Mo Bakker: Santa Claus's grandson and his boyfriend cruise in Kenya, cuddle in Greece. With bonus Belgian d*cks

Link to the n*de dudes

English-speaking audiences are most familiar with Flemish actor Mo Bakker for the three Claus Family movies: 

Die Familie Claus 1 (2020): Christmas-hating teenager Jules discovers that his grandfather is Santa Claus, about to retire and expecting him to take over the family job

Die Familie Claus 2 (2021): Jules goes on a trial run to grant a little girl's holiday wish.  Plus the kids try to fix up Mom with her best friend, not realizing that he is gay and has a husband.

Die Familie Claus 3 (2022): Jules and his sister Noor work together to fix the mess Grandpa made of the gift-delivery. Plus Mom's new boyfriend Jeff (Kurt Rogiers) drops towel.

Throughout, Jules is heavily queer-coded, with an interest in musclemen and no romantic interest in girls: he keeps partnering with girls, but they are always relatives or just friends.  Although there are no undeniable queer codes, no boyfriends, or "I'm gay" statements, the series, and especially the first, appears every year on lists of "The Best LGBTQ Holiday Movies."

But what about actor Mo Bakker.  Surely he wasn't cast because he was gay.  At age 14, he may not even have known.  So let's check to see if he is out now.

Mo was born in 2006, son of Belgian actor Kuno Bakker, who played a gay guy in Feast (2022).  

Older brother Kes, also an actor, has 12 credits listed on the IMDB, including the teen drama High Tide, available to stream on Netflix.  He plays a gay character, falls in love with a dude, and drops towel.

Mo's acting career begins with August (2014), a short about a boy with a girlfriend.   He has several other projects listed, with plot synopses and trailers only in Flemish, including:

Niet Schieten (Don't Shoot, 2018): A boy is dying, and his grandfather feels guilty.

The tv series Please Love Me (Zie miej graag, 2017-20): A divorced woman is "trying to put her life back together."  Mo and his brother Kes play her sons.

Sisyphus at Work (2021): A film director is dying.

Finn's Heel (Finn's hiel, 2022): Two boys (Mo, Brecht Dael) bond over boxing lessons, and hug.  This one sounds gay.

The teen tv series wtFOCK (2023), about students in a prestigious high school in Antwerp.  There are gay guys in the cast (who make out in the pool), but Mo plays a heterosexual athlete who gets his girlfriend pregnant.

Not a lot of gay content here.  Let's check Mo's Instagram to see if he is gay in real life.

I'm always jealous of Europeans, who can jet to my top 10 favorite countries (outside the U.S.) in a couple of hours.  Here Mo and his boyfriend are cuddling on a raft in Nicosia, Cyprus: five hours from Brussels, 14 hours from Minnesota.

More after the break

Stefanos Kakavoulis: Bizarre, cerebral gay movies and n*de performance pieces, plus an adult video and a kooky documentary

  

Link to the n*de photos

When Stefanos Kakavoulis appeared on the n*de celebrity site, I thought his name was a prank.  Kaka means "bad, evil, garbage" in Greek, so Kakavoulis means, roughly,  "The Little Stinker"  But that's really his name:

Stefanos  was born in Australia in 1977, but moved to Greece when he was a baby.  He got his degree in teaching art from the Higher Drama School New Greek Theatre of G. Armenis (that's what it says).

He has five acting credits listed on the IMDB, and several others on his personal website.  I took a year of Greek in college, but it wasn't quite enough to understand the untranslated plot synopses and trailers. 

Hnychterini sonata ("The Nightengale Sonata," 2015).  I don't know what it's about, but it shows some people in towels kissing.

Exoria ("Exile," 2019):  Stefanos kisses a dude, but strangles him during the bedroom stuff, and approaches a lady dressed as a bumblebee who is lap-dancing a guy in a bunny mask. 

That's what the trailer shows.

Antonious (2020): , a 38-minute poem by gay Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa, translated into Greek by Stefanos.  The Emperor Hadrian mourns the death of hislover.

Copper Sand (2020): Two men serve in the army together, then meet again after 15 years.  Is the spark still there?

Based on the trailer, I'd say that it's still there.

Howl (2020): A 20-minute performance of the Allen Ginsberg poem, translated into Greek.

Kathartirio ("Purgatory," 2022).  "Stories about love in modern Greece."  

Leonardo's Ring (2024), based on the play by Rick Elice, is about a ring that travel from hand to hand over the centuries.  Owners include gay icons Leonardo Da Vinci, Oscar Wilde, and Tchaikovsky.  Looks like a lot of musclemen in a pool, and two guys in bed in a crappy apartment.

Stefanos is primarily a theatrical actor.  His credits include The Importance of Being Earnest, The Talented Mr Ripley, Bent. and Vitruvio, where he performs Da Vinci's Vitruvian Man (n*ked, of course) in a meditation on mortality.

I'm getting the impression that he's gay.

More after the break

"Troy: Fall of a City": Soap opera version of Homer's "Iliad," with the gay characters turned bi

I went into the Netflix tv series Troy: Fall of a City expecting a vast canvass, a lot of spectacular special effects, and nonstop beefcake.  After all, a new take on one of the most familiar stories in the world has to have something to justify the retelling.

The first episode was promising: Paris Prince of Troy  (Louis Hunter, left) meets a mysterious group of beings who might be gods.  Zeus (Hakeem Kae-Kazim) asks him to choose who is superior: Hera (power), Athena (wisdom), or Aphrodite (beauty).  When he chooses beauty, the others in a rage vow to shatter his world. 

Very interesting, very evocative.  It goes downhill from there.

Troy is the story of a battle between the gods, with humans their unwilling pawns.  Paris (remember him?) kidnaps Helen, Princess of Sparta, to the consternation of her husband Menelaus (Jonas Armstrong, top photo).  The Spartans and their allies lay siege to Troy, a siege that lasts for ten long, gruelling years.  

In the Iliad, Homer covers only a few weeks in the story; his Odyssey focuses on the minor character Odysseus (Joseph Mawle, left) trying to get home.  

Other ancient authors have filled in the rest, explored interesting byways and asides, speculated about the lives of the characters before and after the War, given other minor characterstheir own epics.  You couldn't cover all of it in a hundred tv series.

Troy: Fall of a City tries to.

The result is a jumble of people, name upon name splattering across the stag. Some I recognized from literature or mythology: Ajax, Hector, Priam, Hecuba, Cassandra,Troilus, Odysseus, Aeneas.

Some not: Xanthus (David Avery), Diomedes, Thersites, Harmon, Dolan, Iola.

The main stories are minimized or ignored.  The famous are shuffled off to the side.  

Hesion (who?)  gets as much air time as Hector (Tom Weston-Jones).  

More after the break

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.

The Subtext in Casper the Friendly Ghost

When I was a kid, my favorite comic book title was Harvey, with its odd jack-in-the-box logo and its fantasy characters (Casper the Friendly Ghost, Spooky the Tuff Little Ghost, Hot Stuff the Little Devil)

Harvey also produced comics about human kids, like Richie Rich, Little Dot, and Little Lotta.  Casper the Friendly Ghost was about a ghost boy who lives with three nameless adult guardians in the Enchanted Forest (Not to be confused with the inferior Charlton knockoff Timmy the Timid Ghost).

In Casper’s world, ghosts were not dead people, but beings in their own right, who are born, grow up, take jobs and houses, and eventually grow old and die.  Their main pastime and means to social prestige is scaring, but Casper refuses to scare. 

Gay-coded, but no sissy or milquetoast, Casper is a strong-willed nonconformist, a Vietnam-Era pacifist who refuses to follow the hawkish status quo of ghost society. So strong are his principles that even when his life is in danger, he refuses to “boo” his way to safety.

Casper has an ally and confidant in Wendy, a blonde-haired, blue-eyed witch girl in a red jumpsuit who lives with three guardians of her own. They are not romantically involved; they are merely friends and comrades, thrown together by their common disdain for the social institutions that tell them they must scare. Neither expresses any heterosexual interest. (The 1995 movie starring Devon Sawa turned Casper heterosexual.)

But occasionally Casper moves beyond a simple lack of heterosexual desire to offer a glimpse of that other world. His efforts to bond with other beings (almost always male) sometimes transcend the merely friendly, especially whe the objects of his attention are perfect strangers whose struggles may cost him his life.

He accompanies Oliver Ogre on a perilous journey to the moon (Casper 113, January 1968), and helps an ancient Egyptian pharaoh regain his throne from a villainous usurper in (Casper 117, August 1968).

 When his new friends are adult humans, pixies, or Greek gods, drawn with the hard tight chests and rippling biceps more commonly associated with the DC and Marvel lines, it is easy to locate romantic attraction among his motives.

We see similar gay subtexts in “The Evil Planet” (Casper in Space 6, June 1973): Casper dreams that he has joined the deep space expedition of Crash Hammerfist, a Buck Rogers-type adventurer drawn as a brawny muscleman. They land on The Evil Planet, where flying bird-men abduct Crash’s female companion, Gale. While Casper calmly evaluates their options, Crash goes to pieces:

Crash: This is a disaster! Look – my cape is ruined! I can’t explore this evil planet looking like this!

Casper: [Trying to keep him focused on the crisis.] Is Gale your girlfriend?

Crash: No. . .she’s my seamstress. She made this entire outfit. [Hand swishily on hip.] Do you like it?

Casper: [Looking decidedly suspicious.] Er. . .yes.

At Casper’s urging, they ignore the soiled cape and set out to rescue Gail. They discover that she is being forced to compete in a beauty contest; the winner will become the wife of Emperor Zinzang, a young, slim Castro Clone. 

 When Crash bursts in, flexing his muscles and issuing taunts, the Emperor seems quite impressed, if not downright attracted; he forgets all about the beauty contest and challenges the superhero to single combat. They spend several panels lunging, grabbing, and jumping on top of each other, in the process accidentally shredding their outfits so the interplay of their muscles becomes even more evident.

During a lull in the battle, the Emperor explains to Casper that he really likes Crash, and he’s not evil, he’s just crazed with power – he received a year’s worth of invulnerability for his 27th birthday, and he’s been behaving rudely ever since. But in a few minutes he’ll be 28, normal again, and Crash will annihilate him.

Casper suggests that he call a truce and apologize for abducting Gail, and then he and Crash could start over as friends. The Emperor agrees.

 Then, abruptly, Casper wakes up. We never find out if the Emperor selects a wife, or if Crash and Gail ever leave the Evil Planet. Should we attribute this sudden jerk into “reality” to the writer’ incompetence, to running out of space in the issue, or to the realization that the only logical conclusion to the story as portrayed involves Crash and the Emperor arm in arm, watching the sun set on the Evil Planet?

Kaos: Scheming royals...I mean modern-day Greek gods, some queer, some Daddies, some both

  

Greek gods and demigods are usually heterosexualized in modern texts, but in the original myths they were all queer, having sex with any being who caught their eye, and even pursuing an occasional same-sex romance.  Kaos, on Netflix, imagines a world where the gods are still active and involved in human affairs, like a royal family with the power to turn humans into artichokes.  Let's see how well their queer past holds up.

Scene 1: Prometheus (Stephen Dillane, above), the one who gets his liver eaten every day, narrates as we zoom in on Mount Olympus: "Power can give a man many things. Taste is rarely one of them." Zeus, Jeff Goldberg, struts Hugh Heffner-like through his gold-and-white mansion, sits on his throne, and invites mortals to worship him on Olympia Day.  But you shouldn't: "He's a transcendent, unmitigated bastard." 

Prometheus has a plan to bring him down, involving three mortals and a prophecy.

Scene 2: Modern-day Heraklion, Crete, except they're still worshipping the Greek gods, or at least keeping track of their scandals.  The first mortal is Eurydice, or Riddy, who isn't interested in politics. 

Cut to Riddy at the supermarket, looking at boxes of Spartan Crunch, Gaia's Granola, and Achilles' Heels, har har.  A woman tries to pick her up, but she deflects her by mentioning a husband.  

Check-out counter: on tv, an announcement of Olympia Day.  She buys a pomegranate, har har.  Look it up.

Outside, the woman who tried to pick her up is being manhandled by security for stealing cat food. Riddy intervenes.

"Nobody believes me," the woman says, "But it all comes true.  I told them about the horse..."  OMG, this is Cassandra!  Look it up.  She tells Riddy, "Today's the day you leave your husband.  Your love is dead."

Scene 3: Up on Olympus, Zeus is producing lightning and thunder.  His wife Hera arrives, and he shows her the Meander, a fountain where the water flows in circular pattern in mid-air.  He will reign as long as it runs.  He noticed a blip in it.  She thinks he's being ridiculous.  He asks "Where's our son, by the way."

Cut to the son, Dionysus, Nabhaan Rizwan, "god of pleasure, madness, and wild frenzy," dancing and carousing at a nightclub, smooching with men and women both, getting a blow job from a lady, then leaving, depressed.  He tells the falafel guy that he works for his dad, "but he doesn't take me seriously."  So sons have complained since...um...ancient Greek times.  He wants to do more for people than just dance and have sex.

Dillane's cock and Nabhaan's butt are on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends 

He zooms up to Mount Olympus for an uncomfortable breakfast.  Hera sneers "Would you like some honey?", har har.  Look it up.

Dionysus gives his Dad an Olympia Day present: a watch, because "time together is precious."  Zeus is not impressed: "nope, ugly."  He summons his ball boy to dispose of it.  A ball boy to fetch tennis balls, not a sex partner.

It's the wrong time to ask for a promotion, but Dionysus tries anyway: "Make me the god of love, or war, or anything with influence."

Nope.  He gets all bratty, so Zeus uses his god powers to pound his head into the table.  "Where did I go wrong?" he asks Hera.  None of his kids come to visit him.

Down on Earth, they're about to unveil the Olympia Monument.  Uh-oh, it's been stolen, replaced by the graffiti: "F*k the gods"!  

Zeus goes all Spirit of Vengeance.  "Who has desecrated the gods?  Who has blasphemed against me?   I am going to wipe them off the face of the Earth."

No, he isn't, Hera suggests.  Kings delegate power.  Call  Poseidon (Cliff Curtis, left).

Scene 4: Riddy drives home, to where her husband, Killian Scott, is playing his guitar and thinking about how much he dislikes her.  Wait -- he's Orpheus.  They're the stars in like the greatest heterosexual love story of all time!  And their love is dead, har har.   They certainly joke, frolic, and kiss like they're still in love. 

Back story: Orpheus is a famous singer.  But you knew that already, right?

The problem: he's too needy.  He forced her to model for the cover of his new album, and his latest song is entitled "Eurydice." 

Prometheus: "There's nothing quite like the loneliness of someone you're falling out of love with."

They do some sloppy smooching and hit the bed, Orpheus with his shirt off, Eurydice with her bottom showing, but they're interrupted by Calliope, the Muse of Music, evidently his agent, picking him up for rehearsal.

I'm out of space, but I read ahead to see about the fates of the LGBTQ characters. After the break

Daniel Cudmore: Colossus, Felix, fitness model, and the God of War. Plus his colossal Colossus cock.

Link to the colossal Colossus cock

Canadian actor Dan Cudmore has 51 credits on the IMDB, including Peter Rasputin, aka Colossus, in the X-Men franchise, Felix in the Twilight franchise, Jackhammer in Arrow, Gridlock in The Flash, and Behemoth Thing in Superman & Lois.

He specializes in superheroes and supervillains like Colossus, but he's done other projects.  I first saw him in Magicians, as the God of War.  Apprised that a gay-stereotype god called the Nameless is looking for something the other gods stole from him, he responds "I don't know what it is, but you have my permission to search my ball sack with your tongue."  Sure, that sounds like fun, I'd be happy to...oh, you're being homophobic.

I know he's just playing a character, but still, his homophobic quip left a bad taste in my mouth, so to speak.

His other projects include comedies like Fresh Off the Boat, romcoms like All of My Heart (as the romantic lead's friend who devotes his life to getting him laid, and horror like Rites of Passage, which appears to have a gay subtext -- not his. 

Also 14 stunt credits including Psych, The Predator, Sonic the Hedgehog, and Percy Jackson and the Olympians.

And a stunt cock at least once.

Some fitness modeling from early in his career

More Daniel after the break

Arnold Schwarzenegger: Nude photos of Trench, Mr. Freeze, The Terminator, Conan, and an Austrian fitness model

Link to the nude photos

Arnold needs no last name.  He almost single-handedly took bodybuilding out the realm of  Muscle Beach physical culturists and Italian sword-and-sandal movies and created the genre of Man-Mountains. His superlative physique and distinctive Austrian growl have been parodied innumerable times, on Saturday Night Live, on Seinfeld, on Tiny Toon Adventures).    It's hard to leave a room temporarily without being tempted to use his signature line from The Terminator, "I'll be back," or Terminator 2, "Come with me if you want to live."

Already a Mr. Universe and nearly a Mr. Olympia, the 21 year old Mr. Schwarzenegger moved to the United States in 1968 with his best friend Franco Columbu, to become an actor.  He posed for a lot of fitness magazines, including the gay-coded Tomorrow's Man.  In the 1970s he was the subject of more conventional semi-nude paintings by Jamie Wyeth.  In the 1980s, photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe.

I had a friend in the 1980s whose bathroom featured what looked very much like a nude photo of Arnold, clipped from a fitness magazine.  It's not the black and white flexing photo that's available everywhere; this one was in color, and showed Arnold standing on a hillside.

His first starring role was in Hercules in New York (1969), which nobody saw.  His accent was so bad that his lines were dubbed.

He starred in Stay Hungry (1976), about a young man, drawn into the world of bodybuilding, and in The Jayne Mansfield Story (1980), asMansfield's muscular husband, Mickey Hargitay.

More Arnold after the break

Harry Hamlin Making Love

Harry Hamlin hirsute, handsome, and pleasantly muscular, but not a bodybuilder -- he was kin more to Tom Selleck and  Gregory Harrison than Sylvester Stallone. But gay teenagers in the early 1980s looked beyond his muscles, for his role as the first positive gay character in a Hollywood movie.

Aspiring to be a great actor, not a hunk-of-the-week, Harry graduated from Yale with a degree in drama and then received his Master of Fine Arts degree.  He appeared in two serious adaptations of the classics: The Taming of the Shrew (1976) and Studs Lonigan (1979) before relenting and appearing in a toga, or out of a toga, in Clash of the Titans (1981), a retelling of the Perseus myth of ancient Greece.

It's heterosexist, with Perseus getting the girl at the end, and there is little or no buddy-bonding, but it was one of the few movies of the period where the hero was nude or shirtless throughout.

The next summer Harry starred in Making Love (1982), as successful writer Bart McGuire. The producers really, really wanted us to like him.  There is a long montage at the beginning that demonstrated just how good, noble, and kind he is.  Also not at all stereotypic, except he likes Gilbert and Sullivan, the precursor to show tunes.

Another long montage establishes that successful doctor Zack Elliot (Michael Ontkean), is also good, noble, and kind.  So is his wife, Claire (Kate Jackson, then famous for the babe-detective series Charlie's Angels).  

The superhuman virtue of the three main characters established, Bart and Zack become friends.  Bart tells Zack he's gay. He responds nobly. Bart offers Zack a back rub that turns into sex.

Zack tells Claire that he's gay.  She responds nobly.  They break up so Zack can move in with Bart.

Bart wasn't really looking for a romance, so they break up. But not to worry, Zack finds a new boyfriend instantly.

Everyone is affluent, tolerant, noble, and perfectly coiffed, with no anxieties, no conflict; everything works out fabulously.  It's awful.  I can't watch it today.  But in 1982, we were watching and saying: "Look, a gay character on a movie screen!  Who isn't leering and decadent, and doesn't die at the end!"

Harry Hamlin has been busy, starring in over 30 movies and 12 tv series.  Michael Ontkean, too. But Boomer kids will always remember the summer of 1982, when they were Making Love.

The Gay Villages of Sonia and Tim Gidal

When I was little, my search for a "good place" often led me to the My Village books.  Tim Gidal (1909-1996) was a a pioneer in the field of photojournalism and a respected academic at the New School for Social Research.  In the interest of fostering international understanding, he and his wife Sonia published My Village in India (1956), a photo-story about the everyday life of a real ten-year old boy in a rural village.

It became so popular that they started scouting out villages in other countries, eventually traveling to 23:

1956: Austria
1957: Yugoslavia, Ireland
1958: Norway
1959: Israel, Lapps (Norway)
1960: Bedouins (Jordan), Greece
1961: Switzerland
1962: Spain, Italy
1963: Denmark, England
1964: Germany, Morocco
1965: France
1966: Finland, Japan
1968: Korea, Brazil
1969: Ghana
1970: Thailand
They only stopped when the couple divorced.



Each story was written in present tense and covered a few days in the life of a 10-12 year old boy: shepherding in Yugoslavia, fishing in Norway, tending to a vineyard in France.  He also went to school, played with his friends, talked to other villagers, went to a festival or took a field trip to a big city, and sometimes solved a minor mystery.  On the way you learned something about the history, language, and culture of the country (probably for the first time).

No gay people or same-sex romances were ever mentioned.  So why did these books offer a glimpse of a "good place"?

1. The boys were all exceptionally cute, from my preteen vantage point, and in warm climates they often stripped down to swim or fish or frolic.  Even in cold climates: the Norwegian boy stripped down for bed, and the Finnish boy was photographed completely nude in a sauna.

2. Their fathers, older brothers, and neighbors all lived off the land: they were farmers, shepherds, fishermen, loggers.  That meant endless photographs of muscular adult men.


3. American media of the 1960s was full of preteen boys "discovering" girls.  But the Village boys never expressed the slightest interest in girls.  Indeed, they didn't seem to know any, other than their sisters.

4. However, they often came in pairs that were extremely expressive by American standards: always hugging, wrapping their arms around each other, lying side by side, even kissing each other on the cheek.  To my preteen mind, it was obvious that they were boyfriends.

See also: Looking for Love in the Encyclopedia

Michael Forest: Playing a God of Masculine Beauty

The September 22nd, 1967 episode of Star Trek had the cryptic title "Who Mourns for Adonais?"

Even when I grew up and studied English literature, the title was still cryptic.  It comes from "Adonais," an elegy written by Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley for his dead friend, John Keats.

He took the name from Adonis, the ancient Greek god of masculine beauty.

So audiences were supposed to expect a god of masculine beauty?

They got one: 37 year old Michael Forest as Apollo, an alien who was mistaken for a god by the ancient Greeks, and who still expects worship.  It takes a femme fatale scientist to subdue him.

The heterosexist plotline didn't detract from the image of Michael Forest as Apollo, clad in a toga, with a laurel leaf, his bare chest, shoulders, and arms visible, one of the iconic beefcake shots of the Boomer generation.

Although never a beefcake star of the Henry Willson stable, Michael managed to display his bare chest several times during the 1950s, in guest-spots in Westerns (as an Indian) and swinging-bachelor dramas, and in horror-sci fi movies like Beast from Haunted Cave (1959), 

He fell somewhat short of the superlative physique necessary to cash in on the 1960s bodybuilder craze; his only peplum was Atlas (1961), directed by Roger Corman.

But he worked steadily through the 1960s, with guest spots across the tv dial, and starring roles in movies.

One of his most important was Deathwatch (1966), based on the Jean Genet play about two prison inmates, Maurice (Paul Mazursky) and Lefranc (Leonard Nimoy) competing for the affections the hot, muscular Green-Eyes (Forest).

That's right, Leonard Nimoy playing a gay character, a year before he became Spock.

(This actually wasn't his first; he played a hustler in Jean Genet's The Balcony in 1963)..

After Star Trek, Michael continued to take off his shirt a lot, playing Achilles (1972), a motorcycle thug (1972), a spaghetti Western Man with No Name (1972), and Agamemnon (1973).  Plus theater and lots of voice-over work (look for him in the 2008 documentary Adventures in Voice Acting).

In 2013, he reprised the character of Apollo on the web series Star Trek Continues (2013).

Apparently heterosexual in real life, he has retired to Walla Walla, Washington.

The Mighty Hercules

Before He-Man, there was The Mighty Hercules, part of the 1960s sword-and-sandal fad. He appeared on Saturday morning and sometimes Sunday morning tv from 1963 to 1966, and occasionally afterwards, in five-minute segments with stiff animation that seemed amateurish even to little kids.  With his square jaw, expressionless face, and black curlicue hairstyle, he  looked exactly like the Filmation Superman, but in a toga so his muscles would be visible.

Unlike the Hercules of Greek mythology, this Hercules ruled the kingdom of Caledon along with his two sidekicks: a teenage centaur boy who repeated everything twice ("Be careful, Herc!" "Be careful, Herc!"), and a young satyr boy who only tooted his panpipes. Some commentators have found a romantic subtext in the interactions between Hercules and the centaur-boy, but I don't remember enough episodes to be sure.

But I do remember the thrilling theme song (sung by gay-friendly Johnny Nash).  It was a tad risque, and it summed up all of the characteristics gay boys in the 1960s were looking for in boyfriends.

Softness in his eyes,
Iron in his thighs,
Virtue in his heart,
Fire in every part,
Of the Mighty Hercules.

Could we circle back to the  "iron in his thighs"?