Kurt Russell's Secret

We usually went to church on Sunday nights, but for some reason I was home one night in November 1968 to see the last half of the best movie ever made, The Secret of Boyne Castle, on the anthology series Wonderful World of Color.
This was former child star Kurt Russell's only movie as a Disney Adventure Boy (others included Peter McEnery, Tommy Kirk, Tim Considine, and Jeff East) before he moved on to playing oddball outsider Dexter Riley in a series of Disney comedies.

Here Kurt plays Rich, an American exchange student in Dublin who learns that his older brother Tom (bisexual muscleman Glenn Corbett, previously a model for Physique Pictorial and star of Route 66) is not a steel company executive after all, but a spy charged with delivering essential information to Boyne Castle, in the west of Ireland. When Tom is captured by Russian agents, Rich must take over the mission, racing through the quaint villages and lush green hills of Ireland, hoping to elude capture and reach Boyne Castle before the Russians. Fellow student Sean (long-faced, steely-eyed Patrick Dawson) tags along, throwing himself into deadly danger for no logical reason except that he rather likes Rich.

The two are presented as more intimate than mere buddies, framed in tight shots, their faces together in close ups. While they are sleeping on the heather, Rich hears a suspicious noise, and wakes Sean by moving his own body slightly. Although all we see are their faces and necks, to wake someone with such a small gesture means that they must be cuddling together. They rescue each other a dozen times, and are eventually rescued by big brother Tom.

But the most important scene, the scene I have remembered fondly for 40 years:

At an inn, Rich flirts with a waitress.

“You didn’t tell me you had an eye for the ladies!” Sean exclaims, as if he hadn’t anticipated any competition.

Rich responds by asking the waitress if she has any rooms to rent for “for a few hours.” Suspicious, she wants to know why the two boys would need a room for such a short period.

Rich and Sean exchange a knowing grin.

In 1968 I was entranced by that grin. I knew that it was a clue to the secret. If only I could decipher it, I could find my way to that other world, Oz or Living Island or Middle Earth, the world where boys could fall in love and got married.

How might we account for the not-so-subtle homoerotic bantr between the Rich and Sean? Certainly Glenn Corbett might be a gay ally: he began as a model for the Athletic Model Guild, the Advocate Men of its day, and made a career as a buddy-bonding “man’s man. Kurt Russell was never particularly gay-friendly.

Patrick Dawson works mostly in Irish radio, but his limited filmography includes the gay-vague Ginger in The Jigsaw Man (1983). We should look at the director, Robert Butler, who in the 1960’s specialized in dramas with strong male leads, such as Ben Casey, Dr. Kildare, and I Spy, and later directed such hunk-fests as Remington Steele, Moonlighting, and Lois and Clark. Whether he was working with Bruce Willis, Dean Cane, Pierce Brosnan, or Kurt Russell, Butler neither minimized nor hid their physicality, allowing and even directing them to be open as objects of desire, both to male viewers and to each other.

There are nude photos of Kurt Russell on Tales of West Hollywood

See also: Kurt Russell

Peter McEnery: The First Gay Teenager

In Victim (1961), 21-year old Peter McEnery played the first explicitly identified gay teenager in film, a working class boy named Boy who commits suicide in prison.  His affluent, middle-aged lover, Melville Farr (gay actor Dirk Bogarde), tries to uncover the blackmail ring responsible for his death.  Portraying gay men as victims rather than monsters was revolutionary, and paved the way for the decriminalization of same-sex acts in Britain in 1967.

Peter moved directly from an amazingly courageous role to Disney, becoming an Adventure Boy with the two usual attributes: a muscular physique and heterosexual obsession.

In 1964, he starred in The Moon-Spinners as Mark Camford, a young banker who gets involved with spies in Crete, and in the process falls for vacationing British girl Nikki (regular Disney star Hayley Mills).  No buddy-bonding, but quite a lot of shirtless scenes, and more suspense than one usually gets from Disney.

In 1966, he played the titular role in The Fighting Prince of Donegal: Red Hugh, the 16th century Irish prince who started a rebellion against the oppressive English.  Hugh falls for a girl (Susan Hampshire), but also buddy-bonds with an older man.

Maybe the parallels with Victim were too great, or maybe Disney was being extra-cautious after the accidental outing of Tommy Kirk.  For whatever reason, Peter never worked for Disney again.  Instead, he continued his career of gay-vague and not-so-gay vague characters.

In I Killed Rasputin (1967), Peter played Prince Felix Yusopov, who was bisexual in real life, the lover of Grand Prince Dmitri Pavlovich (and enjoyed dressing in drag).  The movie tries to closet him, and all but eliminates Dmitri, but still Peter manages to imbue his character with a homoerotic passion (and he dances with a man).

Other sexually adventurous movies followed, but the most famous is Entertaining Mr. Sloane (1970), based on the play by gay writer Joe Orton.  Mr. Sloane (Peter) is a male prostitute who moves in with a closeted gay man (Harry Andrews) and ends up the unwilling boy-toy of both him and his sister.

I haven't seen any of Peter's later works, mostly British television and tv movies, but some of them look interesting, and with ample buddy-bonding potential: The Cat and the Canary (which has a "gay" keyword on the Internet Movie Database); a version of Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream; and Clayhanger, from a series of novels by reputedly gay author Arnold Bennett.

I have not been able to discover his real-life sexual identity, only that he was married to Julie Peasgood for a time, and has a daughter.  But with all of his gay-vague and gay roles, who cares?

See also: Fighting Prince of Donegal.

Kurt Russell: Teen Idol Turned Man Mountain

Few actors make the difficult transition from child star to teen idol, and fewer still survive as adults in show biz.  Kurt Russell did it, but he lost something along the way.

Born in 1951, Kurt first became a star on The Travels of Jaimie McPherson (1963-64) , about a boy traveling through the Old West who bonds with a gruff wagon train operator (Charles Bronson).

Later in the 1960s, he became a familiar sight on tv, often playing oddball outsiders -- a jungle boy on Gilligan's Island (1965), an alien warrior who bonds with Will Robinson on Lost in Space (1966), an Indian boy who bonds with William Smith on Laredo (1966).  His physique became a familiar sight, too, as many gay preteens of the era could attest.

As a teenager, Kurt's impish smile and slightly confused expression made him unsuitable for Disney Adventure.  He made only one Adventure Boy movie, The Secret of Boyne Castle (1968) -- as American exchange student Rich who fights spies in rural Ireland, along with his boyfriend -- but unlike other Adventure Boys like James MacArthur and Peter McEnery, he never dropped a button.  He had many more shirtless, underwear, and semi-nude shots as a boy than as a teen.

After that, he concentrated in comedy, taking over the oddball genius roles left behind by the fired Tommy Kirk -- The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes (1969), The Barefoot Executive (1971), Now You See Him, Now You Don't (1972), The Strongest Man in the World (1975). With one major exception -- Tommy Kirk wasn't very good at displaying believable heterosexual interest, but Kurt's comedy characters were indefatigably girl-crazy.

As a young adult in the 1970s, Kurt moved into serious dramatic roles, playing Charles Whitman, the University of Texas sniper, in The Deadly Tower (1975), and Morgan Beaudine, who travels through the Old West bonding with his estranged brother Quentin (Tim Matheson) in The Quest (1976).

And from serious dramatic roles to gnarled, surly Snake Plissken, who negotiates Manhattan as a maximum security prison in Escape from New York (1981); R. J. Macready, who fights a monster escaping from the Antartic ice in The Thing (1982); Reno Hightower, who longs to regain his former football glory in The Best of Times (1986).

His list of memorable buddy-bonding roles is practically endless: Detective Cash, who gets naked in the shower with Sylvester Stallone's Tango in Tango and Cash (1989); firefighter Bull McCaffrey, who rescues his brother Brian (William Baldwin) in Backdraft (1991); Michael Zane, who tracks down his former partner during an Elvis convention in 3000 Miles to Graceland (2001).

But subtexts only work if the actors are utterly unaware of the homoerotic potential of their on-screen friendship, or are completely aware and ok with it.  The adult Kurt Russell is aware, but not ok with it; he uses homoerotic potential as a source of squeamish laughter or disquieting menace.

There are nude photos of Kurt Russell on Tales of West Hollywood.

Fall 1987: The Universal Agony of Heterosexual Life

Fall 1987:  I'm in grad school in Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California, enrolled in a Seminar in Modern Literature.

Big mistake.  I've had my share of elitist, condescending, heterosexist professors who dismiss everything I like as "plebian," "bourgeois," or "idiotic," but Dr.Lazar is the most elitist, condescending, and heterosexist of them all.

"I don't watch television, of course, but last night I was looking for the news, and...."

"We won't be reading mindless trash in this classroom."

We read only the World's Greatest Authors: Eugene Ionesco, Harold Pinter, and especially The Greatest of the Great, Samuel Beckett (1906-1989).

Beckett was born in Ireland but wrote in French. I'm quite sure that the top photo is a composite, since he wasn't into bodybuilding.  Or much of anything else except women -- he rejected socialite Peggy Guggenheim -- who got revenge by starting a rumor that he was gay -- and then married Suzanne Dechevaux-Dumezil. But he also had a long-term romance with BBC writer Barbara Bray.

During his lengthy heterosexual machinations, he managed to stay in good shape through playing tennis.  And he wrote Great Literature.

He liked James Joyce, but thought that Ulysses was far too simplistic.  After all, if you dig down far enough past all the obscure references, you come up with characters and a plot.  He wanted to write plays and novels that had no characters or plots, just random thoughts that made no sense.

Besides, it has pleasant scenes.  He wanted to depict the unrelenting agony of life.

While living in Paris and playing tennis with an heiress.

So he wrote horrible plays:

Waiting for Godot: two guys stand around waiting for him, but he never comes.  Let the heavy-handed over-symbolic interpretations begin.

Krapp's Last Tape:  an elderly crazy guy replays the tapes of his life as he's dying.

Happy Days: in a horrible postapocalyptic world, a woman who is slowly sinking into the ground tries to carry on her daily routines, while her husband (left) walks backwards.

And horrible novels:

Molloy: an elderly man lives in his mother's old room and thinks.

Malone Dies: an elderly, bedridden man is writing a novel about something or other before he dies.

The Unnameable: the inner musings of a deformed being who is apparently blind and unable to move.

 Professor Lazar is completely enchanted with the last line: "I can't go on, I'll go on."

"This is a commentary on all our lives," he says.  "Determined to endure in spite of the horror."

Ok, he lived through World War II, so he saw some horrors.  But now he's a tenured professor who flies off to Paris to give speeches.  Surely there's been a few pleasant moments in his life?

Gay subtexts: are the guys in Godot gay?  Is Malloy?

"No, of course not.  Beckett writes of Everyman, of the universal agony of human experience.  He has no time for something so ridiculous as the gays."

I can't go on, I'll go on.

Sorry I can't stick around for more discussions of the universal agony of heterosexual experience.  I have to get to the gym, and then I'm meeting Alan for dinner at the French Quarter, and afterwards we're going cruising at Mugi.  A paradise of masculine beauty awaits.

See also: Gather the Faces of Men; Cruising Dublin with James Joyce.

The Gay Connection of Celtic Gods

When I was a kid in the 1960s, the Celtic world was everywhere.  Mr. Bass in The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet was from Aberstywyth, Wales,  Rich and Sean exchanged a look that meant something in rural Ireland, and if you liked Kipling's Jungle Book, librarians nudged you toward Puck of Pook's Hill.  There was a Celtic Festival every year where you could see guys in kilts and play homoerotic "feat of strength" games.

Taran Noah Smith, who played Jonathan Taylor Thomas's younger brother on Home Improvement, was named after Taran, the assistant pig keeper who becomes High King in Lloyd Alexander's Chronicles of Prydain.  And a dozen other fantasy novels drew from Celtic myth.

But was there any gay symbolism?  Any suggestions that the Celtic world might be a "good place"?

In Hero Tales from Many Lands (Alice Hazletine, 1964),  I read of a boy who had lost his memory.  Wandering aimlessly through the thick woods of Wales, he encounters a bard, blond with a blue robe, stunning beautiful, singing a song that brought both joy and pain.

They travel together, until finally the wanderer gives his life for the bard.  Then he remembers: he is Manawyddan, God of the Ocean, and the bard is his fellow god Pryderi in disguise.  His quest required him to sacrifice himself for a friend (and the amnesia was necessary, lest he remember that he was immortal).

The source was The Book of the Three Dragons, by Kenneth Morris (1930), which recounts many adventures of the Manawyddan and Pryderi.  Both marry women, but their love for each other is strong enough to save the world.

By the way, when the magician Gwydion and his brother Gilvaethy stole Pryderi's pigs, the High God Math turned them into various animal pairs (boars, deer, wolves).  At the end of each year, they brought him an animal sacrifice, and he turned it into a beautiful boy. A same-sex couple having children!

Finn MacCool in Irish myth was a rough, muscular boy who accidentally tasted the Salmon of Knowledge, and became super-intelligent.  He liked women -- the famous Pursuit of Diarmuid has him chasing the woman he likes and her male lover all over Ireland -- but he also led a band of warriors, the Fenians, who were devoted to him and to each other.  During the 19th and 20th centuries, several Irish nationalist groups called themselves the Fenians.

And Cuchulain, who single-handedly defeated the army of Ulster at age 17, depicted here as a muscular Conan-style barbarian: he was so beautiful that everyone who saw him desired him.  The sagas mention both male and female lovers.  For instance, Ferdia:

Fast Friend, forest companions,
we made one bed and slept one sleep
In foreign lands after the fray.
Scathach's pupils, two together.

But the most evocative of all the Celtic gods and demigods was Puck the trickster.  He appears in Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream to procure a catamite for King Oberon and to mock and befuddle heterosexual loves.  Nearly every teen idol has played him at one time or another: Danny Pintauro, Will Rothhaar, Eli Marienthal, even Mickey Rooney (left).

See also: Celtic Festivals

Bachelor Weekend: Six Irish Guys Get Naked on Holiday

You're probably wondering about muscular, bulgeworthy, and otherwise memorable actors illustrating my post on James Joyce.

They're from a 2013 Irish film called The Stag, or in America The Bachelor Weekend, about a group of guys giving their mate one last taste of freedom before his wedding.

In American films, this sort of party involves hookers and girls jumping out of cakes, but in Ireland, it's a weekend trek through the countryside, where they get lost and naked.

The six mates are:

Right: Wimpy groom Fionnan, whose fiancee Ruth insists on the weekend in the country, even though he hates the outdoors (Hugh O'Conor, who played Stephen Dedalus in a 2003 version of Ulysses).

Left: The Machine, Ruth's psychotic brother, who pushes his way into the weekend and causes havoc  (Peter McDonald, a familiar face on Irish television).

Right: Davin, the macho best man, who was dumped by Ruth before she started dating Fionnan, and isn't happy about it (Andrew Scott, Moriarty in the tv series Sherlock).

Left: Depressed businessman Simon (Brian Gleeson, known for Snow White and the Huntsman).

Left: Little Kevin, Fionnan's younger brother, who is gay (Michael Legge, the teenage Frank in Angela's Ashes).

Right: Large Kevin, his drug-addled older boyfriend (Andrew Bennett, the narrator in Angela's Ashes, and Edwart in the gender-bending Sherlock Holmes short Edwart & Arlette).

I haven't seen it; the trailer looks fine, but the reviews are atrocious.  Apparently there are many homophobic and transphobic jokes, in spite of the gay characters and the "group hug" ending.

But I do want to see a lot more of Little Kevin.

Spring 1983: Cruising Dublin with James Joyce

When I was an English and Modern Languages major, one of my professors said that Ulysses was the greatest work of literature ever written.  Even more, the only work.  If ever civilization is destroyed, we can rebuilt the entire opus of English literature with a copy of Ulysses.

It would be a heterosexist world.  There is only one reference to gay people, a sniffing rebuttal of the allegation that Shakespeare was a pederast. 

There's hetero-sex -- lots of it -- a visit to a brothel, Molly Bloom's famous nine-page long "yes yes yes" as her husband tups her.

Fall 1969: My Boyfriend and I Play "Fighting Prince of Donegal"

This is the 1966 Scholastic Book Club edition of Fighting Prince of Donegal, by Robert T. Reilly.

It may not look like much now, but when I was in fourth grade at Denkmann Elementary School, and it appeared among the selections offered by the Scholastic Book Club, I was entranced.

This was no wimpy fairy-tale prince in love with a princess, but a Fighting Prince, strong and powerful.  I had never heard of Donegal, but it was obviously a mystical, distant country with castles on high mountains, outlined against an orange moon.

My boyfriend Bill and I both ordered copies.  They wouldn't arrive for four to six weeks.

We talked about the book every day.  Would the Prince have muscles?  Would he have a best man?  Would he rescue his best man, who would then sigh "My hero?" and melt into his arms?

We made swords out of cardboard and played "Fighting Prince of Donegal."  My brother got to be the villain, who would lock Bill in the dungeon (the lilac bushes outside my house) so I could rescue him.

We often talked about what the Prince looked like.  If you read the ad very carefully, you could see that the book was originally called Red Hugh, Prince of Donegal.  That meant a red-head.  He must look something like this: 

Or, from an adult point of view, like this:

We looked up Donegal in the Golden Book Encyclopedia.  It was a county in Ireland, on the northeast coast.

There was a book in the Denkmann Library about Donegal, but it was all fairy tales, which we  hated.

Would those books ever arrive?

Bill's big brother Tom told us that a couple of years ago, Disney made a movie version of The Fighting Prince of Donegal, starring Peter McEnery as Red Hugh.

"Did he rescue a boy or a girl?" I asked expectantly.

"Neither one," Tom said.  "He gets rescued by an older guy.  I don't remember his name." (It was Henry O'Neill, played by Tom Adams.)

The books arrived around Halloween.  We ran to Bill's house and upstairs to his room, thrust aside our other selections --  Journey to the Center of the Earth, Arrow Book of Ghost Stories, The Forgotten Door, The Secret Hide-Out, 13 Ghostly Tales -- and opened our books and started reading.

It was the most boring thing I had ever read!

After a few minutes, I looked up.  Bill was leafing through the pages, looking for the "good parts."

I skipped ahead to the end -- Red Hugh gets a girlfriend!

Bill and I looked at each other.  He put the book down and glanced at our cardboard swords in the corner.

"Wanna play Fighting Prince of Donegal?" I asked.

He nodded.  "But this time I wanna rescue you, and you have to melt into my arms and say 'My hero!'"

See also: Gay Teens in the Summer of Love.

Victor McLaglen: Boxer turned Silent Movie Boyfriend

Victor McLaglen was a British boxer who retired in 1920, moved to Hollywood, and became a popular character actor, mostly in parts that emphasized his towering height and bulging muscles: Hercules, Strong Boy, Biff Williams, Bull Stanley, Big Steve Andrews, Big Ben Wheeler

 He often appeared in movies directed by the homophobic John Ford, costarring with the homophobic John Wayne.

Yet the gay subtexts were everywhere.

1. The Unholy Three (1925). Three circus performers, a strong man, midget, and transvestite, form a "queer" criminal family.

2. Beau Geste (1926).  Buddy-bonding in the French Foreign Legion.

3. The Cock-Eyed World (1929).  Two marines (Victor, Edmund Lowe) compete over girls in Russia, Brooklyn, and Latin America.

4. The Lost Patrol (1934).  Soldiers lost in Mesopotamia during World War I take their shirts off while trying to find their way back home.

5. The Great Hotel Murder (1935).  Victor and Edmund Lowe are back, now novelist and detective competing to see who can solve a murder.

6. South of Pago Pago (1940).  Victor and Jon Hall take their shirts off while competing over a girl in the South Pacific.

7. The Quiet Man (1952).  Victor plays an Irishman who doesn't like the idea of American John Wayne marrying his sister, so they fight, tearing up the town, and end up buddies.

8. The Abductors (1957). Victor and buddy Gavin Muir plot to steal the remains of Abraham Lincoln.  No nudity, but by this point he's 69 years old.

Victor was married 3 times, but if you look closely at his personal life, you can find any number of provocatively intimate same-sex friendships.