"The Unlisted": Come for the Australian-Indian Culture, Stay for the Gay Subtexts

In The Unlisted, twelve-year old twins Kal (the cool one) and Dru (the smart one, signified by his glasses) are...

Did I say twelve?  They are played by sixteen-year old Vrund and Ved Rao, who could easily be mistaken for college students, and look decidedly out of place in a school full of 12-year olds.

If you can get past the jarring age discrepancy, the setting in the Australian-Indian community is interesting.  In the first episode, everyone is in a flurry to prepare for Divali.  I liked the scene where the jar of ghee breaks, so they have to run from store to store, but everyone is sold out, except for one shop which won't sell to Kal because he doesn't speak Hindi: "You can't pick and choose your culture."

In the second episode, a mean girl is spying on them,so they invite her into the family store and disgust her with Indian snacks like chili banana chips and nimboo pickles.

In the third episode, it's Multicultural Day, so Grandma introduces the school to the Indian sport of kabbadi.

Why not just make it a sitcom about clashing values of modern and traditional Australian-Indians? But instead we have dystopian sci-fi:

A corporation called The Infinity Group is providing free dental exams to all students, but Dru  is afraid of dentists, so he talks Kal into taking his place.  Tim (Otis Dhanji), whose parents refused to permit the checkup, goes missing.

Later everyone who got a "checkup" freezes in place.  They are being controlled by dental implants!  Plus they are super-strong and fast.

 Dru must pretend that he is being controlled, and get Kal to take his place for the athletic tests, while the boys try to unravel the sinister plot.

Eventually they find allies in their aunt, a doctor who got a job with the initiative without realizing what it was about, and Jiao  (Zachary Wan), whose implant never worked.

And four refugees who knew too much and are now on the run:  three girls and Jacob (Nya Cofie, right), although Gemma (Jean Hinchliffe) is so androgynous that I thought the character was meant to be nonbinary.

Originality of the plot: C-.  It's been done before.  See:  The Tripods.

Beefcake: D.  Most of the actors are too young to be of interest.

Gay characters: A.  The twins have a built-in gay subtext, two of the refugee girls are in a romantic relationship, an adult ally says she was "queer before there was a word for it," and lack of expressed heterosexual interest abounds.

Fade out kiss: C.  Dru states that he and Chloe are "just friends," but Grandma goes on and on about which girl thinks the boys are handsome and wants to date them.

Australian-Indian culture: A+.

"Selection Day": Ultra-Closeted Gay Cricket Players Who Don't Play Cricket

The 2016 novel Selection Day, by Aravind Andiga, traces the journey of two boys, Radhu and Manju, being groomed by their father to become cricket stars.  Well, perhaps "aggressively shoved into" is more accurate.  The elder Mr. Kumar is completely obsessed with the sport, and believes that his sons are his ticket to fame and fortune. 

Manju, the central character, has two secrets: he doesn't like cricket very much, but he's afraid to tell his father tha he wants to become a scientists; and he's gay.  But if he comes out, he will lose his cricket scholarship and his career -- cricket is even more heterosexist than American sports, and gay athletes absolutely "do not and cannot exist."

His wealthy boyfriend Javed encourages him to come out anyway, but you know, Manju is poor.  The rich have options that the poor do not.  They can choose not to marry.  They can spend most of their time in London.  They can be "eccentric" without losing their families, their social statuses, maybe their lives.  The poor have to marry or die, they can't flee to London.  They are stuck.  The novel ends with Manju stuck.

I was interested in seeing how the Netflix tv series (2018) would handle the book.  After all, Manju being gay is pretty much the entire plot.  How could they heterosexualize him? 

Turns out that they don't exactly heterosexualize him, but they gay-subtext him into oblivion.  He's angst-ridden over something that is unknown and unknowable.  He kind of glances at Javed. He hangs out with girls.

Javed (Karanvir Malhotra, above) is such a minor character that he doesn't make much of an impression at all.

I actually get more of gay vibe from Lord Subramayan (Shiv Pandit, top photo and left), Manju's touch-feely mentor. But it's a creepy-homophobic gay predator vibe.

If I didn't know Manju was gay from the book, I'd never figure it out in the series.  In an interview, Mohammad Samad (who plays Manju) states that he wasn't even aware that his character was gay until after he was cast.

I have two more questions about this boring, homophobic mess:

1. These are athletes. Shouldn't there be some locker room scenes, or at least some shirtless workouts?

2. In a tv series about cricket players, shouldn't there be some scenes with them playing cricket?

Why Orangeburg?

Manish Dayal, the Indian-American actor who has appeared in White Frog, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., 90210, and The Resident, was born in Orangeburg, South Carolina in 1983.

So, when his parents or grandparents immigrated from India, they could settle in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, or San Francisco, but out of all of the great cities in the U.S., they thought they would be happiest in Orangeburg, South Carolina?

Ok, let's see what that city has to offer that beats the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Loop, West Hollywood, or Castro Street.

Location: in the middle of nowhere, about halfway between Columbia and Charleston.

Demographics: Population 14,000, 75% African-American, median household income $30,000.

Violent and property crime rates: Among the highest per capita in the nation.

Bodybuilders: Darius "Buff" Milton.

Politics: 67% voted for Clinton in the 2016 Presidential Election

Sights:
The National Fish Hatchery
Edisto Memorial Garden, with 4000 varieties of roses
I.P. Stanback Museum and Planetarium
The Pink Palace (the old Orangeburg jail)

Bookstores:
Only Christian ones.

Restaurants:
Thai Lotus

Gyms:
Orangeburg Athletic Club
Orangeburg New City Gym

High schools:
Orangeburg-Wilkinson Senior High.  No gay club, but a Gentlemen's Club and a Les Charmes.  Sports: volleyball, wrestling, track.

Orangeburg Christian Academy

Orangeburg Preparatory Academy

Colleges:
Claflin College (historically black, the top liberal arts college in the state)

South Carolina State University (historically bl
ack)

Churches:
Church of God Which He Hath Purchased with His Own Blood
Four Holes Baptist Church
Orangeburg Baptist Tabernacle (Tim Tebow is apparently a member)
Gospel Temple of Deliverance
Holy Trinity Catholic Church

Mosques:
Masjid al Taqwa

Hinduism:
Hindu Temple and Cultural Center

Shri Swaminarayan Mandir. A temple devoted to a sect of Hinduism that reveres Swaminarayan (1781-1830) as an emanation of the Divine.

I'm beginning to think that maybe Orangeburg has a lot of emanations of the Divine.

Two Boys and an Elephant: Jay North on Maya

In the movie Maya (1966), Terry (15-year old Jay North,  formerly Dennis the Menace) travels to India with his father, runs away after an argument, and meets Raji (14-year old Sajid Khan) and his elephant, Maya.  Not for the first time.  The white European or American paired with the Indian jungle boy is commonplace in post-War movies and tv, probably deriving from the work of Sabu in the 1940s.

After many adventures, nude shots, and buddy-bonding moments, including a scene in which the two literally hold hands, Terry and Raji  are reunited with Terry's father and go back to America together.

When the beefcake-heavy Flipper ended in 1966, its Saturday night timeslot was filled by a tv version of Maya  (1967-68).  It was retconned a little: now Terry goes to India in search of his missing father, and though he never displays a bare backside, he apparently forgot to pack any shirts.  He meets the androgynous, gay-coded Raji, who also owns no shirts, and they spend the next 18 episodes caring for each other, rescuing each other from danger, and gazing deeply into each other's eyes.

Gay kids were ecstatic -- it was like Jonny Quest and Hadji come to life, or Andy's Gang in color!  But producers must have found the homoerotic romance a little too overt.  In the next season, the time slot was taken over by the macho cops of Adam-12.

Sajid Khan looked like my friend Bobby in Rock Island: brown and firm-bodied, with soulful black eyes and full lips.  There hadn't been a South Asian in teen culture since Gunga Ram of Andy's Gang (and even he was played by a Caucasian), so Sajid got some play in the teen magazines.


After Maya, he tried his hand at singing, performing on It's Happening in 1968 and releasing a teen idol album in 1969.


He returned to India during the 1970s, starred in a few films there, and then retired from show business.

India is not known for being gay friendly, so Sajid was surprised to discover that there were rumors that he was gay.  In an 2011 interview with The Times of India, he acknowledged the rumors and said "I have not gone out and tried to change people's perceptions.  I have never done things to try to win brownie points in my life."

Jay North, tall, thin, and blond, didn't get much attention from the teen magazines -- they already had Dean Paul Martin, Davy Jones, and the Cowsills.  But gay boys still liked him.

After Maya, he moved into voice work, live theater, and The Teacher (1974), in which he seduces his older teacher (and if you look closely, you can see him getting into the scene).

Today he works with Paul Petersen on A Minor Consideration.  He has been married to women twice, but remains a gay ally.

There's a Jay North hookup story on Tales of West Hollywood.

Asian Muscle #3: South Asia

South Asia is dominated by India, a land of 1.3 billion people speaking over 700 languages, mostly Indo-Aryan in the north (Hindi, Bengali, Punjabi, Assamese) and Dravidian in the South (Tamil, Telugu).  It is the birthplace of four of the world's major religions, Hinduism. Sikhism, Jainism, and Buddhism, plus there are many adherents of Islam, and Christianity.  It is an extremely poor country, with a GDP per capita of U.S. $1,700 (compared to $39,000 in Japan and $30,000 in France).  But there is a huge middle class able to afford cars, houses, trips to Paris and Munich, and gym memberships.

This bodybuilder is from Tamil Nadu, in the south.

The Tamil language is Dravidian, so nothing like Hindi:

Show me your sausage.
Hindi: Mujhe apana sosej dikhao
Tamil: Uṅkaḷ tottiṟai kāṭṭuṅkaḷ

Punjabi, however, is Indo-Aryan.  The resemblance is obvious:

Hindi: Mujhe apana sosej dikhao
Punjabi: Mainū āpaṇā lagūcā dikhā'ō

Punjab is 60% Sikh.

Mumbai, formerly called Bombay, was a major British colonial capital. The most common language is Marathi, which is Indo-Aryan.

Manush Chauhan, called "The Indian Billy Elliot," grew up in Mumbai.  He is now dancing for the Oregon Ballet Theater and speaks fluent English, but if you want to impress him, here's how to say "Come to my hotel room":

Hindi:    mere hotal ke kamare mein aao
Marathi: Mājhyā hŏṭēla rūmamadhyē yē

422 million people, or about half the population, speak Hindi as their first language.  They are concentrated primarily in north central India, around New Delhi, although many others speak Hindi as a second or third language.  You can get along in India fine with some conversational Hindi plus English.

2015 Mr. Delhi Bodybuilding Contest

Nepal is known for its stunning Hindu and Buddhist temples, its view of the Himalayas, and its gay-friendliness.  Not only are same-sex relations legal (as opposed to, say, India), but there laws against discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.

Bhutan, a small Himalayan country with less than a million people, is known for its distinctive penis shrines.  40% of the population speaks Nepali, and the rest a variety of languages related to Tibetan, notably Dzongkha.  

The 1947 Partition of India resulted in two states, the primarily Hindu India and the primarily Muslim Pakistan (divided into east and west).  Millions of people with the "wrong" religion immigrated to and from the new states. Hindustani was already split into Hindi (spoken mostly by Hindus) and Urdu (spoken mostly by Muslims), so Urdu became the official language of Pakistan.

Today Pakistan often is at odds with India, and the people often look west toward the Middle East.  It is more conservative than India on gay rights.

Bangladesh, formerly East Pakistan, was once the poorest country in Asia.  Economic growth has been tremendous.  The World Bank estimates that only 16% of the population is now living in poverty.

In 2017, Naseef Rahman represented Bangladesh at the Mr. Global bodybuilding competition.

Sri Lanka, called Ceylon by the colonials, is primarily Sinhalese.  The Tamil minority have been pushing for independence for years.  After a 26-year long civil war, the Tamil Tigers were defeated.

The Top 10 Public Penises of Hinduism

If I had to select a religion based on beefcake alone, Jainism would be #1, where the holy men walk around naked.

But #2 would have to be Hinduism.  Where else can you find a god who offers wisdom, compassion, and enlightenment plus a bodybuilder's physique?

And they make them big.  Statues of Hindu gods are some of the tallest in the world.  Here are the top 10 Public Penises of Hinduism.

The Trimurti, the three Great Gods who represent different aspects of the Divine, are a little too esoteric for representation.  Only Lord Shiva, who destroys and transforms life, appears often.









1. Lord Shiva at Rishikesh, on the banks of the Ganges.  It was washed away by flood waters in 2010.

2. There are several other statues of Lord Shiva that are even bigger.  The one in Kachnar City, Jabalpur is 75 feet tall.

By the way, Mohit Raina (top photo) plays Lord Shiva in the popular Indian tv series Devon ke Dev (2011-)











3. Lord Vishnu, who preserves and maintains life, is represented by this very detailed -- and very large -- bust in Bali.

4. Vishnu has 10 avatars, for various incarnations of the world.  The one for humans, Lord Krishna, receives lots of devotion.  For members of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, he's the ultimate god of the universe.  Usually he's portrayed as a baby, or as a beautiful youth. Here he stands beside his bull, Nandi.

5. Another avatar of Vishnu, Rama, lived about 1.2 million years ago.  He is the protagonist of the Ramayana and a veritable action hero.  Sometimes he's portrayed with his devoted wife Parvati at his side, but alone, he's used for both secular and profane purposes.  Here a young boy appears to be crawling under his legs.




More after the break

The Bodybuilding Villages of India

In West Hollywood, everyone went to the gym.  The dating game was very competitive, and if you had a partner, there were lots of guys eager to break you up.  So you had to be in shape.  We joked that you could always tell the sexual orientation of guys in their 40s: the gay men looked 30, and the heterosexuals looked 60.

But there's a village in India where nearly the entire adult male population, gay and straight alike,  is into bodybuilding.

Actually two adjoining suburbs, Asola and Fatehpur-Beri, about 10 miles south of New Delhi, near the airport.

They belong to the Gurjar, a Scheduled Tribe (historically disadvantaged) from Rajasthan, previously nomadic, relocated to Delhi to work in farming and low-paying government jobs.  But mostly unemployed until they discovered bodybuilding.

The bodybuilding craze began 15 years ago, by accident.  A wealthy businessman, driving past, saw some of the village men wrestling, and offered them 2,000 rupees apiece (about $32 U.S.) to be the security guards at a wedding he was hosting.
This was big money!  They jumped at the opportunity.

Soon professional bouncer agencies were placing the other muscular young men of the village.  The more massive, the better.

You can make a living through your physique?

 Everyone started hitting the gym.

Kids growing up looked to bodybuilders as role models.

Now over 200 villagers are employed as "hired muscle": bouncers at New Delhi's trendy nightclubs, private security guards, and bodyguards.

The jobs are temporary: once you reach your 30s, your attractiveness to potential employers declines.  But by then, most of the  men have used their connections to pursue other careers.  Some have become wealthy businessmen.

I assume that the standard proportion are gay; the gay dating services list a number of men from Asola and Fatehpur.

See also: A Bodybuilding Contest in India; and The Erotic Temple Carvings of Khajuraho

Jay North's Gay Connection

Dennis the Menace (1959-63), the sitcom adaptation of  Hank Ketcham's comic strip, was before my time and rarely rerun, so I have never seen it.  But I knew Jay North's Dennis, a gangly blond wearing a striped shirt and white overalls with a famously breathless "golly gee" tone (acquired when his director told the eight-year old to "act younger").  For the first generation of Baby Boomers, he became the iconic Dennis the Menace, even though he was no menace -- his character was kind, helpful, sweet-tempered, even "square," an object of ridicule when the Boomers grew into cynical teenagers.

Jay did not enjoy his years on Dennis.  His work schedule was brutal -- not only the show, but guest shots, talk shows, and even an album; he was not allowed to play with the other children on the set, or to get a decent education; his guardians were physically and emotionally abusive. And even after he left the series, he couldn't escape Dennis.  He had trouble making friends among his cynical teenage peers; he couldn't keep up in school; casting directors wouldn't consider him.

The highlight of Jay's acting career was the intensely homoromantic movie Maya (1966) and spin-off tv series (1967-68).  He loved the location shoots in India; he and his costar, Sajid Khan, became lifelong friends. And he was proud of his performance.  But teen idol fame eluded him.

So he tried to distance himself from Dennis by playing mature, adult roles.





The Gay Connection:

In 1969, gay superstar Sal Mineo was directing Fortune and Men's Eyes at the Coronet Theater in Los Angeles, and playing Rocky, who rapes and abuses the naive Smitty (Don Johnson).  When Don Johnson was hired to do The Magic Garden of Stanley Sweetheart (1970), Jay North auditioned to replace him, hooking up with Sal Mineo in the process.  He rehearsed for several weeks, but the play closed before he could perform.

In 1972, Jay played the lead in a touring company of Norman, Is That You?, about Jewish parents (Hans Conreid, Fritzi Burr) who discover that their son is gay.

Back in Hollywood, Jay did some voiceover work and starred in The Teacher (1974), a sleazy entry in the "teen has sex with older woman" genre.  And his acting career was over.

In the 1990s, he became involved with Paul Petersen's A Minor Consideration, dedicated to ameliorating working conditions for child stars.  Today Jay works as a prison guard in Florida, but he often attends conventions, where he is always happy to talk to the many older gay men who had a crush on him in 1966.

There's a gay dating story about Jay North on Tales of West Hollywood.

Spring 1983: T.S. Eliot. Oh, Swallow, Swallow!

When I was studying for my M.A. in English at Indiana University (1982-84), my professors and most of my classmates agreed that Literature consisted of:

1. Ulysses, by James Joyce
2. The Waste Land, by T.S. Elliot
3. The Tin Drum, by Gunter Grass
4. The Sound and the Fury, by William Faulkner
5. A Confederacy of Dunces, by John Kennedy Toole

And maybe a little Shakespeare.  Everything else was footnotes or hack work.

I hated all of the pretentious rot, but I loved to hate The Waste Land the most.  The only way my gay Indian English-major friend Viju and I could get through it at all was to imagine a gay theme.





It begins with a quote in Latin in which the Cumaean Sybill speaks Greek.  I knew smalle Latin and lesse Greek (see, I can be pretentious, too), but we assumed that anyone speaking Greek is talking about gay people.

Tom (T.S.'s real name) is watching the sunlight over the Starnbergersee (in Munich), saying "We're not Russian" (in German), and calling someone the Hyacinth Girl.  Hyacinth was the gay lover of the Greek god Apollo, so we assumed the Hyacinth Girl is a boy.

Then, wandering around London, Tom sees a guy he knows and asks if the dead bodies he's buried have risen yet.  Tom calls him "mon semblable,—mon frère!"  My double -- my brother!  Charles Baudelaire, who was probably bisexual, wrote it in the gay-themed Fleurs du Mal.  

After a chess game and an elitist dig at pop culture, Tom meets with Lil.  Her husband Albert keeps wanting sex, but she won't put out because she keeps getting pregnant.  Meanwhile someone keeps saying "Hurry up, it's time" (presumably time to die).  Aha!  A critique of the futility of heterosexual marriage!

Tom wanders around London, saying bad words in Elizabethan English.  Mr. Eugenides, who has a pocket full of currants (or maybe he's just happy to see Tom) invites him to a weekend at the Metropole.  Presumably that's a gay hotel, so he wants a homoerotic liaison.

Illustration to Eliot's "Animula" (1927)

Suddenly Tom turns into a man with breasts -- so he thinks that taking the passive role in sex is feminine?   He watches as a working-class man sexually assaults his girlfriend.  She says "Well, I'm glad that's over" and puts on a record.  A critique of heterosexual sex!

Then he takes a barge down the Thames and says "Highbury bore me."  It bores me, too.

A dead guy, Phlebas the Phoenician, floats by.  Tom thinks "he was once handsome and tall."  We were all for depictions of masculine beauty, even in a poem about how we're all going to die.

Then Tom goes to a dry desert where everybody is dead, and wonders if the person walking next to him is a man or a woman.  Androgynous, huh?  Or maybe a drag queen?

The young Tom Eliot

Tom and a friend reminisce about  "the awful daring of a moment’s surrender, which an age of prudence can never retract."  Sounds like you guys had a hot fling in your youth: "by this, and this only, we have existed."

So sex is the meaning of life?

Or is it surrendering to passion: "your heart would have responded  gaily, when invited, beating obedient to controlling hands."

Then everything goes crazy.  People say things in Italian, Latin, French, and Sanskrit.  Come on, Tom, you were born in St. Louis, and everybody knows it.

Somebody quotes an obscure Elizabethan playwright and a 19th century French Romantic poet.  Tom responds "oh, swallow, swallow."

At this point, Viju and I couldn't stop giggling.

This interpretation might not be orthodox, but it did get us through a late-night study session.

And it was a lot of fun to walk up to random guys and say "Oh, swallow, swallow!"

By the way, some contemporary biographers think that Tom was gay, but deeply closeted.

Aaron Stone: Superhero and Android

The Disney Channel is famous for its teencoms, light comedies about teenagers in real-life situations, sometimes with a paranormal element.  But Aaron Stone (2009-2010) was action-adventure, with minimal laugh-tracking.

 It starred Kelly Blatz as Charlie Landers, a 16-year old boy who must assume the identity of video game superhero Aaron Stone to save the world.  He has a gay-vague android sidekick, STAN (J.P. Manoux, right); a female sidekick, Emma, and a younger brother.

As with most Disney Channel series, there were many heterosexual romances, but also substantial gay subtexts. Charlie and STAN have last-minute rescues, full-body hugs, breakups and reconciliations.   Jason (David Lambert) crushes on girls, but also has a rather obvious crush on Charlie, and finally discovers his secret identity.

There is a gay-vague couple, the South Asian "brothers" Vas and Ram Mehta (Vas Saranga, Jesse Rath), who double-date with Charlie and Emma.

Darker, and with a more complex mythology than its competitors, Aaron Stone lasted for only a season and a half before sinking.  But there is still an avid fanbase shipping Charlie and Jason or Vas and Ram, or mixing the pairs up.

It's not out on DVD, but you can see episodes on youtube.

Kelly Blatz went on to star in Glory Daze (2010-2011), the short-lived drama about a college fraternity in the 1980s (his fratmates included Matt Bush).

David Lambert is currently starring in The Fosters, about a lesbian couple with foster children, along with Jake T. Austin.

Jesse Rath and Vas Saranga went on to star in the Canadian teencom Mudpit (2010-2011).  Jesse, who is gay in real life, is currently starring in the sci-fi series Defiance .