The Mickey Mouse Club: Which Mousketeer was the cutest? Which was gay?

When Annette Funicello died on April 8, 2013, the world mourned one of the iconic figures of the Boomer generation.  She was the first crush for many heterosexual boys and gay girls who watched her every week on The Mickey Mouse Club, and later in comedies co-starring Tommy Kirk and Frankie Avalon (left).

The Mickey Mouse Club (1955-59) was the first children's television program that starred real children, "the Mouseketeers."  They wore wore mouse ear-shaped caps and white sweaters emblazoned with their first names, and performed song-and-dance numbers interspliced with Disney cartoons, amateur talent contests, and dramatic serials.

In the early 1980s, the original series was broadcast on the Disney Channel.  My sister watched every day after school, and I saw a few episodes.  Girls outnumbered boys three to one, but if you could find them, the boys were exceptionally cute.  And in the 1950s, singing and dancing were widely labeled "sissy" pursuits, so they were all gay coded.  Turns out that only two were actually gay.

1. Bobby Burgess (born 1941), who was very tall, well-scrubbed, and always smiling. Straight. 

He went on to dance on The Lawrence Welk Show.

2. The short, sandy-haired Lonnie Burr (born 1943) was the intellectual of the group (his website commemorates Annette Funicello's death with the Latin phrase "ave atque vale"). Straight.

He was a poet and playwright as well as an actor.

3. Tommy Cole (born 1941) was hired primarily for his singing ability, though had a handsome face and the hunkiest physique among the Mousketeers (left). Straight.

After MMC, he had a stint in the air force and then became a makeup artist.

4. Cubby O'Brien (born 1946), the kid of the show, became a professional drummer. Straight.

More after the break

Johnny Crawford: Growing Up in the Old West

Westerns in the 1950s and 1960s were good for beefcake but not for bonding.  The days of the cowboy and sidekick were long gone, replaced by single fathers and womanizing card sharks.

The Rifleman (1958-63) was no exception.  The tale of widowed Lucas McCain (Chuck Connors) and his son Mark (Johnny Crawford) had two men living together and caring for each other, and lots of nick-of-time rescues -- Mark seemed to get tied up and threatened by bad guys just about every week -- but they were father and son, and neither developed a significant relationship with anyone else, male or female.

On the other hand, there was lots of muscle.  A former basketball player (and reputedly the star of a gay underground film), Chuck Connors was lean, lanky, and craggy.  As Johnny Crawford grew into a teenager, he surpassed his father, developing a ripped bodybuilder physique.

But that didn't mean that he stopped being the object of "my hero" heroics.

They were also shirtless in comic books, coloring books, big-little books, and every other tie-in imaginable.

Johnny Crawford appeared in Indian Paint (1965), some teen beach and horror movies, such as Village of the Giants (1965) with Tommy Kirk.  He was even fully nude in The Naked Ape (1973) and The Great Texas Dynamite Chase (1976) before settling down to a career as a singer.

But he has continued to appear occasionally before the camera; for instance, as Deputy Noah Paisley on an episode of Murder She Wrote (1985), or as Art in the children's movie Rupert Patterson Wants to Be a Superhero (1997).

In The Gambler Returns (1991), Kenny Rogers' Gambler encounters some of the most famous figures of the Old West, including Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, Diamond Jim Brady, President Teddy Roosevelt -- and Mark McCain!

The Naked Ape: Johnny Crawford's First Nude Scene

Other than Burt Reynolds posing on a bear skin rug for Cosmo, this is probably the most famous nude photo ever: a frontal of Johnny Crawford, a Boomer icon for his teen idol songs and his role as the squeaky-clean, innocent kid on The Rifleman, no longer squeaky-clean or innocent, letting it all hang out for the swinging 1970s.  It was used to advertise The Naked Ape (1973). 

But no one has actually seen the movie, unless you went to the theater on the three days in August 1973 when it was playing.

The book The Naked Ape (1967), by Desmond Morris, attributes our behavior today to the evolutionary advantages of our caveman ancestors.  Women are attracted to big muscles, for instance, because they were better for fighting off saber-toothed tigers, thereby enhancing survival.  Men are attracted to big breasts because they can nourish infants better, thereby enhancing offspring survival.

Wait...not every woman likes big muscles, and not every man likes big breasts.  Sometimes it's the other way around.  Physical attractiveness is primarily a matter of cultural norms.

Anthropologists thought it was ridiculous, but the back-to-nature set grabbed copies as fast as they could be printed, creating the first anthropological bestseller since Margaret Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa.  

But how do you make a movie out of an anthropological text?

Not very easily, apparently.

It seems to be about two college student (Johnny Crawford, Victoria Principal), who get all horny with each other and hang out naked, while a psychiatrist (John Hillerman) explains their behavior as cave-people grunting.  There are trippy animated sequences.  Robert Ito of Quincey plays a samurai.  Davis Olivieri of The New People is in there somewhere.  Since it was produced by Hugh Heffner of Playboy, I doubt that there is any gay content.

In spite of the word "naked" in the title, The Naked Ape came and went instantly.  Writer/director Donald Driver never wrote or directed any movie ever again.  It received no play on tv, hardly any on cable tv, it's not on youtube or Netflix, and there's no DVD available. It's hard to even find a plot synopsis.

Maybe it's for the best.  After seeing the nude frontal of Johnny Crawford so often for so many years, what movie could live up to the expectation?

You can see the uncensored photo on Tales of West Hollywood.

Chuck Connors

Chuck Connors may be forever remembered as the taciturn, loving, and endlessly shirtless Lucas McCain,  Johnny Crawford's dad on The Rifleman, but he had a long career before and after as a screen hunk.  Born in 1920, he started out as a pro ball player -- both baseball and basketball -- before a talent scout spotted him and cast him in Pat and Mike (1952).  Dozens of Westerns, spy movies, and war movies followed, with an occasional comedy thrown in, like the tv series Hey Jeannie (1958) and Love That Jill (1958).

The Rifleman brought him fame, of course, both for his shirtless shots and for the frequency with which he kills bad guys -- two or three per episode.  Fortunately, the kids who grew up on a diet of nonstop violence turned out fine -- the 10 year olds of 1958 grew into the 20-year old anti-war protesters of the Summer of Love.

Immediately after The Rifleman, Chuck moved back to the 20th century to play Porter Ricks in the movie version of the boy-and-pet-dolphin movie Flipper (1963), with Luke Halpin as Sandy; it later became a popular, beefcake heavy tv series.

In the Doris Day comedy Move Over, Darling (1963), Ellen (Doris) is lost at sea and presumed dead, so after five years her husband Nick (James Garner) moves on.  But Ellen resurfaces during his honeymoon.  Hijinks ensue. Chuck plays Steven Burkett, the handsome, athletic, leopard-skin swimsuit-clad man she shared a desert island with for five years.  Nothing happened, however.

Some dramas and Westerns followed, including Synanon (1965), with Alex Cord; Branded (1966-67), about a man unjustly drummed out of the army for cowardice ("what do you do when you're branded, and you know you're a ma-aa-n?"; and Cowboy in Africa (1967-68), which I never saw, but appeared to be about a same-sex couple (Chuck Connors, Tom Nardini) who run a ranch in Kenya and adopt a native boy.  It was based on the movie Africa: Texas Style, starring Hugh O'Brian.

I didn't seem much of Chuck during the 1970s; he appeared mostly in Westerns, which I didn't care for.  But he appeared again in Werewolf (1987-88), which starred hunky Eric (John J. York), a college student bitten by a werewolf; Chuck played evil head werewolf Janos Skorzeny, the object of Eric's quest to free himself from his curse.

Chuck Connors died in 1992.  He was married three times and had four children.  Recently there was a rumor circulating that he did some gay porn during his pro-ball days.  I doubt it; he wasn't part of the Physique Pictorial or Henry Willson crowd, and the footage doesn't really look like him.

But here's a censored full-frontal.  It looks a lot like him.

The uncensored photo is on Tales of West Hollywood.

Bobby and Johnny Crawford

Many Boomer kids aren't aware that Johnny Crawford, the 1950s teen idol, star of The Mickey Mouse Club and The Rifleman, the bodybuilder with full nude scenes in The Naked Ape, had a older and even more muscular brother, Bobby Crawford or Robert Crawford Jr.

Born in 1946, Bobby starred with Johnny on three episodes of The Rifleman, and in Indian Paint (1965),  where the two play Native Americans.  They get many semi-nude shots and, as a bonus, develop a quasi-romantic physical intimacy.

TV and movie magazines love brother acts, and soon Bobby and Johnny were being photographed together, often framing them as if they were a romantic couple.  They released several albums together, including one entitled Pals. 

But Bobby also had a solo career, with guest spots on The Donna Reed Show and Whirlybirds, and a recurring role on Zorro.  

He was nominated for an Emmy for his performance on Child of Our Time, a 1959 episode of Playhouse 90, about a young boy searching for a home in 1930s France.

He starred in the Western Laramie (1959-60), about two brothers who run a stagecoach stop in the Wyoming Territory.  His character idolizes the hunky drifter Jess Harper (Robert Fuller), and soon the two actors were seen out together in real life, "two bachelors" hitting the Hollywood hotspots.

Later in the 1960s, Bobby played an oddball outsider on Kraft Suspense Theater, a World War II French resistance figher on Combat, and a young man who idolizes his outlaw brother on Gunsmoke.  His last small-screen appearances were on My Three Sons in 1968.

Moving behind the scenes, he produced The Sting (1973), The World According to Garp (1982), The Little Drummer Girl (1984), and other movies.

Village of the Giants

Tommy Kirk's first movie after he was outed and fired by Disney was Village of the Giants (1965), which I saw at a kiddie matinee on my first date in October 1968.

A small town full of rednecks and inept police officers, the sort frequently overrun by giant ants or Commie body snatchers during the 1950s, gets a different sort of invasion: six hippies who play loud music and smart off to authority figures.  Oddly, though the group is of mixed sexes, none of them seem to be heterosexually involved, and no one displays more than a passing interest in the ogling of the other sex: it’s boys on one side, girls on the other.










Meanwhile, nice teenager Mike (Tommy Kirk) spends about ten minutes demonstrating that he is heterosexual by kissing up a girl, but then he descends to the basement nightworld of her pint-sized brother Genius (Ronnie Howard, future star of Happy Days).  Genius has invented a concoction called “goo,” which transforms dogs, birds, and people into giants.

After ridiculing the nice teens at a local hotspot, the hippies steal the goo, figuring that they can use it to create more mischief.  They eat it and shoot up to thirty feet tall, in the process shredding their clothes.

Director Bert I. Gordon previously accentuated the beefcake in several B-movies, including The Amazing Colossal Man (1957) and The Boy and the Pirates (1960), and his camera lingers lovingly on the thick arms and sculpted torsos of the boys, including a young Beau Bridges.

And a very sexy Tim Rooney (Mickey Rooney’s son), while all but ignoring the girls.

The giant hippies conclude that the Revolution has come, the Establishment has been defeated, and youth are in charge of this brave new world.  They don Roman-style togas that enhance the boys’ musculature, and celebrate by dancing semi-nude  in slow motion in the town square.








So far, in spite of the beefcake, we have a heterosexist fable, like A Cold Day in the Park, in which establishment heterosexuals face off against the sexual ambiguity of the counterculture.

But when Genius develops an antidote to the goo, Mike dumps his girl to hook up with Horsey (Johnny Crawford of The Rifleman, left, looking jealous on a title card).  They administer the antidote by catapulting Horsey directly onto the bosom of one of the giant girls.

In many situations a human missile fired onto a bosom would be overbrimming with heterosexual undertones, but in this case Horsey is attacking, literally trying to destroy the symbol of monstrous femininity.  When he falls and seems stunned, Mike rushes to his aid.  The manly love of comrades  wins out over heterosexual practice, however aggressively pursued.