Kampan Soni: Czech-Indian boy plays a ghost-chaser and a bartender, jokes about cats, doesn't mention girls. With potential n*de photos

 

Link to the n*de dudes

Ride or Die on Amazon Prime, features a professional assassin named Judith, being pushed out of the business due to her age, who discovers that baddies are targeting an MP (that's Member of Parliament, to Yanks) and his wife, Debbie.  Who happens to be her "ride or die" (best friend).

I reviewed the first episode.  Not a fan. 

Not much beefcake. We see Judith's hookup (Taylor Napier, on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends) shirtless, and her mark (Ed Skrein) coming out of the shower. 

No gay characters.  Calum Lynch (left) as Judith's handler gives off a gay vibe, but he flirts with a girl.

Even crowd scenes display endless arrays of male-female couples. 

And there's a nasty bit of queerbaiting.  In an antique warehouse, the PM's wife Debbie gets to a prized apothecary cabinet before celebrity antique dealer Drew Pritchard and his boyfriend.  They fume with envy.  Except the real-life guy is straight.  They just pretended he was gay to fool viewers. 

The only bright spot was Kampan Soni, the  cute bartender who Debbie complains to as she downs tequila after tequila.

Kampan grew up in Ahmendabad, in Gujarat State in western India, and graduated from St. Xavier High School in 2018.

He then moved to Prague, where he received a B.Sci. in Agriculture and Food Sciences in 2022.  He is currently a Global Mobility Specialist at   Amazon Prague, which means working in Human Resources.

There are two n*de photos on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends.

Plus he does comedy povs: "Making you question things you never noticed: Facts, Psychology, Hidden History"

"Why does the ATM pin have only four digits?"

"What do cats really think about?" 

"Why do we like horror movies?"

"Why are popcorns so expensive?"

More after the break

Jonny Quest: Gay in the 1960s, hetero in the 1990s, gay again (sort of) in the 2010s

An adventure series with distinctively realistic animation,Jonny Quest first appeared on prime time in 1965-65, and then on Saturday morning through the 1970s. Renowned scientist Dr. Benton Quest (Don Messick), with a reddish-brown beard and a white lab coat, and his white-haired, hard-muscled boyfriend Race Bannon, investigate weird mysteries in the Andes, the Artic, the Sargasso Sea, or most commonly in steamy jungles full of dragon-like lizards and headhunters.

 Tagging along, either to figure out the mystery or get abducted by bad guys, are Dr. Quest’s 11-year old son, Jonny (Tim Matheson) and his companion Hadji (Danny Bravo), who met them in Calcutta and then tagged along for no logical reason except that he rather liked Jonny.

Dr. Quest and Race Bannon were quite obviously gay partners. Neither displayed the slightest interest in women.

 Race was often drawn in a swimsuit so his massive muscles were visible.  Here he stains himself with purple berry juice to convince the savage Po-Po Indians that he is a god.

But I was more interested in Jonny and Hadji. Jonny, blond in a tough guy’s black turtleneck, rushes double-fisted into danger, while Hadji, slim and brown with petite hands, wearing a turban with a ruby in it all the time (even when swimming), is skittish and emotional, shouting “Be careful!” from the sidelines as he waits for an opportunity to assist with his mystical arts.

Hadji is presumably Hindu, although the turban suggests Sikh (in the 1990s series, his full name is Hadji Singh).  So why is his name an honorary title given to Muslims who have completed the hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca?

He was one in  long line of South Asian boy-adventurers such as Sabu (left), Kim in the Corentin series, Gunga Andy's Gang, and Raji on  Maya (below) .

More after the break

Andy's Gang: Beefcake and Bonding on 1950s Children's TV

The earliest generation of Boomer kids have fond memories of tv programs that, at least to modern sensibilities, seem outlandish and bizarre.  You Can't Do That On Television in the 1980s can't even begin to compete with the weirdness of Kukla, Fran, and Ollie, Pinkie Lane, or Howdy Doody.  

But the weirdest of all was Andy's Gang (1955-60), hosted by long-time Western sidekick Andy Devine (previously a radio and tv series hosted by Ed McConnell, and called Smilin' Ed's Gang)

1. A scary kid with blond page boy curls and one eye perpetually closed announced "I'm Buster Brown...I live in a shoe.  Here's my dog Tige...he lives in there,too."  Whereupon the studio audience went wild with laughter (actually, it was the same clip of a hysterical kid, over and over again).

2. The anarchic Froggy the Gremlin kept popping in to skewer human pretensions and stir things up.  Cue the same clip of a studio audience going into hysterics.

3. A cat named Midnight could talk. But she said only one word: "Nice," and it sounded more like a meow.  Cue the hysterical laughter.

But gay kids in the audience were waiting for the "Story Time" segment about Gunga, an Indian boy (surprisingly buff college student Nino Marcel).  He was supposed to be Indian, but he looked sort of like Jay North on the similarly-Indian themed Maya, or an older version of  Jonny Quest.  I'll bet he had blond hair under that turban.

Although they lived in India, Gunga and his boyfriend, Rama (a surprisingly buff Vito Scotti) got into Bomba the Jungle Boy-style adventures with animal poachers, lost cities, and savage cannibal tribes.

But unlike Bomba, they had no interest in girls, at least not in the episodes I watched. Rama was the one who usually needed rescuing.

They were amazingly physical in their interactions, always hugging, clinging together, touching arms and shoulders.

Afterwards, Andy would end the program by underscoring the buddy-bonding:  "We're pals, and pals stick together!"  Then, to keep Christian fundamentalists happy, "Remember, Sunday school or church tomorrow!"  (No Hindus in the audience, apparently.)

Nino Marcel also played his Gunga Ram character, but with a different premise, in the feature film Sabaka (1954): he is a young elephant trainer who vows revenge against the evil cult that killed his family. His costar was none other than the famous Boris Karloff.

You can watch the full movie here.

See also: Burr Tillstrom, the gay puppeteer behind Kukla, Fran, and Ollie.

Beefcake and Bonding in the Green Library

When I was studying French in high school,  if I ever tired of Tintin, Alix and Enak, Corentin, and Spirou and Fantasio, I could move on to the small square children's books published by the Librairie Hachette, the Bibliotheque Rose (pink) for humor and the Bibliotheque Verte (green) for action/adventure.

I preferred the green, especially Georges Bayard's Michel series, about a 15-year old and his older brother who sleuthed like the Hardy Boys (Michel a Rome, Michel en plongee, Michel et Monsieur X, etc.)  Except there were more kidnappings and last-minute rescues than the Hardy Boys faced, more stories set on boats and at the beach, and  unlike the American adventure boy series of the 1940s and 1950s  Hachette was not skimpy on the beefcake.  He was as physique-intensive as the British boys annuals.  Apparently being a teen sleuth gives you a magnificent physique.

I also liked the Italian street urchin of David Daniell's "By Jiminy" books in his French translation, Cricketto (Cricketto de Napoli, Cricketto et le petite prince, Cricketto dans la foret vierge, and so on).  He became a lean, muscular teenager, who adventured and buddy-bonded with his older friend and benefactor, Tom Trevor.  The illustrations favored black speedos for Tom and red for Cricketto.

Willis Lindquist's Haji of the Elephants is about a young Indian mahout and his Western boyfriend, in the tradition of Sabu, Jonny and Hadji, and Terry and Raji.  But in the French translation, they both became teenagers in dhotis with beautifully drawn chests and shoulders.

Rene Guillot wrote many juvenile adventure stories about massive Tarzans raised in the wilderness, such as Le Chef au masque d'or. 

And I can't even begin to count the homoerotic subtexts in Philippe Ebly's "Conquerants de l'Impossible" series, about three buffed, eternally shirtless teenagers from different time periods: Serge (modern France), Xolotl (Aztec Mexico), and Thibault (Medieval France).  They band together in a complex plot arc that decides the fate of worlds, while never so much as looking at a girl.

Ebly also wrote the "Evades du temps" series (Time Runaways), about two  teenagers, Thierry and Didier, who are hiking through a mysterious woods when they become unstuck in time, like Paul in Spellbinder.  They meet the prehistoric teenager Kouroun, who doesn't own a shirt, and band together to fight supernatural enemies and look for a way home.

They even had gay-themed novels, such as Pierre Loti's Iceland Fisherman.

I wonder if my French teacher noticed that I only borrowed the books with the beefcake covers.

In college I discovered a whole new collection, the Signe de Piste.

Panchayat: Gay Subtext Series (With a Little Tweeking) from India

Indian mass media has a rather poor record on gay representation, but that doesn't mean you can't queer the text.  I'm going to go into the Indian tv series Panchayat cold, without any research, because the star Jitendra Kumar is cute.  And I'm going to assume throughout that, no matter what, that the protagonist is gay.

(After watching the episode, I discovered that Kumar plays a gay guy who marries his boyfriend in the 2020 comedy Shubh Mangal Zyada Saavdhan).

Scene 1: A bus through  the desolate Indian countryside of Uttar Pradesh (Americans: think Kansas).  Abishek cuddles against his boyfriend, who wears a fluffy white sweater tied around his neck.  They both ask the conductor when they will reach Phulera.  

Cut to Abishek at the mall, now in a blue sweater with a feminine silver bracelet, explaining to his chubby friend Prateet why he took a job as Secretary to the Village Pachayat (Office of Rural Development).  In a small town 100 miles from the nearest gay bar!  "What choice did I have? I should have gone to a better college."  

Prateet looks on the bright side: "It's not teaching Gay Studies in Paris, but you'll be digging sewers, building roads. Imagine the hunks in your crew, girlfriend!  You'll be getting more action than any of the big city queens.  Come on, I'll buy you a striped shirt.  They're slimming!"

Back to the bus.  Cuddle Bear was just a trick -- Abishek is alone when they finally reach Phulera -- or rather, the dry desolate outskirts. 

Scene 2:  Chubby Prahlad and svelte, stylish Vikas are sitting on a bench outside a run-down government building, waiting for Abishek's arrival:  Prahlad says: "I hope he's a top -- and hung!" Vikas scoffs: "And into you?  Please!"  

Abishek drives up on his motorcycle.  They check out his bulge while Vikas introduces himself as his new assistant.  "And Prahlad is the Deputy Pradhan (deputy mayor, I think). I sent you his profile on Grindr, remember?"

"Sure," Abishek says.  "I'm into chubbies.  We'll talk later."

They are moving Abishek into a spare room in the building.  It's all furnished, but the bed might be too big  -- they didn't know how...um...big Abishek was.

Scene 3: Town rich guy Brij Bushan, husband of the Pradham (mayor?), arrives.  First he makes Vikas wash his hands for him, and then search in his pockets for the key to the building.  Obviously he expects Vikas to grope him.  Abishek is shocked -- what a closet case!  This is the 21st century.  Just come out!

Scene 4: Brij lost his key, so they head to the fields to look for it.  Abishek gets squirted by a water jet and steps in ox poop, and there aren't any hunks around!  He thinks: I wish I was back in Delhi, cruising the waiters at the Cafe D'Etoile!

They can't find the key, so Vikas drives into town to fetch a locksmith.

While they are waiting, Brij invites Prahlad home for "um...a cup of tea."  He refuses.  Not into Daddies!

Scene 5:  Brij's house.  He tells his battleaxe wife: "I'm thinking of inviting the new Secretary over for dinner."  She yells: "Sure, invite the Secretary, and those two queens from the office, and all of your Grindr hookups ! Turn this house int a gay bar!  I don't mind!"

Scene 6:  Abishek is walking through the disheveled, rundown, old-fashioned village, where women still wear saris and carry water jugs on their heads, and the men are all homophobic: "You dress mighty fancy.  Where are you from, San Francisco?"  Or else they try to grift money from him.

Scene 7: Abishek waits at the office.  Finally Vikas returns, with no locksmith and a convoluted story about how he got into a motorcycle accident.  They have to break the lock to get into the building.

Cut to Battleaxe Wife yelling: "You're not breaking my lock, you worm! Let the office stay closed!"

"But the Secretary will have no place to stay -- unless he stays with us."

"What?  You want to move one of your boyfriends into my house?  No way! Just break the lock!"

Scene 8: Night.  Abishek arrives at Brij's house for dinner.   Brij cautions him: "The situation inside is delicate, so be careful.  Stay in the closet, ok?"  

The two eat.  Wife cooks, but is too homophobic to join them.

Scene 9:  Back at the office.  Vikas didn't break the lock -- he broke the whole door down. 

A horrible, dark, dusty room, with papers and furniture scattered everywhere.  An antiquated computer.  Beefcake pictures of Rama and Vishnu on the walls.  

They leave Abishek to his squalid digs.  He calls his friend Prateet in the city. "This is much worse than I expected!  I want out!  I want to come home!"

"But sweetie, the only way you can get another job is to clear CAT (the Common Admission Test for graduate management training)" Prateet tells him. "Besides, this experience will look good on your resume.  You've seen the real India, the down-to-earth Middle America of India!"

"The Middle America of India is full of closet cases and homophobic idiots.  I'm studying for the CAT.  Send me the books, in care of Vikas Khan."

"You have a boyfriend already?  Girl, I told you there'd be wall to wall hunks!"

"Just write down the address."

We zoom out to the utter darkness of the countryside.

The end.

I changed a tiny bit of dialogue, but otherwise this is a major gay subtext series.

See also: Deli Boys: Brothers discover a secret about their Dad.  With lots of gay characters and some random Pakistani d*cks

Never Have I Ever: Indian teenage meets the bulge that can raise the dead

"Never Have I Ever": Indian Teenager Meets the Bulge That Can Raise the Dead

The teen coming-of-age comedy Never Have I Ever showed up on my recommendation list on Netflix.  It's been a desert for so long that we returned to the DVD service.  So...

Scene 1. Fifteen-year old Indian-American Devi (Maitreya Ramakrishnan) is praying, sort of -- does it count if you ask the gods, "What's popping?"  Her requests: to be invited to a party with alcohol; to get less arm hair; and to get a stone-cold hottie boyfriend.

Gee, if the Hindu gods provide hotties, I might set up an altar to Ganesha in my bedroom.

Scene 2. John McEnroe, the tennis legend,narrates Devi's story.  First her father (Sendhil Ramamurthy) dies.  Then her legs stop working, confining her to a wheelchair.

She had two friends, science nerd Fabiana and drama queen Eleanor.  Plus she has a crush on Paxton the God (Daren Barnet).

Cue him rising from the swimming pool and walking past at bulge-level.  Whew!  Is it even possible to have one that big?  What does he call it, Godzilla?).

And suddenly, her legs work again.  She rises from her wheelchair and walks!

So...what else can Paxton's bulge raise up?

Scene 3. Devi lives with her micromanaging Mom ("Don't let the textbook fall to the floor!  I'll have to drove all the way out to Rancho Cucamonga to get it blessed again!) and her perfect cousin Kamala ("I'm not a model, I'm a biologist.  I'm too curvaceous to be a model).

Scene 4. At Sherman Oaks High, Devi reveals her plan to rebrand the squad, making them "glamorous women of color" through getting boyfriends.  She wants Fabiola to date the short  but handsome Alex Gomez, and Eleanor gets Boris Kozlov,the Russian exchange student (shown eating an onion like an apple).

Devi herself is going for Jonah Sharpe (Dino Petrera), who presents every gay stereotype in the book but is not out yet, and so popular that she can springboard from him to a straight guy.

Meanwhile, Devi's nemesis, Ben Gross (Jaren Lewison), overhears their flirtation.

Scene 5. Ben's father is an entertainment attorney, so a celebrity I never heard of came to his bar mitzvah. He's a know-it-all, an elitist, a snob.  He has no friends.  He and Devi have been competiting for awards and honors for years.

Sounds ike a teen romance coming up.

Scene 6. Time for the hip bohemian teacher Mr. Shapiro to begin class: "Facing History and Ourselves."  They'll be unpacking uncomfortable topics like slavery (he looks at Fabiana) and the Holocaust (he looks at Ben).

Then Paxton the God shows up, and Devi decides to jump past the gay guy to grab for the pot of gold...or should that be bulge of gold?

More after the break

Sabu: The Original Jungle Boy and His Boyfriend

An orphan, the son of a mahout, Sabu Dastigir was riding a real elephant around Mysore when he was signed to star in Elephant Boy (1937), an adaptation of the Kipling tale "Toomai of the Jungle."  Wearing only a dhoti and turban, his last name deleted to make him seem more savage, he became a media sensation.  He was transplanted to England as a ward of the state and enrolled in school, but he found little time to study when he was receiving almost as much publicity as Johnny Weissmuller.

After a starring role in the pro-colonial Drum (1938), he was cast in The Thief of Bagdad (1940), set in the mythical past, an "Arabian fantasy in technicolor."  In the 1924 silent version, Douglas Fairbanks plays a thief who wins a princess, but Sabu would not win any princesses.  Instead, the spunky, enterprising  thief Abu falls in love with Prince Ahmad (John Justin), who has been deposed by an evil uncle.  The two escape together, steal a boat, and plan to sail downstream from Bagdad to the ocean, where they might find a safe haven in the wilderness.  But then Prince Ahmad falls in love with a princess from another kingdom, and insists that they stay in Bagdad. The rest of the movie involves the prince ignoring, endangering, or simply abandoning Abu to make time with the princess.  In the throws of unrequited love, Abu often looks hurt but never complains.

After starring in a loose adaptation of Kipling's Jungle Book (1942), in which Mowgli befriends both a native girl and a British officer but falls in love with neither, Sabu moved to Hollywood and signed on with Universal, where he starred as a dhoti-clad Jungle Boy in three Technicolor romances, all set in distant lands where no one had ever heard of Hitler.   Sabu was in a rather precarious position.  Although he (or rather, his body) was the top-billed star, he was irrelevant to the plots, about swarthy adventurer Jon Hall wooing cool, mysterious Maria Montez.

Sabu became a darling of World War II beefcake photos.  His torso, v-shaped, barrel-chested, bronze-skinned, sculpted but softening slightly at the stomach, is often displayed in a bright light against a black backdrop, so that every muscle will stand out.  The only problem is, he has no one to desire; in movie after movie, his same-sex loves go unrequited.

 He courts Jon Hall's character aggressively -- hugging, grabbing, taking his arm, pressing against his chest, unbuttoning his shirt, mussing his hair, offering him flowers, chasing away other suitors with a barking "Get back, he's mine!"  Hall's characters respond with amusement and affection, but no longing.







Sabu is captured once, and once he and Hall are captured together, but otherwise Hall is tied, struggling, about to be drowned or fed to cobras, and the jungle boy comes swinging down on a rope or galloping up on a white horse to save him.

And Sabu's characters never expresses any heterosexual interest. In Arabian Nights, Ali (Sabu) enters a harem to deliver a message, and the sex-starved girls engulf him, groping and fondling. He screams "Please stop!  Stop it!" with shrieks of terror.  They back off, bewildered, as if no man or boy had ever resisted their advances before.

At the end of each movie, Sabu practically shoves Hall's characters into the arms of Maria Montez. Then, after the final clench, they offer to adopt him.  It seems absurd to emphasize Sabu's muscular physique, have him approach Jon Hall with blatant homoerotic desire, and then claim that he is just a little boy, not yet able to understand "adult" desires.

After the war, when Sabu was too old to play teenagers, he played heavily muscled, usually half-naked Jungle Men who get girlfriends.  He appeared briefly in his own comic book title.  Later in the 1950s, he invested in a real estate business and took whatever roles he could find that did not require wearing a loincloth.

Days after filming A Tiger Walks in 1964, Sabu died of a heart attack. He was in perfect health and only 39 years old. He left a legacy of superbly homromantic movies, and influenced two generations of dhoti-clad Jungle Boys,  from Gunga in Andy's Gang, Hadji on Jonny Quest, Haji of the Elephants, and Raji on Maya, to the various Mowglis of the 1990s.

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

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 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.

We were too shy 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.

Richard Halliburton: A Gay Adventurer of the Jazz Age

When I was a kid in the 1960s, I was constantly looking for "a good place," where I could be free from the "what girl do you like?" interrogations.  One such "good place" was a book in the Denkmann Elementary School Library, Richard Halliburton's Complete Book of Marvels (1941).

I didn't know much about Richard Halliburton, except for his amazing adventures:

Crossing the Alps on an elephant, like Hannibal.

Swimming naked in a pool outside the Taj Mahal at midnight.

Swimming across the Panama Canal.

Exploring a secret room beneath Temple Mount in Jerusalem.

Receiving a gift of shrunken heads from a Dayak chief

Sort of like Donald Duck and his nephews jetting off with their Uncle Scrooge to find King Solomon's Mines or explore a lost city in the Himalayas!

Except Donald always had to return to Duckburg, where Daisy was waiting to "civilize" him with afternoon teas and shopping trips, and marriage and children and despair.

How did Richard Halliburton manage to have all of those adventures, and avoid the mind-control drone of "what girl do you like?"

Many years later, I discovered that Richard Halliburton (1900-1938) was the last of the old-style adventurers, thrilling the Jazz Age with his exploits through speaking engagements, radio broadcasts, a syndicated column, magazine articles, and a dozen books: The Royal Road to Romance, The Glorious Adventure, New Worlds to Conquer, Seven League Boots

 And he was gay. He knew gay rights pioneer Harry Hay, he was romantically linked to silent film star Ramon Novarro, and he had a long-term domestic relationship with journalist Paul Mooney.  In 1937 they had an idiosyncratic house built in Laguna Beach, called Hangover House because it was hanging off a cliff.

There is no hint of Halliburton's same-sex romances in any of his writings, and evidently he kept them secret from almost everyone in his private life, including his parents.

Following the footsteps of Richard Halliburton, I've lived in five countries (including the U.S.) and visited 26. It's not exactly swimming across the Panama Canal, but it's a start.

See also: The Disappearance of Sean Flynn; The Disappearance of Michael Rockefeller.

Corentin and Kim

Like Alix and Enak, Jonny Quest and Hadji, and a dozen others, Corentin and Kim were a teenage European-Indian homoromantic pair. Belgian cartoonist Paul Cuvelier began painting the androgynous, muscular teenager in 1943.

Herge, creator of Tintin, saw them and suggested a comic strip, which appeared in  Tintin magazine beginning in 1946.














The comic story begins with Corentin at age 14, a Breton boy in the 18th century who runs away from his abusive uncle, stows away aboard a ship, and is shipwrecked on a desert island.  Soon he teams up with an Indian boy named Kim.  They also add a gorilla named Belzebuth and a tiger named Moloch to their entourage.

Corentin was aimed at somewhat younger children than Alix, so his adventures were less complex, but the backgrounds were just as spectacular, and there was nearly as much nudity (especially as the two boys aged into muscular late adolescence).









  








Seven comic albums appeared between 1950 and 1974, rather a paltry number compared to Alix, sending Corentin and Kim to India, China, Italy, Egypt, and back to Brittany (Corentin's grandson also appeared in the 1800's Wild West).  There were also novels, an animated cartoon series (1987),  and an original comic strip, translated into German, Spanish, and Dutch.

Nevertheless, Corentin was never as successful as Alix, and Paul Cuvelier less concerned with homoromance; eventually Corentin gets a girlfriend, and many of Cuvelier's other works featured female nudity.

"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+.