Lance Kerwin: The Golden Boy of the 1970s offers gay promise for about five years, then vanishes to Hawaii and fundamentalism

Link to the n*de photos

Fall 1977.  Thursday night meant staying downstairs with the family to watch The Waltons (ugh!) or going up to the room I shared with my brother to watch the ABC lineup of hip sitcoms on our small black-and-white tv: Welcome Back Kotter, What's Happening!, Barney Miller, Carter Country.  But if my brother wasn't around, I changed over to CBS before Barney Miller to watch the opening sequence of James at 15 

James (17-year old Lance Kerwin) jumps out of bed, checks for acne, does overhead presses (shirtless), swims across the pool (displaying his bare shoulders) -- practices the flute, goes skateboarding, photographs some iconic sights of Boston, walks in the rain, walks through a crowd -- and walks through the locker room (in his swimsuit). Teenagers had never seen so much teen idol beefcake.  

I didn't actually watch the show because it was almost entirely about girls: James dates a girl who is "easy," a girl who belongs to a cult, who's taller than him, who plays basketball for a rival team; "becomes a man" with a Swedish exchange student (whereupon the series becomes James at 16), has a disease scare. But just seeing James in a swimsuit was a queer code.

Lance had already been a busy child star, with roles in Emergency, Police Story, Cannon, Gunsmoke, Wonder Woman, and lots of others.  Even as a child, he specialized in contemporary angst drama, like:

The Loneliest Runner (child abuse)

The Death of Richie (drug overdose)

Four episodes of the Roman Catholic "contemporary issues" series Insight (on alcoholism, stalking, unemployment, and hydrophobia).

Five After School Specials (on bullying, stepparents twice, being short, and being poor).

The guy staring at Lance's chest in "The Amazing Cosmic Awareness of Duffy Moon" is Ike Eisenmann, who would go on to a future of jaw-dropping physiques.

But it was James at 15, with its controversial decision to make a teenage boy active with girls, that made Lance the Golden Boy of the 1970s.  He had one memorable foray into horror, a gay-subtext buddy-bond with David Soul in the tv-version of Stephen King's Salem's Lot (1979).

But otherwise it was a lot of angst with his shirt off: buddy-bonding with alcoholic high schooler Scott Baio in The Boy Who Drank Too Much (1980)

Dealing with his parents' divorce (in Children of Divorce, 1980)

Accidentally shooting Wil Wheaton in "The Shooting" (1982)

Being threatened by his murderous Dad in A Murder in the Family (1983). 

Eric Stolz played another threatened brother (n*de photos on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends)

More after the break