Robert Rodan and the Gay Casting Couch of "Dark Shadows"

One day in May 1968, when I was second grade in Racine, Wisconsin, my friend Doug invited me home after school.  We came into the living room to find his older sister watching tv.   Outraged over her co-opting Garfield Goose, we demanded that she change the channel, but she said "Cool it, gremlins!  This is good."

I looked at the screen.

A naked man on an operating table.

Seeing shirtless guys on tv was almost unheard of, and here was a guy almost totally naked. Chest, shoulders,arms, belly, legs....penis....


I had heard of the Gothic soap opera Dark Shadows -- the older kids all grooved on tortured vampire Barnabas Collins.  But I didn't watch, so I didn't know that Barnabas was trying to cure his vampirism by by transferring his life force into a young hunk, a man built out of the spare parts of bodybuilders.  I don't think I had even heard of Frankenstein.

But there was a naked man on the operating table!

In the actual episode, he's covered up except for his head and shoulders, but in my memory you get an eyeful.

It was a busy summer, with Vacation Bible School and then three weeks at Aunt Nora's house while Mom and Dad negotiated the move from racine to Rock Island, so I only caught an occasional half-episode of Dark Shadows. 

After a few weeks of Frankenstein-style grunts, the man, dubbed Adam (Robert Rodan), becomes eloquent, super-strong, and vicious.   An altogether formidable foe, but all he really wants is a date.  First he tries for Caroline, the teenage daughter of the super-wealthy Collins family.  Then he forces reformed vampire Barnabas and his doctor-sidekick Julia to build him a mate, Eve.  His storyline ends in December 1968, when he goes off to a clinic to have his scars removed and fade into obscurity.

He never got naked on screen, but he did in my memories.  

Robert Rodan, 30 years old at the time, was born Robert Trimas (he chose his last name after his favorite sculptor).  An art major at the University of Miami, he graduated in 1960, spent five months in the army reserve, and then moved to Los Angeles to seek a job in advertising art.  But he was so goodlooking that people kept mistaking him for a movie star and asking for his autograph, so he figured, why not?

In the mid-1960s, he landed only a few minor roles:  an episode of A Day in Court (1963), a musical called Looking for Love (1964), and the comedy Goodbye, Charlie (1964).  Then he moved to New York and began modeling for magazines and auditioning for the theater.

A soap opera gig sounded like a good steady paycheck.

When he went to the Adam audition wearing regular clothes, Robert was intimidated: the other actors came in full Frankenstein makeup.  Still, he was tall, dark-haired, and blue-eyed, characteristics that, according to Robert himself, producer Dan Curtis found especially sexy.

Wait -- is he implying that there was a gay casting couch going on?

And that Dan Curtis was a member of the fraternity?

That explains why half of the male cast members were gay.

After doing Adam, Robert returned to L.A. and started auditioning for movies.  But he was typecast as a monster. 

He acted in a few commercials and the softcore porn thriller The Minx (1969), which a Swedish producer bought and turned into an X-rated movie.  Then he  hung up his headshots, turned back into Robert Trimas, and went into real estate.

Later in life, Robert returned to acting, voicing some of the Dark Shadows audio dramas.  He died in 2021, at the age of 83, divorced, with children and grandchildren.  No gay rumors.

But, half a century ago, he gave a 7-year old Wisconsin boy one of the iconic moments of his life by lying naked on an operating table. 

See also: Barnabas and Willie

Dark Shadows: Barnabas and Willie

In the spring of 1969, my friends and I began running home from school as fast as we could (my house was the closest) to catch the last ten or fifteen minutes of Dark Shadows (1966-71), a soap opera about the brooding, guilt-wracked vampire Barnabas Collins (Jonathan Frid) and his immensely wealthy, occult-obsessed family.

He enters the story when the slim, stuttering ne’er-do-well Willie Loomis (John Karlen, left), prowling around the Collins estate on the stormy coast of Maine, discovers a secret room in the old mausoleum, and inside it a chained coffin.  At this point, most people would flag down the next bus to Boston, but the none-too-bright Willie decides to open the coffin.  A bejeweled hand shoots up and grabs him by the neck.

The next day Barnabas Collins presents himself as a long-lost “cousin from England” and talks his way into possession of the ancient, decrepit Old House.

Willie inexplicably moves in with him, telling his friends that he has taken a job as Barnabas’ servant; yet he is obviously more than a servant.  The two spend an inordinate amount of time together, and are on an altogether chummy first-name basis, a liberty taken by no other servant on the estate.

The truth, of course, is that Barnabas bit him, and now they are co-conspirators if not secret lovers.  What is a vampire’s bite, after all, but a form of sexual congress?

Gossip about the early years of the series reveals that the producers were so skittish about potential homoerotic readings of the relationship that they gave Willie a heterosexual crush, and mandated that same-sex neck-biting must always occur off-camera.

But the heterosexual crush backfires, as the writers have Willie confiding in Maggie Evans about his problems with Barnabas.

Maggie: Where's Barnabas?

Willie: I don't know where he is.  He left without saying anything to me.

Maggie: You seem very angry with him.

Willie: I don't care about Barnabas.

Maggie: You don't really believe that, do you?

Eventually the strain of living with a vampire is too much for Willie; he has a nervous breakdown, and is confined to Windcliff Sanitarium. Later, Barnabas misses Willie, and asks him to return.  Willie eagerly agrees.  Later that evening, their friend Julia Hoffman (Grayson Hall) is sitting alone in the drawing room of the Old House, evidently keeping guard, when someone comes to the door.  “Barnabas isn’t here  – he’s with Willie,” she says with a diffident glance upstairs – to the bedrooms. Exactly what is Barnabas doing up there to welcome Willie home?  

When Barnabas announces his plans to cure his vampirism by transferring his spiritual essence into a different body, Willie worries that the new Barnabas will not be attracted to him (or, perhaps, that he will not be attracted to the new Barnabas):
Willie: Suppose he don’t like me?
Barnabas:         He will be exactly toward you as I am.
Willie: You don’t know that!  You might come out of this all different. . .It won’t be the same.

Although Barnabas barely acknowledges his affection, Willie obviously cares deeply for him, with an unstated and perhaps unconscious homoerotic desire.

As Barnabas zapped back and forth between time periods and parallel worlds, he encountered different characters played by the same cast members, and John Karlen managed to infuse all of his characters with a sometimes frivolous, sometimes dark and passionate attraction to the vampire hero.

When Barnabas visits Collinwood in the year 1897, he meets Karlen as Carl Collins, a fop only slightly toned down from Oscar Wilde’s green carnation crowd.  Carl grabs his shoulder,  touches his hand, takes his arm, and whispers softly in his ear “You look so nice!  We’re going to be close friends, aren’t we?  We’re going to be buddies!”  And thereafter, whenever he has a problem (usually involving ghosts or werewolves), he throws himself into Barnabas’s arms, overtly presenting himself as a lover.

Many of the cast members were gay, including Joel Crothers, left (who played Maggie Evans' boyfriend and remained her best friend in real life) and Louis Edmonds (patriarch Roger Collins).

When Don Briscoe (werewolf Chris Jennings) took time off to appear in the gay-themed Boys in the Band (1969), he brought Chris Bernau and Keith Prentice back with him.

Most of the others were gay friendly, including Grayson Hall (who was nominated for an Oscar for her role as a repressed lesbian in Night of the Iguana), Katherine Leigh Scott (Maggie Evans), Roger Davis (who went on to star in Alias Smith and Jones),  and the vampire himself, Jonathan Frid.

Most soap operas, like One Life to Live, were unremittingly heterosexist, requiring us to seek out subtexts, but Dark Shadows had ample male characters who were immune to the charms of eyelash-fluttering governesses and sought out each other: David Collins, heir to the family fortune; the fey Noah Gifford (Craig Slocum), who has an unspecified and “sinister” relationship with the golddigging Lieutenant Forbes (Joel Crothers); Aristede (Michael Stroka), a brooding, androgynous “manservant”; the nerdish mad scientist Cyrus Longworthy (Christopher Pennock); and the darkly sensuous Gerald Stiles (Jim Storm) who was not shy about expressing his devotion to werewolf/man-about-town Quentin Collins (David Selby).


No wonder we ran home from school as fast as we could to watch.

Top 10 Beefcake Horror Movies: The 1970s

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tony Dow Stars in the Teen Soap "Never Too Young"

Never Too Young (1965-1966) is famous as the first teenage soap opera, an attempt to draw the Beatles crowd into daytime tv.

It was set in Malibu, where Alfy (David Watson) ran the High Dive, the local teen hangout, and negotiated the angst-ridden lives of three high school girls, Joy, Rhoda, and Susan, and their boys:

Dack Rambo, who would go on to star in All My Children and Dallas, played all-around good guy Tim (shown here with his twin brother Dirk Rambo).  Both were bisexual in real life.

John Lupton (shown here with Michael Ansara and, apparently, their child) played rich kid Frank.

Tony Dow of Leave It to Beaver appeared in 10 episodes as brooding, always shirtless race car driver Chet.  Then he joined the California National Guard and temporarily retired from acting.

Tommy Rettig of Lassie played his boyfriend Jojo.











Michael Blodgett, a beefcake star of the 1960s, played injured football star Tad.

Never Too Young ran daily at 3:00 in the afternoon from September 27, 1965 through June 24, 1966.

That's a pitiable short life span for a soap; apparently teenagers were staying away in droves.  But not to worry, they grooved on the vampires and werewolves of its replacement, Dark Shadows

Only five episodes have survived  You can sometimes find them on Ebay.  But be warned, the reproduction is not very good.  Check out John Lupton's bulge, if you can.

Dark Shadows: David Collins, the Gay Heir to the Throne

I loved the Gothic soap opera Dark Shadows (1966-71), though in retrospect I didn't see it very much.  It came on just as the school day was ending, so if my friends and I ran fast, we could catch the last 10-15 minutes.  But even after 40 years, I still have fond memories of the gay-subtext romance between Barnabas and Willie, the conflicted, often-shirtless werewolf Chris Jennings, and David Collins, the young heir to the family fortune and ghostly doings.

Although he was a kid, and then a teenager (aged 10-15), he didn't do any of the things I did: he never watched tv, went to school, or got birthday or Christmas presents, and his parents, Elizabeth and Uncle Roger, never pushed him into playing sports or liking girls.


He sometimes had a female companion for adventures, but he never longed for them; they were playmates, nothing more.  Instead, David found his strongest emotional bonds with older men, first Chris Jennings, then Quinten (who had a Dorian Gray portrait in the attic), and then unwitting antichrist Jeb Hawkes.  I didn't know it then, but I saw some strong gay symbolism in David.

David Henesy, who played David Collins, was as popular as the other teen idols of the 1960s, like Bobby Sherman and David Cassidy, and photographed for teen magazines nearly as often.  Oddly, he consented to only one shirtless  shot, but still, I thought he was dreamy, and fantasized about meeting him one day.

In fact, by the time I moved to West Hollywood, he had retired from acting, and moved to Panama, where today he runs a chain of upscale restaurants.

There have been remakes in 1991, 20015, and 2012, but they eliminated the gay symbolism by casting David with little kids: Joseph Gordon-Levitt,  Alexander Gould (top photo), and Gulliver McGrath.

Or maybe it's too late for the magic to return.

See also: Alexander Gould in Weeds.