Boomerang: Queer Inclusivity and Tequan's Pecs

Eddie Murphy is a major homophobe, so I haven't seen many of his movies, and I never heard of Boomerang (1992). It sounds dreadful: a player gets his comeuppance when he falls for a female version of himself.

But the tv version on BET (available on Vudu and Amazon Prime) stars Tequan Richmond, the dreamy teen idol from Everybody Hates Chris, so I figured it wouldn't hurt to run through a few episodes on fast-forward, just in case he takes his shirt off.


He plays Bryson, son of the female player, a successful music executive (at age 26?) into hooking up.  Except this is 2019, and hooking up is no longer considered a character flaw; in fact, it's a common pastime among his cohort of coworkers/buddies:




1. Simone  (Tetona Jackson), daughter of  Eddie Murphy character, co-owner the company, and Bryson's on-off girlfriend.

2. Ari (Leland B. Martin, left), his best friend

3. Tia (Lala Milan), a singer.

4. David (RJ Walker), who runs a storefront church.

5. Crystal (Brittany Inge), his ex-wife

Plots involve helping each other out of the crisis du jour rather than punishing players.

And guess what?  In the nearly thirty years since the original movie, times have changed.  Homophobia is no longer considered funny (except in movies aimed at teenage boys), and inclusivity is in.  Tia is a lesbian  dating a woman named Rocky, and Ari is bisexual.  Not just "bisexual but only dating women at this moment," actually kissing guys.

In the episode PRIDE, they all attend the Atlanta Black Pride Festival (which for some reason takes place in the wintertime) to film Tia's new music video, and Ari gets schooled by an ex-girlfriend "You like both?  That means you gay!"  But he keeps his bi flag unfurled.  Meanwhile David shows up as a street preacher, but instead of the usual "Y'all going to hell!' screaming, he says "Y'all are all beautiful!"

You're probably wondering if Tequan shows his physique.

Not often.  But after all that queer inclusivity, who cares?

See also: Everybody Hates Chris

The Beefcake and Gay Pride of Myrtle Beach

My sister and her husband go to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina almost every year, and this year they invited me and Bob.

But I declined; I've already been to South Carolina once this summer, and Myrtle Beach is not exactly on my bucket list.

It's full of tacky amusements, like a pre-War Coney Island:

1. A wax museum
2. Ripley's Believe it or Not
3. A Medieval-themed dinner theater
4. A Hard Rock Cafe.
5. A tacky boardwalk

6. A Ferris wheel.

This gets 14 million visitors annually?

Harbinger of the end of civilization: the Metropolitan Museum of Art only gets 7 million.

Besides, it's surrounded by South Carolina.






Of course, it's a beach, and beaches have men in swimsuits.

But they'll probably be surrounded by a woman and children.














Or a lot of women

Or a lot of children.

There are about a dozen high schools and colleges in the vicinity, including Carolina Forest, Myrtle Beach (with its motto "We go hard at Myrtle Beach"), Socastee, two Catholic, one Jewish, and the Calvary Christian School for the fundamentalists.

The Christian School seems to take them a little younger than high school age, though.













There's some attention to diversity in town.  Max Wolff, who has Down's Syndrome, was on the swim team at St. James High School.  He graduated in 2017.  In July 2018 he won two silver medals in swimming at the Special Olympics (missing the gold on a technicality).

And Myrtle Beach is the gayest city in South Carolina, if that's a draw, with gay rights protections and 12 gay couples per 1000 households, or 1% of the population, not counting the singles.

In June 2018 Myrtle Beach held its annual LGBTQ Pride Festival, featuring a series of expensive parties entitled "What happens on the beach, stays on the beach."

Sounds closeted.

If this is LGBTQ Pride, I'll take vanilla.

See also: The Beefcake of Myrtle Beach

Kim's Convenience: Gay People are the Problem of the Week

Kim's Convenience (2016-) which just appeared on Netflix, is a popular Canadian sitcom adaption of a play that has run since 2011.  It's about a Korean-Canadian family running a convenience store in a diverse neighborhood of Toronto.

It seems a bit retro: in each episode, the curmudgeonly, old-fashioned Mr. Kim (Paul Sun-Hyung Lee) rams head-first into something about modern society that he doesn't understand.  In the first episode, it's gay people.

He refuses to allow a gay pride poster to be placed in his shop window, because why do gay people have to advertise themselves with a parade?  Koreans don't march down the street yelling "I'm Korean!"  If they're gay, why can't they be quiet, respectful gays?

I started to cringe, having heard this complaint a dozen times, even from gay people.  It is a standard homophobic misconception that gay pride is about proclaiming that you have gay sex rather than celebrating survival in a hostile world.

 Accused of being homophobic, Mr. Kim backtracks by offering a 15% discount to gay people during Pride Week. Through the rest of the episode, he decides who warrants the discount and who doesn't.

He tells Boy Toy (Alexander Nunez) "You're not gay, you're just pretending."  Boy Toy returns with a flamboyant friend as proof, but Mr. Kim merely asks him what his favorite movie was in college.  Caddyshack.  Straight.

But when a guy (Andy Yu) drops in to apply for a job, Mr. Kim offers him the discount.  He protests that he is straight, but Mr. Kim wink-winks "Sometimes it takes awhile for the gay to come out."

He does give the discount to a drag queen after a conversation about "Why you dress like a woman?"  She actually seems pleased by the question, and replies: "It feels comfortable.  It feels like home."

The episode was not exactly offensive, at least not offensive enough to turn off, but it made me uncomfortable.  It was like watching people talk about me behind my back.

No gay people appear, or are referenced, in any of the other episodes I sampled.  Evidently the gays were the problem of the week, and the show moved on:

A friend asks Mr. Kim to become a "wingman" on a double date.

A kid runs wild in the convenience store, and the mother refuses to discipline him.

Mr. Kim gets a crush on the new female pastor, and insists on not charging her for anything.

After the first few episodes, the convenience store was relegated to the B plot, while the primary plot involved the problems and relationships of the two Kim children:

Janet (Andrea Bang), a photography student at OCAD University, struggles to achieve independence by moving out, getting a job, and refusing to "marry a nice Korean Christian boy."  .

Jung (Simu Liu), who hasn't talked to his father in years, works at a car rental company, where he has a crush on his female boss.  He doesn't appear to own a shirt.

The writers play up Jung's hunkiness deliberately, as a remedy to the countless sexless Asian characters in media.

Simu Liu has also appeared in the play Banana Boys, about the stereotypes Asian Canadian men face,  such as "they are bananas (yellow on the outside, white on the inside)."

Other male characters include:

Kimchee (Andrew Phung, center ), a clownish slob, Jung's roommate, coworker, and bromantic life partner.

Gerald (Ben Beauchemin), their nerdish, self-depricating coworker, and eventually Janet's platonic roommate.

Terence (Michael Musi), another coworker at the car rental place, who Kimchee doesn't like.

Alex (Michael Xavier), Jung's childhood friend who briefly dates Janet.

Enrique (Rodrigo Fernandez-Stoll), a regular customer at the convenience store.

Alejandro (Mark Grazzini), who dates Jung's boss.

Roger (Kevin Vidal), who briefly dates Janet's friend.

Raj Mehta (Ishan Dave), who dates Janet.

Peter (Zach Smadu, left).  I don't know who he plays.  I just had trouble finding beefcake photos of the other actors.

I like the fact that the Canadian locale isn't closeted: this is definitely Toronto.  The scene where a guy tries to rob the convenience store with a knife instead of a gun made me want to move there.

But I don't like the exclusion of gay people from the universe, after the first "gay problem" episode.

Matt's Date with Johnny Sheffield's Son

San Diego, July 1989

My ex-boyfriend Fred's boyfriend Matt was loud and proud, out to everybody and everything.  "Hi, I'm gay, and I'd like to order a large pizza."  "Hi, I'm gay.  What time will the flight from Kansas City be arriving?"

Fred didn't care for gay pride events, but Matt dragged him to Christopher Street West in L.A. every year, and sometimes to the parades in San Francisco and San Diego too.  "Mon chevalier blanc, it will be fabulous!" he promised.  "And, as any queen knows, they come with nonstop cruising.  Finding a Cute Young Thing to share my butt and our bed will make it all glorioski, n'est pas?"

In 1989 they went to the San Diego gay pride parade, and afterwards they went to a "hair cutting" exposition at the Eagle.  One of the guys in the chair was a Cute Young Thing named Stewie (this was before Family Guy co-opted the name): early 20s, tall, slim, very tanned, with brown curly hair, a round open face, pinprick nipples, and an average-sized penis.  Plus he came from a wealthy family and attended a private school, just like Matt.  They immediately hit it off, and were so busy talking that they almost forgot to cruise.

The full story, with nude photos and explicit sexual situations, is on Tales of West Hollywood.

Gay Pride Has Changed

I've been marching in gay pride parades since they were called gay rights marches.

I was in the first ever to be held in the state of Iowa, in June 1981.

When I lived in California and New York, from 1985 to 2001, I marched almost every year, either with the Metropolitan Community Church or with the gay synagogue.

 It was the biggest event of the year: we spent months deciding which group to march with, working on banners and floats, charting out the route, making plans to meet friends afterwards, at the festival.

The day of the parade,we would show up at the staging ground on Crescent Heights an hour early (walk, if you could), dressed lightly -- Los Angeles in June is hot!

It was fun to be walking down the streets we drove down every day, with a wall of spectators on all sides, more gay men and lesbians than we ever knew existed.

The hetero screamers, outraged by our existence, with their signs saying we were going to hell, were confined to a small area next to the Rage, where we could ignore them easily.

Then came the festival in West Hollywood Park: 20 or 30 booths from every gay organization you had ever heard of, and some you hadn't: Dignity (for gay Catholics), Frontrunners (for runners), Gay Fathers, the Gay Asian-Pacific Alliance.  A few food carts, whatever vendors were brave and non-homophobic enough to come, selling ice cream, corn dogs, and Thai food on a stick.

A huge crowd of gay men and lesbians, some you would never see anywhere else.  A chance to catch up with friends you'd lost track of.

Acres upon acres of shirtless musclemen.  Nonstop cruising: it wasn't a successful pride festival unless you got at least three phone numbers.

Hetero screamers milled about with pamphlets about how we were going to hell, so the rule was: never accept anything someone tries to hand to you.  Representatives of gay organizations will sit at their booths with brochures for you to pick up.

In the evening there was a round of parties and dances, with a lot more cruising, and there was always that one guy who was completely nude in a public place.

At work the next day, you could always tell who was gay: they were sunburned.

In Florida I didn't go, and in 2005 I moved to the Straight World, where Gay Pride was a small, understated affair.  A barbecue in the park for about 20 people.  A parade with about 20 banners but no floats that marched down one side of the street, the other still open to gawking traffic.

I haven't been to a big-city Gay Pride for 16 years.

They've changed.

Last weekend I went to Minneapolis for Twin Cities Pride.  Due to a GPS problem, my wisdom tooth extraction, and oversleeping, my friend and I missed the Parade, but we went to the festival in Loring Park, near downtown.


1. It's not Gay Pride or LGBT Pride, it's just Pride. It's rather annoying to be erased from your own festival.

2. Instead of 20 or 30 booths, there were over 200.  Most were not gay-specific.  Banks, credit unions, colleges (not college LGBT groups, just "why you should come here"), sheets and towels, a service that would clean your rain gutter.

Instead of two or three food trucks, there were about fifty.  No longer do the organizers have to scrounge around to find enough vendors willing to be seen with us.

3. The rule about not accepting anything someone tries to hand you was gone.  Everyone tried to hand us something: beads, buttons, bags, brochures.  I didn't take anything -- force of habit.

Fortunately, I didn't see any screamers.

4.  But the festival wasn't for us anymore.  Over half of the crowd consisted of male-female couples, often with kids in tow, and most of the rest were groups of women  A scattering of gay men.  

5. The acres and acres of beefcake were gone. Very few of the men were shirtless, and very few were buffed.  At least I can say that I have a better physique than 99% of the men at a Gay Pride Festival.

6. The cruising was gone, too.  The few times I got cruised, it was by a woman or a teenage boy.  I get more action at the doctor's office.

Afterwards we walked back across Lyndale Avenue, through the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden.  A large Muslim family was photographing each other in front of the cherry spoon statue.  College kids were playing miniature golf on a weird course with brillo pads and maps of downtown.  There was a baseball game going on at the stadium.

They were half a mile from Gay Pride.  They didn't know, or they didn't care.

"Gay Pride has changed,"  I told my friend.

"For better or worse?"

"I'm not sure."

One of the college boys playing miniature golf looked over at me with a cruisy glance.

Some things don't change.

This post with nude photos is on Tales of West Hollywood

See also: My First Gay Rights March

Turning a Straight Guy Gay in 10 Easy Steps

Ok, you can't turn an actual straight guy gay, or vice versa.  Sexual orientation can't be changed.  If he isn't into guys, he isn't into guys, period.

But there are plenty of men who think they are straight but are actually bisexual, attracted to women most of the time, but sometimes interested in men.

Or who think they are straight but actually gay, interested in men 100% of the time. They assume that being heterosexual means having cool, unsatisfying relationships with women and passionate, intense same-sex "buddies."

You can help him figure it out.  He -- and his family and friends -- will be a lot happier if he stops pretending.

Getting someone to acknowledge same-sex desire is not for the faint of heart.  It might be a better idea to stick to guys who have already figured it out, who know that they're gay, or bisexual, or straight but curved a little around the edges.

But if you're determined, here are 10 simple steps to success

1. Define your goal.  Why do you want him to figure it out? If your goal is sex or romance, be careful: after figuring it out, he  will want to try everything the gay community has to offer, mostly things that don't concern you.

2. Judge the strength of his same-sex interests.  Is he almost exclusively interested in men, or is his desire fleeting and trival?  That is, could he live happily in a heterosexual relationship?

3. Judge the strength of his homophobia.  Does he just have a few minor stereotypes about gay people, or is he seething with rage?   Does he make homophobic jokes, or does he say "live and live"?  If he's exceptionally homophobic, skip Step #4.

4. Come out to him.  Don't expect him to just figure it out by your lack of heterosexual interests and frequent discussions of hot guys.  Straight guys never figure it out.  You have to give him "the talk."

But assure him that you don't find him physically attractive.  Even if you do. Straight guys are under the impression that every gay man wants to have sex with them, and may refuse all future contact unless you make it clear that you don't intend to gawk at him in the shower or grope him in the subway.

5. Introduce him to gay people.  The biggest reason for not figuring it out is the belief that gay men in real life act like they do on tv: they squeal, flutter, gossip, leer, and discuss skin care products.  He likes football and beer, so he must be straight.  Introducing him to a variety of gay people, with a variety of behaviors and interests, will disconfirm him of that notion.

6. Introduce him to accepting heterosexuals.  The second reason for not figuring it out is the belief that family and friends will reject him.  Straight guys rarely read about or discuss gay rights, so they often believe that the world is far more homophobic than it really is.  Introducing him to some straight people who aren't screaming bigots will disconfirm him of that notion.

7. Know your Bible.  The third reason for not figuring it out is the belief that God hates gay people.  There are five Biblical passages that have been used to justify homophobic hatred.  Be ready to look them up and explain what they're really about.  If he's particularly religious, have a list of pro-gay churches and religious groups available.

8. Introduce him to physical contact.  The fourth reason for not figuring it out is the belief that masculine physical contact is creepy and icky.  You can disconfirm him of that notion quite easily. Tell him that gay guys always hug -- it doesn't mean anything.  Invite him to a party that's so crowded that you have to sit pressed together.  Once you get past the barrier of physical contact, he's almost there.

9. Invite him to a gay venue.  Like a Gay Men's Chorus concert or a gay restaurant, but not a Gay Pride festival (too noisy).  By this point, you're acting as if you assume that he's gay, and he's probably figured it out.  If he continues to protest that he's straight, ask "Aren't you about ready to stop pretending?"

Be prepared for some trauma some guys aren't thrilled by the news that they're gay.  They may experience guilt, shame, anger, and all of the other baggage they got growing up homophobic.  You may even have to point out some support groups for newly-out gay men.

10.  It make take awhile.  But hang in there -- he's got nothing to lose, and quite a lot to gain.

See also: Yuri Comes Out; and The Homophobic Thad Becomes a Male Stripper