Children of Eden: A Beefcake-Free Adam and Eve

The musical Children of Eden is not the beefcake-fest you might imagine, with a retelling of the story of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, and Noah. 

1. The actor playing Adam is rarely nude.  He wears heavy Patriarch robes, or a modern costume.   They can wear heavy Patriarch robes, or modern costumes.

2. So there is no reason to cast anyone particularly hunky.

What do you expect from something originally written in 1986 for a group called Youth Sing Praise? 

The Adam and Eve plot is relatively faithful to the two Biblical accounts, but it ups the heterosexism: love! love! love! is the key to everything.  Always choose love over power, regardless of what the Serpent says.















Cain's story is different.  He wants to leave the family, and bring Abel with him, but Adam forbids it.  They fight, Abel takes Adam's side, and Cain in a rage beats him to death.  Then, heartbroken, Cain says it should have been him who died and leaves.

Ok, there's a little homoerotic buddy-bonding there, but it's drowned out by the Second Act, a forbidden romance between Noah's son Japheth and Yonah, who belongs to the wrong race (it's as uncomfortable as it sounds).

I suggest that you wait around for the Community Theater's next production of Tarzan.

David and Goliath: From King James Bible to Gay Men's Bedrooms

The Philistine warrior Goliath was BIG: nine feet nine inches (enough about the nine feet, let's hear about the six inches).  His suit of armor weighted 125 pounds.  He challenged King Saul and the Israelites, but they were too scared to approach him.

The shepherd David agreed to fight him, but the sword and armor was too bulky, so he took his clothes off and fought with just a slingshot.  He immobilized the giant, then rushed up with a sword and decapitated him.

Don't read too far, though, since in 2 Samuel we discover that David didn't do the job at all; it was Elhanan the Bethlehemite.

The story of David and Goliath in 1 Samuel was a mainstay of Sunday school classes, probably because it showed a little guy triumphing over a big guy.  And because it's rather fun to imagine a nude, muscular shepherd boy striding across the battlefield, his penis swinging, the warriors all gazing in awe at his beauty.

The Biblical writers probably intended for David to be well into adulthood, in his late twenties, but artistic depictions generally make him 14-15.  And leave his pants on, as in this painting by French artist Gabriel Ferrier (1847-1914)

Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) made him the right age, but upped the clothing, giving him a tunic and pants.

This Italian engraving by Marcantoni Raimondi (1480-1534) gives David a massive body and a penis, with a cloak flapping behind him.

Daniele de Volterra (1509-1566) emphasizes Goliath's buffed body.

Alessandro Turchi (1578-1649) shows us a beautiful angelic David holding the gross bloody head.  Quite a contrast.

Antonio Zanchi (1631-1722) clothes both David and Goliath.















Most of the artistic depictions of David and Goliath come from the late Renaissance and Baroque eras.  Going by the hair and face, you would expect this nude David in Zurich to be Baroque, too, but it's actually by Ivar Johnsson, erected in 1921.

Michelangelo's David (1501-1504) is the most famous statue in the world.  No Goliath around, just the nude, amazingly beautiful David, his cloak in his hand, his bag of stones at his feet, frozen at a pivotal moment of his life.

There are replicas in many cities, including Antwerp, Buffalo, Mexico City, Philadelphia, and Montevideo.

And in the living rooms of about a million gay men of a certain age, who used it to communicate gay identity in the years before Stonewall.

Ishmael and Hagar

You remember the story of Ishmael in the Book of Genesis:  he was Abraham's oldest son, born to Sarah's handmaiden Hagar; but Sarah wanted her own son Isaac to be heir, so she had Ishmael and Hagar cast out into the desert to die.  When they were dying of thirst, an angel appeared and made a well magically appear.  Eventually they settled in the desert of Paran, where he married and had twelve sons, the ancestors of the twelve tribes of the Arabs.

Ishmael was sixteen years old when he and his mother were cast out, an adult in ancient society, but a lot of artists like to make him a baby or a little boy, to emphasize the pathos. 

And to avoid having to draw muscular men.

Simone Cantarini (1612-1648) compromises.  Ishmael is that chubby baby in the background, dying of thirst while a naked, muscular male angel is appearing to Hagar.










Others, like Lodovico Caselli (1817-1862) have the naked, dying youth wrapped in his mother's arms, a sort of Pieta.

At least Jean Charles Cazin (1840-1901) gives us a nicely shaped bum.

As does Edward Sheffield Bartholomew (1822-1858)

Fidardo Landi (1865-1918) skips Hagar and concentrates on Ishmael.

In the 1994 movie Abraham, Ishmael is played by Giuseppe Peluso

The Good Samaritan: Two Nude Men Embrace

Everybody gets the story of the Good Samaritan in Luke 10 wrong.

Remember, a traveler was accosted by thieves, who robbed him, stripped him naked, and left him by the side of the road.  A Pharisee and a Priest passed by without helping, but a Samaritan took him home and cared for his wounds.

The poit is not that we should help people in distress.  Samaritans were looked down on as heretics, evil, unclean, degenerate. not really human at all.  Jesus was telling us that we shouldn't pre-judged people.  Some of the seemingly righteous Pharisees and Priests are actually morally bankrupt, and there are some good Samaritans.

Regardless of the point Jesus was trying to make, artists have embraced the story as a way show a naked man and still be seen as devout.

Like William Etty (top picture), the first significant painter of male nudes in modern Britain, whose 1838 version takes a dig at Islamophobia, making the Samaritan a modern Turk.

Nicola Grassi (1682-1750) gave the victim thick, glowing muscles, and took a dig at anti-Semitism, making the Samaritan Jewish (which they were, of course).

















Cornelius Van Haarlem (1627) makes the victim completely nude (but censors the penis), and the Samaritan a contemporary Dutch burger.

You can also use the Samaritan story as an excuse to show homoerotic potential, a man cradling another man in his arms. This version is by Leon Bonnat (1833-1922).

And George Frederick Watts (1817-1904), with an older but still muscular victim and a black Samaritan.

More after the break.

A Gaggle of Josephs

It's theater season again, and that means beefcake.  Dozens of high school and college theater departments will be finding the most buffed megahunk who can carry a tune and casting him in Joseph in the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, knowing that he will spend most of the play out of the dreamcoat.

I saw a high school version the other night.  Joseph kept his shirt on, but the guards were rather buffed (see: The Best Date in the History of the Plains).

Here are the top 10 Josephs, rated by their chests rather than their acting ability.

1. Casey Daniel of the Valley Youth Theater shows some nice abs.










2. Lee Mead, who starred in the 2007 West End revival, has a face that draws attention from his pecs.

3. Michael Cicirelli of the Chelsea Youth Theater in Connecticut gets points for agreeing to appear shirtless.

4.  Ben Thacker of Anoka High School gets points for showing his navel.













5. Anthony Fedorov, former member of the boy band 7th Heaven, has pecs and abs to spare.

More after the break.

The Four Cassidy Brothers and the Gay-Friendly 1970s

Speaking of show business dynasties, character actor Jack Cassidy (who starred with Paul Anka in Look in Any Window) married musical theater star Shirley Jones in 1956 (they divorced in 1974).  They had three children of their own. After their divorce in 1974, Shirley Jones married comedian Marty Ingels, who helped her raise the youngest two.

1. David was born to Jack Cassidy and his first wife Evelyn Ward in 1950.  By 1970 he was starring with stepmom Shirley Jones in The Partridge Family (1970-74) and establishing himself as the top teen idol of his generation.  But he also did some tv and movie work, including his own series, David Cassidy: Man Undercover (1978-79).


2. Shaun, born in 1958, became a tv star of his own in the gay-subtext Hardy Boys Mysteries (1977-79).  He also had a teen idol career before becoming a writer, director, and producer.

3.Born in 1962, Patrick began his acting career in the anti-drug cautionary tale Angel Dusted (1981), and played gay characters twice: a West Point cadet in Dress Gray (1986), and an actor with AIDS in Longtime Companion (1989).  He is still involved in raising consciousness about AIDS.


 He's appeared in lots of other tv series and tv movies, including two versions of the Superman myth: he played the villainous Leslie Luckinbill in three episodes of Lois and Clark (1996) and Henry Small, the father of Superboy's girlfriend Lana Lang, on Smallville (2002-2003).

On stage, he got to display his physique in two renditions of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.  He's also been in The Music Man, Annie Get Your Gun, Camelot, and 42nd Street.

4, Ryan, born in 1966 (bottom, with his mother, Patrick, and Shaun), wasn't interested in an acting career.

But he guest starred on three episodes of The Facts of Life (1985) with Mackenzie Astin (left) which made the teen magazines go wild  -- and in the buddy-bonding Jesse Hawkes (1989) with several other celebrity kids, including Chad McQueen, Ethan Wayne, and Ramon Sheen.  Then he moved behind the scenes as a set designer.

See also: David Cassidy.

The Tomorrow People

During the "British invasion" of the 1970s, I got a taste of British science fiction on PBS: Doctor Who, The Tripods, Timeslip, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Space: 1999, UFO, and The Prisoner.  One of my favorites was The Tomorrow People (1973-79), about children who are different.  Like the X-Men in comics, they are the next stage of human evolution, with telekinetic, teleportation, and telepathic powers (which allows them to communicate with aliens from all over the galaxy).  They work out of the Lab, in an abandoned London underground station, where they hide from the baddies who want to hurt them, fight various threats, and keep a watch for other Tomorrow People who are "breaking out" (recognizing their identity).

The gay symbolism is obvious: children realize that they are different, but must keep their identity a secret.

During Season One (1973-74), the three main Tomorrow People were Kenny (15-year old Stephen Salmon), John (24-year old Nicholas Young, left), and Carol (Sammie Winmill). But then Stephen (16-year old Peter Vaughan-Clarke, right) "broke out" and quickly became the central character.  He established a strong bond with John.

Stephen and John remained paired through Season Four (1975-76), as other Tomorrow People came and went with the frequency of Doctor Who's mortal companions.

There were also lots of other kinds of "different" kids.  Robert (Jason Kemp), for instance, belonged to the alien Denagelee race, who hatch from eggs, releasing enormous energy (last time they hatched, the Roman Empire fell).

15-year old Mike Holoway (right), well known in Britain as the drummer of the teen group Flintlock, joined the series in 1975, playing muscular rocker Mike.  His popularity led to the dismissal of Peter Vaughan-Clark; when Season Five began, Stephen was absent without explanation.

Mike frequently expressed heterosexual interest, but his constant shirtless, swimsuit, and underwear shots made up for it. He remained the central character until the series ended in 1979. (It was revived with new casts in 1992-95 and 2001-2007).

Mike Holoway is still a recording artist, and his numerous musical stage roles, such as Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and Godspell, provide substantial beefcake.

The American version (1992-1995) starred Christian Tessier.

Converting the Fundamentalist Boy

Upstate, September 2010

The Freshman came into Sociology of Religion class ready for a fight.  I knew all the signs.

He was Hispanic, tall, broad-shouldered, with short dark hair, dark skin, and a round open face.  A muscular physique, but not a football player.

Intense, one of those front-of-the-room hand-raisers.  The first to get to class, pull out his notebook, and sit with his pen ready to take notes. And frown with disgust at everything I said.

He rarely interacted with the girls in the class, always sitting next to boys and choosing boys for partnered work.  Probably gay.  Maybe he didn't know it yet.

There was a King James Bible atop all of his other books, even though the Bible was not one of the required texts for the class.

I knew where he was coming from.  I grew up fundamentalist, with three sermons per week that were mostly quoted Bible passages, Sunday school and NYPS classes that were mostly Bible studies, plus extra points for reading your Bible daily and extra extra points for carrying it around so you could witness to the world.

We were told that the Bible was literally dictated by God, word for word, to the human authors. We didn't even call it the Bible, usually.  We said God's Word.

Obviously if God wrote it, it had to be perfect, flawless, with no errors, no mistakes, no lies.

If the Bible said the world was created in six days, obviously that's what happened.  God would know, wouldn't he?

Methuselah lived for 969 years.  Check.
There were 2 or 7 of each animal on Noah's Ark.  Check.
Joshua caused the sun to stand still.  Check.

It took me years to acknowledge that Mark 13 didn't exist in the earliest manuscripts, that the book of Daniel contains words that didn't exist at the time of Daniel, that some of the Pauline Epistles were written in a polished, erudite Greek totally unlike that of the Apostle Paul.  That none of the writers of the Bible expected it to be taken literally.

This Freshman was just starting his journey.  He had stormed into the classroom ready to defend God's Word against attacks, probably planning to win the souls of the Professor and the entire class.

 I had to work carefully.  I didn't want the Freshman storming out of the class in anger and dropping.  If he was gay, he needed this class.  Most internalized homophobia is due to a mistaken belief that the Bible promotes anti-gay hatred.

My tactic: don't dispute the literal meaning of the Bible.  Turn it against him.

I started slowly, with an easy one: the story of Sodom.

"None of the Biblical writers thought that the sin of Sodom was same-sex activity,"  I said.  "It was a lack of hospitality to strangers."

The Freshman's hand shot up.  "What about Jude 7, which says that the Sodomites were punished with eternal damnation for going after 'strange flesh.'"

"Strange flesh, sarkos heteros in Greek, wouldn't mean same-sex acts -- hetero means 'different.'  It probably means an attempt to have sex with strangers."

On like that.  Leviticus.  Thou shalt not lie with man as with woman.  Abomination refers to ritual impurity in ancient Judaism, like eating pork or mixing cotton and linen fibers.

Romans: Men burned with lust toward one another.  The Apostle Paul was referring to a specific case in which heterosexual men engaged in same-sex acts.  He was not aware of the existence of gay men.

Colossians:  arsenokoitai and malakoi shall not inherit the Kingdom of God.  "Homosexuals" is a mistranslation.   Arsenokoitai is a vulgar slang term, similar to our assholes, meaning basically jerks.  Malakoi means "soft."

The Freshman looked like his head would explode.  He frowned, sighed, thumbed furiously through his King James Bible.

"But it says 'effeminate!'  That must mean gay!"

"We need to look at the original Greek manuscripts, not a translation."

"But God guides the hand of the translators, so it means exactly the same thing in English as in Greek!"

And on and on.  Sometimes it felt like the class was taking place between me and the Freshman, with the other students merely onlookers.

The breakthrough came when I mentioned the MCC, a gay Christian denomination.

"It must be weird going to church when God hates you," the Freshman said, "Singing praises the God who is going to send you to Hell.  How can they deal with it?"

I was getting annoyed by his pig-headedness.  "They don't think God is a bigot," I said.  "Their reasoning is, why would God be homophobic?  Or prejudiced against any minority group?  Actually, a large number of Protestant denominations agree: Episcopalians, Lutherans, Baptists..."

A few days later, the Freshman showed up during my office hours.

"Do you happen to have the address of that gay Christian church?" he asked.  "I want to go there and..um...witness to them."

"There are several hundred in the United States.  The closest is in Albany.  But be careful -- you'll be outnumbered.  The congregation numbers around five hundred."

"Five hundred!  Come on -- you're exaggerating.  There aren't that many gays in the world!"

We moved on to other topics for the rest of the semester, so I didn't know if the class helped the Freshman overcome his homophobia or not (the quiz questions were all neutral).  He got a B+, and vanished, like students usually do.

Late in the spring semester, the Freshman came into my office again.  "Thanks for telling me about the MCC," he said.

"Did you find your visit enlightening?"

He grinned.  "You could say that.  I'm dating the pastor."

Hey, these stories can't all be about me hooking up.  I do have other interests, you know.

The uncensored post is on Tales of West Hollywood

See also: The Bible, Christianity, and Homosexuality at gaychurch.org

Samson, the Biblical Muscleman

The famous muscleman Samson appears in the Hebrew Bible in Judges 13-16.  His long hair is the source of superhuman strength, allowing him to wreak all sorts of mischief on the evil Philistines.  But Delilah teases the secret out of him and cuts his hair.  The Philistines blind him and put him to work on a giant millstone.  But he regains his strength long enough to pull down the pillars in the Temple of Dagon, killing himself and 3,000 worshippers.

Sounds similar to the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Several incidents from Samson's life have inspired artists. Leon Bonnat's Samson's Youth (1891) portrays a young, naked Samson killing a lion with his bare hands.  He will later use the lion's jaw to make up a riddle for the Phillistines.

At Yale University you can see a statue by John Cheere (1709-1787) of Samson getting a...I mean Samson slaying a Phillistine (he really hated them)

Probably the most common subject for artists is the betrayal by Delilah.

Giovanni Francesco Guercino's Samson Captured by the Phillistines (1619) emphasizes his muscular backside, and pushes Delilah over to the side in insignificance.

Samson and Delilah (1609-10), by Peter-Paul Rubens, shows the sleeping muscleman about to get cropped.

Paul-Albert Rouffio, Samson and Delilah (1874) by Paul-Albert Rouffio, shows a long-haired Samson with a smoking body reclining at the feat of Delilah.

Another popular theme is Samson pulling down the pillars at the Temple of Dagon. This statue is in Portugal.












This stylized depiction, with Samson as massive and square-edged as the pillars themselves, is in Ashdod, Israel.

Guido Renni's The Victorious Samson (1609) doesn't show any temples being destroyed.  A rather young, naked Samson is removing the blindfold from his eyes.