Duke Kahanamoku: A Life Devoted to Surfing and Men

Born in 1890, Duke Kahanamoku was "the fastest swimmer alive," who popularized the sport of surfing, and to a great extent popularized Hawaii.  He won gold medals for swimming at the Olympics in 1912 and 1920, and a silver in 1924 (Johnny Weissmuller won the gold).

In 1925, he won even more international fame when he rescued eight drowning men from a sinking ship off Newport Beach, California, using only his surfboard.

He divided his time between Honolulu and Hollywood, where he appeared in 14 movies, playing a lifeguard, an Indian chief, an Arab, a pirate, and a "devil-ape," most notably as a Pacific Island chief in Mister Roberts (1955).  Later in life he appeared in the surfing documentaries Free and Easy (1967) and Surfari (1967).  He died in 1968.

He married Nadine Alexander rather late in life, at age 50. Although they apparently enjoyed ballroom dancing together, he spent most of his time with men, and surrounded himself with both Hollywood hunks and Speedo-clad beach boys.

He knew all of the athletes and beefcake stars of the day, including Buster Crabbe (top center), Wallace Beery, and Tyrone Power.  He was a particularly close friend of fellow Olympian and 1930s Tarzan Johnny Weissmuller (left, the one with the bulge).

The punk group The Queers has a song about him:

It ain't the waves you catch
It ain't the drugs you do
You'll never be as cool as Duke Kahanamoku

More conventionally, he has been honored with a statue in Waikiki (where the Oahu Gay Surfing Club meets) and a postage stamp.

See also: Jack London and the Gay Surfers.

Kahuku, Hawaii: Beefcake Li Dat

When I lived in L.A., people kept trying to talk me into going to Hawaii.

"It's got beaches!"  they exclaimed.

I should fly 6 hours across the Pacific for beaches?  We have them in L.A., and I never go.

The only reason I would go to Hawaii would be to see some Hawaiian culture.  Almost no one speaks Hawaiian as their first language anymore, but there are 600,000 native speakers of Hawaiian Pidgin.

Like Kahuku, a small town on the north side of Oahu, over an hour's drive from Honolulu.  Not much to do there except go swimming and surfing, like everywhere else on the island.and stop in at Lani's Yummy Yum Funnel Cakes.

Are you kidding?  I'm definitely getting some Yummy Yum Funnel Cakes!  Broke mouf!

Kahuku High School, "The Pearl of the North Shore,"  has 1400 students. It offers a Hawaiian Immersion Program whereby most classes are taught in Hawaiian.  Sports include surfing, soccer, beach volleyball, and wrestling, but no swimming.

And football, of course.  But I think momo boy been cockroaching da funnel cake.

Anybody wearing a crown draws my attention.  Da kine so ono.

Snakes on a Plane: Not Enough Buddy Bonding

Yes, I've seen Snakes on a Plane (2006), the heavily hyped, endlessly joked about vehicle for Samuel L. Jackson to say "I have had it with these  m___f___ snakes on this m___f___ plane!" 

Can't argue with that.

Snakes is actually not bad. It harkens back to the 1970s disaster movies like The Towering Inferno, and their parody in Airplane:  a disparate group of rich snobs, working-class stiffs, jive-talking black men, nuns, kids, dogs, and miscellaneous are trapped somewhere awful, and try to survive.

In this case, the slacker/surfer Sean (Nathan Phillips, left) is the witness to a murder that will bring down gangster Eddie Kim (Byron Lawson, below), and FBI agent Neville Flynn (Samuel L. Jackson) is assigned to protect him en route from Hawaii to Los Angeles to testify. 

Eddie, naturally, wants to kill him.  So comes up with the bright idea of filling the plane with hundreds of poisonous snakes, and pumping them with pheromones so they'll be extra aggressive. 

Like, how about shooting him?  Or pumping the snakes into his hotel room the night before the flight?

Enter a luxurious three-level airplane with a winding staircase. The staff consists of two 1970s-sex kitten flight attendants; a gay-male flight attendant; their supervisor on one last run before retiring (gulp); a 1970s sexist horndog pilot; and a married pilot anxious to get home to his wife and kdis.

The passengers are likewise escapees from the 1970s:
1. The pretentious "Do you know who I am?" jerk.
2. The ingenue with a dog in her purse.
3. The fat lady.
4. The guy afraid of flying.
5. The two kids flying alone for the first time.

6. Three G's (left), a famous rapper with only female fans, and his jive-talking entourage.
7. The Hispanic woman with a baby in her arms.
8. The blond prettyboy (Taylor Kitsch, below) and the blond sexpot, who want to join the mile high club.
9. The kung fu fighter who you expect to be karate chopping snakes, but he doesn't.

About halfway through the flight, the snakes come out and start picking them off, one by one.  There are lots of gross scenes and some shockers.  Both pilots get snake-bit.  The honor of landing the plane goes to Troy (Keenan Thompson), who has only flown planes in video games.

Meanwhile on land, FBI Agent Harris (Bobby Cannavale), who watches porn and talks about his wife, find a snake expert (Todd Louiso) who tries to track down antitoxins for the various snakes.

I rather liked the horror aspects, the self-referential jokes, and the 1970s feel.  All you needed were Hare Krishnas chanting in the airport.   I rather wish that Sean the slacker/ surfer had done something heroic to redeem himself, but he was mostly stuck with "stay back here where it's safe).

But what I couldn't abide was the intense, endless heterosexism. 

1. Every establishing shot shows a pulchritudinous woman or two walking by.
2. There are tons of sleazy hetero-sex jokes.
3. Both Sean and Neville hook up with stewardesses and smooch.
4. The flight attendant who everyone thought was gay smooches his girlfriend.

At least there's no dead wife in Neville's background.  Or maybe there is, and I missed that part.

Beefcake:  Sean takes off his shirt once or twice, the prettyboy is nearly naked before getting eaten, and a guy is bitten on the penis.

Gay References:  The flight attendant who everyone thinks is gay is not particularly swishy,but he's awfully interested in men, and he offers to suck the venom out of a guy who was bitten on the butt.  Is that a gay reference?

The movie ends with Sean taking Neville on a surfing vacation in Tahiti, but there was practically no buddy-bonding before, so the "fade into the sunset together" seems tacked-on and unbelievable.

My verdict:
Character development: 3
The gay subtext: 3
Beefcake: 2
Heterosexism: 8
The snakes: 10

The Beefcake of High School Row, Manoa, Hawaii

I didn't think of looking for beefcake in Hawaii  50% of the population is Asian/Pacific Islander, and it's always summer, so isn't it all beefcake, all the time?

But I had to look into Manoa, the ritzy neighborhood of Honolulu just north of Waikiki, with its High School Row: a dozen high schools and colleges, all lined up on either side of Waialae Avenue.

1. Chaminade University.  Private, Roman Catholic (Father Chaminade was a priest). It offers special Native Hawaiian programs.   The Silverswords (great team name) play volleyball, tennis, golf, and softball, but no swimming.

Come on, you're a half mile from the ocean!

2. Kaimuki High School. Public, founded in 1943, the 35th best high school in Hawaii.  A lot of tragedies and scandals in its news.

It offers canoeing, but no swimming.

Are you kidding?

3. Saint Louis School.  Roman Catholic, founded in 1846, when it was known as the College of ʻĀhuimanu,  At least it offers swimming, but its big star is a wrestler, Corey Cabanban.  Four-time state wrestling champ, all-American, wrestler of the year according to Wrestling Magazine. He graduated in 2018.

4. The University of Hawaii at Manoa.  (Manoa is not a town, it's a neighborhood).  17,000 students.  You can major in Filipino, Ilocano, Tahitian, Vietnamese, Sanskrit, Thai, Hindi, and of course Hawaiian.

5. The Mid-Pacific Institute.  Sounds like someplace where you would study reiki or holistic medicine, but it is actually a college preparatory high school offering a degree called an International Baccalaureate, which is not actually a B.A. degree.  It was the first school in the U.S. to supply Ipads to all students. 

Their sports team isn't the Pac-5s.  That's the name of the conference.

6. Punahou, the exclusive college prep school, the alma mater of Joan Blondell, Buster Crabbe, surfer Gary Lopez, ebay founder Pierre Omidyar, and Barack Obama.  It also specializes in sending athletes to the Olympics.  Over 3,000 students.

7. Maryknoll School.  Private Catholic k-12, admits boys and girls, founded in 1927.  Former teen idol Glenn Medeiros was vice principal.  He has also been a professor at Chaminade University, and now he's the headmaster of Saint Louis School.

8. McKinley High School.  Public, 1700 students, motto "Ike Makaukau Aloha."

I couldn't find any good photos, so here are some unhappy runners from Honoka'a

9. Roosevelt High School, not to be confused with the one in Des Moines.  I like the King Kamehameha crown.

10. Hawaii Pacific University, a private, nondenominational, nonprofit university with 3,700 students.where you study mostly business and STEM subjects.   They don't have any teams, but there are intramurals, and the Aloha Tower Fitness Center.

Sausage Sighting of James Arness

I'm Ali, short for Alika, "Guardian."  I was born and raised in Makaha, the surfing capital of the world.

Kind of a bummer when you hate surfing.

I was a bit of a chubby kid, not at all athletic, and a "sissy" -- I got picked on a lot.   I liked to hang out on the beach and look at the surfers, but I didn't like hanging out with them.  They're, as a rule, macho, sexist, and way homophobic, surfing to "prove" their manhood, goading each other on with homophobic slurs.  Even today, there are no openly gay professional surfers.  You have to have a wife and kids back home.

Imagine what it was like when I was growing up in the 1960s!

The only surfer I could stand was my classmate Brian Keaulana  -- Native Hawaiian, with beautiful dark skin, brown eyes, and a smooth muscular chest.  He teased me all the time, but at least he wasn't mean.  No tripping, no hitting, just ribbing me on being momona (fat), and on watching tv all the time.

I did watch a lot of tv.  I longed to escape from the island, find my way into the world of Lost in Space (Billy Mumy, sigh!) or That Girl (I wanted to be Ann Marie, and get to kiss Donald Hollinger).

Or Gunsmoke.

Marshall Dillon (James Arness) was exactly my type: tall, broad-shouldered, deep-voiced, a Grade-A cowboy complete with 10-gallon hat and leather vest.  And what a bulge on him!  What I wouldn't give to be captured and tied up by the bad guys, and have Marshall Dillon burst in to save the day!  Maybe carry me off into the sunset, for lots of kissing and hugging!

Remember, I was like nine or ten years old.  I wouldn't be thinking about sex for a few years.

One day I told my friend Brian about my crush on Marshall Dillon -- omitting the kissing and hugging, of course -- and he said "I know him.  We buddies."

"Not!"  I exclaimed.  Surely he was putting me on!

"No lie, Brah.  He's a surfer, and his son, too."

"Not a surfer, a cowboy!"I protested, angry.  He had no right to pull my Archetypal Cowboy out of his mythic setting in the Old West and plop him down into the mundane, every day world of Makana Beach!

"Don't be buggin', Brah!  He an actor, right, come over here from the Mainland to surf.  His son, too.  They tight with my dad, come for dinner, play Matchbook cars, like that."  His father was Buff Keaulana, a lifeguard and former surfing great.

"You lolo, or pull my leg!"

"I can prove it!  Next time James Arness comes to Hawaii, you come over for dinner, too."

I figured he was just blowing hot air, but sure enough, a few weeks later, Brian invited me to lunch at James Arness' house!

Apparently he really was a surfer -- he and Rolf rented a bungalow on Makana Beach two or three times a year, and flew out from L.A. for a surfing vacation.

When Brian and I arrived, James, Rolf, Buff, Corky, and a couple of guys I didn't know were sitting on deck chairs in swimsuits, eating take-out bentos full of poke (raw fish), tako (octopus), chicken and rice, and liliko (passionfruit).

 An all-male party full of hot guys in swimsuits!  My hormones should have been spilling out all over the place, but I couldn't my eyes off James Arness.  Broad shoulders, smooth chest, gigantic bulge visible in his swimsuit.

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

The Beefcake Bonanza of Hula Boy Memorabilia

The hula is a traditional Hawaiian interpretive dance accompanied by music.  Although practiced for hundreds of years, it did not become widely known outside Hawaii until the Tiki Craze of the mid-20th century brought various aspects of Polynesian culture to restaurants, bars, and game rooms across the U.S.

Men and women both performed, and not in grass skirts -- women wore pa'us, and men malo loincloths.

You can find a lot of hula boy memorabilia in antique shops and on ebay.  You may have to buy boy and girl figurines and throw out the girl, or endure the sappy heterosexist "He's looking for a hula girl," but you can get some nice retro Hawaiian beefcake.







A very muscular figure in a beige grass skirt.

Car bobbler with the same face as the above figure, but different hair.  A skirt of real fibers and a ukelele.

A rare ceramic figure from the 1950s.  Not exactly hula, but he has a ukelele and a flower lei.














This hot cartoonish Hawaiian guy is decked out like Father Christmas.  He's actually on wall paper; his "hula girl" is on the next panel.

More after the break.

The Beefcake Bonanza of Surfing Ads, Logos, Decals, and Miscellanea

If you're a collector of beefcake art, check out surfing miscellanea: decals, logos, posters, and ads, meant to be thrown away after use, and so quite rare today.  You can get some surfing history and culture along with the muscular guys.

This is a parking sticker attesting membership in the San Onofre Surfing Club.  (San Onofre is a state park about 80 miles south of West Hollywood.)









Distressed wooden surfboards frame the decal for the North Shore Longboard Club in Oahu, Hawaii.

A wooden plaque advertising the North Shore of Hawaii.

Waikiki Beach, south of Honolulu, where the Hawaiian royalty surfed on longboards.  This plaque shows three hot guys and a surfing dog wearing a lei.

La Côte des Basques is a beach in Biarritz, in the Basque country of southern France.  La Côte Basque was a famous restaurant in New York City.

More after the break.

Gilad's Body in Motion

During the 1980s, this was one of the most famous physiques -- and bulges -- in the world.

It belongs to Gilad Janklowicz (try telling your Dad that you want a poster of Gilad Janklowicz for your birthday).

Gilad was born on a Kibbutz in Israel in 1954.  His parents, who escaped from Nazi Germany via China, were both sports enthusiasts.  He ran track and field in high school, and became a decathlete and fitness instructor in the Israeli army.  After an Achilles heel injury ruined his Olympic aspirations, he moved to Los Angeles, enrolled in the UCLA Film School, and became a personal trainer.

Here he holds hands with a young Arnold Schwarzenegger.








In 1981 he moved to Hawaii where in 1983 he launched Bodies in Motion, a half-hour aerobics program in which he demonstrated routines to a pounding back beat while male and female models worked out behind him.

His sister Ada was co-host for a year before breaking out with her own show, Basic Training.

Over the years, Bodies in Motion ran on ESPN, Fox Sports, the Health Channel, and Fit TV.  It is still running several times a day on TBS, and in 80 countries around the world.







Gilad also hosts Total Body Sculpt  (2005-), publishes fitness articles, and sells a wide range of merchandise.

He's never married or been connected any of the models he works with, so he's probably gay.

But I'm more impressed by his exceptional physique and commitment to fitness past age 60.  One of his clients lived to the age of 103, and still walked the 23 flights up to his apartment every day.

Jack London and the Gay Surfers

In 1907, adventure writer Jack London and his wife Charmian sailed their yacht, The Snark, to Hawaii, where they went swimming, gave book readings, and got taken around by the Honolulu elite.

One night they were sitting on the veranda of their hotel when a small, slight man appeared, introduced himself as a fellow journalist, and told them about a native Hawaiian sport: surfing.

He turned out to be Alexander Hume Ford, aka Hume, a globetrotting journalist who had published books and articles on Eastern Europe, Russia, Siberia, and China.  He had recently arrived in Hawaii for a brief visit, and fell in love with the surfers on the beach

Particularly 23-year old George Freeth (1883-1918).

Jack, Charmian, Hume, and George spent a riotous vacation together, two couples hitting all of the Honolulu hotspots.

They tried out surfing, and Jack liked it so much that he wouldn't take a break from the sun, and got the sunburn of his life.  He and Charmian returned to America devotees of the newly discovered sport.

Enraptured by surfing -- and by Hawaii's cultural and natural wonders -- Hume extended his visit indefinitely.  He and George became inseparable companions..  Later in 1907, when a Congressional delegation toured the islands to determine if Hawaii was ready for statehood, they acted as their guides.

When industrialist Henry Huntington read about George's surfing exploits, he invited him to come to California to give a demonstration.  George stayed on, living in the Huntington mansion, introducing surfing to the beaches of Southern California, and inventing new lifeguarding techniques.  He died suddenly in 1919.

Hume soon found a new protege, 17-year old Duke Kahanamoku, and began promoting him as Hawaii's "Champion Surf Rider." Kahanamoku went on to become an Olympic Gold Medalist and actor, and to befriend such beefcake legends as Johnny Weissmuller.

Hume stayed in Hawaii permanently, promoting the sport of surfing in books and articles, joining surf clubs, founding the famous Outrigger Canoe Club, writing and editing Mid-Pacific Magazine, and photographing muscular young men standing next to their surfboards.

He died in 1945, and is still remembered today for his undaunted enthusiasm for the sport of surfing, and for his adopted home.

Of course, it's possible that Hume and George weren't partners, that they weren't even gay.  But they never married, they sought out the company of men throughout their lives, and they rhapsodized about the lean, muscular bodies of surfers gleaming in the sun.

See also: Duke Kahanamoku

James Shigeta and His Gay Buddies

Asian male actors have been underrepresented in American media, and when they appear at all, they are typecast as computer nerds and wise purveyors of inscrutable wisdom, never as hetero-romantic leads.  Even when they are action heroes, they never "get the girl."

Except for James Shigeta, who died a few days ago at the age of 85.   When he first started out in Hollywood in the 1950s, he broke through the racial barriers to land hetero-romantic roles.  One was even interracial, which scandalized audiences in the 1960s.

Generally the pursuit of The Girl was mediated by a competitor or buddy, giving Shigeta's movies a number of pleasant gay subtexts.

The Crimson Kimono (1959): Two L.A. detectives (Shigeta, bisexual actor Glenn Corbett) fall in love with the same girl.

Flower Drum Song (1961): Two Chinese-American men, a nightclub owner (Jack Soo) and a college student (Shigeta) fall in love with the same girl.

Paradise, Hawaiian Style (1966): Elvis starts a helicopter service in Hawaii, and bonds with Dan Kohana (James Shigeta) and his ten-year old daughter.

Nobody's Perfect (1968): In Japan, an American soldier (Physique Pictorial star Doug McClure) falls in love with a Japanese woman who is betrothed to a traditional man (Shigeta).

Shigeta received fewer starring roles after the Swinging Sixties ended, but he appeared on tv in Medical Center, Mission: Impossible, The Young Lawyers, The Streets of San Francisco, and Hawaii Five-O, playing both idealistic young heroes and villains.

I remember him in Samurai (1979), a silly tv pilot with Joe Penny (then rumored to be gay) as a lawyer who goes undercover as a samurai warrior (which the producers thought was some kind of superhero).  Shigeta played Takeo, his Asian-wisdom-spouting sensei.

In Cage (1989) and Cage 2 (1994), two buddy-bonding man-mountains (Lou Ferrigno, Reb Brown) open a bar, and run afoul of the gang lord Tin Lum Yin (Shigeta) and his illegal "cage matches."

His last role was in The People I've Slept With (2009), about a woman who has had many lovers.  When she finds herself pregnant, she goes on a quest to find the father, accompanied by her gay BFF (Wilson Cruz). Shigeta plays her hip dad.

No wife is mentioned in his wikipedia article.  Maybe he was gay.

See also: What Happened to the Asian Beefcake?