Dane's Polar Plunge: a 365 day Lake Tahoe Challenge, with Scott Gaffney, Danish d*cks, and the n*de dudes of Notre Dame

  

Link to the n*ude dudes

I've been following Dane G. on Instagram.  He doesn't post much, but in August 2026 he complains that he just arrived at the University of Nevada Reno for his freshman year, when he had to evacuate due to the wildfires.   

Back when he was a student at North Tahoe High School, Dane posted a lot: he was doing a challenge where he jumps into Lake Tahoe every day for a year. Even on Day 190: Water temperature 39.3, air temperature 32.  That's Fahrenheit. 

 

Day 173: Gray, cloudy. Water temperature 37.3, air 33.0.  Dane walked through the snow-- barefoot! -- toward his icy plunge.

On Day 184, he brought his Dad, professional skiier Scott Gaffney Water temperature 48.5, air 55.

He invited Tony Cavalero of The Righteous Gemstones, but Tony ended up ignoring him to flirt with Scott.

On Day 120, he brought the North Tahoe High School Varsity Basketball Team -- at least the ones brave enough to try. Water temperature 39 degrees, air with wind chill 19.  

The Wildflour Baking Company in Tahoe donated some donuts.  How about space heaters?

I can't imagine being interested in the aesthetics of the p*enis after all that icy plunging, but there are some guys running n*aked through the snow on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends

Plus n*de Danish dudes in the snow outside an ice cream stand. 

An ice cream stand?

More after the break.  Caution: Icy.

Grit: Beefcake and Bonding in an Attic in Rural Indiana

Every summer, and sometimes at Christmas, we visited my Grandma Davis in Indiana.  She had an attic full of old magazines, and my brother and I used to spend rainy afternoons there, leafing through half a century worth of browning ephemera.

Today I get the impression of someone who longed for an urbane, sophisticated life as an artist in Jazz Age New York, but somehow found herself in a farmhouse in rural Indiana, with a husband who was gone weeks at a time, and spent her life lapsing between attempts to rebel and attempts to adapt:

Rebellion:  Nash's, Collier's, The Saturday Evening Post

Adaption: Better Homes and Gardens, The Farmer's Wife, Grit

Grit?

Who would name a newspaper after that gross stuff that gets in your eye after you sleep?

Maybe it was grits, the gross Southern food made out of boiled corn.

It was like a tabloid newspaper, with lots of human interest stories: a blind guy who works as a postal carrier, a woman who found her lost wedding ring in an egg laid by her chicken, a traffic accident that reunited a father and his long-lost son.

Nothing that took place anything near a city: in the world of Grit, no settlement with a population over 2,000 exist in the U.S.

No foreign countries exist, either.  Or black people.  Or Jews.  Or women who weren't housewives.  Or gay men and lesbians.

But -- there were a lot of cute 4-H Boys holding up prize sheep, providing a hint of beefcake on rainy rural afternoons.

Here's a shirtless boy in a bunkhouse at the Millstone 4-H Camp in Ellerbee, North Carolina, 1961.

There were also pages of comic strips, some the old-fashioned dinosaur strips familiar from the Rock Island Argus -- Blondie Prince Valiant, Out Our Way -- and some even older.

Beefcake titles like  Jungle Jim, Mandrake the Magician, and Flash Gordon.

Very nice physique, for a guy from the 1930s with his head wrapped in a plastic bag.

Here's an ad from Grit about selling Grit.  

$6 in 1956 is the equivalent of $50 today.  Not a bad source of income.

Grit was founded in 1885 by German immigrant Dietrich Lamade.  It was especially popular in the 1930s and 1940s, with over 400,000 weekly subscribers, competing favorably with newspapers that wouldn't deliver to rural areas.

The decline of the rural population after World War II, and competition from radio and television, led to a nosedive in subscriptions.  By 2000, there were less than 10,000 subscribers, mostly elderly.

Under new management, Grit has rebranded itself  as a bimonthly blog and print magazine for food and gardening enthusiasts, with articles on free range chickens, hybrid tomatoes, and lawn mower maintenance.






The new Grit is more inclusive, with racial and religious minorities, urban dwellers, and gay men and lesbians:

"Who do you call when you have an animal in trouble?  The ladies next door are at work, and I can no longer phone the gay guys down the street because they have me blocked since we had a shouting match about being invited to a Pampered Chef party, so I call the SPCA."

 It has over 150,000 subscribers.

Dad throws away my Book of Cute Boys

Link to the photos of n*de dudes with books

I love books.  I love browsing through used bookstores, driving home from the mall with a Barnes and Noble bag beside me, checking my recommendations on Amazon.

And reading every night before turning out the light, unless I'm on a date.

Well, sometimes the guy I'm dating has a well-stocked bookcase that distracts me from the bedroom stuff.

I've been buying at least two books per week since college.  That adds up to nearly 5,000,  but actually I have only about 2,000.  Every time I move, I pare down my collection.

Where did this bibliomania start?  Maybe with my parents, who disapproved of books.  They were at best a waste of time, and more likely sinful.  The only way I could get away with reading was to claim that it was a school assignment (evidently my teachers assigned a lot of science fiction and fantasy novels).

Or maybe it's all due to a traumatic incident that happened when I was about four years old, when we were still living on Randolph Street in Garrett,  Indiana.

 I had a Little Golden Book  I couldn't read most of the words yet, but the front cover showed two boys hugging and waving.  So I called it my Book of Cute Boys.

I think it was a retelling of the Disney movie The Swiss Family Robinson (1960), starring James MacArthur (left) and Tommy Kirk. I would not see the movie or read the original novel for many years, but I could tell that it was about a family living in the jungle.

One day we were driving somewhere on a scary country road, and I was reading in the back seat (this was before car seats, or even seatbelts).  Dad yelled back, "Don't read in the car!"  

He was afraid that I would get carsick and throw up.  It happened once, but I was never allowed to read in the car again.

More after the break

A high school boy gives me his underwear

 

Link to the NSFW version

When I was growing up, we visited my parents' home town in northeastern Indiana about twice a year, at Christmastime and during the summer.  My favorite part of the visit was when Grandma announced "Let's go to Fort Wayne!"

When we were very little, Mom and Dad came, too, and when we were older, my baby sister came with us, but for about five yeares it it was just Kenny and me, fighting over who would get to ride "shotgun" in Grandma's brown Chevy Impala as she drove down country roads through Butler Center and Laotto and Huntertown, and finally  Fort Wayne:

The biggest, brightest, most exciting city in the world.

It was unimaginably huge, bigger than Rock Island, Moline, and Davenport put together, and it had the most fascinating places I had ever seen.  There was always something new: a gigantic County Courthouse; a candy factory much nicer than that scary one in the Willy Wonka movie; a Children's Zoo with its own train; an art museum; the history museum at Old City Hall; Kern's Toy Store; a memorial to Johnny Appleseed.

Somehow Grandma always knew where there were a lot of cute boys:  playing basketball in schoolyards, crowded into booths at the soda shop, building snowmen at Lakeside Park,  running around in groups at street fairs.  Sometimes she let us play with them, while she sat on a bench, reading a magazine.

We usually stopped for lunch at the Famous Coney Island on Main Street: hot dogs with chili, cheese, and onions, and steamed buns.   Plus french fries, onion rings, and root beer floats (vanilla ice cream floating in a gigantic mug of root beer).

And a never-ending supply of cute high school boys in white shirts, black pants, and black bow ties who brought out your orders.

On a cold day just before Christmas in fourth grade, we were having lunch at the Coney Island, and my brother and I were rough-housing, stealing fries off each other's plates, shoving each other, and laughing.  Grandma Davis told us to settle down, so I stopped and picked up my root beer float.

Then Kenny shoved me again.  I dropped the heavy mug onto my chest, drenching my shirt with root beer.  More root beer splashed onto my pants, and the clump of melting ice cream fell right onto my lap.

Gross!  Cold and wet!  I pushed it onto the floor.

Kenny laughed and pointed.  "You peed your pants!"  

"Oh, no, you're soaked!" Grandma Davis exclaimed.  She grabbed some napkins and tried to dab me, but the root beer and ice cream had already soaked in.  "You can't ride all the way back to Garrett like this -- it's freezing out!"

A high school boy came running up: short, compact, muscular, with brown hippie-hair and a bright smile.  He was carrying a little pad and pencil.  I don't remember his name, if I ever knew it, so I'll call him Jim.

"Don't worry, Ma'am, I'll take care of your grandson," he said.  "Come on, champ, let's get you cleaned up."

 He took me by the hand and led me past the staring patrons to a little door marked "Employees Only."  Inside it looked like a kitchen, with tables and chairs and a little refrigerator.  There was a bank of lockers on on side, and a rack with a lot of coats hung up on it.

The full story, with n*de photos, is on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends

See also: Comic Books and C*cks at the Furniture Store. With bonus Desi guys

The Answer to the N*ked Man's Question

Dillon Brady: Four-time Gemstone extra, IT guy, crabber, polar plunger, model, and Slytherin

Topper Guild: The youtube star breaks into tv. With Kaido Roberts, muscle men, Nick d*ck, and Topper

Little Max: A Gay Father in 1950s Comic Books

Whenever we visited my relatives in Indiana, I spent the night with my Cousin Buster in the trailer in the dark woods, and we would squeeze into his narrow twin bed, our bodies pressed together, reading Harvey Comics.  I read until long after he fell asleep, associating the tales of friendly ghosts and little devils with that warmth and affection.

Two boys together clinging, one the other never leaving....

In high school, I looked back on those moments of perfect happiness, and tried to get my hands on the Harvey Comics I read all those years ago (actually less than 10 years ago, but when you're 16, it seems like an eternity).

So I put an ad in the Rock Island Argus, and a very cute Augustana student named Clay answered with an offer of five Little Max comics from 1958-1959 for a dollar each.

I never heard of Little Max, they were from before I was born, and a dollar was four times what a hew comic cost at the Comics Cave.  But some of them had the familiar jack-in-the-box logo and tv set icons displaying the stars, so I bought them anyway.

It was a weird type of deja vu, like looking at a photo of your parents before you were born: familiar, yet bizarre, with a story going on that you are not a part of and can't possibly understand.  

What are you covering up, Max buddy?

The star, Little Max, looks like Little Audrey in drag: he is drawn in the familiar Harvey style, cherubic-cute, with a big head and gigantic eyes. He doesn't speak, and his thought balloons are full of malapropisms that suggest a learning disorder: "They're both so kindly and generosity!"

 

His mentor, chum, adopted father, or something is Joe Palooka, a tall, very muscular guy with a weird toothless grin. Max calls him "Dear Joe."

Later research revealed that Joe Palooka was a boxer in a comic strip drawn by Ham Fisher from 1930 through the 1980s.  He was so popular that he appeared in twelve movies (played by Stuart Erwin and Joe Kirkwood), a radio series, a tv series, and a lot of merchandise, including lunch boxes,  a board game, and a mountain.  "Palooka" became slang for a big, dumb guy.

Little Max was a supporting character in the Palooka comic strip, a mute shoe-shine boy who Joe befriended.  His comic book series ran for 73 issues, from 1949 to 1961.

Joe has also adopted or is mentoring an unnamed girl.  Max calls her "Dear Her."  

She may have a speech disorder, saying "Maxth" and "Mith-ter Palooka," but I think girls in the 1940s affected a lisp to appear more childlike.  

More after the break

Revisiting "Eerie, Indiana"

 

I have fond memories of Eerie, Indiana (1991-1992), although I'm not sure how many episodes I actually saw.  Maybe just one: it aired on NBC on Sunday nights, against a block of must-see sitcoms on Fox: Parker Lewis Can't Lose, Herman's Head, and Married...with Children.  

What I remember is: teenagers Marshall Teller (Omri Katz) and Simon Holmes (Justin Shenkerow) are gay-subtext buddies who investigate humorous paranormal mysteries:  a mother uses magical tupperware to keep her sons from aging for 30 years; a boy they are babysitting gets trapped in a old horror movie on tv; an ATM machine becomes sentient and showers Simon with money.  The mysterious Dash X (Jason Marsden) seems to be the key to the ongoing mystery, but the series ends before it is resolved.

Omri Katz (top photo) went on to star in the Halloween classic Hocus Pocus (1993) and the gay-themed Journey into Night (2002) before retiring from acting.  I assume he's gay in real life.  

Justin Shenkarow went on to star in Picket Fences (1992-1996), and  do lot of voice work.  This is the only beefcake photo I could find on his Instagram.  There are also about 1,000 photos of him and his mother and none of anyone else, so I assume that he's gay in real life, too.

Bob and I have recently been watching/re-watching Eerie, Indiana, and it's completely different from what I remember.

1.  Marshall is hetero-horny.  It seems like he gets all dopey over a girl every other episode.

2.  Marshall gets all dopey over a boy in every other episode, too.  Simon just sits and smiles while Marshall dumps him for the teen hunk du jour:  Gabrial Damon, Cory Danzinger, Tobey Maguire, Scott Weinger, and finally Jason Marsden.  At the end of the episode, when the boy dies, gets zapped into an alternate reality, or just vanishes from the narrative, Simon quietly takes him back.

But when Simon dumps Marshall for a pair of older boys, Marshall gets jealous and tells himself  "This isn't like Simon!  He must be brainwashed!"

3. The tone shifts from humorous to somber at the drop of an episode.  People die, quite often.  A boy is being abused by his father..  A girl is homeless.  A man is mentally ill.  When you tune in, you never know if you're going to get a sitcom or an After School Special.

4. Marshall's 17-year old sister Syndi (Julie Condry) seems to be in another series.  We keep getting snippets of telephone conversations or off-hand comments about things going on in her life, but nothing is ever developed.  In her only B-plot, she thinks that she might want to become a police officer, but her surprisingly old-fashioned parents nix the idea: too dangerous for a girl.  So she changes to firefighter.

5. Marshall's parents (Mary-Margaret Humes, Francis Guinan) are absurdly wacky, authoritarian, or caring and hugging, depending on the needs of the episode, but at least Francis Guinan is cute.  He has 88 film/tv credits on IMDB, and has done a lot of live theater in Chicago, including some plays with gay themes.

He's one of the older guys in a bathrobe in this shot from the stage play Penelope.

Eerie, Indiana is not the show I remember from 1991.  It has even more gay texts and subtexts.

See also: Eerie, Indiana: Omri Katz, Paranormal Investigator

Bill Cable: 1980s gay model and video performer, boyfriend of Elvira and Pee-Wee Herman, the rock star in "Basic Instinct."

  Link to the N*de Dudes

If you grew up in a heteronormative desert, like most gay boys in the 1970s, with n*de and even shirtless guys vanishingly rare in magazines, movies, and tv, West Hollywood in the 1980s was a Paradise.  You could buy a dozen glossy, full-color magazines aimed at gay men with every conceivable taste and interest:

Drummer for leather

Blueboy for dating advice

Mandate for muscle

In Touch for humor 

Inches for...well, you get the idea.

All of them were illustrated by full-page and centerfold photos of men, artistic or not, always n*de, sometimes more.

You saw this guy everywhere, but probably didn't realize that Cable, Stoner, and Bigg John were all the same model.  Now we know.

He was Bill Cable, born William  Laurence Cumpanas in northern Indiana in 1946. His grandparents were from Dalmatia (now part of Croatia), and he grew up with a strong sense of his Croatian identity,   

His family moved to Los Angeles in 1950.  He played football at North Hollywood High School and the University of Nevada, but a  massive head injury forced him to quit.  In 1970, he returned Los Angeles to pursue a new career as a model.

Bill modeled in all of the famous gay magazines of the 1970s and 1980s, plus gay pictorials for Colt Studios and The Athletic Model Guild.  

He also appeared in straight pictorials, mainstream fashion ads, and the influential After Dark magazine.  And in gay postcards, which you bought with no intention of actually mailing.

He posed for Playgirl three times, for:

"Long Cool Summer" (July 1973)

Victoriana (November 1974)

"Beauty and the Beast" (May 1975)

Bill's movie career began with a non-speaking role as a leatherman in the gay  Bijou (1972).  Next came some collaborations with straight director Carlos Tobalina: Last Tango in Acapulco (1973), Jungle Blue (1978), and Flesh and Bullets (1985).

Sometime in the early 1970s, Bill and Carlos wrote, directed, and starred in  What's Love (restored in 1987), "which deals with the themes of romantic obsession and Christian blasphemy."  From what I can tell from the various plot synopses, Carlos plays a cop who gets in touch with a magical self.  Bill as Jesus sleeps with him and his wife. 

More after the break

The Gay Adventures of Jerry Lewis

When I was growing up, every summer and sometimes at Christmastime, we drove 300 miles from Rock Island, Illinois to Garrett, Indiana, to visit my parents' family.  We usually stayed with my Aunt Nora, whose kids were nearly grown-up: when I was 10, Cousin Ed was 21, Cousin Eva 19, and Cousin Joe, the only one still living at home, 17 .

It was fun staying with Aunt Nora.  Their house was only two blocks from the Limberlost Library, where Cousin Joe let us check out books on his card.  It was three blocks from Sylvan Lake, where we could go swimming and fishing in the summer.

And in the winter, there was another treasure: an attic full of comic books from the 1950s!

Donald Ducks! Ancient chubby Caspers!  Archie going to sock hops! Pre-code horror!



And Jerry Lewis.

At the time I didn't know that Jerry Lewis was a real person, a comedian whose shtick involved blatant gay subtexts.

I just thought that he was a comic book character, a big-jawed, rather dopey, but cute young man who was not interested in women, as many cover gags demonstrated


 However, he had a long-term partner named Dean Martin.

The Adventures of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis title (1952-1957) had the pair traveling around the world, to China, the Middle East, Mexico, sub-Saharan Africa, or Ruritanian countries of Europe, where they became immeshed in intrigues involving spies, bandits, evil cultists, or cannibals, allowing the easily-frightened Jerry to leap into Dean's arms.

Dean often got girls along the way, but Jerry did not.


In the few issues that displayed him shirtless, he had a pleasantly solid physique.

In 1957, shortly after the real-life comedy duo split up, Dean Martin vanished from the comic books, and The Adventures of Jerry Lewis continued for another 84 issues, finally folding in 1971.


Now Jerry was a single parent raising his sarcastic preteen nephew, Renfrew, and still not interested in women, though often they tried to seduce him.  The duo had humorous paranormal adventures with ghosts, witches, werewolves, monsters, mad scientists, and so on.

Eventually Jerry became the headmaster of a school for kids who are "different."

Some nice gay symbolism in my Aunt Nora's attic during the long, dull days after Christmas.

10 Things You Should Know about Noah Schnapp. Most do not involve hazelnut spread

1. He plays Will Byers: a shy, artistic boy who gets zapped into a scary alternative universe in Season 1 of Stranger Things.   In later seasons, he becomes upset when his friend Mike gets a girlfriend and doesn't want to hang out as much.  Mike tries to explain that every boy becomes interested in girls; it's part of growing up.  But Will isn't having it. Fans began speculating that Will was gay.  The showrunners confirmed that he is, but he has not yet come out on the show.

2. He has been criticized for his long, slow coming out process, but he counters that the show is set in the 1980s, where teachers and parents generally pretended that same-sex desire and practice did not exist.  So Will is unlikely to realize that being gay is even possible, or else he'll think that he is the only gay person on Earth.

3. He has 14 credits on the IMDB, including Hubie Halloween and The Tutor.

4.  In January 2023, Noah came out to his family and friends.   He then came out to his fans on TikTok, saying "I'm more similar to Will than I thought."  His first Gay Pride was in New York in 2023.

5. He has a Facebook page, but it seems to be just dozens of ads for TBH.  He doesn't say what it is: he just shows the jar and assure you that it's the most incredbily amazing, fantastic thing that ever existed.  You have to click on the link to the company website to find out that it's hazelnut spread (like an incredibly nutritious peanut butter).

Sorry if I sound sarcastic, but I was expecting pictures of Noah hugging a boyfriend, and instead I get commercials.

6.. Noah's favorite social media site for non-hazelnut posts is TikTok.  One of his TikTok posts accidentally showed his penis, but he deleted it right away.  He was over 18 at the time, so technically it was legal, just embarrassisng.

More after the break

Borden's Elsie: Alpha Bull Dad and Gay Son

Sometimes when we were visiting my Grandma Davis in Indiana, my brother and I got permission to go up into the attic and browse through her piles of old magazines. Good Housekeeping, Saturday Evening Post, Grit...nothing really exciting, but we liked to marvel at the craziness of the past.

One day we stumbled upon a series of illustrated stories from the 1940s starring Elsie the Cow, the mascot for Borden's Milk.

Wait -- was this cow selling the milk that came from her body?  Disgusting!  And who would name it "Hemo," after blood?

The stories were about a battle of the sexes between housewife Elsie and her alpha-male bull spouse, Elmer, with an incredibly sexist passive-aggressive vibe and the hint of violence:

"But Elmer, all the answers in the book can't be wrong!"
"I'm not trying to turn the child against you, darling!"
"Why do men lose their temper more easily than women?"
"It's possible to kill a wife with kindness, dear."

Was this an idealization of the 1940s nuclear family, or a critique?

Borden created a whole back story for the cow couple, including a teenage daughter, Beulah, a mischievous son, Beauregard, and infant twins.  Stories of their domestic life appeared through the 1940s, and for the kids, there was a 1950s comic book series.  And so many advertising tie-ins that there's a whole book devoted to them.

Elmer the Bull, future mascot for Elmer's Glue, was blustering but, oddly, sexy.  He was naked though his family wore clothes.  He had thick bull-muscles.  And, most provocatively, his sex organs were coyly obstructed. I had seen bulls on the farm -- I knew what was being hidden.

Beauregard was a general mischief maker, but he also had some gender-transgressive qualities that lent him some gay symbolism.  Here he seems to be trying on green lipstick and hair dye.

In the 1950s comic books, he's a teenager, and also rather muscular.

By now I imagine he looks something like this.

(Image borrowed from Roberto Linares on YGallery).

See also: Grit

Axl in Underwear: "Raising Hope" and "The Middle"

 

 

I hate to be one of those guys who complain that "things were much better in my day."  But just look at muscle on network television 30 years ago, in 1982-83:

Programs to watch for the beefcake: Voyagers (Jon-Erik Hexum), Chips (Erik Estrada), Trapper John MD (Gregory Harrison), Taxi (Tony Danza), The Dukes of Hazard (John Schneider and Tom Wopat), Fame (lots)

Programs to watch for the teen idols: Alice (Philip McKeon), Family Ties (Michael J. Fox), Happy Days (Billy Warlock), One Day at a Time (lots).

And in 2012-13, just three.

1. Suburgatory.

2. Raising Hope, about the buffed but nerdy Jimmy (Lucas Neff) raising his infant daughter in an unspecified Southern city. He lives with his working-class parents and senile great-grandmother (played by comedy legend Cloris Leachman).

Although buffed, Jimmy rarely appears shirtless on screen, lest his muscles detract from his nerdiness.

Cousin Mike (Skyler Stone), who my friend David claimed to have hooked up with, appeared in four episodes, usually in his undewear.

His dad, Burt (Garret Dillahunt), works as a pool cleaner and landscaper.  He offers more shirtless and underwear shots.

3. The Middle, about a working-class family in Middle America, whose teenage son Axl (Charlie McDermott) somehow manages to make surly and self-possessed endearing.  Though his preference for lounging around in his underwear is presented as slovenly rather than hot, his physique has garnered him a huge fanbase among gay boys and straight girls.

Hollywood believes that all gay people are affluent lawyers living in New York or Los Angeles, so of course there are no gay people in either of these programs, but they appear in allusions:

On Raising Hope, Jimmy's boss mentions that he grew up with two moms.

On The Middle, Axl's sister Sue has a flamboyantly feminine "boyfriend" that has her parents exchanging worried looks (but no one ever says the word, and Sue remains oblivious).

However, the knowing subtexts are frequent.

On Raising Hope, Burt shows off his physique to get tips from both male and female customers.

On The Middle, Axl's friends, played by John Gammon and Beau Wirrick, are muscular jocks, and rather obviously into each other.  They even dance together at a wedding.

See also: Brock Ciarlelli, the Uncle Tom of "The Middle" and  Why No Gay People in "The Middle"?

James Whitcomb Riley: Even Dull, Depressing Poets Can Be Gay

When I was growing up in Rock Island, teachers thought it their duty to lecture incessantly on local writers and artists, like Carl Sandburg, gay jazz musician Bix Beiderbecke, and Isabel Bloom.

My cousins in Indiana were hearing about their local writers and artist, of course, and whenever I visited, I had to hear about them, too: Theodore Dreiser, Gene-Stratton Porter, Hoagy Carmichael....

The one I hated the most was James Whitcomb Riley (1849-1916), the "Hoosier Poet," the official poet laureate of the state of Indiana.

My Aunt Mavis scared me and my Cousin Buster to death with her rendition of "Little Orphant Annie":

The goble-uns'll git you ef you don't watch out! (The "git" was accompanied by a sudden grab.)

And "Nine Little Goblins":

You shan't wake up 'til you're plumb dead!

My Cousin Joe had to read "My Bachelor Chum," about a guy who is old -- nearly 40 -- and fat, who claims that he loves being unmarried -- he can smoke and drink and stay out late, and there's nobody around to nag him.  But then he sneaks off to a private study, looks at a picture of a woman, and starts crying.

Not only heterosexist, but depressing! Can you believe that James Whitcomb Riley was one of the most popular writers of his era, and all of his books were best-sellers?

Glancing through a copy of the Selected Poems that was on every bookshelf in Indiana, I found nothing but death, despair, lost heterosexual loves, dying soldiers, and more death.

They loved that kind of thing in the 19th century.

Riley's most famous poem is "The Old Swimmin' Hole": an old man reminisces about how as a boy he used to enjoy skinny dipping with his chums, but now he just wants to die:

I wish..I could dive off in my grave like the old swimmin' hole

Wait -- he liked to swim naked with his chums?

Could Riley have been gay?

His biographer, Elizabeth Van Allen, says certainly not, but what biography doesn't try desperately to establish the heterosexuality of her subject?

She admits that he sought same-sex friendships through his life, and described them in passionate terms; to physician James Matthews, for instance, he wrote: "I love you, and no knife shall cut our love in two."

But that's just a 19th century convention, she explains: "he understood that there was a limit to what was socially acceptable between people of the same gender."

Of course there was.  The same limit exists today -- it is expected, encouraged, and demanded that same-sex relationship be platonic, and cross-sex erotic.    Being gay crosses that line.  But that simply means that gay people must spend a lot of time defending themselves against the accusations that they're trying to destroy the world.  It doesn't mean that they aren't gay.

Or that they never experienced glimmers of same-sex love while writing their dull, depressing poems.

See also: John Greenleaf Whittier and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.