Why Hot Stuff Wears a Diaper

One of the Harvey Comics stable of magical beings, Hot Stuff the Little Devil is a queer outsider.  He lives in the same Enchanted Forest as Casper, Wendy, and Spooky, but their paths never cross.  There is no devil society, like the ghosts have; Hot Stuff rarely encounters another devil.  In most stories he is alone, peering into the daylit world without understanding it, or defending himself from its threats.

To emphasize his outsider status, many stories have Hot Stuff trapped in bizarre sub-worlds with their own incomprehensible rules, struggling to break free.

One wonders why Hot Stuff isn't underground with the other devils.  Was he banished, cast out of Paradise for some fault only devils know of?

Hot Stuff also has a s*exual potential that the other magical beings lack. First, his name is 1950s slang for "s*exually appealing," and you would call someone a "little devil" for making a mischievous advance.

Second, he carries a phallic trident, which fails here as an ice king freezes his flames.

Third, the ghosts wear no clothes, and their bodies are smooth and formless, but Hot Stuff's asbestos diaper suggests a need to cover his s*ex organs.

And infancy -- Hot Stuff is very, very young, in spite of his self-sufficiency.  Like a baby, his main concerns are eating and sleeping.  But he will grow. He will become tall and strong, and potent, in a way that the ghosts never will.

When that day come, will he long for the male or the female?

Hot Stuff occasionally encounters the Fairy Princess Charma, but she is by no means a regular character, and they are not interpreted as romantic partners.  Instead, she makes attempts to civilize him, to draw him from his savage infant world through gender polarization.  Here, for instance, he grudgingly allows her to use his super-hot hand to iron clothes.

In a story from 1970, Hot Stuff and a friend wonder what games human children play.  They peer in a window at a group of boys and girls playing “spin the bottle," in which you must spin and then bestow a kiss upon whomever the bottle points to (in the presumably gay-free 1970s.  The two devils rush back to the Enchanted Forest and play their own version of the game, bestowing zaps of fire rather than kisses.  They, and the human children, do not experience heterosexual desire at all, and can only imagine that heterosexual practice is a form of torture.

When Hot Stuff grows up, if devils grow up, he will doubtless find a more amenable activity.

See also: Why the Devil has no Penis.

The Top 10 Hunks of "The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina"

I'm about halfway through The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, the Netflix series revamping Sabrina the Teenage Witch from Archie Comics, although I must admit to fast-forwarding past the many smarmy scenes where Sabrina and her boyfriend Harvey discuss how much they love each other, care about each other, can't live without each other, would die for each other, etc., etc., etc.

The setting is beautifully realized.  Everybody in town lives in a creepy old house; teachers have offices full of heavy furniture and antique books; it's an antique horror movie bathed in sepia light.

I like the witches' religion, an over-the-top Satanism complete with Black Masses, names signed in blood, cannibalism, human sacrifices, and a grunting, goat-hoofed Dark Lord.  But it comes with many realistic, mundane touches, like casually saying "Praise Satan" the way fundamentalist Christians say "Praise the Lord."

I like the over-the-top acting, especially Sabrina's aunts, the dour "what will the other witches think?" Zelda and the cheery "have a cuppa" Hilda, who seems too nice to be evil.  I guess that's the point? 

Sabrina's Scoobies are also drawn with a very broad brush. There's Roz, the freethinking intellectual, who happens to be the daughter of the town minister (except everybody is Catholic); Suzie, the gender-fluid women's rights activist, who happens to be the daughter of a conservative farmer; and Harvey, a working-class jock whose father is downright abusive.  Daddy issues, anyone?

I'm not a big fan of Sabrina,  however: 16 years old, half mortal, half witch, torn between two worlds, gleefully using her magic to right the wrongs of her high school, while scheming to take down the Dark Lord himself.   Really?  Granted, she is the prophesied Chosen One.  Everyone has a vested interest her witchcraft success; Madame Satan, an Archie comics character from the 1950s, returns from oblivion to guide her; but still, that's a staggering amount of hubris.  Even Luke Skywalker waited until he was old enough to vote.

I really disliked a homophobic scene in which Sabrina and her allies get revenge on some bullying jocks (led by Ty Wood, left) by casting a spell to make them hug and kiss each other, then blackmailing them with the photographs.  Threatening to reveal that someone is gay?  Is being gay that shameful?

But, on the plus side, Cousin Ambrose gets a boyfriend, not a girlfriend.

And there's nearly as much beefcake as on Sabrina's sister show, Riverdale.

1. Longtime shirtless aficionado Ross Lynch as Harvey (top photo, right)

2. Ty Wood as the bully.

3. Chance Perdomo as Cousin Ambrose.

4. Darren Mann (left) as the boyfriend.







More after the break

Miles Burris: Footballer/bodybuilder/family man. "Retribution will come onto you, and I'll do the coming."

  

Link to the nude photos

Former football player Miles Burris broke into acting with roles as football players in Starwood and Safety, and a lot of buffed guys: Rip Hardcore in The Really Loud House,  Triple H in Young Rock, Huge Guy #1 in Gym Rat and Mr. America in Federation.

He played Lucifer's dudebro brother Jophiel in a 3-episode story arc on Lucifer.

Link to NSFW site

In Season 2 of The Righteous Gemstones, he plays, God Squad bodybuilder Titus, who begins the decline and fall of Kelvin's God Squad cult.  He'd rather exercise than listen to a Bible story. When he is sentenced to a week in the tiger cage as punishment, he exclaims: "Retribution will come upon you, and I'll do the coming."

Sounds ok, dude, but I prefer oral

Miles discusses how he prepared for the role: by watching a lot of youtube videos about Christian muscle groups.  "They would lift their brothers and rip phone books."

Miles' instagram features lots of humorous reels poking fun at the buffed-guy experience.  They tend to be entirely heterosexist, assuming that the only reason guys work out is to get girls, but some of them are funny.

Miles of Miles after the break

Why the Devil Has No Penis

When I was a kid at Denkmann Elementary School in Rock Island, my friend Greg, had a small oil painting on his bedroom wall: a muscular guy plunging headlong from a sky of thundering, blue-black clouds.  Naked, his backside bare, looking angry, not terrified, as he veers toward the dark mass of land below.

I found it disturbing, and also fascinating.  Who was this guy, why was he falling, and why was he so nonchalant about it?

Later, after Greg moved away, I surmised that the painting depicted Lucifer, the greatest of angels in Christian myth, who began a war to dethrone God, and as punishment was cast down to Hell, where he became the Devil.

 John Milton's Paradise Lost presents Lucifer as a tragic figure, striving against oppression even when he can't win.  Others see him as a queer figure, subverting the hetero-normativity of Adam and Eve in the Garden.



I've never found that particular painting -- it must have been an original -- but Lucifer appears in a lot of artwork.  His muscles are drawn in loving detail, every curve and bulge in place.

All but the penis.  He has none (except maybe Jason Lewis, who played Lucifer in the 2007 movie).

Notice the wisp of fabric hiding the Morning Star's manhood Lucifer in the Bower of Adam and Eve (1805), by Stephen Rigaud.

Or Pietro Calvi's muscular, winged statue (1883), with a rock outcropping covering his privates.

William Blake's 1808 depiction is androgynous and sexless, and so are most modern versions, like Michael Creese's Lucifer (2013, below).

Painters and sculptors who have no qualms about frontal nudity in their depictions of Biblical heroes, epic heroes, Greek gods, famous people, and the guy next door suddenly get skittish when they portray Lucifer, and obscure or erase his sexiest part.

How can we explain the absence of Lucifer's penis?

My suggestions:

1. Because Lucifer is "beautiful," a full set of male sex organs would make him too stunning to bear.

2. His fall from heaven has "unmanned him," left him without male power and potency.

See also: Why Hot Stuff Wears a Diaper.

Tony Cavalero's Magick, with a nude neopagan bonus

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.

The Only Penis Drawn by Willy Pogany

My first exposure to mythology came from some older books in the Denkmann library: The Adventures of Odysseus, The Children of Odin, and The King of Ireland's Son, all written by Padraic Colum and illustrated by the Hungarian-American artist Willy Pogany (1882-1955).


He liked his models big.

Later I found some other books illustrated by Pogany.  This is my first exposure to the Faust legend.  The diabolical figure Mephistophiles is rather muscular, and naked, but I was disappointed to see that he had no penis.

Ok, for some reason  the Devil never has a penis in Western art.

But there's no excuse for Pogany's depiction of  Amfortas in the German epic Parsifal without a penis.

One might expect the advertising layout for Mohawk Rugs to feature Native Americans, but no, it's a harem of Middle Eastern boys.

Pogany was also interested in the female form. His art instruction books all have naked women on the covers, and he illustrated Pierre Louys' Songs of Bilitis (1926), poems in praise of the lesbian poetess Sapho.  Del Martin borrowed its title for the first lesbian organization in the U.S., The Daughters of Bilitis.


Also some heterosexual erotic art -- but even there, his men lack penises.














In fact, I was able to find only one penis depicted in all of his oeuvre.  Sort of:

See also: Why the Devil Has No Penis

Damn Yankees

When I was a kid, I kept away from the movie Damn Yankees (1958) and its various live versions.

It was about baseball -- yawn -- there was a lady in her underwear on the poster -- and the word damn hurt my ears -- Nazarenes thought that even saying the watered-down darn was a sin.

Turns out I was mistaken: baseball is discussed, but there's also a  lot of beefcake, and a nice gay subtext.







The plot: middle-aged Joe Boyd is obsessed with baseball, and wants his team, the Senators, to beat the New York Yankees.  He makes a deal with the devil, aka Mr. Applegate (Ray Walston), to become an expert player for the Senators.  He can back out of the deal anytime before they win the pennant.

Transformed into the young, virile "Shoeless Joe" Hardy (gay actor Tab Hunter), Joe takes the team into a winning streak, but he misses his wife back home.  Applegate has to find some way to keep him distracted long enough to win the pennant and lose his soul permanently.

So he sends one of his previous clients, Lola (Gwen Verdon), to seduce Joe.

But it doesn't work.  Lola confronts Joe in the locker room, gyrating suggestively and singing  "Whatever Lola wants, Lola gets, and little man, little Lola wants you."

He completely ignores her.  Ostensibly because he's being faithful to his wife, but you can also read him as gay.

He ignores every other woman who approaches him during his superstardom.  Same reason.  Or is it?

Meanwhile,there's lots of shirtless athletes singing and dancing.

On stage, gay-coded Mr. Applegate has been played by a number of actors who specialize in gay-coded roles, such as Tony Randall, Bill Kerr, and Sean Hayes.

Shoeless Joe has been portrayed by Cheyenne Jackson, Jake Gyllenhaal, Christopher Charles Wood, Matt Bogart, and Jarrod Emick.

Gods' Man: Lynd Ward

In Glimpses of the Devil (2005), psychiatrist M. Scott Peck, who wrote the excellent Road Less Traveled, goes crazy.  Peering into closets and under beds for evidence of demons, he latches onto the "the darkest, ugliest book" in the world, Gods' Man, by Lynd Ward.

The author was certainly possessed by demons, Peck yells, and anyone foolish enough to read it is in grave spiritual danger!

So, naturally, I had to dig up a copy.

Turns out that Lynd Ward (1905-1985) was not at all obscure. He illustrated over 100 books, including Frankenstein, Beowulf, stories of O. Henry and Ambrose Bierce, modern bestsellers, and children's classics.

And he was not a Satanist.  The son of a Methodist minister, he was a conservative Christian.  His six wordless "novels in woodcuts," forerunners of the modern graphic novel, all excoriate the decadence and decay of a modern civilization that has turned its back on God.

Gods' Man (1929): a man sells his soul to a Mysterious Stranger in exchange for artistic fame, but hates the decadence, decay, and sexual licentiousness of the art world.  He tries to find happiness in the woods with a wife and kids, but it's too late: the Stranger comes for him.

Madman's Drum (1930): a demonic drum from Africa destroys a man's life. His wife and two daughters succumb to sexual licentiousness and die, and then, driven insane, he consorts with his wife's lover.

Wild Pilgrimage (1932): a factory worker escapes from the decadence and sexual licentiousness of the modern world by fleeing to the woods, but sexual licentiousness follows him there.

And so on...

Grotesquely over-moralizing contempt for modern society, and especially for sexual desire.  An over-idealized heterosexual nuclear family provides the only salvation from the horrors of sex.

Both men and women stand at the gate of Hell.

And the woordcuts show them.  In detail.

Stylized art deco muscles. Men shirtless and nude. Bulges. Backsides. Penises.

The physiques mostly belong to monsters, or to men who are doomed by their sexual licentiousness.  But still....Lynd Ward liked drawing men.

He also drew nude women, symbols of the sexual licentiousness that leads men to destruction.

He was an equal opportunity Puritan.

Maybe his temptations...and his passions...extended to both men and women.

By the way Ward's protege, Don Rico (1912-1985), published many novels about gay men and lesbians: The Man from Pansy, The Odd World, Brand of Shame, Women Like Me, School of Lesbos, The Gay and the Savage.