizabeth Taylor, Lauren Bacall, and Betty Ford.  In the 1970s he traveled in the circles of the gliteratti, doing disco and drugs with Liza Minelli, Andy Warhol, Bianca Jagger, Burt Reynolds, and Bella Abzug, throwing money around like he was Richie Rich.  His career came crashing down during the 1980s due to bad business decisions, excessive partying, and not doing any work.  He died of AIDS in 1990.

Fashion design?  I own about thirty shirts, but I usually alternate between the same three.  And in the winter, four sweaters (my favorite is over 20 years old).  I can't remember the last time I wore a suit.  Maybe I'm not the intended audhience for this miniseries.  But I watched anyway.  

1970s Glitterati:  Lots of recognizable 1970s faces, especially Halston's bff Liza Minelli, but also Bianca Jagger, Steve Rubell (of Studio 54), Betty Ford, Calvin Klein, and Divine.   

But basically this is a workplace series, so only a few scenes involved partying.  Mostly we see Halston's work rooms, he's either screaming at people or coming up with a stroke of genius: "You can't make a trench coat out of suede, but what about ultra suede?  Darling, bring me the chinois silk...."

Gay Characters: Halston has a boyfriend in the first episode, and an on-off relationship with a rent boy/aspiring artist named Victor Hugo (Gian Franco Rodriguez, top photo), who ends up blackmailing him ("I have tapes of what we did.").  Halston vastly preferred to hang out with women, reserving men for behind-the-scenes sex.  

By the way, Victor Hugo was a real person, but his relationship with Halston was somewhat exaggerated.  He spent most of his career at Andy Warhol's Factory, posing for erotic photos and licking people and things.

Beefcake:  Not a lot of nudity, but there are some cute guys around, like John David Ridge (Jack Mikesell), hired to take over the designing when Halston's partying keeps him from meeting deadlines; and Mark Benecke (Eli Perdue).  young designer with a drug problem soon eclipsed by Halston's. (Both real people.)

Halston: An interesting portrait of thoroughly unlikeable person. Halston itreats his staff like dirt.  He treats his business associates like dirt.  He treats his boyfriends like dirt.  He's egotistical, monomaniacal, narcissistic, rude, and...well, he has no redeeming qualities at all, except for his genius.

Fashion design again: Halston pulls out a dress and says "let's put this strap up here, and move this over there," and everyone gasps "Magnificent!  Incredible!  The greatest work of art since Michelangelo's David.  This will make revolutionize the fashion industry!"   They're not just fawning to avoid being yelled at -- they really believe that the changes have produced a masterpiece.  Personally, I can't tell the difference, but I'll take their word for it.

The Songs: Krysta Rodriguez ws excellent as Liza Minelli, singing snippets of "Liza with a Z" and  "Bonjour Paris,"  But we never get to hear the whole song.  I'd rather watch Rodriguez doing a full-length Liza Minelli homage. Or better yet, stream Cabaret.

My Grade: B-

See also: Nude Photos of Ewan McGregor

Top 10 Beefcake Horror Movies: The 1970s

Horror movies in the 1970s upped the blood, guts, and overall grossness content to compete with tv, but unfortunately backed away from the nonstop nudity of the swinging 1960s.  Still, there were plenty of muscular guys around, taking showers, climbing into bed, or being strapped to tables for weird experiments.  You just had to know where to look.  Here are the Top 10 Beefcake Horror Movies:

1. Daughters of Darkness (1971): John Karlen, the gay-vague Willie Loomis of Dark Shadows, plays a hip artist who stumbles upon a couple of female vampires.  You get a lot of butt shots, and a glimpse of Willie's willy in a shower-sex scene.

2. Malpertuis, aka The Legend of Doom House (1971): A Belgian movie about an androgynous sailor (Matthieu Carrier), who is abducted and brought to a creepy house populated by Greek gods, all of whom have sexual designs on him.

3. Frogs (1972). About homicidal frogs.  Sam Elliot (left) doesn't seem to own a shirt, and beefcake model Nicholas Cortland gets frogged to death in the shower.

4. Flesh for Frankenstein, aka Andy Warhol's Frankenstein (1973): Baron Von Frankenstein tries to build a sex-machine monster out of Srdjan Zelenovic (top photo), while his nude boyfriend, Andy Warhol regular Joe Dallesandro, tries to save him.  But be careful -- there are an awful lot of bare breasts on display.

5. Devil Times Five (1974). Five crazy kids, including future teen idol Leif Garrett, invade a winter resort and cause mayhem.  But guest Taylor Lacher still has time to strip down and make out with his wife.  There's also a seduction of a mentally-challenged handyman.

6. The Devil's Rain (1975).  If you didn't get enough of a shirtless William Shatner in his early teen idol days or on Star Trek, you can see him here as a guy battling small-town Satanists.  Look for the film debut of John Travolta as "Danny."

7. The Reincarnation of Peter Proud (1975): Michael Sarrazin, who took off his clothes frequently in 1970s dramas, here hangs out in the swimming pool a lot while figuring out that he's the reincarnation of his girlfriend's murdered Dad.

8. Track of the Moon Beast (1976).  If ever a movie was tailor-made for the Mystery Science Theater 3000 riffs....College student Chase Cordell gets hit by a meteor fragment and goes on a rampage.  He also took off his shirt in the grindhouse Sins of Rachel (1972).

9. Eaten Alive (1977).  A hotelier in the South handles unhappy guests by feeding them to a giant crocodile.  Robert Englund, who would go on to play Freddie Krueger in the Nightmare on Elm Street series, displays rather a nice physique as a victim named Buck.

10. Coma (1978).  Half-naked musclemen (and women) are being kept in comas to harvest for organs. Among them is Tom Selleck, a few years before he became Magnum, P.I.

Joe Dallesandro: Counterculture Icon with the Most Famous Face, Physique, and Bulge of the 1960s

Joe Dallesandro had one of the most recognizeable faces, physiques -- and bulges -- of the 1960s.

When the teenager met Andy Warhol in 1967, he had already had a colorful career as a juvenile delinquent who had run away from two detention centers, crashed a car during a police chase, and was shot by a police officer.  He was currently working as a hustler, and a model for the gay-themed Physique Pictorial.  Bisexual, adventurous, a little dangerous, and devastatingly handsome, he was just the sort of person Warhol wanted for his entourage.










Joe immediately got a starring role in Flesh, directed by Warhol staple Paul Morrissey.  He plays a bisexual hustler who has several frontal-nude scenes and has sex with a number of people, including a transvestite.

During the next few years, Joe starred in five more Warhol movies:

Lonesome Cowboys (1968), a Western spoof which involved a nude wrestling scene, plus Trash, Heat, Andy Warhol's Frankenstein, and Blood for Dracula, sometimes with nude scenes, sometimes without, but his fame as a counterculture icon was sealed.

He appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone, nude, with his infant son.  20 years later, they recreated the iconic photo.

















He appeared on the cover of the Smiths' album The Album.

His bulge appeared on the cover of the Rolling Stones album Sticky Fingers.  Actually, Andy Warhol submitted it from a stack of photos without knowing who it depicted, but Joe has always claimed that it's him.  He should know what his own bulge looks like.

He was referenced in the Lou Reed song "Walk on the Wild Side":

Little Joe never gave it away, everybody had to pay.


(Joe is 5'6", a head shorter than Andy Warhol at 5'11")










During the late 1970s, Joe broke into mainstream cinema, first in Europe (The Gardener, The Climber, Season for Assassins, Je t'aime moi non plus), then in the United States, specializing in gangsters and other tough guys (The Cotton Club,  The Hitchhiker, Cry-Baby, Guncrazy). He also worked in tv, on such series as Wiseguy and Matlock.  

Today, at age 68, he has retired from acting, although he appears occasionally as a commentator in in documentaries about the 1960s, or Andy Warhol, or himself.

Joe has always been a vocal advocate of LGBT rights.  He said that if his sons, Joe Jr. and Michael, were gay, he wouldn't want them to endure the homophobia that he witnessed in the "liberal" 1960s and 1970s.

There's a story about Joe's hookup with Bobby Driscoll on Tales of West Hollywood.

The nude photos are on Tales of West Hollywood

Walk on the Wild Side

The gay world is always hidden, flickering on the edge of our vision, invisible to the average person.  Merely a shadow to us.  But then one day something happens.  By accident or design, we go down the rabbit hole, or through the wardrobe, or to Platform 9 3/4, and we can see the gay world, bright and colorful.

With a bit of a mind flip, you're into the time slip, and nothing can ever be the same.

"Walk on the Wild Side," by Lou Reed (1972), is about several people making that slip from dull Mundania to the gay world, where all gender and sexual norms vanish and you can find yourself -- or lose yourself -- in the savage possibilities.

Holly shaved her legs and then he was a she.

Candy was everyone's darling in the back rooms.

Little Joe never gave it away, everybody had to pay.

Sugar Plum Fairy visited the Apollo, where the "colored girls" sang.

Jackie thought she was James Dean and crashed.

Transvestism, back-room sex, male prostitution, interracial sex, drugs -- heavy stuff for 1972.

When I first heard the song, in high school, I didn't understand most of the sexual references.  I didn't know that the people mentioned were all members of Andy Warhol's Factory: Holly Woodlawn, Candy Darling, Joe Dallesandro, Joe Campbell, and Jackie Curtis.

But I knew that there was a world out there, "beyond the fields we know," the Wild Side, frightening, dangerous, disturbing -- and free.

See also: Searching for a Gay Comic; Andy Warhol; Joe Dallesandro

The Andy Warhol Museums: Erasing the Gay

You probably know that Andy Warhol, the gay-yet-homophobic pop artist, was the son of immigrants from Miková, a small town in Slovakia, near the Polish and Ukrainian borders.
 
You probably don't know that the nearby town of Medzilaborce features the Andy Warhol Museum of Modern Art, established in 1991 to celebrate Andy's Slovak heritage.

It was a tough sell to the locals, who worried that the museum would glorify the "homosexual aspects of the drug parties." So it tried to make him a good Slovak communist (later, a good Slovak Catholic).  There are paintings of butterflies, flowers, and a Russian hammer and sickle.  His gayness is not mentioned.

To emphasize his loving (and presumably heterosexual) family connections, there are also works by his mother (a drawing of the Annunciation of our Lord), his brother Paul Warhol and nephew James Warhola.

But no beefcake.  Not even this cover that James drew for Robert Heinlein's sci-fi novel Stranger in a Strange Land.

Still, locals stay away, and parents won't even allow their children to attend the art classes held on the site, for fear that the gayness will rub off on them.

There's another Andy Warhol museum in his native Pittsburgh, considerably larger, with 17 galleries and 900 paintings.  Is it any better at acknowledging Warhol's gayness?

They do a little better.

True, you can walk through the entire permanent exhibits of giant Campbell's Soup cans and silkscreens of Marilyn Monroe without ever suspecting.

And the biography page on the website discusses his college career, his Catholicism, the Factory, his celebrity interviews, his visits to Studio 54, but not his gayness.

But the gay-themed work is available for those willing to dig, like the short film, Tarzan and Jane Regained, Sort Of (1963), starring Davis Hopper and Taylor Mead (top photo).

And some of the special events are gay-inclusive. In 2012 there was a book signing and reception for Lance Out Loud, a biography of the gay icon by his mother, Pat Loud.

So, like the "outsiders" of Howard Becker's classic sociological study, it's invisible to most people, but you can find it if you're "in the know."

See also: Andy Warhol; Lance Loud

Fall 1973: Junior High Fantasies of Paul Getty Junior

During the summer of 1973, just after 7th grade at Washington Junior High, I started reading newspaper articles about Paul Getty Jr., the 16-year old grandson of oil tycoon J. Paul Getty, who had mysteriously disappeared from his apartment in Rome.

Soon I discovered that it wasn't a paranormal disappearance: he had been kidnapped, with a ransom demand of $18 million.  His father and grandfather refused to pay, believing that he had somehow arranged the kidnapping himself.

The articles didn't say anything else about Paul, but the photos showed a cute, long haired guy with a slim build and dainty, feminine hands.

He obviously liked boys, not girls.  I imagined flying to Italy to mount a daring rescue, and getting a "my hero" hug and kiss.

Was he tied up with his shirt off?  Or naked? Was he struggling against the bonds, his chest heaving, his slim biceps straining?

On November 10th, a week before my 13th birthday, the kidnappers sent Paul's mother a package containing his severed ear, and warned that they would start returning him "by bits."  What body part would they cut off next, I wondered.  A finger -- or maybe his penis.

How big was his penis, anyway?

When I stormed into the dungeon where he was tied up naked, I would find out.  Then we would...

It never occurred to me to feel guilty over using Paul's ordeal as the subject of my junior high fantasies.

The elder Getty finally negotiated a deal, and delivered $2.9 million.  On December 13th, Paul was released.



He dropped out of the news, and I heard nothing more about him; I didn't even realize that Balthazar Getty, a noted actor of the 1980s, was his son.  But recently I began to wonder about the object of my junior high fantasies, and looked him up.

Apparently Paul was not as innocent as I imagined: living with a girlfriend, hanging out with criminals and mafiosi, using and selling massive quantities of drugs.

But he was bisexual: his biography notes experiences with both men and women.

After the kidnapping, he continued his jetsetting, bon vivant life.  He was married from 1975 to 1991, but pursued many friendships with gay men.  He partied with gay celebs like Elton John and Andy Warhol, who managed to talk him into nude photos.

It didn't take much talking.  Friends describe him as amiable, uninhibited, and eager to explore the risque.

And his tastes in clothing veered toward the Quentin Crisp style.

Paul was interested in show business, and starred in two movies, The Territory (1981) and The State of Things (1982).

But he continued to use massive quantities of drugs.  In 1981, at the age of 24, he drank a nearly-lethal mixture of alcohol, valium, and methadone, and suffered a massive stroke that left him paralyzed and nearly blind.

The tragedy did not destroy his spirit.  Friends say that he remained positive, amiable, and charming up to his death thirty years later.

See also: The Gay Anthropologist and the Cannibal; and The Disappearance of Sean Flynn.

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

N.C. Wyeth (1882-1945), who incorporated male nudes into many of his children's book illustrations, was very conflicted about same-sex desire.

His youngest son Andrew (1917-2009), one of the most famous artists of the twentieth century, not so much.

Andrew is best known for Christina's World (1948), which depicts a young woman lying on a vast field, looking at a farmhouse in the distance, condemned by the isolation and misery of rural life (a theme similar to American Gothic, by gay regionalist Grant Wood).

He was a devotee of female beauty.  One of his favorite models was "Helga," a German woman who lived near the Wyeth farm in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania.  But later in life, he occasionally devoted himself to the homoerotics of everyday life.

The Clearing (1979) depicts a similar rural world, but not with isolation and misery: a muscular, tanned, naked man, his long hair blowing in the wind, stands with arms akimbo, inviting us to join him.

Man and the Moon (1990) shows the nude backside of a muscular motorcyclist.

Andrew's son Jamie (born in 1946) is completely nonchalant about gay identity.  Although he has followed in his father's footsteps as a regionalist, depicting landscapes, houses, and farm animals, he has also painted nude and semi-nude beefcake icons such as artist Andy Warhol, bodybuilder Arnold Schwarzenegger  (top photo) and dancer Rudolph Nureyev.

As well as a series of paintings of the wild men and boys of Monhegan Island, Maine, especially the teenage Orca Bates.

When he was researching a portrait of the late President in 1967, Jamie found himself returning again and again to John F. Kennedy's life-long friend Lem Billings.  He finally drew a man who was gay, or who at least understood the beauty of same-sex desire: "under the surface of the paint is a portrait of Lem Billings."