"Welcome to Wanderland": Beyond Gay-Inclusive

Welcome to Wanderland, a 4-issue limited series by Jackie Ball and Maddie Gonzalez, is set in a Disney-style theme park that has fallen on hard times.  Middle schooler Bel has practically grown up there, and her older brother/guardian Mike works there as a costumed character, the Princess Lark.

Mike is gay; although his romantic interests are referenced only once, he says things like "I swear to Gaga" and spends most of his scenes in drag.

Thanks to a magic door, Bel finds herself in the real Wanderland, a magical sword-and-sorcery world ruled by the tyrannical Sylvia.  The real Princess Lark, who prefers the kick-ass name Riot, is in exile.

Riot and Bel become buds, and use the magic door to travel between their worlds whenever they want. Mike assumes that they are a couple, but Bel explains that she is not interested in anyone in that way.  Presumably asexual.













But Riot is gay.  She has a crush on a female pirate captain, who shows up to help them in the final battle (to restore the rightful king to the throne), and then becomes Riot's girlfriend, kiss and all.

Heterosexual romance is only referenced once in the entire series, when the minor character Keith mentions his "girlfriend."

This is a world I can get behind.

I only have a few quibbles:

1. Apparently Bel has the ability to make magical changes to the theme park. But that plotline is underdeveloped; the few changes she makes are uninteresting.

2. There are several loose ends left hanging.

3. Mike doesn't get a boyfriend.  Granted, he only appears in a few scenes to "big brother" Bel, and then to participate in the climactic final battle.  But an occasional flirtation with a hunk would be nice.

Kurt Russell's Secret

We usually went to church on Sunday nights, but for some reason I was home one night in November 1968 to see the last half of the best movie ever made, The Secret of Boyne Castle, on the anthology series Wonderful World of Color.
This was former child star Kurt Russell's only movie as a Disney Adventure Boy (others included Peter McEnery, Tommy Kirk, Tim Considine, and Jeff East) before he moved on to playing oddball outsider Dexter Riley in a series of Disney comedies.

Here Kurt plays Rich, an American exchange student in Dublin who learns that his older brother Tom (bisexual muscleman Glenn Corbett, previously a model for Physique Pictorial and star of Route 66) is not a steel company executive after all, but a spy charged with delivering essential information to Boyne Castle, in the west of Ireland. When Tom is captured by Russian agents, Rich must take over the mission, racing through the quaint villages and lush green hills of Ireland, hoping to elude capture and reach Boyne Castle before the Russians. Fellow student Sean (long-faced, steely-eyed Patrick Dawson) tags along, throwing himself into deadly danger for no logical reason except that he rather likes Rich.

The two are presented as more intimate than mere buddies, framed in tight shots, their faces together in close ups. While they are sleeping on the heather, Rich hears a suspicious noise, and wakes Sean by moving his own body slightly. Although all we see are their faces and necks, to wake someone with such a small gesture means that they must be cuddling together. They rescue each other a dozen times, and are eventually rescued by big brother Tom.

But the most important scene, the scene I have remembered fondly for 40 years:

At an inn, Rich flirts with a waitress.

“You didn’t tell me you had an eye for the ladies!” Sean exclaims, as if he hadn’t anticipated any competition.

Rich responds by asking the waitress if she has any rooms to rent for “for a few hours.” Suspicious, she wants to know why the two boys would need a room for such a short period.

Rich and Sean exchange a knowing grin.

In 1968 I was entranced by that grin. I knew that it was a clue to the secret. If only I could decipher it, I could find my way to that other world, Oz or Living Island or Middle Earth, the world where boys could fall in love and got married.

How might we account for the not-so-subtle homoerotic bantr between the Rich and Sean? Certainly Glenn Corbett might be a gay ally: he began as a model for the Athletic Model Guild, the Advocate Men of its day, and made a career as a buddy-bonding “man’s man. Kurt Russell was never particularly gay-friendly.

Patrick Dawson works mostly in Irish radio, but his limited filmography includes the gay-vague Ginger in The Jigsaw Man (1983). We should look at the director, Robert Butler, who in the 1960’s specialized in dramas with strong male leads, such as Ben Casey, Dr. Kildare, and I Spy, and later directed such hunk-fests as Remington Steele, Moonlighting, and Lois and Clark. Whether he was working with Bruce Willis, Dean Cane, Pierce Brosnan, or Kurt Russell, Butler neither minimized nor hid their physicality, allowing and even directing them to be open as objects of desire, both to male viewers and to each other.

There are nude photos of Kurt Russell on Tales of West Hollywood

See also: Kurt Russell

Was the Duck Man Gay?

When I was growing up in Rock Island, Disney comics were a mixed bag.  Some stories depicted Donald Duck as a harried urban schlub, taking soul-destroying jobs and being abused by his nattering girlfriend.

Others depicted him as a stalwart adventurer, going off with his Uncle Scrooge and resourceful preteen nephews in search of the Seven Cities of Cibola, the Mines of King Solomon, the lost Crown of Genghis Khan, the golden fleece of Jason and the Argonauts, giving me my first glimpses of many of the twists and turns of our cultural heritage.

It was a rough-and-tumble man-only world, with never an instant of hetero- desire or hint of hetero-romance. Girls did not usually exist at all, and when they did, they were killjoys, waiting back home along with the bank notes and mortgages and all the little miseries and dull dread of "adult" life.  Who wouldn't prefer searching for the Seven Cities of Cibola to shopping for hats with Daisy Duck down at the Bon Ton?

In high school and college I found many more of these "good Duck stories."  Others I read about in comic book guides, dreaming about the wonders they held for those who could fork out hundreds of dollars for the original comics:

"Land of the Totem Poles"
"Trail of the Unicorn"
"In Ancient Persia"
"The Gilded Man"

During the 1980s,  I read most of them in reprints and special editions, and I thought about the "Good Duck Artist."  With his wonderful romanticization of masculine worlds and constant critique of heterosexual romance, surely he was gay!

I knew that his name was Carl Barks,  and he was a Disney studio animator turned comic book artist, but I didn't know anything else about him.  Maybe I didn't want to know anything else.  What if this cherished figure of my childhood was straight, sleeping with ladies while he penned men-only worlds?

Then Barks' successor Don Rosa began to spin a series of epic romance stories featuring Uncle Scrooge in love with Glittering Goldie, a dance hall girl he met while prospecting in the Yukon.

But Goldie appeared in only one canonical story!  I exclaimed. As a villain!  Carl Barks would never envision a hetero-romance!

So I looked into Barks' biography to "prove" that he was gay.

Born in 1901, Barks grew up on the family farm in Oregon, surrounded by rough-and-tumble types: prospectors, loggers, and "well-armed cowboys."

Well-armed, yeah? Nice arms?  Big biceps?  Nudge, nudge, wink,wink.

As a boy Carl  (second from right) was not interested in sports. He preferred reading, music, and art.

Artistic, yeah?  Quiet type, not athletic.  Sort of a milksop?   Nudge, nudge, wink,wink.











At age 17, he moved to San Francisco, where he lived in a residential hotel and found a job as an errand-boy.

Errand boy, yeah? Lots of errands.  Lots of running around. yeah? Lots of guys wanting things done? Wink, wink, nudge, nudge.

In 1921, the 20 year old Carl married Pearl Turner.

Gulp.

They had two daughters.

Carl took a variety of jobs, including mule driver and carriage maker, while trying to sell his art.  He published a lot of risque comics in the Calgary Eye-Opener, a Jazz Era "dirty magazine."

Gulp.

After he divorced Pearl in 1929, Carl married Clara Baiken.  That marriage ended in divorce in 1951.  He married Gare Williams, a painter, the following year.  They stayed married until her death in 1993.


Gulp.

He eschewed big cities, preferring the wilderness, ending up in Grants Pass, Oregon.

Gulp.

Well, was he at least gay-friendly?  He lived to be almost 100, long enough to know all about the Gay Rights Movement, support gay people in the military, and maybe even support gay marriage.

Nope.  He was a staunch Republican who "disliked Democrats," a fiscal conservative who wanted things to stay the way they are.  There don't appear to be any specific statements about gay people in his work, but the comic book story The Golden Helmet (1952) contains a homophobic stereotype: when Donald is working as a museum guard, a fluff approaches and asks directions to the "lace and tatting" collection.  Donald bemoans the lack of "he-men" in modern society.

So Donald and company rejected women because they were heterosexual he-men?

And because Barks believed that his audience of preteen boys would not be interested in hetero-romance.

Yet.

See also: Donald Duck's Double Life; Heterosexualizing My Childhood Hero

Mary Poppins Helps a Gay Dad

Remember Mary Poppins (1964), the classic Disney movie in which a strange magical governess sweeps down from the sky to introduce joie de vivre into the lives of two kids and their stuffy, negligent parents? 

To refresh your memory, the parents are stuffy George Banks, a banker (good name), and Winifred, who is ludicrously obsessed with women's suffrage (imagine, women having the right to vote!).  The two preteen children, Jane and Michael, needed saving from their nascent juvenile delinquency.

Well, now there's a sequel, Mary Poppins Returns (2018).

P. L. Travers actually wrote a sequel to her first book, with Mary Poppins returning a year or so later, dealing with the same family all over again.  But in the movie version, it's been 25 years.  The elder Banks are deceased.  Michael (Ben Whishaw, top photo) has abandoned his dream of becoming an artist and taken a job in banking, like his father, and Jane has grown into a shrill labor activist, like her mother.

Michael has three children (Georgie, John, and Annabel), but no wife, and a lot of financial trouble: he's in debt up to his eyeballs and may lose his house.  So Mary Poppins (Emily Blunt) has a lot of fixing-up to do:

1. Find some way to make Jane less shrill.
2. Restore Michael's faith in art.
3. Rescue the children from a kidnapping animal gang that also happen to be the Bad Guys trying to destroy Michael's career.
4. Find the note that will allow them to save the house.
5. Reveal the corruption at the heart of the British banking industry.
6. Oh, yeah, teach them how to fly kites again.

Bert, the jack of all trades who knew Mary from many of her dysfunctional-family-saving expeditions, has long since retired (Dick Van Dyke appears as the president of the bank).  Mary's new chum is the lamplighter Jack (Lin-Manuel Miranda), who teaches the kids the joy of being working class.

Beefcake:  Not much.  I couldn't even find shirtless photos of most of the male cast in other productions.  This is Tarik Frimpong, who plays one of Jack's coworkers.

Gay subtexts: Lots.

Mary doesn't try to get Michael a girlfriend (or, horrors, become his girlfriend), which is usual in a show about a single parent.  Could it be because Michael is gay?  Ben Whishaw is, after all, and Michael never expresses a glimmer of heterosexual interest (Jane does start dating Jack; have to put the hetero-romance in there somewhere).

Also, Admiral Boom (David Warner), the navy captain from down the street who thinks he's still living on a ship, has a "first mate"/boy toy (actually they're the same age, but they've been living together without the company of women for a number of years, so....).

And Edward Hibbert, who played the swishy-but-straight Gil on Frasier, and is swishy-but-gay in real life, does the voice of Mary's talking umbrella.

Was Mary Poppins Gay?

The Disney film Mary Poppins (1964) stars Julie Andrews as a magical, mysterious governess who introduces her young charges (and their parents) to the importance of having fun, a direct ancestor of such "servant brings joie de vivre to dysfunctional family" tv programs as The Nanny and the Professor, The Nanny, Who's the Boss, Gimme a Break, and Charles in Charge.

After seeing the movie, millions of kids sought out the original novels by P.L. Travers (the first two in 1934-1935, seven later), and were astonished by the original Mary Poppins: much more mythological, a sky goddess, sister to the stars, plus harsh, stern, condescending, demanding, a nasty piece of work.  How had this whimsy-hating sociopath been transformed into someone who says "supercalifragilistic"?

I just saw Saving Mr. Banks (2013), about the 20-year quest of Walt Disney (Tom Hanks) to convince the dour, whimsy-hating, jollity-hating,  Mickey Mouse-hating "my books have a serious purpose" Pamela L. Travers (Emma Thompson) into allowing a Disney film adaptation.  In desperate need of money as her book sales flagged, and desperate to present a hagiography of her father (Colin Farrell), an Irish storyteller saddled with a horrible job in a bank, she finally agreed, but with dozens of startlingly picky stipulations that straitjacket the screenwriter and lyricist (B.J. Novak, top photo)

1. Mr. Banks must not have a moustache (her father didn't), and he must be a positive, caring father.
2. The color red must not appear in the movie.
3. No animation.
4. Mary Poppins (never just "Mary") must not be attractive, must not smile, and must not dance.
5. There should be no hint of romantic interest between Mary Poppins and Cockney jack-of-all-trades Bert (Dick Van Dyke).

That last thing got me wondering: Pamela has no hetero-romance, in either her past flashbacks or in 1960s California.  Could she have been gay?

So I bought a recent biography by Valerie Lawson, Mary Poppins, She Wrote: The Lifeof P.L. Travers.

Travers did have some hetero-romances.  She tended to fall in love with men who were old enough to be her father, and in positions of authority over her, so she could move from disciple to lover.  One was poet and theosophist AE Russell, whose son Diarmund became her agent.

Aside from her hero-worship flings, Travers seemed to prefer the company of woman.  She lived with Madge Burnard, daughter of the editor of Punch, for over a decade.  The two took vacations together and photographed each other nude. "But that does not indicate that they were lovers," Lawson assures us.

Later Travers became an intimate friend of Jessie Orage.  They exchanged letters of "increasing intimacy," according to Lawson, and joined a lesbian social group in Paris.  "But that, of course, is not conclusive proof that they were lesbians," Lawson assures us.

Good grief!  What would be conclusive proof?  A notarized coming-out statement?  This is more evidence than we have for 90% of the lesbian in the world, including most that you  are personally acquainted with.  You have no way of knowing if they are actuallyhaving sex (if that is, in fact, the requirement for being a lesbian, which is ridiculous).

Her literary creation, Mary Poppins, is obviously a lesbian, too.  She treats men as friends but has ecstatic, mystical relationships with female elemental spirits, fairies, crones, and stars.  A worshipper of the Divine Feminine.  What other evidence do you need?

Savage Sam: Disney Adventure Kid

The Disney Adventure Boy was usually a teenager (Tommy Kirk, left, James MacArthur, Roger Mobley, Kurt Russell,Jeff East)    who demonstrated his all-American masculinity by taking off his shirt (as Jimmy Lydon also did inTom Brown's School Days)  and by falling in love with a girl.  By the end of the 1950s, heterosexual desire as as emblematic of "young manhood" as a hard chest and bulging biceps. 

Only a few of the Adventure Boys were preteens, or cast as preteens (Bryan Russell, Kevin Corcoran Ike Eisenmann).  Then the requirements changed: they weren't expected to like girls at all -- the mythic "discovery" was still in the future.  But they still had to take their shirts off, displaying their physiques as blatantly as the teenage musclemen.  And the conflation of semi-nudity and lack of heterosexual interest allowed a space for the recognition of same-sex desire among the preteens in the audience.

Kevin Corcoran was born in 1949 into a family of actors (with six siblings in the business).  By the age of 7, he was starring on The Mickey Mouse Club as one of the singing, dancing, ear-wearing Mouseketeers

In The New Adventures of Spin and Marty (1957), Kevin played Moochie, the tagalong annoyance to the gay-coded couple (Tim Considine, David Stollery).  The name (and the personality) stuck, and soon he was playing tagalong annoyances named Moochie in several Disney productions, often as the little brother of Tommy Kirk, James MacArthur, or both.

But not merely annoyances. The boy exceeds the teenager in masculine bravado, his masculinity becoming even more enhanced by the absence of heterosexual desire. His semi-nudity itself becomes queer, signifying maleness without a feminine gaze. 

In the boy-and-dog Western, Savage Sam (1963), for instance, 14-year old Kevin plays Arliss Coates, his Old Yeller character, now living alone with his big brother Travis (Tommy Kirk). 

Mom and Dad are breezily dismissed, but adult guardian Uncle Beck (Brian Keith, who always wears pink) looks in on the boys from time to time, occasionally bringing along his gay-coded life partner, Lester White (Dewey Martin, who always wears lavender) and daring us to draw conclusions.

Travis does the wimmen’s work, cookin’ and cleanin’ and bein’ purty (the adult men constantly comment on how handsome he is), while Arliss, a scrappin’, ornery cuss, does the man’s chores.

Girl next door Lisbeth (Marta Kristen), responsible for demonstrating that Travis is heterosexual, overdoes it, eyeing him hungrily and bandying about barely-cloaked sexual innuendos. When they ride together, she places her hands not around his stomach, like most back-seat equestrians, but around his belt, a posture that might allow her intimate access to his privates. We can find few more risqué gestures in the Disney opus.
A band of Apaches, unregenerate savages of the old school, abduct Travis, Arliss, and Lisbeth, rip off the boys’ shirts to give the audience what they bought their tickets for, and force them on a cross-country journey back to their village. Butch Arliss squawks and fights, but shy, feminine Travis suggests that they bide their time until they can escape.

As a consequence, the Apaches pretty much leave Lisbeth and Travis alone, but they decide to make a brave out of Arliss. They grab and grope him exhaustively, including hands placed directly in his most intimate areas, suggesting a link between homoerotic desire and savagery, as juxtaposed with the “civilized” heterosexual romance of Travis and Lisbeth

Tommy Kirk was outed a few years later, and fired from Disney.  

Kevin played "the man of the house," his masculinity undiluted by a feminine desire for the feminine, in The Shaggy Dog (1959), Toby Tyler (1960), Swiss Family Robinson (1961), and The Mooncussers (1962).  In adolescence he retired from acting, but continues to work behind the camera, directing episodes of Scarecrow and Mrs. King, Quantum Leap, Baywatch, and Murder She Wrote.  

The Top 10 Hunks of "Once Upon a Time in Wonderland"

Lewis Carroll never intended to create a coherent fantasy world, where people could actually live, with governments, economics, social structures, and logical rules.  Alice is dreaming.

So when later writers and filmmakers try to make a Tolkienesque alternate-world fantasy out of Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, they rin into countless problems: incoherent geography, sudden time shifts, queens without countries, worlds without history.  They closer they stick to the source material, the worse the results are.

Once Upon a Time in Wonderland, a spin-off of Once Upon a Time, sticks too close.

Oh, there's a new plot, with new characters and the extensive back stories we expect from the original. But the convoluted interconnections make no sense.

The plot: An adult Alice returns to Wonderland to rescue her True Love, Cyrus (Peter Gadiot, left), who happens to be a genie.  She is assisted by the Knave of Hearts (Michael Socha, above) and the White Rabbit, and foiled by the Red Queen and Jafar from Aladdin.

Meanwhile, the Knave of Hearts turns out to be Will Scarlet from Robin Hood, who is searching for his lost True Love, Anastasia (not the heir to the Romanovs; the daughter of Rapunzel), who happens to be the Red Queen.

The White Rabbit and the Caterpillar are actual animals, but the Lizard is just a nickname.  You can't have it both ways.

There are woefully out of place puns ("Forget-Me-Knot") which destroy the versimilitude.

At least, like the original series, Wonderland is a hunk paradise.  Here are the top 10 hotties:

1. Michael Socha

2. Peter Gadiot





3. Matty Finochio as Tweedledee.  He and his Tweedledum counterpart are Anastasia's servants.

4. Lost alumnus Naveen Andrews as Jafar.

5. Raza Jaffrey as Taj, Cyrus's older brother and the heir to the throne of...um...genieland?

6. Dejan Loyola as Rafi, Cyrus's other brother, also a genie.

7.  Hugo Steele as Orang, one of Jafar's guards.

8. Steve Bacic as "The Grendel." In the original Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf, it's just Grendel, his name, not his species.

9.  Darren Shahlavi as a genie hunter.

10.  Arkie Kandola as a bartender.  He's also a Vancouver-based Sikh comedian.














'


How about another peek at Darren Shahlavi?

Peter McEnery: The First Gay Teenager

In Victim (1961), 21-year old Peter McEnery played the first explicitly identified gay teenager in film, a working class boy named Boy who commits suicide in prison.  His affluent, middle-aged lover, Melville Farr (gay actor Dirk Bogarde), tries to uncover the blackmail ring responsible for his death.  Portraying gay men as victims rather than monsters was revolutionary, and paved the way for the decriminalization of same-sex acts in Britain in 1967.

Peter moved directly from an amazingly courageous role to Disney, becoming an Adventure Boy with the two usual attributes: a muscular physique and heterosexual obsession.

In 1964, he starred in The Moon-Spinners as Mark Camford, a young banker who gets involved with spies in Crete, and in the process falls for vacationing British girl Nikki (regular Disney star Hayley Mills).  No buddy-bonding, but quite a lot of shirtless scenes, and more suspense than one usually gets from Disney.

In 1966, he played the titular role in The Fighting Prince of Donegal: Red Hugh, the 16th century Irish prince who started a rebellion against the oppressive English.  Hugh falls for a girl (Susan Hampshire), but also buddy-bonds with an older man.

Maybe the parallels with Victim were too great, or maybe Disney was being extra-cautious after the accidental outing of Tommy Kirk.  For whatever reason, Peter never worked for Disney again.  Instead, he continued his career of gay-vague and not-so-gay vague characters.

In I Killed Rasputin (1967), Peter played Prince Felix Yusopov, who was bisexual in real life, the lover of Grand Prince Dmitri Pavlovich (and enjoyed dressing in drag).  The movie tries to closet him, and all but eliminates Dmitri, but still Peter manages to imbue his character with a homoerotic passion (and he dances with a man).

Other sexually adventurous movies followed, but the most famous is Entertaining Mr. Sloane (1970), based on the play by gay writer Joe Orton.  Mr. Sloane (Peter) is a male prostitute who moves in with a closeted gay man (Harry Andrews) and ends up the unwilling boy-toy of both him and his sister.

I haven't seen any of Peter's later works, mostly British television and tv movies, but some of them look interesting, and with ample buddy-bonding potential: The Cat and the Canary (which has a "gay" keyword on the Internet Movie Database); a version of Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream; and Clayhanger, from a series of novels by reputedly gay author Arnold Bennett.

I have not been able to discover his real-life sexual identity, only that he was married to Julie Peasgood for a time, and has a daughter.  But with all of his gay-vague and gay roles, who cares?

See also: Fighting Prince of Donegal.

Peter Pan

I'm fine with drag now, but in 1966, I was freaked out by Mary Martin's portrayal of Peter Pan, a monstrous conflation of male/female and child/adult (Peter is traditionally played by an older woman, in the tradition of the British Christmas pantomime).

Three years later, in 1969, my uncle took me to the theatrical re-release of the Disney version (1953), with 15-year old Bobby Driscoll voicing Peter Pan. Although I was older, I was still freaked out by the dog wearing the nanny cap and the Lost Boys in bear, wolf, and skunk costumes, monstrous conflations of the human and the animal.

And the heterosexism, nearly as intense as in the Disney live action adventures like Light in the Forest with James MacArthur.

There's a story about Bobby Driscoll's date with Joe Dallesandro on Tales of West Hollywood.






Peter is subjected to the amorous flirtations of Tinker Bell and the mermaids, all of whom try to kill his current gal pal, Wendy. He goes beyond flirting with Princess Tiger Lily, whose kisses make him redden and tremble with erotic ecstasy.  Meanwhile, the Indian men explain how they "became red": they're all reddened with erotic ecstasy after being kissed by Indian women.

Captain Hook, one of Disney's standard gay-vague sophisticated villains, dislikes women and has an arguably erotic interest in Peter Pan.  He stays in Neverland year after year, in spite of the advice and near-mutiny of his crew, with only one goal: to "get" the boy.

Homoerotic desire is evil, unwholesome, and destructive.  Heterosexual desire inflames you.  A monstrous perversion of the original novels and plays by J. M. Barrie (who was gay in real life), where Peter Pan inhabits a homoerotic Eden, free from the constraint of "growing up" into heterosexual marriage.


But it gets worse.

In Hook (1991), Robin Williams plays a Peter Pan who grew up, forgot his identity, graduated from law school, and married Wendy's granddaughter.  When his children are kidnapped by Captain Hook (Dustin Hoffman), Tinkerbell (Julia Roberts) appears to restore his memory and his powers so he can rescue them.  She accomplishes this task by reminding Peter of the hetero-erotic Eden he abandoned:
"You know that place between sleep and awake?  The place where you still remember dreaming? That's where I'll always love you."

In Peter Pan (2003), Peter (13-year old Jeremy Sumpter, top photo and left) is dressed in wisps of leaves that lay bare unexpected bits of his body, like a prepubescent strip tease, as he struts about, emblematic of heterosexual eroticism.

He doesn't just flirt -- he desires Wendy, and the stories she tells, which all end with a kiss. He wrests her from her parents ("Sorry, we both can't have her), and their prepubscent passion ignites into a power that can defeat Captain Hook (who, by the way, is no longer gay-vague)

Let's not even mention the depressing Death of Peter Pan (1988),  about the "impossible love" of J.M. Barrie's adopted son Michael and his schoolmate Rupert Buxton.

See also: Jeremy Sumpter: A Normal Kid