12 Fairytale Hunks of "Once Upon a Time"

Once Upon a Time is a pastiche of feuding figures from fairy tales (mostly Disney versions), mythology, novels, folklore -- you name it.  The main characters are Snow White, Snow's daughter Emma, her grandson Henry, Regina the Evil Queen (who turns into the Good Queen), Rumpelstiltskin, Prince Charming, Captain Hook, and Belle from Beauty and the Beast.

But many other recognizable faces from your childhood appear.

With physiques that are the stuff of legend.


1. Michael Socha as Will Scarlett, Robin Hood's chum.

2. Liam Garrigan as King Arthur, the mythical king of Dark Age Britain, seen here schtupping his bff Lancelot (just kidding)

3. Deniz Akdeniz as Aladdin (the one from the Disney movie, not the one from the 1001 Nights).

4. Charles Mesure as Blackbeard, the real-life pirate, aka Edward Teach (1680-1718)
























5. Sinqua Walls as Sir Lancelot from the Arthurian legends.

6. Hank Harris as Henry Jekyll, from the Robert Louis Stevenson novel (Sam Witwer as Mr. Hyde).





More after the break

Philip Jose Farmer: Gay Sci-Fi with Muscles

When I was in college, you couldn't walk into Adam's Bookstore at the Augustana Student Union or Readmore Book World downtown without seeing a dozen sci-fi novels by Philip Jose Farmer (1918-2009) on display.  Bright, colorful paperbacks with amazingly muscular hunks on the covers, sometimes nude, and stories inside that sounded fascinating.

Sometimes they were.

There were three main types:

1. The World of Tiers: The Maker of Universes (1965), A Private Cosmos (1968), etc.  A man from our world is trapped on a multi-plane world occupied by various human, alien, and mythical beings.   He kills lots of bad guys and falls in love with a girl.  Yawn.

2. The Riverworld series: To Your Scattered Bodies Go (1971), The Fabulous Riverboat (1972), etc. Every person who has ever existed wakes up on the banks of an endless river.  Richard Burton, Alice Liddel (the inspiration for Alice in Wonderland), Mark Twain, a Neanderthal named Kazz, and other colorful characters search for answers.

The first book is great, but it takes three more before anyone solves the mystery, and then it's a complete let-down: "So this was what all the fuss was about?"

Still, it was nice to imagine every person who has ever lived standing around naked, including Genghis Khan, William Shakespeare, and my high school history teacher,

3. I was most interested in the postmodern, self-referential mash-ups of fictional heroes: Tarzan meets Doc Savage (Lord of the Trees and the Mad Goblin, 1970), and Sherlock Holmes (The Adventures of the Peerless Peer, 1974).  

The Jules Verne hero Phineas Fogg meets aliens (The Other Log of Phileas Fogg, 1973).  

Dorothy's son returns to Oz (A Barnstormer in Oz, 1982).

One of the first sci-fi writers to incorporate sexual activity into his stories, Farmer went wild, with graphic descriptions of multiple sexual acts.  But no gay characters that I can recall, though in A Feast Unknown (1969), Tarzan and Doc Savage find that they can only get aroused through violence, so they enter into a violent homoerotic relationship of sorts.  It was originally published as porn.

Also, in Flesh (1960), the good guy mass-murders a tribe of gay-stereotype Elves.

Bill and I Fall Asleep Reading Uncle Scrooge

When I was a kid in the 1960s, it was hard to find comic books.  I didn't get a regular allowance until junior high, and when I did manage to earn a quarter or a dime, Schneider's Drug Store would be out of my favorite titles. I depended mostly on gifts from my uncles, or hand-me-downs from my cousin or the big kid down the street.

So one of my fondest childhood memories is of the summer of 1971 -- a few weeks before my Aunt Mavis took us to see The Time Machine.  My boyfriend Bill, my brother, and I went to the Denkmann Elementary School Carnival, and  I won a whole box of Disney comics that somebody donated-- Donald Duck, Walt Disney's Comics and Stories, Uncle Scrooge --  over 20 in all.

In those days new comics cost 15 cents, so that was quite a score!

I could do without the Donald Ducks, with Donald being forced to sit on a chair at the Bon Ton while Daisy tried on hats, and the Walt Disney's Comics and Stories were uneven, but each of the Uncle Scrooges was a gem.

In each issue Uncle Scrooge traveled to a far-flung corner of the world with Donald and his grand-nephews (Huey, Dewey, and Louie) to manage his various business enterprises or acquire more wealth.

They are captured by the Harpies while searching for the Golden Fleece.
They rocket to a solid gold moon created by a Venusian explorer.
They find the Mines of King Solomon.
They visit the kingdom of Tralla-La in Tibet.

History, astronomy, mythology, chest-pounding adventure, either before or at the same moment that I was discovering Treasure Island, King Solomon's Mines, Coral Island, Journey to the Center of the Earth, and the books in the Green Library!

It was a male-only world, with no damsels in distress to be rescued and no girls waiting back home at the adventure's end.  Uncle Scrooge is elderly, his life nearly over, and he has never expressed the slightest interest in a woman.

But my memory has another layer:

I did not read the comics alone.

Bill invited me to stay over at his house so he could "help me" read, squeezed into his small bed in the room down the hall from his big brother Mike.

I read long into the night, long after Bill loosened his grip on a comic, his eyelids fluttered shut, and he began to snore. Once he shifted position until we were pressed together, his soft chest rising and falling, his lips parted slightly, his face illuminated in the golden light of his cowboy lamp.

When I was ready to sleep, I lay against his chest, and he put his arm around me.

I had slept over with Bill many times before, and I would sleep over again, but that was the only time we slept in each other's arms.

Omar Sharif and His Grandson

When I was a kid in the 1960s, our newspaper, The Rock Island Argus, had several interesting columns: Dear Abby, a criptoquip, and "Omar Sharif on Bridge."

Nazarenes weren't allowed to play cards, so I was only barely aware of what bridge was.  Still, it seemed exciting that a famous actor would stoop to writing about something so mundane as a card game.

Born in 1932 in Egypt, Sharif got his degree in physics before becoming an actor.  He starred in many Arabic movies before hitting Hollywood with a starring role in Lawrence of Arabia in 1962.  A rarity in its day (and even now), the movie fails to heterosexualize the gay T.E. Lawrence, and even gives him a gay-subtext relationship with Arab leader Sherif Ali (Sharif).

Next came starring roles in the big-budget epics Doctor Zhivago (1965) and Genghis Khan (1965), plus dramas, Westerns, and musicals.  He played revolutionary leader Che Guevara (Che!) and the mysterious Captain Nemo (The Mysterious Island).

This nude scene is from the Western MacKenna's Gold (1969). He plays an effervescent but amoral Mexican outlaw named John Colorado, who doesn't display any interest in women.

He became best friends with French actor Jean-Paul Belmondo after they starred together in Le Casse (The Burglars, 1971), as a jewel thief and the corrupt cop who wants his share of the loot.

By the way, bridge was not only a hobby for Sharif, it was a second career.

I don't know if he was gay-positive or not, but his grandson, Omar Sharif Jr. is gay.  Also an actor, he left Egypt in 2012 after the restriction of human rights, and came out in an article in The Advocate.

Pat Boone, Gay Icon

It's hard to imagine, but conservative spokesperson Pat Boone was once an icon for gay kids.  In a 1959 version of the Jules Verne classic Journey to the Center of the Earth, one of a series of adaptions of Jules Verne classics which Disney made during the period, Alec (Boone) journeys into the subterranean world with his geologist uncle, Professor Lindenbrook (James Mason), their guide Hans (Peter Ronson), and a love interest for the professor (Arlene Dahl).

While minimizing plausibility (they encounter giant lizards and the ruins of Atlantis), director Henry Levin maximized beefcake. As the explorers descend, Alec doffs his clothes, and the camera forsakes closeups of his prettyboy face to concentrate on his small, firm biceps and lean, tight chest.

Soon Hans doffs his clothes, too; he is blond and beefy, considerably more defined, a veritable Tarzan.

The men spend the rest of the movie falling into pits, fleeing from lizards, almost suffocating in salt pits, and almost drowning in oceans, and consequently rescuing, grabbing, holding, and comforting each other; Alec is especially likely to require rescue, followed by cradling in Hans' strong arms. When they reach a field of giant mushrooms that will replenish their dwindling food supply, they are so delighted that they break out into a dance while the Professor's love interest stands aside, a spectator only.

Hans is not interested in girls, but Alex has a girlfriend back home, whom he marries in the last frames of the movie.  But after two hours of half-naked men grabbing, holding, and comforting each other, we could put up with a fade-out boy-girl kiss.

In real life, Pat Boone is a conservative Christian who frequently makes homophobic statements, although my friend Randall said that he was "straight but open to suggestions back in the 1950s.

See: Dick Sargent's Hookup with Pat Boone

Chris Demetral: Dream On

Star Trek fans will recognize Chris Demetral from his role as Riker's son on a 1990 episode of The Next Generation.  The 14-year old Michigan native had only been in Hollywood for two years, but he had already landed guest spots on several high-profile tv series, including Mr. Belvedere, The Wonder Years, and The New Lassie, and he would go on to guest on several more.


Chris became best known for playing Jeremy Tupper, son of book editor Martin Tupper (Brian Benben) on the HBO series Dream On (1990-96). Advertised as an "adult sitcom," it mostly featured Martin pursuing women (with lots of cable-tv nudity).   Jeremy has his share of dates and romances, and even has sex during the December 18, 1993 episode.

But the heterosexist part didn't prohibit buddy-bonding elsewhere. In the spring of 1993, Chris became a series regular on Lois and Clark, playing a homeless teenager named Jack, whom Clark/Superman (Dean Cain) takes in.  Designed as a replacement for Jimmy Olsen, with some buddy-bonding and nick of time rescues, Jack didn't click with Superman purists, and he was written out.

In Blank Check (1994), Chris plays Damian, the brother of the 12-year old who cashes a check for $1,000,000.  Damian's relationship with his brother Ralph (Michael Faustino, younger brother of David Faustino) is called into question when a computer repeats "Ralph and Damian sleep butt to face."

Chris's last major role was in The Secret Adventures of Jules Verne (2000), a Canadian tv series.  The French science fiction writer travels around with his friends, Phileas and Rebecca Fogg (Michael Praed, Francesca Hunt), and his servant Passepartout (Michel Courtemanche), fighting monsters and the League of Darkness.

Not much buddy-bonding, but Jules is certainly gay-vague. Whenever the group meets a damsel in distress, the horny Phileas takes over.  Jules spends most of his time striking up conversations with strange men.

Chris disliked the "Hollywood lifestyle," so he retired from acting and moved back home to Michigan. He currently works for talkhumor.com, where his bio states that he is "a reformed smartass" known for his love for his wife, family, friends, the Lakers, and his saviour Jesus. I didn't find any gay-positive or homophobic content on the site.

Jules Verne: The Disney Version

During the 1960s, every boy I knew loved Jules Verne -- journeys to distant corners of the world, weird dangers, lost civilizations, monsters, volcanoes, maelstroms, and nick-of-time escapes, all in an environment so masculine you could practically taste the homoerotic tension.

I read 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, From the Earth to the Moon, Mysterious Island, and A Journey to the Center of the Earth in elementary school, in abridged Scholastic Book Club editions.  In high school, I read the originals, and collected some of the Ace paperbacks of Verne's lesser-known works: Michael Strogoff, The Begum's Fortune, The Carpathian Castle, Master of the World, The Village in the Tree-Tops.  

During the 1950s and early 1960s, "Disney" versions of these Verne classics appeared, with two important changes:
1. To draw the all-important Boomer audience, a teenager.
2. To ensure a Hollywood fade-out-kiss, heterosexual obsessions were added.

In 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, the French scientist Pierre Aronnax, his assistant Conseil, and his Canadian friend Ned Land are captured by Captain Nemo, who holds them prisoner in his electronic submarine.  Nemo became an outcast after his wife died, but no other women are mentioned or longed for.

In the 1954 movie (the only one actually from Disney), Ned (Kirk Douglas, not a teenager) sings about "the girls I've loved on nights like this," whose kisses make him "bubble up like molten lava."

In A Journey to the Center of the Earth, Professor Lindenbrock, his nephew Axel, and their Icelandic guide Hans journey alone, although Axel does have a girlfriend waiting back home.  In the 1959 Disney version (actually from 20th Century Fox), the Professor meets a lady, and the girlfriend gets a more substantial role.  But at least there are substantial shirtless shots of teen idol Pat Boone as Alec (Axel).  And in the last scene he's completely nude except for a sheep.

In The Mysterious Island , five Civil War POWs escape in a hot-air balloon and end up on the mysterious island, where they fight giant bees and pirates, encounter Captain Nemo (Omar Sharif), and flee a volcano eruption. In the 1961 Disney version (actually from Columbia), there are women on the island for the men to fall in love with.

But at least they are shirtless or semi-nude most of the time, especially Herbert Brown (Michael Callan).  The scene where he and the girl hide from a giant bee in a honeycomb is still scary today.

In Five Weeks in a Balloon, three men explore Africa in a hot air balloon. Again, no women are mentioned or longed for.

The 1962 Disney version (actually from 20th Century Fox) changes the cast, adding pilot Jacques (teen idol Fabian Forte) and newspaper report O'Shay (Red Buttons).  Each falls in love with a woman en route; the movie ends with two couples enthusiastically kissing. And there's no beefcake (although Fabian, right, often appeared shirtless and nude in other productions).

This was also the era of the Disney Adventure Boys -- like Tommy Kirk, James MacArthur, and Kurt Russell -- hired to display Cold War masculinity, which meant two things: muscular physiques and heterosexual obsession.

The League of Extraordinarily Heterosexist Gentlemen

  I was looking forward to seeing The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003).  What's not to like about a Victorian England with steam-powered submarines and tanks?  Or a group of secret agents made up of Jules Verne's Captain Nemo, H. Rider Haggard's Alan Quartermain, and other fictional characters of the era?   Including a grown-up Tom Sawyer (Shane West, left)?  I knew that Mark Twain wrote some novels about the grown-up Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn as secret agents.  And Oscar Wilde's gay antihero Dorian Gray?  I heard some bad things about the movie.  Like the stars had a three-picture contract that was scrapped.  And director Stephen Norrington hated it so much that he swore off directing for good.  But I said to myself, obviously some members of the audience haven't read the original novels, and won't get the jokes.  Then I started watching.    The set-up is interesting enough.  The mysterious M, a precursor to the M who heads the British secret service in the James Bond novels, recruits a group of action heroes.  The previously mentioned four, plus:  5. Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll (Jason Flemyng, left, whose Mr. Hyde is an Incredible Hulk clone) 6. Mina Harker (from Dracula) 7. "An invisible man" (Tony Curran, below; they couldn't get permission to use The Invisible Man, by H. G. Wells).      Their opponent, the villainous Darth Vader-like Fantom, plans to start World War I a little early by blowing up Venice.  There are more plot twists, double-agents, and betrayals.  I think.  It's all so very, very tedious that I kept falling asleep.  When I wasn't getting angry about the constant heterosexism.  These Extraordinary Gentlemen are all very, very, very heterosexual.  The older ones are all mourning dead wives, and the younger ones spend their time flirting with Mina Harker, telling each other "She's out of your league," or thinking "She'll never be interested in anyone like me."  The gay subtexts of the original novels are gone.  Even Dorian Gray has been de-gayed.  He gazes at men as unwelcome competition in his quest to get with Mina.    The only gay subtext of any sort comes between Tom Sawyer and Alan Quartermain, who can't keep their hands off each other, and keep talking about the size of each others' "guns."  But lest we get "the wrong idea," Quartermain explains that he lost his son, and he's trying to be a father figure to Tom.  There wasn't even any decent beefcake, just the extraordinarily ugly Dr. Jekyl with his shirt off and whatever CGI muscle they used for Mr. Hyde.  Nothing to take my mind off everyone congratulating each other on being heterosexual and yelling "Aren't you happy that gay people don't exist!"  I hated this movie.  See also: Robert Louis Stevenson; Jules Verne; H. Rider Haggard. 

Michael Strogoff: Jules Verne's Gay Couple

Jules Verne is most famous today for his science fiction novels, like 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and The Mysterious Island, but during his lifetime his biggest fame came for a romance, Michel Strogoff, or Michael Strogoff: Courier for the Czar (1876).  

It was translated into a dozen languages, and there are film versions in English, Spanish, French, Italian, and Turkish. The 1970 French-Italian version starred counterculture beefcake icon John Phillip Law (the nude angel in Barbarella), and the 1975 German version rugged bear Raimund Harmstorf (left).

The plot sounds unrelentingly heterosexist:  In "contemporary" Russia, Tartar rebels have taken control of Siberia, and the governor, brother of Tsar Alexander II, is trapped in the besieged city of Irkutsk.  Michael Strogoff is assigned the task of traveling across enemy-occupied territory to warn him of a plot to blow up Irkutsk.

On the way he meets and falls in love with Nadia, who is traveling to meet her exiled father.  They are captured by the Tartars, who decree that Michael be blinded (in a shirtless scene that appears on almost every book cover and movie poster).

But the blinding doesn't work, and Michael and Nadia escape and continue on to Irkutsk to save the day.  Then they are married. The end.

But there is also a gay-subtext couple, French and English reporters Alcide Jolivet and Harry Blount (played by Donatello Castallaneta and Christian Marin in the 1970 version), who accompany Michael on his journey.

They meet as jealous rivals for the same "scoop," but then they must work together.  They help Michael fight off a giant bear.  Harry is shot, and Alcide tends to him.  They are captured by the Tartars, and escape together.

At the end of the novel, they attend Michael and Nadia's wedding, with an exchange that sounds very much like a marriage proposal:

"And doesn't it make you wish to imitate them?" asked Alcide of his friend.

"Pooh!" said Blount. "Now if I had a cousin like you—"

"My cousin isn't to be married!" answered Alcide, laughing.

"So much the better," returned Blount, "for they speak of difficulties arising between London and Pekin. Have you no wish to go and see what is going on there?"

"By Jove, my dear Blount!" exclaimed Alcide Jolivet, "I was just going to make the same proposal to you."

And that was how the two inseparables set off for China.

Michael Callan: A Gay Guy and His Pretend Wife

One of the most iconic beefcake moments of my childhood came in Mysterious Island, the 1961 adaption of the Jules Verne classic about some Civil War soldiers who end up lost on a mysterious island with giant crabs, prehistoric auks, and Captain Nemo. The 1960s version added some women to up the hetero-romance, but made up for it by divesting Michael Callan of his shirt.  The scene where he and his girlfriend get trapped by giant bees is still frightening today.

Michael Callan was the go-to guy for teenage beefcake in the 1960s, wandering between Disney, ARP, and anyone else who would put a shirtless scene.  I've seen him as a bulgeworthy circus aerialist in The Flying Fontaines (1959), a troubled high schooler in Because They're Young (1960), a gang member in West Side Story (1961), a teen dancer in Gidget Goes Hawaiian (1961), and a rascally cowboy in Cat Ballou (1965). 

He also took off his shirt in Bon Voyage (1962), The Interns (1962), The Victors (1963), and who knows what else?

Although he always seems to have his arms around a girl, many of Michael's early movies involve as much buddy-bonding as girl-kissing.  He bonds with Warren Berlinger in Because They're Young, Cliff Robertson in The Interns, and Dwayne Hickman (left) in Cat Ballou.  

The sitcom Occasional Wife (1966-67) seems to have been a sitcom about a gay guy and his "beard."  Businessman Peter (Michael Callan) knows that he can't get ahead without being married, so he convinces his gal pal Greta (Patricia Hartley) to pretend to be his wife.

Plots involve backstabbing coworkers, people suspecting their secret, and Greta's boyfriend suspecting that they're really involved, but no hetero-romance for Peter.  You can see some episodes on youtube.

In real life Michael was married three times, and doesn't have a lot of gay rumors attached to him, though Dwayne Hickman spends many pages of his autobiography describing their warm friendship.

 

Josh Hutcherson: Straight but Not Narrow

In April 2012, 19-year old Josh Hutcherson became the youngest person ever to win the GLAAD Vanguard Award for the "Straight but Not Narrow" anti-homophobia campaign that he started (with buddy Avan Joggia of Victorious).

Paradoxically, his on-screen performances have veered toward the heterosexist.

I first noticed him in Bridge to Terabintha (2007), about two preteens who escape from the horrors of real life into an imaginary world, but find that it can't help them.  Real life is too awful.

I hated it: the trailers led me to expect a Chronicles of Narnia-style adventure about a "real" fantasy world, not two mentally ill kids who were hallucinating.  And one of them dies. Oh, and Josh's character gets a girlfriend.

And Firehouse Dog (2007), about a movie-star dog who goes to work in a struggling firehouse, and revives it with the help of a boy, Shane (Josh).  Who gets a girlfriend.

So far this actor's work was depressing, but being a Jules Verne fan, I gave him another chance in the latest adaption of Journey to the Center of the Earth (2008).   In search of his missing brother, geologist Trevor Anderson (Brendan Fraser) explores the Center of the Earth, along with his nephew Sean (Josh) and their teenage guide Anita.  Both Trevor and Sean are into Anita (she picks Trevor).

Ok, what about Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant (2009), based on the gay-subtext novel series by Darren Shan?  There's some buddy-bonding: Darren (Chris Massoglia) offers to become a vampire to save the life of his buddy Steve (Josh).

And The Kids are All Right (2010): Josh plays Laser, teenage son of a lesbian couple.

But The Hunger Games (2012): Peeta (Josh) and Katniss (Jennifer Lawrence) are chosen to participate in a teenage survival-death game where the last one alive wins.  They fall in love, and find a way to both survive.  Fade out kiss.

The Forger (2012), with Jansen Panettiere, looks promising. But Paradise Lost (2014) will star Josh as a young surfer who meets "the girl of his dreams" in Colombia.

Besides, I'm still mad about The Bridge to Terabintha.

Classics Illustrated

A decade after the Seduction of the Innocent scandal that blamed comic books for single-handedly causing the downfall of society, teachers still thought they were cesspools of corruption.  Archie, Casper the Friendly Ghost, Little Lulu -- it didn't matter.  The only comics we could read with impunity at recess or summer camp were Classics Illustrated, the long-running series of comic adaption of adventure classics: Moby Dick, The Last of the Mohicans, Around the World in 80 Days.  

The publishers quickly ran out of adventure classics and began presenting adaptions of obscure works that no one except literary scholars ever read, like Eugene Sue's Mysteries of Paris, Emile Zola's The Downfall, Jules Verne's Michael Strogoff, and Charles Nordhoff & James Hall's The Hurricane. 

But regardless of the "classic," you could always depend on shirtless and semi-nude muscle shots to draw the eye to the cover art.  Who knew that Mark Twain's Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court had such a buffed physique?

There was also a Classics Junior series, with fairy tales and mythology.  The Magic Pitcher was about the muscular Hermes of Greek mythology dishing out a cornucopia, with disastrous consequences.