Why I Walked Out on Tony Danza

October 10th, 1978, a Tuesday night.  I'm 17 years old, a freshman at Augustana College, studying in the tv lounge at the student union.  It's crowded with jocks and their girlfriends, Dungeons and Dragons nerds, future Lutheran preachers, and ironic-artsy types. Tuesday is the power night of must-see tv: Happy Days, Laverne and Shirley, Three's Company, Taxi.

I figured "it" out last summer, but I haven't met any gay people yet, and I know nothing about gay life.  Except one thing: no straights must ever know.  At best they will never speak to you again.  More likely they will attack. You will be kicked out of the house, expelled from the college, arrested.

So watching tv in a group presents a problem.  You have to feign disinterest in the hot male actors and pretend to find the "hot chicks" attractive.  If you make a mistake, and accidentally express an interest in an "uggo," it will all be over.

And what about the occasional gay characters? If you seem too interested, act as if you want to hear about "fags," the straights will suspect.  But they wil also suspect if you bellow with outrage ("Why do you care so much? Are you that way?)

You have to express just the right level of disgust: "I don't care what they do in the bedroom, as long as they don't try anything with me."

Happy Days: "Happy days" in the 1950s.  Fonzie, motorcycle hoodlum turned role model, bonds with his ex-girlfriend's son, whose father abandoned him.  No references to gay people, no hot guys, a few murmurs about the hotness of the ex-girlfriend, no big deal.

Laverne and Shirley: More "happy days," with two working girls in 1950s Milwaukee.  Neither is presented as particularly attractive.  They go on a quiz show.   No big deal.

Three's Company:  Jack Tripper (John Ritter) pretends to be gay so the uptight landlord will let him share an apartment with two girls.  Usually not a problem: no actual gay people appear, and when Jack has to "be gay," he swishes and limp-wrists to elicit laughter rather than outrage.   He doesn't even swish in this episode: the gang mistakenly believes that Helen is cheating on her husband.

Taxi:  About a disparate group of drivers for the Sunshine Cab Company in NewYork.  This is only the fifth episode, but it's already a major hit.

Not a problem, except for trying not to sigh over the rock-hard hunkiness of Tony Danza.  This episode centers on Elaine (Marilu Henner), an aspiring artist who doesn't want her snooty friends to know that she drives a cab.

Then....

Elaine's fare (William Bogert) believes that she is deliberately driving the "scenic route," and refuses to pay.  She threatens to claim that he tried to rape her.  He says: "You may have a little trouble getting that story to stick when the police find out I'm the National Secretary for the Gay Liberation Force."

I blink in surprise.  Is there such an organization (no, there wasn't)?  Do gay people have groups, clubs, national organizations?  I thought it was just clandestine bars. 

Suddenly I realize that everyone is laughing. 

Should I laugh, too? Should I make a comment about how New York is full of fairies?  What if he turns out to be a major character in the episode, the owner of the art gallery or something? What if he turns out to be a recurring character in the series?

Should I stay or should I go?

I go.

See also: Taxi

Watching the Muppet Show

When I was an undergraduate at Augustana College, I spent most of my free time in a little bookstore off the Student Union lobby. It stocked some bestsellers and miscellaneous nonfiction, including The Little Prince and Dag Hammarskjold's Markings,  but mostly science fiction and fantasy, with some underground comics under the counter.

It provided a bright belonging place for "head cases," boy who were majoring in English or philosophy or music, who wanted something greater and nobler from life than carrying briefcases into skyscrapers.  We called ourselves the Bookstore Gang.

During any hour of the afternoon and early evening, half a dozen members of the Bookstore Gang could be found standing by the counter, or sitting on it, or browsing through the shelves, or reading in the armchairs or green couch that blazed with western sunlight.  We discussed classes, comic books, movies, ghosts, and politics, but for some reason never girls.  When the bookstore closed, we adjourned to the Rathskeller or to the TV Lounge, to argue and advise and review, discussing The Wizard of Id or Saturday Night Live, yelling "No one expects the Spanish Inquisition!" while stuck-up Business Majors stared.

Everything we watched or listened to or read was hip, anarchic, iconoclastic, but my favorite was The Muppet Show (1976-81), with Kermit the Frog from Sesame Street hosting a comedy-variety show, juxtaposing parodies of medical dramas or Star Trek ("Pigs....in space")  with musical numbers, while the elderly gay couple Statler and Waldorf heckled everything (except for the famous guest stars, of course).

And what a cast of guest stars!  Everybody who was anybody stopped by:
Joan Baez
Milton Berle
Bert and Ernie
Joel Grey
Arlo Guthrie
Vincent Price
Tony Randall
Sylvester Stallone

Other hip, anarchic, iconoclastic tv programs and movies -- Monte Python, Mary Hartman, Saturday Night Live, WKRP in Cincinnati, Blazing Saddles, The Cheap Detective, Silent Movie -- were loaded down with fag jokes and hetero-horniness, but The Muppet Show had neither.

Only Miss Piggy regularly displayed heterosexual interest -- at Kermit and various male guest stars -- and she was always rejected. And instead of constantly ridiculing gender transgressions, same-sex contact, and "fags," like most venues in the 1970s, The Muppet Show offered a pleasant nonchalance about diversity in size, shape, affect, and affection (who knew what Gonzo the Great was into?).

Muppet creator Jim Henson was a gay ally, as is his daughter Lisa, now CEO of Jim Henson Enterprises. In 2012, the company severed ties with Chick-Fil-A due to its homophobic bias, and donated existing proceeds to GLAAD.

I always knew that the Muppets were gay-friendly.

Gather the Faces of Men: Homophobia in American Literature Class

When I was a junior in college, I took courses in "The Modern British Novel", "The American Renaissance," and  "Modern American Literature," plus German, French, and Spanish Literature.  And I forever afterwards restricted my literature consumption to the pre-modern (I should have known from my freshman-year class in Fiction Writing).  The professor of the Amer Lit class chose the texts that most jubilantly proclaimed the absence of gay people from the world.

1. John Updike, "A and P." A teenage boy is working in small-town supermarket: “In walks these three girls in nothing but bathing suits.” He goes on to describe their bodies in detail. Why do men never walk in with their shirts off?

2. Alan Dugan, "Tribute to Kafka for Someone Taken." He is at a party, when the police arrive. “I take one last drink,” he writes, “A last puff on a cigarette, a last kiss at a girl. . . .”   Why is there never a last kiss at a boy?

3. Carl Sandburg, "Stars, Songs, Faces": "Gather the faces of women" through our lives, and then, as we prepare to die, “Loosen your hands, let go and say goodbye.” Why are men's faces not worth gathering, or letting go?

Was there no glimpse of same-sex desire or love in these authors?

Not much. Carl Sandburg  evokes "the stormy, husky, brawling laughter of youth, half-naked, sweating," but his world is overwhelmingly that of “slender supple girls with shapely legs."

Men are described only in their connection to women: the Shovel-Man, who dreamed of by “a dark-eyed woman in the old country,” or Jack, who “married a tough woman and they had eight children,” or a Polish boy, “out with his best girl” on a Saturday night. Men only and always long for women.

John Updike writes endlessly about men noticing women, kissing women, and marrying women.   “We are all Solomons lusting for Sheba’s salvation,” says the narrator of “Lifeguard.”

There is a drag queen in "A Bar in Charlotte Amelie," but he is a lonely, pathetic creature, and he never expresses any same-sex interest.

In Updike's magnum opus about alienated suburban heterosexuals, Rabbit Run (1960),  Rabbit (played by James Caan in the movie version) wonders why his friend Tothero likes to watch him undress.  Could he be queer?  He wonders in horror.  No -- it's a nostalgic pleasure, a memory of all the times he used to watch boys undress in the locker room when he was young.

Um...so that means Tothero isn't gay?

Alan Dugan was “the poet of masturbation,” endlessly describing his straight desires and exploits, with no mention of men except for barroom cronies.

His “Night Song for a Boy” is not about a boy, but about his depression over his failure to get enough women.

In old age, Dugan has a homoerotic dream about a dead friend, but in perhaps the most homophobic line in any poem since Catullus, he is horrified at the thought that his dream self might be “an impotent homosexual necrophiliac,” and longs for the “right” sort of dreams, dreams about women, again.

Every selection on the syllabus of that long-ago class came from an author who obsessed over heterosexual passion and erased nearly every trace of same-sex love from the world.  Their descriptions of men are bare and lifeless, as if too trivial to mention amid the endless paragraphs devoted to girls’ legs.

There were gay writers in mid-20th century America to choose from: Truman Capote, John Cheever, Robert Duncan, Thom Gunn, Allen Ginsburg, Amiri Baraka, Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal. But I never heard of any of them in Modern American Literature class.

See also: Carl Sandburg's Two Gay References

The Bloated White Caterpillar of "A Confederacy of Dunces"

When I was an undergraduate at Augustana College (1978-82), I got bored to death with Southern Gothic. It was all any English major ever talked about, except for Ulysses:  I had my fill of The Sound and the Fury, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Light in August, The Grass Harp, A Streetcar Named Desire, the disgusting stories of Flannery O'Connor and Eudora Welty...

So when everybody began praising A Confederacy of Dunces, around the fall of 1980, my junior year in college, I wasn't interested.

But they kept up.  Spectacular!  A masterpiece!  A classic!  The greatest novel ever (except for Ulysses).

Plus, like all "great novels," it had an interesting origin story.  John Kennedy Toole (1937-1969), a gigantic mass of flab, an aspiring writer, a literary wit, a permanent student who never finished his Ph.D. (although he was much smarter than his professors), an avid heterosexual stymied by constant "just friends' speeches from girls  (maybe cut back on the cake?), an anti-Catholic teaching at a Catholic college, a prude who railed against the vulgarity of the 1960s co-eds who filled his classes, finally couldn't take it anymore, and committed suicide at the age of 31.

While cleaning out his things, his mother found a carbon copy of a novel called A Confederacy of Dunces (the original had been rejected by some publishers and finally destroyed).  She contacted writer Walker Percy, who at first refused to read it -- who needed another Truman Capote, especially a heterosexual one?  But eventually he gave in, loved it, and after 11 years managed to get it into print.  The rest was history:  Stupendous!  Colossal!  A masterpiece!

Prey to peer pressure, I bought a copy, read a few pages, and threw it out, not so much offended as disgusted, like when you touch a door handle and there's something gross and sticky on it.  Nearly 40 years later, I don't remember what the problem was.  I remember that it featured a bulbous jerk who hated everybody and everything except Boethius, but why the visceral disgust?  Why does it come back every time I hear about Confederacy.

So, 39 years later, I found a preview on Amazon and read the first few pages.

Page 1: In a godforsaken small town in the South, no doubt somewhere near Yoknapatawpaw County,  the bulbous Ignatius waits for his mother to finish shopping and criticizes the fashion choices of passersby (Ignatius is O'Toole. I get it).  He's wearing a hunting cap and boots too small for his bulbous feet.  He's so fat that movement is difficult.


Page 2: The town turns out to be New Orleans (not that small).  More about how fat he is:  when he tries to move, "in his lumbering elephantine fashion," he sends "waves of flesh rippling."  Even his boots are swollen to bursting from his swollen fat feet. (This guy isn't just fat, he's a disgusting bloated white caterpillar with a nearly human face..  That's what caused the disgust!  I feel my gorge rising even now!).

Plowing on:  the bloated white caterpillar is upset because his favorite game at the arcade is missing, which we hear about for several paragraphs.  (Boring, but it beats hearing how fat he is again).

 Page 3: More about the arcade game.  A police officer, seeing his bag of sheet music and spare string for his lute, saunters up and asks him for an ID.  Ignatious objects, complaining that the city is full of criminals, like sodomites and lesbians.  Why not target them instead?  (And he's blathering homophobe!  Help!)

Page 4: Meanwhile, Mom is buying macaroons and cakes.  More about how fat her son is. She talks to a friend, who complains about her feet (More about feet!  Was Mr. Toole a bit of a foot fetishist?).  They discuss the fact that Ignatius isn't married, and how he gets nasty when she doesn't provide enough cake (he's nightmarishly fat -- I get it).

Page 5: Back on the street, people are gathering around in defense of Ignatius, and the cop threatens to arrest them, particularly when they imply that he might be a "comuniss." Fortunately, Mom comes to the rescue, macaroons and wine cake in hand (I'm never eating a piece of cake again.  I may never eat again, period).

According to wikipedia, I'm not missing much plot.  Confederacy seems to be mostly episodic, minor adventures with various colorful characters, in fact, just about everyone from his opening-cop diatribe, including a sodomite, lesbians, strippers, onanists, and so on.   Meanwhile, Ignatius discusses how vulgar modern society is, and how much he likes Boethius.  The only major events:  Mom decides to get married, and to commit Ignatius to a mental hospital (good!)

There's a statue of Ignatius on Canal Street in New Orleans, to scare away the tourists. He looks rather svelte for a bloated white caterpillar.

There have been numerous attempts to film the book, but most actors who have agreed to play Ignatius died before they could sign a contract: John Belusi, John Candy, Chris Farley, Divine.  John Goodman is still alive, but getting a little old to play the 20-ish misanthrope. Will Farrell and Zack Galifianakis have also agreed to star in versions that never got made (good!)

Oddly, I have no problems with chubs or even superchubs in real life.  I find them rather attractive.  But the bloated white caterpillar was disgusting. And homophobic.

I Spend the Night with Calvin and His Four Brothers

Calumet City, Illinois,  February 1982

When I was an undergraduate at Augustana College, there was  no place to meet gay men except for Rock Island's only gay bar, the Hawaiian Lounge.  I was too young to get in, and besides, bars were scary to a Nazarene.  Of course, I met dozens of guys in class, at the campus radio station, and at my job in the Student Union, but how to tell if they were gay?

I obviously couldn't come out to them, and they would never come out to me.  So I tried a noncommittal reference to gay people, to judge their reaction:

"I visited Los Angeles two years ago. Very interesting. Sights you'd never see in Rock Island, like gay guys walking around openly on the street." 

Most of the time, my target said "Gross!  Those freaks should all be taken out and shot!  Fortunately, there aren't any  in Rock Island.  I couldn't stand being in the same city with one!" 

Straight.  Time to make an excuse and leave.

A few said: "I don't know...I mean, they're sick, they're disgusting, and all that, but, really, they're not hurting anybody. Why not just let them alone?"  

Straight.

But one guy in a dozen, or one guy in a hundred, abruptly changed the subject: "Los Angeles, huh?  So, did you meet any movie stars?"  


The hesitancy about discussing gay people at all meant that he was gay.

Calvin (not his real name) abruptly changed the subject.  He was a freshman physics major who somehow enrolled in my upper-division Eastern Religions class, tall and thin with gangly hands, a round face, unruly reddish hair, and smooth pale skin. A tight swimmer's build, but not particularly athletic.

I'm not particularly into redheads with pale skin.  I prefer black guys, Asians, Arabs, or dark, swarthy Mediterraneans.

But Calvin was probably the only other gay guy on campus.  You take what you can get.

In order to ask him out on a date, I needed an activity, and it was hard to find a common interest: he didn't like science fiction, comic books, languages, or the paranormal.  Actually, he wasn't much into anything.  He was taking an overload of 21 credit hours, mostly hard classes that required endless hours with textbooks and calculators.

It was also hard to find a time to schedule the date.  Augie classes met Monday-Wednesday or Tuesday-Thursday, leaving Fridays off, and every Friday morning at 7:00 am, he got into his car and drove home for the weekend.

After a few weeks of ruminating over how to get to stage 2, from "finding out that he's gay" to "asking him out," Calvin asked me!

I mentioned that I was applying to graduate school at the University of Chicago in linguistics and Byzantine Studies, and I wanted to go tour the campus.  But I didn't relish the idea of driving all the way to Chicago and back on the same day.

"Why don't you come home with me this weekend?"  Calvin asked.  "We can go up to the campus on Friday, and then see the sights on Saturday and Sunday."

A weekend, for a first date?  I was too naive to realize how risky that would be.

We actually drove to Chicago with two other guys, so Calvin and I couldn't have much of a conversation. I discussed my ex-boyfriends, Fred and the Priest with the Pushy Mom

The campus was beautiful, Medieval, like Oxford.

But then we started driving.  I thought Calvin lived "in Chicago."  He lived in Calumet City, a suburb 18 miles south, 45 minutes away during rush hour.

Stuck between 3 major highways and Indiana, its motto is "We Love This Town!"  It smelled   bad all the time, due to auto exhaust, overindustrialization, fertilizer factories, oil refineries and marsh gas from the Prairie and Marsh Nature Preserve.  It was once known as Sin City, for its taverns, brothels, and go-go clubs.

It was also known for its Catholics. Calumet College of St. Joseph, affiliated with the Missionaries of the Precious Blood, with 1000 students, in Whiting, Indiana. Across the street from industrial blight.

Calvin lived in a modest three-bedroom house with his parents and FOUR BROTHERS.

Who cared about my date with Calvin.  I wanted a ginger orgy!

The full story, with nude photos and explicit sexual content,is on Tales of West Hollywood.

Summer 1981: Male Nudity in German Class

After the 1978 of Grease, my favorite Boomer summer was the summer of 1981. I went to an Italian Film Festival, moved into my own apartment, learned about the Canterbury Tales and the Beat Generation, and saw a dozen movies: Clash of the Titans, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Wolfen, Arthur, American Werewolf in London, Hell Night, The Chosen.  Not to mention TV: One Day at a Time, Alice, Taxi, Soap, Barney Miller. And  subtext songs on the radio.

Every morning I worked in the college library, checking out books and scouring the shelves for works that my American, British, and French literature professors left out. Everyafternoon, I took summer school classes: Chaucer in June-July and Culture and Civilization of Modern Germany in July-August.

When I took Introduction to German Literature a few months before, Dr. Weber tried hard to prove that Death in Venice had nothing to do with gay people.  But now the gloves were off: Homosexualität 'absolutely, emphatically, did not exist in 20th century Germany.

Photographer Wilhelm van Gloeden (1856-1931) moved to Taormina,, Sicily, where he specialized in placing local men and boys in classical settings with pillars and laurel leaves, usually nude, channeling the homoerotic glory of ancient Rome. According to Dr. Weber, he was trying to evoke the military might of ancient Rome as a model for Germany's future. No Homosexualität 

What about Stefan George (1868-1933), who became obsessed with an adolescent named Maximilian Kronberger?   When the boy died of meningitis on the day after his sixteenth birthday in 1904, George wrote a series of poems, The Seventh Ring (1907), which described their encounter as that of a mortal meeting a god (in Dante's Inferno, the seventh "ring" of hell  is inhabited by sodomites).  Eventually the "Cult of Maximin" drew a circle of gay artists and writers.

According to Dr. Weber, Maximin represented the symbolist quest for beauty for its own sake.  No Homosexualität 





What about the physical culture movement, a celebration of the male body, often nude, a fascination with gymnastics, boxing, and track and field, arguably the origin of modern athletics?  (Franz Kafka, author of The Metamorphosis, was a devotee).


Dr. Weber: the glorification of male bodies was a remedy to the feminization of German culture among the symbolists.  No Homosexualität 



At least he Said the Word several times.

He positively refused to discuss the gay symbolism of Steppenwolf, by Herman Hesse, or Der Eigene, the first gay magazine in the world, published from 1896 to 1932.  An offshoot of the physical culture movement, it had over 1500 subscribers and contributors like Thomas Mann and Wilhelm von Gloeden.

See also: The Gay Werewolf of Steppenwolf; and Death in Venice.

I Spent My High School Years with Barry Manilow

Speaking of singers that you couldn't avoid hearing during the 1970s, I spent my entire three years at Rocky High and most of my four years at Augustana College  running in the other direction while Barry Manilow's syrupy love! love! love! love! crooning spewed forth from transistor radios, car radios, the p.a. at school, record stores, tv...but there was no escape.

Ninth Grade:
"Mandy": I remember all my life, raining down as cold as ice, sending Mandy away.

Well, he got that right -- all my life, I've remembered that song, no matter how much I don't want to.

"It's a Miracle": It's a miracle, a true-blue spectacle, that he is in love.

At least he's over his relationship with Mandy.

"Could it be Magic": baby take me, high upon a hillside, high up where the stallion meets the sun...come, come, come into my... 

This is the first song I heard that I knew was about having sex, although I wouldn't be asking anyone to come, come, come into my....for a few years.

Tenth Grade:
"I Write the Songs": I write the songs that make the young girl cry...I am music, and I write the songs...

Barry Manilow is music?  Rather full of himself, isn't he?

"Trying to Get That Feeling Again": he sees a doctor to get a pill, because he's gone up, down,all around,  trying to get that feeling again. 

You just need to relax, Barry.  It can be tiring going...um....up, down all around.

"This One's for You": This one will never sell, they'll never understand, I don't even sing it well.

He's got that right.  The song won't sell, he doesn't sing it well.

Eleventh Grade:
"Weekend in New England." Last night I waved goodbye, now it seems years -- I'm back in the city, where nothing is clear.  

I'd rather be in the city than stuck in a small factory town in the Midwest.

"Looks Like We Made It": Do you love him as much as I love her, and will that love be strong when the old feelings stir?  

Barry is talking to someone in love with a man about how much he loves a woman.  I can't figure out what's going on.

Twelfth Grade: 
"Daybreak" It's daybreak if you want to believe, it's daybreak, no time to grieve. 

Repeat 38 times. Don't try to figure out what it means. I hav no idea.

"Can't Smile without You": can't laugh, can't sing, finding it hard to do anything.  

So that's why his singing is so bad -- he's broken up with someone!   Quick, get back together!

"Even Now": Even now I think about you when I'm climbing the stairs, and I wonder what to do so she won't see.  

You still thinking about Mandy?  It's been four years!



"Copacabana": this one has a plot, about a showgirl with two boyfriends who shoot each other, so she goes crazy, and continues to come to the Copa, even though thirty years have passed and it's now a disco.  Sort of a Miss Haversham thing.  Cool.

When I was in college, his new songs started moving down the Top 40 charts.

Freshman:
"Somewhere in the Night": You're my song, music too magic to end.  

Wait, I thought Barry was music, and wrote the songs? So how can somebody else be music?

"Ships": We're just out of sight, like two ships that pass in the night. 

He's saying this to his father as they walk along the beach?  Seems weirdly romantic.

Sophomore:
"I Don't Want to Walk Without You."

We already know that Barry can't smile, laugh, or sing without you, so walking is a logical extension.

"Bermuda Triangle."  It's a region where planes disappear and weird things happen.  So Barry sings about losing his girlfriend in the Bermuda Triangle, except he means she got stolen away by another guy.

Junior:

"I Made it through the Rain." And I found myself respected by others who -- got rained on, too.  

At Augustana, we didn't say "I got rained on" to refer to people taking advantage of you.  We had an earthier expression.

I don't remember hearing any more Barry Manilow songs after that, but apparently he's been releasing an album every couple of years: Greatest Hits, Greatest Hits of All Time, A Swinging Christmas, Barry Manilow Sings Sinatra, Night Songs, Duets, The Essential Barry Manilow.  And performing live.  And not using the word "gay."

Oh, didn't I mention it?  He sang about ladies, but he never was seen on the arm of a lady. Everyone assumed that he was gay, but he never said anything, for fear that his fans were homophobic.

He finally came out in April 2017 at the age of 73, having been with his partner, Gary Keif, for 39 years, and married to him since 2014 (not pictured; this is just a random muscle hunk walking along the beach with him).

See also 12 Songs I Hated.

Western Wind: How We Learned that Literature Was About Heterosexuals

August 28th, 1978, the first day of my freshman year at Augustana College.  I was 17 years old, newly out.   I didn't know any gay people, but I hoped that would change.  Surely at a big, modern college, there would be a mention of gay people somewhere, in class, on the quad, in a student group.

My first class was Introduction to Literature, at 9:00 am: 30 students, almost all freshmen.  The professor, an elderly white-haired woman, passed out the syllabus and told us about the textbook: Western Wind: An Introduction to Poetry, by John Frederick Nims.   It was first published in 1974, and had become the go-to book for college English instructors.

Then she read the first poem, "Western Wind," anonymous, from the Middle Ages:

Western wind, where wilt thou blow?
The small rain down can rain.
Christ!  If my love were in my arms,
And I in my bed again.

"The first two lines are easy to understand -- it's raining and windy.  The western wind always brings rain.  What about the last two?"

"The guy wants to get laid!"  a jock exclaimed.

The class erupted into laughter, but the professor said "That's exactly right.  This is a poem about a man missing his lady, and all of the pleasures she offers."

The first moment of my first class of my first day in college was about heterosexual sex!

And it didn't end there.  Poems about heterosexual sex, heterosexual romance, boys gazing at girls, girls gazing at boys.

The sole purpose of literature was to express heterosexual longing, with not a single moment of same-sex intimacy, or a single acknowledgement of the possibility of same-sex desire.

It's been nearly 40 years since that long-ago class.  John Frederick Nims died in 1999.  But Western Wind, now in the fifth edition, is still the go-to book for the ubiquitous Introduction to Literature class.

But surely in modern editions there's an acknowledgement of same-sex desire, some masculine beauty, some references to gay people?

I checked.  A lot of William Carlos Williams, E.E. Cummings, Robert Frost, and Ezra Pound. The horrifyingly incomprehensible "Emperor of Ice Cream" and "Our Bog is Dood."

A few poems by gay authors, but none that mention same-sex desire or relationships.  Sappho's is entitled "There's a Man":

There's a man I really believe is in heaven ---over there, that man. 
To be sitting near you,
knee to knee so close to you, hear your voice, your cozy low laughter,
close to you - enough in the very thought to put my heart at once in palpitation.

They found the one Sappho poem that wasn't about lesbian desire.

A sample of titles:
"Loose Women"
"Blue Girls"
"Upon Julia's Clothes"
"To Helen"
"To a Fat Lady Seen from the Train"
"A Poem for Emily"
"A Woman"

Heterosexual desire abounding.

John Frederick Nims, by the way, wrote about:

Woman mostly, as winter moonlight sees,
Impetuous midnight, and the dune’s dark trees.

The cover photo, with a half-naked man (the titular wind), might provide a bit of beefcake.  But he's carrying a bare-breasted woman in his arms.

And it's actually part of Boticelli's Birth of Venus (1484-86), the famous painting of the emblem of hetero-romance rising from a clamshell:

Introduction to Literature classes are still entirely heterosexist.

Maybe I'd have better luck with the Eastern Wind.

Death in Venice

My sophomore year in college revealed the world of Winnetou and Bravo magazine, but my junior year was oppressively heterosexist: gay-free Modern British Novel and Modern American Literature, and in German Literature, Dr. Weber assigned us the Thomas Mann novel Der Tod in Venedig (Death in Venice, 1912), and then spent a lot of time on a blazing hot spring day pointing out that Aschenbach was not Wearing a Sign.

What I read was obviously about a stymied same-sex courtship.  The middle-aged writer visits Venice on holiday, and becomes obsessed with the beautiful 15-year old Tadzio.  He watches the boy and follows him around Venice, but does not approach.

Aschenbach notices that there is a cholera epidemic in Venice, being covered up by the authorities, but he doesn't warn Tadzio, for fear that he will leave, and beauty will be lost to the earth.  Nor does he leave town himself; he sits, watches Tadzio, and smiles.  Finally he succumbs to cholera and dies. I couldn't help noticing the parallel with Herman Melville's Billy Budd, which we were reading in my American Renaissance class at the same time.

Why didn't Aschenbach just strike up a conversation with the boy? I wondered. Same-sex act were legal in Italy, and the age of consent was 14.  Maybe he thought the match inappropriate due the age difference?  Maybe he was just shy, or maybe same-sex desire was so alien to  his self-image that he was paralyzed?  When Tadzio smiles at him, inviting a "hello," Aschenbach runs away in terror and whispers "I love you" to an empty garden.






But Dr. Weber said: "Aschenbach's obsession for Tadzio is the desire of age for youth, for the new that will supercede the old, even of civilization for savagery.  It is a quest for ideal beauty that always kills.  When Icarus flies too close to the sun, he dies.  There is no hint of homosexuality in the novel."


As "proof" that Aschenbach and Tadzio, like all fictional characters, were straight, Dr. Weber showed us the 1971 film version, Morte a Venezia (this was the same class that showed us a beefcake version of Das Nibelungenlied).  Tadzio was played by 15-year old Swedish actor Bjorn Andresen (left).









But in the movie, Tadzio is obviously gay, engaging in homoerotic horseplay with his friends.  He even appears to have a boyfriend.  And Aschenbach, played by gay actor Dirk Bogarde, is obviously gay, too.  They are separated not by sexual orientation, but by their different worlds.

I've seen the Benjamin Britten opera three times, twice on tv (in 1981 with Robert Garde and an unnamed, non-singing performer, and in 1990 with Robert Tear and Paul Zeplichal). It gives Aschenbach a girlfriend.  But the ballet doesn't; and it transforms Tadzio from an androgynous waif to a muscular, gay-and-proud twenty-something.

So the obsession becomes that of an old-style gay man who believed that his same-sex desire was "too personal" to reveal, who pretended to be heterosexual, who married a woman, and who now longs for the freedom of modern gay youth, cavorting openly on the beach.

See also: Male Nudity in German Class; and The Gay Werewolf of Steppenwolf.

Little Max: A Gay Father in 1950s Comic Books

When I was a kid, whenever we visited my relatives in Indiana, I spent the night with my Cousin Buster in the trailer in the dark woods, and we would squeeze into his narrow twin bed, our bodies pressed together, reading Harvey Comics.  I read until long after he fell asleep, associating the tales of friendly ghosts and little devils with that warmth and affection.

Two boys together clinging, one the other never leaving....

In high school, I looked back on those moments of perfect happiness, and tried to get my hands on the Harvey Comics I read all those years ago (actually less than 10 years ago, but when you're 16, it seems like an eternity).

So I put an ad in the Rock Island Argus, and a very cute Augustana student named Clay answered with an offer of five Little Max comics from 1958-1959 for a dollar each.

I never heard of Little Max, they were from before I was born, and a dollar was four times what a comic cost on the newsstand.  But I bought them anyway.

It was a weird type of deja vu, like looking at a photo of your parents before you were born: familiar, yet bizarre, with a story going on that you are not a part of and can't possibly understand.  Readers were obviously expected to be familiar with these characters and their histories, but I had no idea who they were.

The star, Little Max, looks like Little Audrey in drag: he is drawn in the familiar Harvey style, cherubic-cute, with a big head and gigantic eyes. He doesn't speak, and his thought balloons are full of malapropisms that suggest a learning disorder: "They're both so kindly and generosity!"

His mentor, chum, adopted father, or something is Joe Palooka, a tall, very muscular guy with a weird toothless grin. Max calls him "Dear Joe."

Joe has also adopted or is mentoring an unnamed girl.  Max calls her "Dear Her."  "

She calls Max "Maxth" and Joe "Mith-ter Palooka."

In this Panel, she's looking at Max, not at Joe's swimsuit.








Most of adventures are slapstick, with Max trying to do a good deed that goes terribly wrong.  Here he dresses at an Easter Bunny, is treed by a dog, and reflects on how "embarristing" it is to be "previously engagemented."

There are also fantasies, in which Joe reads Max a fairy tale, and he acts it out in his head, or Max writes his own version.

Sometimes Max appears a bit older, free to wander around without adult supervision.  Although he still can't speak -- or use American Sign Language -- he makes himself understood adequately to interact with a group of friends.

Lots of stories are set on the beach, where Joe can wear a swimsuit and show off his physique, and Max can engage in some heroics (and, here, demonstrate a feminine limp wrist).

Other than the bizarre familiarity, I was attracted to the character of Max, heroic yet not macho, feminine yet never called a sissy.

And Joe Palooka, a single man who had adopted two children, but didn't have a wife or girlfriend.

I've done research since:

Joe Palooka was a naive immigrant boxer in a comic strip by Hal Fischer that premiered in 1921.  He was immensely popular, spinning off into movies, a radio series, Big-Little Books, toys, games, and comic books.  He was less popular by the 1950s, when his Harvey comic book series began, but Harvey in that era adapted several aging comic strip properties, including Terry and the Pirates and Blondie.

Little Max was a supporting character in the Palooka comic strip, a mute shoe-shine boy who Joe befriended.  He had his own comic book series from 1949 to 1961.

And I discovered the origin of Little Max: Max Bartikowsky, a boy artist Hal Fischer knew during his childhood, who roamed around town in his mother's floppy hat.  He became Big Max, owner of Bartikowsky Jewelry in downtown Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.

He never married.

See also: Joe Palooka

Fafhrd and Grey Mouser

When I was in college, the Bookstore Gang was all wild over Fafhrd and Grey Mouser, a sword-and-sorcery duo that Fritz Leiber had been writing about since the 1930s.  Their adventures were being collected in a series of anthologies:

Swords against Wizardry
Swords in the Mist
Swords and Ice Magic
Swords and Deviltry
Swords against Death

Fafhrd is a 7'0 Conan-style barbarian, and the Grey Mouser is a 5'0 sneaky thief.  They wander the barbarian world of Nehwon (i.e., "Nowhen"), stealing cursed jewels, fighting evil sorcerers and renegade gods, exploring strange new lands, brawling, drinking, and wenching.

Yes, they go "wenching."

It wasn't Tolkien.  There was no Dark Overlord to conquer, they didn't spend a lot of time singing mournful songs, and there was sex.  Or whatever stood in for sex in those days.

Eventually they both settle down with wives and kids, become domesticated, and their adventures end.

But in some of the stories, at least, they were a homoromantic pair.

At least, that's how I read it.

Fritz Leiber also wrote Conjure Wife (1943), about men in a small college town who discover that their wives are all witches, and out to do them in.  Nuff said.

Michael Moorcock: Bisexual Decadence at the End of Time

Michael Moorcock was a leader in the British "new wave" of science fiction, confusing mishmashes of sci fi, fantasy, and James Joyce..  I liked the beefcake covers, and his name was...um, appealing.  But the novels were impenetrable.

Except for the Dancers at the End of Time (1972-76), a series of novels set in the far, far, far, FAR distant future, when the few remaining humans have practically infinite power.  They can change the shape of the continents and the color of the sky,  instantly.  No one has been born or died for thousands of years; they can be killed, but their friends resurrect them again.

Beings with names like Lord Jagged, Werner de Goethe, the Duke of Queens, Mistress Christia the Everlasting Concubine, Lord Shark the Unknown, and the Iron Orchid spend their time in aesthetic revelry and partygoing.

Sounds like the Aesthete-Decadent Movement of the late 19th century, with power rings.

And substantial beefcake.

They can change their sizes and shapes in order to produce more aesthetically pleasing effects, and what could be more aesthetically pleasing than a gigantic lavender penis?

And the first hints of same-sex activity that I ever saw in print. 

1. Miss Amelia Underwood, a time traveler from the Victorian Era, is horrified when Jherek Carnelian nonchalantly admits to having sex with "a male friend'!

2. An alien named Yusharisp warns them that they have expended so much energy in their various schemes that the heat death of the universe is imminent.  Jherek Carnelian doesn't really believe him, but thinks it would be a lark to accompany him through the universe, warning people.

Yusharisp comes to believe that Jherek is in love with him!

Turns out that Michael Moorcock often included gay-vague or bisexual-vague characters in his novels, although he never actually portrayed any same-sex relationships.

That's a lot more gay content than most science fiction of the 1970s.  Actually, it's a lot more gay content than most science fiction today.

See also: Xanth; Samuel Delaney.