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.

2nd Generation: The Worst TV Series I Have Ever Seen

While looking up Charlie Gillespie, the current uber-hot it-boy, I found a reference to 2nd Generation (2018), a 6-episode Canadian tv series:'

A coming of age story set in today's harsh melting pot society, trying to draw the line between racism, morals, love, friendship, and secrets.   Shouldn't there be several lines?  Between, like love and friendship, or morals and love, or racism and secrets?

The episode guide on IMD was just as semi-literate and clichéd:

 Ticoon's new found popularity has him dealing with some unwanted attention from a new friend in sheep's clothing, something he could of never have imagined but is very accepting of.

• Ok, it's wolf in sheep's clothing; the cliché doesn't work with "friend."   
• Could of never have imagined?  Try "could never have imagined."
• The something he is "very accepting of" must be the "unwanted attention,"  but how can you be accepting of something unwanted?

As Ticoon's, Virginia's and Brody's relationship blossoms so does the money, catching the eyes of the authorities, as well as straining the already tender relationship with Everett

• Does money blossom?
• A tender relationship can't get strained. 

But it's on Amazon Prime for free, it stars Charlie Gillespie, and Ticoon looks hot, so I watched the first episode.

Holy bait and switch, Batman.  This guy isn't Ticoon, Brody, Virginia, or Everett.  He's an extra used to sell the show.

This is Ticoon Kim (pronounced as in tycoon), played by an actor named Ticoon Kim.  Nepotism much?

In Act 1, Ticoon's father thinks that he needs "more culture," so he signs him up for an inner-city basketball team.

Wait -- that's culture?  How about a class in Chinese calligraphy?  Or Korean poetry?  Or Shakespeare, depending on what culture you're going for.  Sports aren't culture.

Ticoonis the only non-Jamaic an,  the only person under 6'5", and the only person under 28 years old on the team, but his teammates are still completely accepting. One of the 28-year old 6'5" women even offers to have sex with him: "Me gonna break off yo' dick," she promises.

But all of those characters vanish forever in Act 2, when Ticoon goes to school.  There the 5-year old is bullied by his 28-year old, 6'5" classmates. David (Adam Murciano) makes lots of racist jokes, but the chief bully happens to be Asian: Will (Keanu Lee Nunes, left)

Then Brody (Charlie Gillespie), a long-haired androgynous type, intervenes.  So the outcasts are going to bond?

Even more oddly, Brody's sister appears to be dating the bully Will.  She must be a holdover from 1980s nerd movies, where the It-Girl is dating an obnoxious jock with no redeeming qualities, just so she can be won over by the sexual prowess of the nerd.

Ticoon has two friends his own age, Arnold (Matthew Edmonson) or Jacob (David Knoll), I'm not sure which, and  Sonny (Eshaan Buwadwal).  They get together later to discuss "pussy."  For instance, Ticoon's crush is "Justin pussy," meaning that she'll only date Justin Timberlake or Justin Bieber (rather a small number of options).

But they're also interested in why Brody intervened in the bullying.  No way anybody is actually nice.  And what if they become friends?  Ticoon will automatically become "pussy fam.," which sounds like a bad thing: calling someone a "pussy" means that they are weak and ineffective, like a woman's vagina, right?

No, it' a good thing; you aspire to become a "pussy fam." 

Apparently Brody isn't an outcast after all; he's the coolest guy in school.  When he says "What up," Sonny, overwhelmed by his coolness, exclaims, "Hey, yo, Big B, can I get a BJ?"

Arnold/Jacob points out that BJ means "Blow job," and he is embarrassed.

Brody's courtship of Ticoon is stunningly homoerotic, from confessions of "I like you" to hands on shoulders to request to meet in the bathroom. So obviously homoerotic that I'm sure it's canon: they're going to be a gay couple.

But it doesn't work out that way.  Fast-forwarding through the rest of the series, which seems to be about a basketball team and a marijuana selling business (but it's legal in Canada, yo),  I see a lot of scenes of Ticoon dating, and a lot of scenes of his two friends discussing pussy.  They get girlfriends, too, yo.  Brody and Ticoon are never alone in any scene ever again.

 Another bait and switch.

Dreadful.

Not to mention the extremely annoying pseudo-rap talk.  Nobody talks like that, yo.  And the profanity!  I don't mind an occasional "fuck," but every third word?  And every fourth word is "pussy."

Surely they meant cats.

My grade: F---.

The Gay Tease of "Always Be My Maybe"

Netflix recommended this movie for me with a 98% match: Sasha and Marcus had a brief romance in high school.  15 years later, Sasha has become a celebrity chef, while Marcus is still living in his parents' basement.  They feel the spark of attraction again, but can they adapt to each other's worlds?

I sat stunned.  Blurbs about movies with gay people don't include the terms "romance" or "spark of attraction."  They say "forbidden love" and "attraction that threatens to destroy their lives."

And the title would never be Always Maybe.  It would be something like Alex Strangelove.    But the illustration -- it's hard to see from across the room -- seems to show two men.  And Sasha and Marcus are both boys' names.

Remember Sasha Mitchell, sitcom star turned martial artist (top photo)?

And Marcus Schenkenberg, the Swedish model who was popping up all over the tv screen in the 1990s?

Could a gay romance be presented so nonchalantly, as "a romance"?  Could gay people be just....people?  How come we overcame, and nobody told me?

Just to be sure, I checked the byline: Ali Wong, Randall Park, James Saito.  Two of those people are Sasha and Marcus, and all three are men.

So I turned it on.

More after the break.

Jan-Michael Vincent's First Boyfriends

The Banana Splits Adventure Hour (1968-70), was a Saturday morning anthology series starring an animatronic rock band, with psychedelic blackouts, corny jokes, very bad songs, and cheesy cartoons.  But the live-action segment, Danger Island, offered a glimpse of a 1960s gay couple.

Archaeologist Professor Hayden (Frank Aletter, who starred in It's About Time), his daughter Leslie (Ronne Troup), and their young, tanned, and remarkably toned assistant, Link (Jan-Michael Vincent, who would go on to star in Big Wednesday) are searching for a lost city in the uncharted South Seas. Suddenly pirates attack. 

Link is knocked overboard, and sees the ship explode, so he assumes that his friends are dead; he therefore swims for the nearest island, fighting a shark en route. Crawling onto the shore, half-naked and half-drowned, he encounters a pair of long-time castaways.  

The tall, muscular African-American Morgan (Rockne Tarkington) wears a brown vest that accentuates his biceps.  His boyfriend, the short, slim Pacific Islander Chongo (professional stuntman Kahana), who is mute and somewhat addled, wears a yellow vest that looks like it was meant for a girl.

The couple invite Link back to their cave-home, where Chongo fusses over him like a drag queen auntie, making him try on one inappropriately risqué costume after another and in the process “accidentally” fondling his hard chest and shoulders.

Link settles on skintight white pants and a blue sailor shirt (but not to worry, it’s always being torn open or ripped off). Meanwhile, Morgan advises him of the severity of their situation: Danger Island is overrun by wild animals, savages, and pirates, all with different specialties of murder and mayhem (thus its name). 

Eventually Professor Hayden and Leslie, not dead after all, join the party, and they spend many cliffhangers looking for the lost city and fighting the promised wild animals, savages, and pirates (who drool enthusiastically over hardbodied Link). 

 In the last episode, they have thwarted every villain and acquired a boat, and they prepare to head back to civilization. But Morgan and Chongo decline rescue: “We’ve been living this way too long,” Morgan explains, his arm cozily around his partner’s waist. “We wouldn’t know how to live civilized.” 

They say goodbye and walk off arm in arm. I cannot imagine what the actors thought they were portraying in this scene. I can only advise Morgan and Chongo that they could live “this way” quite happily in Greenwich Village or the Castro, with the first heady days of gay liberation immanent.

The Top 12 Public Penises of East Asia

I visited Japan and Thailand many years ago, and took some classes in Mandarin Chinese, but otherwise East Asia is an undiscovered country.   I'm not even sure what sights I want to see, except for the Great Wall and the Forbidden City.

And a lot of East Asian bodybuilders wearing only towels.

I know there won't be much beefcake art on my list.  A combination of Confucian prudishness, Communist prudishness, and the decentralization of the human figure in traditional art has made public penises scarce.

But, for the intrepid, here are 12 respectable examples.

China

1. Olympic Forest Park in Beijing features some statues of naked runners, mostly women, but with some men about.

2. Also in Beijing, the monument to the Tiananmen Square Massacre contains a shirtless hunk trying to stop a tank.

3.Shanghai, the largest city in China and probably the world (14 million) is rather lacking in beefcake art, but the suburb of Suzhou features this rather well endowed individual.  I don't know what the chains are for. 

4. Jiu Lu, the biggest shopping area in Guangzhou, near Hong Kong,  has many bronze statues, but most are fully clothed.  This boy has a penis peeking out of his pants. 

5. Surprisingly, there is a Sex Museum in nearby Tongli.  Only heterosexual acts are depicted, but at least there's a few gigantic phalluses around. 

6. In Hong Kong, there's a statue of Bruce Lane, still a major star and folk hero there. He's posing shirtless.

More after the break.

Taiwan

7. On to Taipei, the capital of Taiwan, where basketball player Kobe Bryant is fighting a giant mamba snake, which is sinking its fangs into his Achilles tendon.  It's in a Basketball Art Exhibition.  I'm pretty sure basketball players don't really fight giant snakes. 

Japan

8. Japan hasn't been subjected to the twin puritanical influences of Confucianism and Communism, as evident in its many nude festivals.  But there still isn't a lot of beefcake art.  If you're lucky, you'll run across this beefy, naked jazz player in Tokyo. 

9. And a sumo wrestler.

10. Momotaro, "Peach Boy," is a popular hero of Japanese folklore, with many statues all over the country.  This one is in Inuyama, near Nagoya.  

Korea

11.  Korea is also lacking in beefcake art, but in Seoul, you can find a neoclassical statue of two semi-nude horsemen. 

12. On Jeju Island, off the southern cost, there are many dol hareubangs, phallus-shaped statues of fertility gods leftover from an earlier culture.  This one is not only phallus shaped, he has a penis of his own.

Maybe you'd be better off looking for the real thing at the Naked Man Festival of Japan.

Star Trek

Star Trek (1966-69) represents the beginning of a franchise that eventually encompassed 6 tv series, 12 movies, and an infinite number of tie-in novels, comic books, games, and toys. But at the time I didn't notice.   Either my parents watched something else, or it aired past my bedtime, so I only watched when I slept over with a friend who was a fan.

And I didn't have a lot of friends who were fans.  I didn't see most episodes until reruns started appearing in the 1980s.

I only remember one moment of joy: in the 1966 episode "Naked Time," the space explorers contract a virus that makes them act irrationally. Navigator Sulu (George Takai), imagining that he is D'Artagnon of the Three Musketeers, rushes down the corridor, sword in hand, his chest hard and bronze and gleaming.  

And later, cured, he returns to the room he shares with Ensign Chekhov (Walter Koenig).  Chekhov, already in bed, rises on one elbow.  "Are you ok?" he asks.  "I was worried."  "I'm ok now," Sulu says, sitting next to him.  They smile.

Like the smile shared by Rich and Sean in The Secret of Boyne Castle, it became an iconic memory of my childhood.  I wanted that smile more than anything.

Except the scene never happened.  Chekhov wasn't even in the episode, and he and Sulu were never shown sharing a room.  I invented the memory.

So, what are we left with:

1. A universe where heterosexual desire is a constant.  Remember when they meet early explorer Zephram Cochrane (Glen Corbett), trapped on a planet with an alien energy cloud.  It's female, and in love with him.  

2. An endless supply of alien babes for Captain Kirk (William Shatner) to smash his face against: "Kiss?  What is kiss?"

3. Some beefcake: Kirk got his shirt ripped off in many episodes, occasionally Kirk or another character (such as Frank Gorshin) bulged, and occasionally an alien dude, such as David Soul or Michael Forest,  wear a revealing outfit.  

4. No significant buddy-bonding.  Some people see a spark of homoerotic desire between Kirk and Spock (Leonard Nimoy), but I don't see it.

5.  No gay characters, ever.  Ok, we can forgive the 1960s series, but what about The Next Generation, Voyager, or Deep Space Nine?  Obviously this is a world where gay people are unknown and unwelcome. No wonder my friends and I spent our time watching something else, or listening to The Monkees.  

Which of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was Gay?

I'll bet you never thought you'd be reading about the ancient Greek drama Alcestis and The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on the same blog, on the same day.  But my search for beefcake and bonding takes me everywhere.

During the late 1980s, pundits often pointed to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles when they needed a quick, easy example of tv being a "vast wasteland" responsible for turning kids into brain-dead zombies.  They probably never watched the cartoon series or read the comic books: the title was enough for them.

TMNT began as a comic book in 1984, and moved into cartoons and extensive marketing tie-ins by 1987.  By 1990, everyone, even pundits, had heard of the four slacker-talking, pizza-obsessed ninja turtles named after Renaissance artists (two of whom, by the way, were gay in real life).
1. Leonardo, the leader.
2. Michelangelo, the fun-loving trickster whose catchphrase is "Cowabunga!"
3. Donatello, the technological genius and computer whiz.
4. The brooding Raphael, who has a Brooklyn accident.

They live in the sewers of New York with their beset-upon sensei, the mutant rat Splinter, emerging only to pick up the pizzas they ordered and to fight crime.  They have two human allies, tv reporter April O'Neil and hockey-mask wearing vigilante Casey Jones.

The cartoon series lasted for 10 years, and new versions are in the works.  A series of films began in 1990, with sequels in 1991, 1993, and 2007.  I've seen the first two.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990) gives us the turtles' origin story, and introduces them to April (Judith Hoag), Casey (Elias Koteas), and their arch-nemesis, Shredder, an evil Darth Vader clone who heads the evil Foot gang, comprised entirely of teenage boys.

April's boss happens to have a sullen teenage son, Danny (Michael Turney), who is secretly working for the Foot gang, and eventually gets big-brothered and rehabilitated by the turtles.

Surprisingly for a movie about turtles, there is significant beefcake, in the older members of the Foot gang, and in Casey Jones, who displays biceps and a prominent bulge.

Casey and April embark on a bickering "I hate you!" hetero-romance, like that of Sam and Diane on Cheers, David and Maddie on Moonlighting, and practically everybody else in the 1980s.  But otherwise hetero-romance is limited.  Of the turtles, only Michelangelo expresses heterosexual interest.  The others enjoy surprisingly open physicality, touching, hugging, grabbing each other at will, and Raphael obviously prefers the company of men: he spends most of the movie buddy-bonding with Casey.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2: The Secret of the Ooze (1991) casts a new April, and eliminates Danny, Casey, and every hint of hetero-romance.  There is none.

Instead, the turtles face a restored Foot gang and discover the secret of their origin, with the help of a befuddled scientist (David Warner, who had a romance with Gregory Peck in The Omen).  This time Raphael buddy bonds with and rescues a new teenager, pizza delivery boy/martial arts expert Keno (Ernie Reyes Jr., who played another hardbodied martial artist in Surf Ninjas).

What are we to make of this pleasant lack of hetero-horniness?  The fact that the dudes are turtles in a human world is irrelevant; anthropomorphic animals from Bugs Bunny to Howard the Duck have often been portrayed as overwhelmed with desire for human women.
The intended audience of preteens is also irrelevant: movies during the 1990s often promoted gushing prepubescent hetero-romances.

For whatever reason, the Turtles were spared.  Cowabunga, dudes.

See also: The Omen; Surf Ninjas

Jack Larson and other TV Jimmy Olsens

In an April 1940 episode of the radio Adventures of Superman, the Man of Steel helped a young boy named Jimmy Olsen protect his mother's shop from racketeers.  Sensing audience identification, the producers soon gave Jimmy a part-time job at the Daily Planet so he could follow leads on his own, snoop around abandoned warehouses, get into trouble, and require lots of nick-of-time rescues.

Jimmy arrived in Superman comics in November 1941, somewhat older, perhaps seventeen.  He was a redhead, like the cliche sidekick in boys' adventure novels of the period, and his v-shaped torso suggested muscleman potential.  But he was never a sidekick, like Robin to Batman, or Bucky to Captain America.  Jimmy never lived with Superman, he never learned Superman's secret identity, he only participated in the adventures by accident.  Was he homoromantic partner, or merely a coworker and pal?  

In Jimmy Olsen's comic book series, which began in 1954, it doesn't take a lot to find the romantic subtext beneath the boy pal text.  But in the tv and movie versions of the mythos, things are a little different.

TV first:

1. In The Adventures of Superman (1952-58), Jimmy Olsen (former teen idol Jack Larson, top photo ) seems mostly a coworker to Superman (George Reeves). We rarely see the two together, except on the job, and even then, Lois (Noel Neill) usually forms the third.  Jimmy requires rescue alone (without Lois or Perry present) just once, when he is kidnapped by a transvestite in "Double Trouble" (1953).  He bonds with editor Perry White (John Hamilton) more often.

 Jack Larson is gay, and even states that he was out on the set during the period; maybe that explains why he kept Jimmy carefully free of any romantic feelings for Superman.

2. Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman (1993-97) starred Dean Cain and Terri Hatcher as the famous couple (yes, now a couple), with the standard antipathy turning into romance ("He's so...arrogant!").

Jimmy was played by Justin Whalin, a former child star (the child of lesbian parents in a 1993 School Break special). Given the hetero-romantic story arc, it would seem that Jimmy would be a third wheel, but he actually has an unrequited crush on the hunky Clark. And there are a few Jimmy-rescues.

3. Smallville (2001-2011) was about Superboy, the teenage Clark Kent, so Jimmy (Aaron Ashmore, left, with an unidentified hunk) was not introduced until Season Six, when Clark arrived in Metropolis.

Jimmy had at least two girlfriends during his three years on the program, and expressed any romantic interest in Clark or Superman.

Clark Kent (Tom Welling) did have a homoerotic bond with a young Lex Luthor (Michael Rosenbaum), but not with Jimmy.

4. Supergirl.  Mehcad Brooks plays a grown-up James Olson, with no Superman around.

Not a very good record.  Where there is a gay subtext at all, it is between Clark Kent and someone else. Why has one of the most substantial and overt homoromances in all of comics failed to make it on the small screen?

Kim's Convenience: Gay People are the Problem of the Week

Kim's Convenience (2016-) which just appeared on Netflix, is a popular Canadian sitcom adaption of a play that has run since 2011.  It's about a Korean-Canadian family running a convenience store in a diverse neighborhood of Toronto.

It seems a bit retro: in each episode, the curmudgeonly, old-fashioned Mr. Kim (Paul Sun-Hyung Lee) rams head-first into something about modern society that he doesn't understand.  In the first episode, it's gay people.

He refuses to allow a gay pride poster to be placed in his shop window, because why do gay people have to advertise themselves with a parade?  Koreans don't march down the street yelling "I'm Korean!"  If they're gay, why can't they be quiet, respectful gays?

I started to cringe, having heard this complaint a dozen times, even from gay people.  It is a standard homophobic misconception that gay pride is about proclaiming that you have gay sex rather than celebrating survival in a hostile world.

 Accused of being homophobic, Mr. Kim backtracks by offering a 15% discount to gay people during Pride Week. Through the rest of the episode, he decides who warrants the discount and who doesn't.

He tells Boy Toy (Alexander Nunez) "You're not gay, you're just pretending."  Boy Toy returns with a flamboyant friend as proof, but Mr. Kim merely asks him what his favorite movie was in college.  Caddyshack.  Straight.

But when a guy (Andy Yu) drops in to apply for a job, Mr. Kim offers him the discount.  He protests that he is straight, but Mr. Kim wink-winks "Sometimes it takes awhile for the gay to come out."

He does give the discount to a drag queen after a conversation about "Why you dress like a woman?"  She actually seems pleased by the question, and replies: "It feels comfortable.  It feels like home."

The episode was not exactly offensive, at least not offensive enough to turn off, but it made me uncomfortable.  It was like watching people talk about me behind my back.

No gay people appear, or are referenced, in any of the other episodes I sampled.  Evidently the gays were the problem of the week, and the show moved on:

A friend asks Mr. Kim to become a "wingman" on a double date.

A kid runs wild in the convenience store, and the mother refuses to discipline him.

Mr. Kim gets a crush on the new female pastor, and insists on not charging her for anything.

After the first few episodes, the convenience store was relegated to the B plot, while the primary plot involved the problems and relationships of the two Kim children:

Janet (Andrea Bang), a photography student at OCAD University, struggles to achieve independence by moving out, getting a job, and refusing to "marry a nice Korean Christian boy."  .

Jung (Simu Liu), who hasn't talked to his father in years, works at a car rental company, where he has a crush on his female boss.  He doesn't appear to own a shirt.

The writers play up Jung's hunkiness deliberately, as a remedy to the countless sexless Asian characters in media.

Simu Liu has also appeared in the play Banana Boys, about the stereotypes Asian Canadian men face,  such as "they are bananas (yellow on the outside, white on the inside)."

Other male characters include:

Kimchee (Andrew Phung, center ), a clownish slob, Jung's roommate, coworker, and bromantic life partner.

Gerald (Ben Beauchemin), their nerdish, self-depricating coworker, and eventually Janet's platonic roommate.

Terence (Michael Musi), another coworker at the car rental place, who Kimchee doesn't like.

Alex (Michael Xavier), Jung's childhood friend who briefly dates Janet.

Enrique (Rodrigo Fernandez-Stoll), a regular customer at the convenience store.

Alejandro (Mark Grazzini), who dates Jung's boss.

Roger (Kevin Vidal), who briefly dates Janet's friend.

Raj Mehta (Ishan Dave), who dates Janet.

Peter (Zach Smadu, left).  I don't know who he plays.  I just had trouble finding beefcake photos of the other actors.

I like the fact that the Canadian locale isn't closeted: this is definitely Toronto.  The scene where a guy tries to rob the convenience store with a knife instead of a gun made me want to move there.

But I don't like the exclusion of gay people from the universe, after the first "gay problem" episode.

Ninja Kids of the 1990s

One of the legacies of Ralph Macchio's Karate Kid (1984), and ultimately Bruce Lee's popularization of Chinese martial arts, was a fad of ninja kids.  Unfortunately, they almost invariably limited buddy bonding to concentrate on making teenage or preteen martial artists, or both, improbably hetero-horny, contributing to the 1990s insistence that no gay kids could exist.

In 1993’s Surf Ninjas, hardbodied teenageJohnny (Ernie Reyes Jr., who also starred in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles) gazes at girls and Playboy magazine.  His brother, Adam, claims lack of interest, but when Johnny’s potential bride shows up in a veil, he quips “Chick’s got a veil, dude better bail,” and when Johnny’s opening line to her is the lame “Wanna go to the mall sometime?” he says “Way to close the deal, Casanova.”  Though he expresses no interest of his own, he is aware of heterosexual desire at the age of eleven.








Born in September 1979, Ted Jan Roberts made several karate kid-type straight-to-video films before he retired to become a martial arts pro. In A Dangerous Place (1994), the fey thirteen-year old kicks, jabs, and buddy-bonds with William James Jones without glancing at girls, but in A Power Within (1995) and Tiger Heart (1996), the fourteen year old’s main goal in life is to ask a girl for a date.

3 Ninjas (1992) starred three martial arts-whiz brothers: Rocky (Michael Treanor), Colt (Max Elliot Slade), and Tum-Tum (Chad Power).  (Because they are strong, quick, and gluttonous, respectively).  Only the oldest, Rocky, is interested in girls, to the hilarious amusement of his brothers.  But none of them expresses any interest in boys, or even has a male friend.

The $29,000,000 gross ensured a sequel, The Three Ninjas Knuckle Up (1995).  This time it's the second brother, Colt, who -- on a vacation in the Southwest, flirts with – and rescues – the Native American girl Jo.  When his brothers tease him, saying “Colt’s gonna kiss Jo,” he happily agrees: “Maybe I will.”

The ninjas had remain to be kids, just on the edge of adolescence, in The Three Ninjas Kick Back (1995), only Max Elliott Slade remained of the original cast. Sean Fox now played Rocky, and J. Evan Bonifant Tum-Tum.   At fourteen Colt was obviously an adolescent, significantly taller, with a deeper voice.  Again, Colt is the one who grins at, almost-kisses, and rescues a teenage girl.

 In The Three Ninjas: High Noon at Mega Mountain (1998), there was a new group: fourteen-year old Mathew Botuchis, teen-idol cute in a red muscle shirt, played Rocky as assiduously girl-crazy, rescuing and kissing not only his girlfriend but a  new, brainy female sidekick.   The other boys, played by Michael O'Laskey and James Paul Roeske.  remain uninterested.










What are we to make of these variations in heterosexual desire?

1. Not every kid in the movie had to pursue a hetero-romance, but at least one of them did.
2. There was no room for same-sex friendships.  Males were bullies, antagonists, enemy spies, never friends.
3. Heroic fantasy, such as the Neverending Story, had more room for buddy-bonding than movies set in our own world.
4. Beefcake was not necessary, nor even recommended, since every shirtless or swimsuit shot invites the gaze of gay boys and teenagers, and you want to pretend that there are none.

The Top 10 Hunks of "Crazy Ex-Girlfriend"

The second and third seasons of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend are up on Netflix, continuing the saga of Rebecca Bunch (Rachel Bloom), who runs into her grade-school crush Josh Chan (Vincent Rodriguez III) one day on the street, and drops everything to move to West Covina and stalk him.

It turns out that Rebecca really is crazy; she has Borderline Personality Disorder, characterized by extreme mood swings, impulsivity, obsessions, and relationship problems.  She moves too fast and overreacts violently to rejection or just "let's slow down."  People who suffer from BPD in real life have praised the show for its realistic portrayal, finally "getting mental illness right."

In addition to Rebecca's ongoing pursuit of Josh Chan and other guys whom she believes will make her life perfect, the palette of the show expands to include subplots.  Josh and his posse don't have perfect lives, after all.  Nearly everyone is involved in a toxic parent-child relationship.

It's one of the most diverse casts I've ever seen, and one of the most beefcake-heavy.

1. Josh (above) is riddled with insecurities, indecisive, and rather dimwitted (not quite Joey Tribbiani, but close).  He still lives with his mother, in spite of her entreaties for  him to move out.

2. He works for an over-accommodating boss (Johnny Ray Meeks and seeks advice from an over-accommodating priest (Rene Gube, left).

3. White Josh (David Hull), who is gay, has a major inferiority complex.  He can't understand why someone as great as David Whitefeather (Pete Gardner) would be interested in him (um...have you looked in a mirror lately?).


By the way, Vincent Rodriguez III is gay in real life, and David Hull is straight.

3. Hector (Erick Lopez) has an unhealthy dependency on his mother.  He's dating Heather (Vella Lovell), a perpetual college student, taking every class, sometimes twice, afraid to graduate and move to the next stage of her life.




















4. Greg (Santino Fontana) dates Rebecca for awhile, then realizes that he's an alcoholic, and goes away to get help.

5. Nathan Plimpton (Scott Michael Foster), Rebecca's boss after Darryl sells the company, is an amoral schemer constantly trying to win his dad's love.

More after the break