The Small-Town Beefcake of France

Finding small-town beefcake in France is not as easy as it sounds.  There just aren't a lot of pictures of swimmers, wrestlers, and other beefcake icons posted online.  But by doing a judicious search on lycée, université,  équipe de natation, and nageurs, I've managed to come up with some high school and college swimmers.


1. The  Lycée Camille Jullian is in Bordeaux is one of the few schools in France to offer Slovak instruction.

2. The Lycée Carnot in Paris is the alma mater of former French president Jacques Chirac and postmodern philosopher Gilles Deleuze.

3. Swimmers from the Stade Français Olympique, a swim club in Courbevoie, near Paris.

I like the peace-sign swim trunks.

4.The Lycée Monge is a technical school in Chambéry in southeastern France, the home of philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

5. I don't know who these swimmers are, but they're from Bagnères-de-Bigorre, a commune in the Pyrenees Mountains, very close to the Spanish border.

More after the break.

Oumpah-pah and Hubert

Oumpah-pah is a distinctively Belgian comic book, written by René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo of Asterix fame.  After a false start in the early 1950s, it was serialized in Tintin magazine from 1958 to 1963.  Only three albums appeared in 1961, 1962, and 1967 (rather a small number compared to the 36 of Asterix).

They were translated into Spanish, German, Dutch, Greek, and English, but the English editions are very rare and go for hundreds of dollars on Ebay.  There are no plans for re-issues, due to the negative stereotypes of Native Americans as patois-speaking savages.

But on amazon.fr, you can get the French reissues for 10-15 Euros each, or "the complete adventures" used for around 20 Euros.

Why bother, when Asterix is readily available?  Because Oumpah-pah has some advantages that his more famous cousin doesn't.

Oumpah-pah belongs to the Shavashava tribe (based on the Shawnee) during French colonial times.

When French aristocrat Hubert de la Pâte Feuilleté, sent by the king to establish peaceful relations with the natives, is captured, Oumpah-pah rescues him and escorts him back to Fort Petit.  They become "brothers."

In a later adventure, Hubert is captured by the hostile Pied-Plads  (Flat-Foot) Tribe, who use him to lure Oumpah-pah into a trap.

They sail for France to get some horses, and encounter the pirate Brake, who captures Hubert and...

Upon returning to America, they battle Prussians and the evil Foie-Malade (Liver Sick)...

You get the idea.  A lot of captures, a lot of muscles straining at ropes, a lot of nick-of-time rescues and stammered "If it weren't for you, I'd be dead!"

Hubert is scrappy and self-confident, Oumpah-pah muscular, attractive, and dominant, and the countless rescues and walking-into-the-sunset together conclusions provide a much more obvious gay subtext than anything you find in Asterix and Obelix.

Antoine and Pierre Bourdelle: Father-Son Beefcake Artists

Antoine Bourdelle (1861-1929) was a French sculptor known for sharing a studio with Rodin, and for his large-scale monuments, like the "Monument aux Combattants et Défenseurs du Tarn-et-Garonne de 1870–71, a battle in the Franco-Prussian War.

But he also had time for some male nudes, like "Heracles the Archer"  There are versions in France, Sweden, and the U.S.

The beefy Great Warrior of Montauban was taken from the Franco-Prussian War Memorial.  It's now in the sculpture garden at the Smithsonian.

His Apollo, receiving inspiration from theMuses, is a bas-relief on the exterior of the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris.

His son Pierre (1901-1966) became an American citizen in 1927.  He was responsible for more large-scale monuments, like this nude art deco athlete at the Dallas Fair Pavilion.

This is Pierre's exotic South Pacific Orpheus (Eurydice is next to him), a wooden panel rescued from a theater in northern California.

Pierre was married twice, but divorced his wife within a few years both times.  Maybe ladies weren't his cup of tea.

Akim and Jim: Tarzan and Boy of European comics

One of the more popular Tarzan clones was Akim, Son of the Jungle, created by Italian cartoonist Roberto Renzi and artist Augusto Pedrazza.  In Italy Tarzan clones are called Tarzanidi.

During his run in Italy (1950-1967), he was exported to France for 700+ issues, Germany for 500+ issues, the Netherlands, Scandinavia, and Greece (where he was renamed Tarzan).  Hundreds of issues appeared through the 1960s and 1970s, with ironic "new adventures" in the 1990s.

Amazon.fr has them for sale for between 5 and 10 euros.

Some of the rarest appeared in this single-strip per page format.  Here Akim fights the Biblical muscleman Samson.

Akim's back story is nearly identical to that of Tarzan:

Count Frederick Rank, the British ambassador to Calcutta, is shipwrecked on the wild coast of Africa along with his wife and infant son, Jim.  The parents soon die, leaving the toddler to be raised by gorillas.

Grown up, he becomes Akim, Son of the Jungle, with various animals at his command.  He marries the British heiress Rita, and they adopt a son, Jim, who turns into buffed blond man-mountain.

In most adventures, they leave Rita back at the tree house and venture out as a pair, leaving all of the gay subtexts of the 1940s Tarzan movies starring Johnny Weissmuller and Johnny Sheffield.

Sometimes Jim goes out adventuring on his own, requiring Akim to rescue him from the usual jungle poachers, cannibals, and lost civilizations, as well as aliens, mad scientists, and dinosaurs.

Whether they're speaking French, German, Italian, or Dutch, the buddy-bonding is easy to spot.

Mario David: Bodybuilder Turned Gay-Vague Comedian

What is it with bodybuilders and comedy?  It's as if film directors are deliberately trying to mask the erotic potential of muscles through jokes and pratfalls.

Case in point: Mario David (1927-1996), a competitive bodybuilder in France in the late 1940s (far left)  He also worked in the circus, as an acrobat, lion tamer, and clown.

He began flexing his muscles in comedies in 1952.

In La tournée des grands Ducs, about a Russian duke visiting Paris (1953), he played "an Attraction" at the Balajo Nightclub.

In Peek-a-boo (1954), about a small-town police officer investigating a strip show, he played "L'homme musclé" (the Muscleman).

Many more muscle-flexing comedies followed: Plus de whiskey pour Gallaghan, Naughty Girls, Anyone Can Kill Me, Les Tortillards (The Trains).  

In 1958 he created the role of gay-vague masseur Philippe Dubois on stage in Oscar, about a businessman who suffers from chaotic calamities during a very bad day.  He returned to the role in the 1967 movie version, and on stage again in 1971.  (Sylvester Stallone starred in an American version in 1991).

There are a few thrillers and dramas on Mario's resume, but even then he often played comic relief parts.  He starred as Paul Riotard in a 1965 episode of the police procedural Les cinq dernières minutes (The Last Five Minutes) (top photo). But the episode, entitled "Hunting Frogs," is about a diver assassinated by an underwater missile (top photo).  You can see the entire episode on youtube.

Mario played gay-vague musclemen in several comedies with film great Jean-Paul Belmodo, such as Up to His Ears (Les tribulations d'un Chinois en Chine, 1965) and Le Magnifique (1971), released in the U.S. as How to Destroy the Reputation of the Greatest Secret Agent.  

In the farce Le gendarme et les extra-terrestres (1979), a bumbling police inspector tries to stop the invasion of aliens who drink oil and sound like empty garbage cans when you touch them.  Mario plays "the Oil Can Thief."

And on like that through his career, which was substantial -- over 100 movie and tv roles -- and won him many accolades.  But throughout his physique was played for laughs.

Tintin and Captain Haddock

When I studied Spanish, I got songs about liking blonde girls ("Las rubias me gustan mas") and a story about Juan y Maria in love, though when I snooped around on my own, I found Papa Soltero and the boy band Menudo.  When I studied French, I got comics: the muscular Roman Alix and his Egyptian boyfriend Enak; Asterix the Gaul;  the cowboy Lucky Luke; the race car driver Michel Vaillant; bellhop turned adventurer Spirou and his reporter boyfriend Fantasio; and of course, Tintin.











A teenage reporter, Tintin first appeared in the Belgian children's magazine Le Petit Vingtième.  23 comic albums, or bandes-dessinees, appeared between 1930 and 1976, sending Tintin to the Congo, Egypt, Tibet,  America, and eventually the Moon (a 24th, Tintin and Aleph-Art, was left unfinished at cartoonist Herge's death).  The albums have been translated into over 100 languages, and in an interesting twist, dozens of dialects. Would you like to know how the Antwerp and Oostend dialect differs from ordinary Dutch?  How about Picard and Gallois from standard French?

There was not a lot of beefcake in the comic stories or the animated films and tv series, but two live-action films starring Jean-Pierre Talbot took care of that.

Early on, Tintin made new friends in each adventure.  His most intimate relationship came in The Blue Lotus, when he rescued Chang, a Chinese boy victimized by the Japanese invasion of Manchuria.

But in The Crab with the Golden Claws, Tintin meets the blustering, irascible Captain Haddock and helps him reclaim his ancestral home, Marlinspike Manor.  Tintin moves in.  After that, there is no question: they are a couple..







During their adventures, Haddock and Tintin work as a team, rescuing each other over and over, hugging, pressing against each other.  At home, they are blatantly domestic, often shown sitting at breakfast, lounging around the parlor, going to movies, taking vacations.

Neither expresses any interest in women, but in Tintin in Tibet, when Tintin's old friend Chang writes to ask for help, Haddock blisters with jealousy and refuses to accompany him on the adventure (he relents later).  And when Haddock spends time with a new friend, Tintin mopes and pouts.

Many commentators, including Jamie Bell, who played Tintin in the 2011 movie, have noticed that Tintin and Haddock behave precisely as a gay couple.

Even Herge himself found it necessary to address the "accusations": he said that Tintin and Haddock could not actively pursue women because mostly boys read the comics, and they were interested in adventure, not romance.  But if that is the case, why did Herge put them into a relationship that looked and felt precisely like a romance?

Anyway, he was wrong: gay boys wanted both adventure and romance.  And they found both in Tintin.

See also: Tintin Porn

What's Gay about "The Afternoon of a Faun"

My friend Mickey the Russian Major, who I met at the Iowa Gay Pride March in 1981, told me about the Ballet Ruses, founded by Sergei Diaghilev to showcase the muscular bodies of male dancers, and his protege and lover Vaslev Nijinsky, who scandalized audiences with his homoerotic interpretation of L'apres-midi d'un faun (The Afternoon of a Faun).  My professor in Russian Culture and Civilization also told me that they were gay, symptoms of the "decadence" of fin de siecle Russia.

But how could you do a homoerotic interpretation of  The Afternoon of a Faun?

The original poem by Stephane Mallarme (1875), is a masterpiece of symbolist literature, but with no gay content.  A male faun of Greek mythology chases and has sex with several female nymphs, while saying things like "Ces nymphes, je les veux perpétuer" (These nymphs, I would perpetuate them).

It inspired Claude Debussy to write Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune (1894), an orchestral piece that imagines the Faun pursuing nymphs all afternoon, and then tiring and falling asleep.  Again, no gay content.

In 1912, Vaslev Nijinsky choreographed and performed a ballet version, pursuing nymphs in a frenzy of heterosexual desire before finally taking one of their veils as an autoerotic fetish object.  He made it homoerotic by:
1. Training all eyes on his body, his masculine virility, not on the nymphs.
2. Training his eye on his lover, Diaghilev, so his autoerotic fantasy is about men.

It received mixed reviews and some downright hostility, so was only performed a few more times.

It was choreographed again in 1953 by Jerome Robbins, with Francisco Moncion (top photo) as the Faun, and in 2006 by Tim Rushton, with Johan Kobberg as the Faun.  They skip the homoerotic veil to make it heterosexist again.

In the 1980 movie Nijinsky, Nijinksy was played by George de la Pena, and Diaghilev by the gay actor Alan Bates.

See also modern dancers Ted Shawn and Erick Hawkins.

The Iceland Fisherman: Gay Romance in Collier's Encyclopedia

When I was little, there weren't many books in the house except for the Bible and the thick, black, ponderous volumes of the 1955 edition of Collier's Encyclopedia.  I used to leaf through it, looking for muscular semi-nude men (try "African Tribes," "The Circus," and "Egypt").   The last volume contained the Reading Guide, a list of the best books ever written, and among them was The Iceland Fisherman (1886), by French novelist Pierre Loti (1850-1923).

Why was a Frenchman writing about Iceland, I wondered.  Because of the Northern Thing, the Viking ships and horned helmets and "Baldur the Beautiful"?  Because it was a place of wild freedom, where men could hug, kiss, and marry?

The mystery of the French Icelander stayed with me for years.  When I took French in high school and then college, I was surprised that no professor ever mentioned Pierre Loti or The Iceland Fisherman-- wasn't it the "best book ever written"?  It wasn't in our library.  But one day I ordered a copy from interlibrary loan.

No professor mentioned it because it was a symbolist novel, no longer in style.  And gay-themed.

A group of Breton fishermen sail to Iceland each summer in search of cod. Sylvestre, "a girlish boy," befrieds the big, muscular Yann, who disapproves of women and says he'll "marry the sea."

Back in France, Sylvestre courts women, in darkness, "dreaming of death," but in the summer he goes out to sea again, and leans against Yann, and they go on "gaily with their fishing in the everlasting daylight."

When Sylvestre dies in Indochina, Yann is heartbroken, and finally marries his sister, so at least some part of him will remain.  But that is not enough, so in the end Yann surrenders to the sea.  But even in death they cannot be together, for Sylvestre had "gone to sleep in the enchanted gardens, far, far, away, on the other side of the earth."

The novel is famous in France.  Pecheur d'Islande has been filmed several times, notably in 1959 (with Jean-Claude Pascal, left, and Georges Poujouly) and in 1996 (with Antony Delon, top photo, and Marius Colucci).  The film versions apparently emphasize The Girl.

Pierre Loti was himself bisexual, sleeping with women but longing for the wild homoerotic freedom of Turkey and the Middle East.  He filled his home with mementos of his journeys, including many paintings of semi-nude men, such as these Easter Islanders, as well as semi-nude photos of his own muscular physique (most destroyed after his death).

Alix and Enak: Jonny and Hadji in Ancient Rome

If the gay kids of Britain had it good, then France must have been a Paradise of beefcake and bonding: bandes-dessinee (hard-bound comic books) overbrimmed with same-sex couples, including Tintin and Captain Haddock, Spirou and Fantasio, Corentin and Kim, and Alix and Enak.

 Alix, who premiered in 1948, was a Roman citizen from the province of Gaul (modern France) who travels through the ancient world,  through Gaul, Egypt, Persia, and eventually as far afield as India, China, and the Pacific, having death-defying adventures in historically accurate settings (give or take a few hundred years) with beautifully detailed backgrounds.






Alix is blond-hared, handsome, muscular, and frequently nude.

That's right, nude.

His creator, Jacques Martin, had no qualms about introducing rear and occasional frontal nudity into his strips.

But that's not all.  Alix is accompanied by his boyfriend Enak, a slightly younger Egyptian, dark skinned, equally handsome, muscular, and nude.

Sort of a Hadji to his Jonny Quest, or a Raji to his Terry.

In the early books, they have no interest in girls; they are devoted to each other, rescuing each other from deadly danger over and over again, saying things like "I won't leave without you!" and "If anything were to happen to you. . . ."

In the books published since the 1980s, they occasionally get girlfriends, but only as momentary dalliances; nothing can interfere with their devotion to each other.

Thirty volumes have appeared, along with some "straight' history of the ancient world illustrated by Alix comics. They have never been translated into English, but you don't need to read French to enjoy the beautifully detailed backgrounds -- or the beefcake.

Spirou and Fantasio: The Bellhop and his Boyfriend

The young hunk and his blond, balding but still youthful boyfriend recline cozily on the couch, watching tv, their legs pressed together.  The young hunk places his foot atop his boyfriend's in a gesture of intimacy.

Suddenly the telephone rings.  "It's a woman," the young hunk announces.  "One who has the chutzpah to call us at this hour and say It's me."

His shirt is open, revealing a smooth, buffed chest.  His boyfriend is wearing a lavender t-shirt and a sky-blue jacket, a style that an older gay man might wear.

As his boyfriend takes the call, the young hunk cuddles their pet squirrel, adopting a nurturing, feminine pose. He's wearing extremely  tight pants.  The boyfriend glances over at him, apparently thinking "I'm lucky to have landed such a hot guy."

It's their coworker, Seccotine, asking for a ride to the airport.  "Sorry, tomorrow I'm going to a conference in Bali," the boyfriend says.  Ignoring the young hunk's frantic gestures, he continues: "...But don't worry, my partner will be glad to give you a ride."

A gay comic?  A parody?  A slash fantasy?  No, this is an actual excerpt from Spirou et Fantasio, a Belgian comic strip for children (and college students learning French).


The young hunk Spirou began his career in 1938 as a bellhop engaged in humorous antics.  In 1944, he met intrepid journalist Fantasio, and soon the two were pairing up for investigations, traveling through time and space, confronting gangsters, spies, dictators, mad scientists, and alien invaders, rescuing each other again and again.


 Like Tintin and Captain Haddock, Corentin and Kim,  and Alix and Enak, Spirou and Fantasio became domestic partners, and rather obviously lovers,  Occasionally Fantasio liked a woman (unlike Captain Haddock), but in the end he always returned to his true love.

During the 1990s, the couple was redrawn, becoming more naturalistic, with pleasantly muscular physiques -- and the gay subtext was revved up (it's hard to read them as anything but a modern-day gay couple).

Over fifty albums have been released to date.  Three have been translated into English.

Home and Away: Gay Subtext Soap Opera

When I was working on my doctorate at USC, I spent the summer in France, and I watched a soap called Summer Bay (original title Home and Away), an Australian soap opera (1989-) centered on a group of foster children, their parents, and the residents of a nearby trailer park. I'm not much for soap operas, but this one seemed to feature a lot of buddy-bonding.  No gay characters, but enough gay subtexts to fill a book  (and a lot more swimsuit and semi-nude scenes than One Life to Live).

Blake Dean (Les Hill) moves to town, clashes with adult authority figures, and can't find a true friend until the hunky Simon (Richard Norton) moves to town.

Nick Smith (Chris Egan), a foster kid on the run from a drug lord, buddy-bonds with Duncan Stewart (Brendan McKesey), until Duncan's bad behavior forces a breakup.

The foster child relationships themselves provided moments of homoromantic buddy-bonding, as with school principal Donald (Norman Coburn), who opens his house to a surprisingly number of hunky teens, including Sam Marshall (Ryan Clark).

Even when there was no subtext, there were lots of hunky actors, such as Geoff Campbell (Lincoln Lewis). Nearly every hunky actor in Australia started his career with a season or two as a troubled teen on the beach: Heath Ledger, Julian McMahon, Guy Pearce, Ryan Kwanten....