My Boyfriend's Secret Bookshelf and What It Means to be Different

 

When I first met Fred the Ministerial Student during my sophomore year at Augustana College, I tried to determine if he was gay by examining his bookcases for books by gay authors -- I only knew about Tennessee Williams, Oscar Wilde, and Shakespeare.  I didn't find anything.

In the open, anyway.

One day a few months  after we began dating, Fred asked me to get something from his bedroom closet, and I found a secret bookshelf, facing away from view, so even if the door was ajar, you wouldn't know what was there.

Curious, I pulled a book out.  Familiar Faces: Hidden Lives: The Story of Homosexual Men in America Today, by Howard Brown.

I had never seen a nonfiction book about gay people.

"There are a few others," Fred told me.  "I have almost all of the nonfiction, I think.  Of course, it has to be hidden."

"I've never seen a gay book in a bookstore."

"Not likely.  They wouldn't stock any -- it's illegal to put them out on the shelves -- and besides, who would walk up to the counter and try to buy one?"   "It's all by mail.  You don't have to give them your name, just a money order and post office box."

With Fred's permission, I spent the afternoon going through the seven gay books in existence.
1. Familiar Faces, Hidden Lives.
2. Greek Homosexuality
3. The Homosexual Matrix
4. Is the Homosexual My Neighbor?: Another Christian View
5. Jonathan Loved David: Homosexuality in Biblical Times
6. Iolaus, An Anthology of Friendship, by early gay activist Edward Carpenter
7. A slim hardback, On Being Different: What it Means to be a Homosexual, by Merle Miller.

(Fred was actually mistaken; there were about 30 nonfiction books about gay people in print in the U.S. in 1980.)

The only author I recognized was Merle Miller.  My English and journalism teachers were always praising him:

Born right next door to Rock Island, in Marshalltown, Iowa,  a graduate of the University of Iowa, and now look at him!  A famous journalist, novelist, and historian, biographer of presidents!

Read his books for a model of good writing.

Novels like The Winter, Island 49, and The Sure Thing.

His book on the television industry, Only You, Dick Darling (1964).

And especially Plain Speaking: An Oral Biography of Harry S. Truman (1973).

They didn't mention, or they didn't know, that in in January 1971, Merle Miller came out in an article in The New York Times  Magazine: "What It Means to Be a Homosexual."  

It was a response to Jacob Epstein, who wrote in the September 1970 issue of Harper's that "If I had the power to do so, I would wish homosexuality off the face of the Earth. I  would do so because I think it brings infinitely more pain than pleasure to those who are forced to live with it..and because, wholly selfishly, I find myself completely incapable of coming to terms with it."  

Merle Miller responded, “I am sick and tired of reading and hearing such goddamn demeaning, degrading bullshit about me and my friends."  Being homosexual" caused pain only because of bigots like Epstein.

His rebuttal received 2000 responses (back when you had to write physical letters), many positive, and was reprinted, with an afterward, in On Being Different,  the slim hardbound volume that I found on Fred's hidden bookshelf. It was republished again in 2012, with a foreward by conservative gay columnist Dan Savage.

More after the break

Coming out with Barry Manilow. That's right, I said "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

Junior High.

1. "Mandy":

I remember all my life, raining down as cold as ice.

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

2."It's a Miracle": 

It's a miracle, a true-blue spectacle....

At least he's over his relationship with Mandy.

3. "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:

4. "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?

5. "Trying to Get That Feeling Again": 

I've 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.

6. "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:

7. "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.

8. "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: 

9. "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.

10. "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!

11. "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!

More after the break

Freshman year at Augustana College: Newly out, I ask Jack Kerouac for a date, unaware that.....

 

  

Ok, this isn't really Jack Kerouac, author of On the Road.  It's Peter Orlovsky, the lover of Beat Generation poet Allen Ginsburg.  

I didn't really have a date with Jack Kerouac, either.  But Jurgen came close.

During my freshman year at Augustana,  I often saw him sitting by himself in the Student Union lounge -- in his twenties, tall, husky, bearded, with wavy brown hair and brown chest hair sneaking up over his lumberjack shirt.  He would smoke a pipe, of all things, drink coffee, and read a book or scribble into a little spiral notebook.  Too old to be a student -- we didn't have any "nontraditional" students at Augie -- but certainly not a professor.  Was he a townie who for some reason liked the ambience of the Student Union at a small Lutheran college?



I had just come out, but I had only told two people: my brother, who was fine with it, and my best friend, who slammed the door in my face and never spoke to me again.  If the college administration found out, I would be expelled.  So I couldn't walk up to him and say "Hi, are you gay?"  I had to use deduction: he's not with a woman, he dresses oddly, must be gay.  

One Tuesday afternoon I got a cup of coffee myself -- even though I hated the stuff -- and sat down in the chair across from him.

"What are you writing?"

He looked up and smiled.  "Just a poem I'm working on.  'Tucumcari Two-Step: Heat in the Year of the Drought.'"

"Cool.  I want to be a writer, too."  Actually, my career goals were up in the air at the moment.  Through high school I planned on becoming a missionary-linguist, translating the Word of God for isolated tribes, but that was impossible now.

Left: Jack Huston, who played Keroauc in Kill Your Darlings

"Who are your favorite authors?" he asked.

"Oh...um...Isaac Asimov, of course. Robert Heinlein, Andre Norton,..."

"Sci fi -- that's for Adam's Bookstore Babies!"  He gestured at the bookstore where my friend Adam sold science fiction and comic books.  "You need a real man's literature.  Hemingway, Kerouac, Henry Miller.  Here -- try Wallace Stevens."

Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds

I had no idea what the poem was about, but a muscular guy with a big...um...cigar was far superior to anything we had studied so far in my stupid English class.

Jurgen was a student after all, an English major, 28 years old -- after high school he had "bummed around" Europe for a couple of years, then moved to California, then hitchhiked to Rock Island (where his parents lived) for college.

All gay men moved to California, and in his life history, he didn't mention women. He must be gay!

The next day I had to work, but on Thursday I hung out with Jurgen again  Neither of us came out, or said anything about gay people; it was the Student Union, after all, crowded with students who might overhear us.

But we didn't mention liking girls, either.

More after the break

Spring break in Iceland: A hookup with a Nordic god

 

Link to NSFW version

Augustana, Junior Year

Augustana was a small college, so there weren't many choices for Modern Language Majors: Spanish, French, German, Swedish, Latin, Greek, and occasionally Russian. We had to "become fluent" in two languages and "competent" in a third, so I chose Spanish and French, which I studied in high school, and German, because I spent the fall quarter of my sophomore year in Regensburg. 

We also had to participate in at least one language club, but the Spanish, French, and German clubs were kind of boring, with bake sales, foreign-language films, and field trips to the Goethe Institut or the Alliance Française in Chicago.

Everybody joined the Scandinavian Club -- they had an endowment from a wealthy alumnus, and paid most of the way for members to go on annual field trips to Scandinavia!  A different country every year, alternating between Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Iceland.

In my junior year, it was Iceland.  I would have preferred Norway, but I wasn't about to turn down ten days in the land of the Old Norse sagas and Nordic hunks.

There were 12 of us, eight boys and four girls, plus two chaperones. We stayed in a youth hostel, four to a room, but everyone got a single bed, so there wasn't any late-night fondling, just a couple of less-than-spectacular sausage sightings.

No one came out willingly in the 1970s, so if any of the other guys were gay, they didn't let on.

Iceland was interesting, but not quite interesting enough for six days.  After you see the National Museum and the  Árbæjarsafn, an open-air museum of Icelandic history, there's nothing but glaciers, geysers, rocks, and scraggly mountains.  I've never found natural wonders as interesting as museums.

We never made it to Akureyri, famous for its annual strongman contest.

One day we took a bus to Hveragerði, about 45 minutes from Reykjavik, to visit Reykjadalur, "Steam Valley,"  an unearthly-looking region of volcanic boulders, spurts of steam, rocks, waterfalls, pools of water, and hot springs with wooden footpaths around.

Our guide told us that some intrepid souls jumped into the hot springs, but you had to be careful -- in some of them, the temperature got up to 80 degrees (175 fahrenheit), and would scald you.

None of us was brave enough.  Besides, it was cloudy and damp, with a cold wind blowing -- who wanted to strip?

When it came time to get back on the bus, we discovered that Erik was missing!

The full story, with nude photos, is on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends

The Bloated White Caterpillar of "A Confederacy of Dunces"

When I was an undergraduate at Augustana College, 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.  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 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.

The Flowers of Evil: A Place Where Hercules and Christ are One

Back before there were shelves labeled "gay literature" in bookstores, when library card catalogs contained two books labeled "homosexuality," if that, you found gay books through key words in the title: something dark, dangerous, sinister was likely to be gay.

So one day when I was an undergrad at Augustana College, I found a copy of Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil), by Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867).

A series of poems about a man who is an alien in his own society, searching for a beauty that the people around him cannot understand.  He remembers countless past lives of Arabian Nights opulence, living only for the pleasures of sight, sound, taste, and touch, surrounded by "nude, perfumed slaves." Male slaves, I assumed.

He longs for a "good place," the distant country portrayed by Michelangelo, where "Hercules and Christ are one."  Where they worship masculine beauty?

He tells the story of four boys charting out their futures. The first longs for the theater, the second, for God, the third, for women...and the fourth, for gypsy men "with enormous black eyes" who live together and make "astonishing music."

The fourth boy is obviously gay.

Turns out that most scholars disagree with my undergrad reading of Les Fleurs du mal.  Baudelaire was a precursor of the Symbolist Movement, whose main voice, Paul Verlaine, was indeed gay.  And he was a dandy, one of one of those flamboyantly feminine men who scandalized polite society in Paris and London.

But Baudelaire himself was apparently heterosexual.  He has a prurient, sordid interest in women's bodies, especially lesbian bodies -- his first title for Les Fleurs du Mal was The Lesbians.  But barely a glimmer of interest in male beauty.

No do we see any significant same-sex loves in his life.  He smoked and drank heavily, wrote in taverns, patronized prostitutes, and had a series of mistresses.

But we know that author's own identity is not necessary for a gay reading.  Nor is authorial intent.  The meaning arises in the interaction between the text and the reader's life experience, expectations, and desire. When you are erased from most literature and mass media, you find meaning where you can, and Les Fleurs du mal remains one of my favorite books.

See also: The Dandy and the Gay Cult; A Season in Hell

See Here, Private Hargrove: To Be Young Was Very Heaven

 When I was an undergraduate at Augustana College (1978-1982), there was a metal book rack in the foyer of the library marked "Take a book, leave a book."  There wasn't usually much of a selection: well-thumbed copies of The Godfather and Love Story,  romance novels, five-year old freshman composition textbooks.  But I found a small red textbook of Medieval Latin and Tarzan the Invincible (one of the later Burroughs novels).  One damp, cloudy Saturday afternoon during my senior year, there was nothing but an ancient, yellow-paged paperback, See Here, Private Hargrove.  

Army life during World War II?  Dreary!  But I was heading for a 5-hour shift at the Student Union Snack Bar, which was always deserted on Saturday nights, and I needed something to read.  So I exchanged it for The Dispossessed, by Ursula K. LeGuin. 

I had a slight sore throat, a sort of lump that made swallowing difficult -- in the COVID era it would be inconceivable to go to work while sick, but back in the 1980s, unless you were dying, you went.  The Snack Bar was a desolate square space with about ten round white tables and a gleaming counter up front. I was the only one working.  We sold hamburgers, french fries, sandwiches, chips, sodas, and some desserts.

 From the cash register I could see the glass wall with doors leading outside, now dark and stormy with rain; the banks of mailboxes to the left, and Adam's Bookstore to the right.   From 5 to 10 pm, I had maybe ten customers.  I had dinner at my post -- a hamburger, french fries, and a carton of milk. 

 But mostly I read See Here, Private Hargrove.  It was a collection of humorous anecdotes, originally published in the Charlotte, North Carolina News, about Marion Hargrove's life as a private at Fort Bragg in 1940 and 1941: "The Boy Across the Table...",  "A Soldier Stuck His Hand....", "I Grinned Weakly...": chores, drills, bellowing sergeants, trips into town to go to movies.  The sort of thing that was popular during the Vietnam War: No Time for Sergeants, Gomer Pyle, Hogan's Heroes (not quite the same, but close enough).

I've done some research since.  The novel was made into a movie in 1944, starring Robert Walker (1918-1951). best known for the gay-subtext Hitchcock thriller Strangers on a Train (1951). He was married twice and had four children, so I doubt that he was gay in real life.

I haven't seen the movie, but according to IMDB, Private Hargrove gets a girlfriend (played by Donna Reed, future 1950s housewife on The Donna Reed Show) and a best buddy (played by gay actor Keenan Wynn).  So there may be some buddy-bonding.

Robert Walker's son, Robert Walker, Jr (1940-2019)., played the boy raised by aliens, Charlie X, on a 1966 episode of Star Trek.  He had three wives and seven children.  Probably not gay.

Marion Hargrove (1919-2003) went on to write two more novels, plus magazine articles and television scripts.  His credits include I Spy, The Name of the Game, and The Waltons.  His humorous account of trying to get a couch for the studio office was published in The Playboy Book of Humor and Satire (1965).  He had two wives and six children, so probably not gay.

Today, I have replaced the small paperback with a hardbound copy -- just to have, not to read -- I don't want any new memories to develop.  I want to see the book on its shelf and flash back to that night -- the sore throat,  the hamburger and carton of milk, gazing out through the glass windows into a rainstorm, all of it.  Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven.

"Hart to Hart": Hairy-Chested Robert Wagner and His Wife Solve Glitzy 1980s Murders

 

The whodunit Hart to Hart (1979-84) just dropped on Amazon Prime, bringing back a blast of memories of my undergrad years at Augustana College and my first years in grad school at Indiana University. Even though I never saw a single episode, or even a single scene, that I remember.  I  I didn't like mysteries in general, and this one seemed to be just keying in to the 1980s love of excess that we saw on Dallas, Falcon Crest, Dynasty, and Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. So why do I remember the series intro so well?

  An extremely elegant man and woman (Robert Wagner, Stephanie Powers) zoom matching fancy cars down a road while holding hands. The voice over explains who they are:

"That's my boss, Jonathan Hart, a self-made millionaire.  He's quite a guy.  That's his wife, Mrs. Hart.  She's gorgeous."  So men are judged by the money, and women by their attractiveness?  How sexist.  And "gorgeous ladies" are a  major turn-off. 

In the second season, they added: "She's one lady who knows ho w to take care of herself."  So she knows self-defense?  Doesn't detract from the gorgeous lady turn-off.

"My name is Max.  I take care of them.  Which ain't easy, because their hobby is...MURDER!"  Apparently audiences believed that the duo actually killed people, so in the second season the line changed to: "When they met, it was...MURDER!"

It's not as if I watched the intro before turning off the tv or leaving the room.  On Tuesday nights we watched Three's Company  at 8:00 pm (John ritter pretending to be gay so his conservative landlord would let him share an apartment with two girls).  At 8:30, ABC always broadcast a terrible filler series that nobody watched (Too Close for Comfort, 9 to 5, Oh Madeline, Shaping Up)   So I was gone long before Hart to Hart started at 9:00. 

Maybe it was just part of the zeitgeist.

According to Decider, my refusal to watch Hart to Hart was misguided: it was actually designed "for the gays": "1980s elegance, hairy chests, deliciously bad puns, and campy action."  

Could we get back to that hairy chest part?

The executive producer and most of the writers were gay, including Boys in the Band Matt Crowley.  No gay characters, of course; they were simply not allowed on 1980s tv except in "very special episodes."  No significant buddy-bonding: the only regular characters were Jonathan, Jennifer, and Max (the guy who "takes care of them.").  But I'll give it a try.

Next up: my review of Season 2, Episode 9, "Murder is a Drag"

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

Walt Whitman, The Good Gay Poet

When I was in high school and college it was customary to closet gay writers.  The professor might have known, but it was assumed unseemly (at best) to tell a class full of "impressionable youth" that gay people exist  So Oscar Wilde was arrested on "scandalous charges," and Shakespeare's rhapsodies over the "fair youth" of the Sonnets was a "poetic convention of the day."

And Walt Whitman (1819-1892), whose Leaves of Grass includes exceptionally open lines like "we boys together clinging, one the other never leaving"?

"Oh...um...he's talking about his brother."

In my junior year, my American Renaissance professor, Dr. Ames, brought Whitman a little farther out of the closet: "He loved women -- he scattered illegitimate children up and down the Eastern Seaboard -- but he also had a bit of the fruit in him."

Thirty years later, Walt Whitman the "good gay poet," and his magnum opus, Leaves of Grass, are still usually closeted by English professors.  I often give my students this list of famous writers, and ask them to guess which ones were gay or bisexual:

1. Herman Melville (Moby Dick)
2. Charles Dickens (Tale of Two Cities)
3. Walt Whitman (Leaves of Grass)
4. William Shakespeare (Romeo and Juliet)
5. Emily Dickinson (Final Harvest)
6. Lewis Carroll (Alice in Wonderland)
7. Oscar Wilde (The Importance of Being Earnest)
8. F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby)
9. Edgar Allen Poe (The Raven)
10. Kenneth Grahame (The Wind in the Willows)

Answers: #1, #3, #4, #5, #7, #10.
They're always the most surprised to find out that Whitman was gay, and Dickens was not.

So let's make things clear:  Walt Whitman, the greatest poet in American history, was definitely, undeniably gay.

There is no evidence that he had any erotic interest in women: the illegitimate children story was a screen, made up during the 1920s to "save" the poet's image.

Before there was a vocabulary for same-sex desire, Whitman was all about inventing one:
"the manly love of comrades" and "adhesive friendships."

Near the end of his life, when the word "homosexual" was coined, and same-sex desire defined as a symptom of a dangerous psychosis, he backtracked a bit, claiming that he meant only spiritual comrades, nothing physical.

But he had many "physical" comrades through his life, and his journals describes cruising in detail.  He picked up men on streetcars, at the docks, in the park.

Jerry Taylor, slept with me last night, heavenly.

Traverce Hedgeman, young, slight, fair, feminine, conductor.

Howard Atkinson, tall, sandy, country-fied.

Thin, smooth, and slightly feminine were his favorite traits. In West Hollywood, we called them Cute Young Things.

His long-term lover, Peter Doyle, went against type.

He also spent time with early gay rights pioneer Edward Carpenter (1844-1929), and, perhaps, artist Thomas Eakins (1844-1916), who painted a famous portrait of him, and may have photographed him nude.

Labeled only "Old Man, Seven Photographs," they are today housed in the Getty Museum.

But not on exhibit; you have to ask for them.

Even today, Walt Whitman is closeted.

See also: Gay American Renaissance

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.

John Milton: 10 Gay Things About the Author of "Paradise Lost"

In one of the iconic scenes in Animal House (1978), Professor Jennings admits that he hates English poet John Milton (1608-1674), author of Paradise Lost:  "He's a bit long-winded, he doesn't translate very well into our generation, and his jokes are terrible."

And, I presumed, as heterosexist as most of the other "great writers" purveyed by English teachers.

A few months later, I started my freshman year at Augustana College, and my English Literature survey assigned Milton's  L'Allegro and Il Penseroso. 

1. Expecting the worst, I plowed in.  Surprise -- not boring at all. The poems contrasted the perennial college student question: should you spend your time partying and having fun, or studying and getting good grades?

 I leaned toward "having fun," since Milton mentions partying with Corydon and Thyrsis, two gay characters from Virgil's Eclogues.

2. During  my sophomore year, a course in Renaissance Literature assigned Comus, a masque (a sort of pageant with minimal plot): a Lady is kidnapped by the evil Comus, who tries unsuccessfully to seduce her while her brothers rush to the rescue.  It was performed for the Earl of Bridgewater, whose own brother had been executed for sodomy.  So Comus becomes a stand-in for a gay temptation.

3. This muscular, shirtless Comus appeared in the only modern production that I'm aware of, at Florida International University in 2010.

4. We also had to read Lycidas: An elegy lamenting the death of Milton's Cambridge classmate Edward King, who drowned (here he is portrayed as a naked muscle god).

Anything celebrating a same-sex love can't be boring.

5. John Fletcher (left) recites Lycidas in his underwear before a blow-up version of Stonehenge.  I don't know why.

6. During my junior year, I took an entire class in Milton, and we read the big, scary one: Paradise Lost, an epic poem the fall of Satan, the temptation of Adam and Eve, and their expulsion from Paradise.  But there were lots of gay subtexts: Satan, an "angel of light," heterosexual sex leads to downfall, and so on.  I wrote a paper on it at Indiana University.

7. And you can't beat the beefcake of the illustrations by Gustav Dore.

8. We also had to read Paradise Regained, about Christ being tempted by all of the pleasures of the world, including: "fair stripling youths rich clad, of fairer hew than Ganymede or Hylas."  So they're hotter than the boyfriends of Zeus and Hercules in Greek mythology?

9. And the "closet drama" Samson Agonistes: the Biblical strongman has been captured by the Philistines, blinded, and enchained.  He bewails his seduction by Delilah: "foul effeminancy held me yoke."  That's right, liking women is effeminate.  Real men like men.

10. Strongman Fernando Lamberty played Samson in a performance at Florida International University in 2009.

John Milton was no doubt homophobic -- who in 17th century Britain wasn't?  But there's still a lot of gay interest in his works.

Love Boat/Fantasy Island: Love Won't Hurt Anymore

During the decade that began on September 24th, 1977 and ended on February 27th, 1987, I graduated from high school and college, got my M.A. in English, spent a year on Hell-fer-Sartain, and moved to West Hollywood.  I spent my Saturday nights going on dates, going out with friends, cruising in the bars, at movies, dinners, concerts, potlucks, or as a last resort at the gym.

Only when I was sick, studying for finals, or back in Rock Island for the holidays did I find myself staying home on Saturday nights.

And when I was home on a Saturday night, I watched Gimme a Break, Love Sidney, We Got It Made, Magnum PI, anything but those nauseating anthology series, Love Boat and Fantasy Island.  

But my parents watched.  All of the older people watched.

Love Boat (1977-87) was set on a cruise ship, where the randy Captain (Gavin MacLeod), ship's doctor (Bernie Kopell), purser (Fred Grandy), bartender (Ted Lange), and activities director (Lauren Tewes) made a hobby of facilitating three heterosexual romances per episode (two serious, one funny).

A sports writer and a tennis pro, a minister and an exotic dancer, a chauffeur and his employer, a rock star and a deaf girl, a celebrity and a tabloid reporter, an advice columnist who can't find love, a magician who can't find love.  It goes on like that. For 248 episodes.

Gay people were unknown, except for an episode where two buddies are mistaken for a gay couple.  By the end of the episode, they both find love (with women).  Problem solved.

But I understand that there were there were lots of guest stars in Speedos lounging around the Cabana Deck, like perennial 1970s fave Bert Convy (top photo).

Fantasy Island (1977-84) was more of the same.  The mysterious Mr. Roarke (Ricardo Montalban, known as Khan on Star Trek) and his assistant Tattoo (Herve Villechaize) ran a tropical resort where, for an additional fee of $20,000 (waived for charity cases), he would arrange to fulfill your "fantasy."  Two or three per episode, alternating between serious and  funny.

In the early years, the fantasies involved nothing more than props and actors, as guests wanted to be Latin lovers or cowboys or movie stars.  Later, Mr. Roarke was able to travel in time, conjure up ghosts and genies, and make a deal with the goddess Aphrodite to fulfill the guests' fantasies.  The Devil even dropped.

Here, too, most fantasies ended with hetero-romance.

No gay people existed, but again, there were guest stars with their shirts off, like Bert Convy again.

I always wanted to ask the old people:  why?  Why do you need yet another dose of heterosexism?  You've already married and reproduced, your life is nearly over (actually, in 1977, my Dad was younger than I am now).  What's the "love, love, love!" brainwashing for?

An article in TV Guide explained: "Love Boat for people who live in Iowa and can't get dressed up and go out on Saturday night."

The dig at Iowa roiled me -- hey, we had four-star restaurants, opera, theater, and the symphony!

But I understood -- these Saturday night "love, love, love!" marathons were to keep them assuaged near the end of their lives: yes, yes, it was all worthwhile, marriage and family was a noble goal, the only thing worth doing.

See also: Love, American Style and Ricardo Montalban.