Cowboy and Indian Toys

When I was a kid in the 1960s, cowboys and Indians were has-beens.  Older kids watched Western tv and remembered six shooters and Davy Crockett hats, but my friends and I played at being spies, Jonny Quest and Hadji, or space explorers.  Still, Indians had a penchant for nudity, like Johnny Crawford and his brother Bobby in Indian Paint (1965), or the god Wisakeha, who Bill and I saw in real life at the Pow Wow in 1969, so when a clueless adult happened to give me a cowboy-and-Indian toy, I made good use of it.

Indian action figures were usually naked except for loincloths, making them the second most reliable source of beefcake in toys (Tarzan was first).

Books about Indians were always good for beefcake photos.

Rock Island was the site of Saukenauk, where Chief Black Hawk ruled over the Sauk and Fox Indians, so his picture was everywhere.  This statue, with a phallic spear extending from his belly,  looked over Chippianoc Cemetery ("City of the Dead" in the Sauk language).  It was lit up with red and blue neon at night.

I got in trouble in school for drawing it in my notebook.  My teacher called it "smut," thinking that the phallic symbol was a real phallus.

I didn't really know who the Lone Ranger and Tonto were, but the idea of cowboy-Indian boyfriends was appealing.  Their arms could be bent, so they could put their arms around each other and kiss.

10 Forgotten Musclemen of Movie Serials

Between 1936 and 1955, you didn't just go to a movie; you went to a whole evening's entertainment, with cartoons, newsreels, two features, and a serial -- a cliffhanging, 12-15 chapter adventure, Western, or science fiction series designed to fill the seats week after week as audiences wondered "How will the hero get out of this jam?"

Three main studios, Columbia, Republic, and Universal, churned out dozens of serials every year, so they needed lots of action heroes.  Some became famous later, in feature films and on tv, and others faded away quickly, but they all offered buddy-bonding and occasional glimpses of biceps and bulges.  Here are the top 10 musclemen of the movie serials:

1. Buster Crabbe may have died in 1983, but his fame -- and exceptional physique -- live on. He was a beefcake staple for 30 years, playing Tarzan and Tarzan clones (1933), cowboys Red Barry and Billy the Kid, and futuristic space heroes Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon.  Lots of scripts called for him to get his shirt ripped off.

2. Herman Brix competed in the Olympics as Bruce Bennett, then gave Buster Crabbe some competition with the serials The New Adventures of Tarzan (1935) and Tarzan and the Green Goddess (1938).  He also stripped down to play Kioga in Hawk of the Wilderness (1938).

3. Former college athlete Charles Starrett was best known for the Durango Kid series, but he also got torn out of his clothes in The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932), to be tortured and turned into a zombie (left).

4. Gordon Jones (left) died in 1963, so he isn't well known to the Boomer generation, but in his day he was a well known face and physique.  Catch his exposed biceps in an early version of The Green Hornet in the 1941 serial.

5. Kane Richmond played the adult mentor/boyfriend to teenage Frankie Darro in a series of 1930s "Thrill-o-Ramas," plus some Charlie Chan mysteries, Westerns, and beefcake-heavy boxing movies.   His main serial was the superheroic Spy Smasher (1942).  He retired to open a hair salon.

6. The rugged Tom Tyler had a long career in Westerns, but flexed his muscles as two comic superheroes brought to life in movie serials: The Adventures of Captain Marvel (1941) and The Phanton (1943)

7. Gerald Mohr played a pulp detective named The Lone Wolf (1946, 1947) and narrated the first season of The Lone Ranger series on tv (1949-50). 

8. Speaking of The Lone Ranger, before Clayton Moore became identified with the Masked Man (1949-1957), he had a long career in movies and serials, mostly Westerns, naturally.

9. Kirk Alyn never disrobed on camera, but his muscular frame was displayed in a Superman costume in the only serials about the original superhero, Superman (1948) and Atom Man v. Superman (1950).

10. Jock Mahoney played a rather long-in-the-tooth Tarzan in Tarzan Goes to India (1962), but he also starred in some serials, such as Cody of the Pony Express (1950) and Roar of the Iron Horse (1951).  

The Lone Ranger and Tonto: The First Gay Couple

When I was a kid in the 1960s, we were all about astronauts and outer space.  Cowboys were strictly for squares. We had a few cowboy toys, presented by clueless adults, but  we didn't dare bring them out with other kids around, and we would watch a tv Western only if it had science fiction elements, like Wild Wild West.  So, except for a few parodies, we knew nothing about the Lone Ranger and Tonto, the most blatant gay couple of the first generation of Boomers.

First appearing on the radio in 1933, the Lone Ranger was a Texas Ranger (a sort of Wild West police officer) who was ambushed along with his squadron and left for dead.  He was nursed back to health by an Indian named Tonto (apparently his creator, Fran Striker, didn't speak Spanish), and the two of them rode off to right wrongs.

The radio series was immensely popular, and led to an endless series of toys, games, cereal give-aways, comic books, Big-Little Books, movie serials, and feature films.

Boomer kids often heard their parents discussing fond memories of huddling over a radio listening to an announcer intone "Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear!", after which the Lone Ranger would say "Heigh-ho, Silver! Away!"

Did none of them figure out that these were two men living together, never displaying the least interest in women, and one of them said "Heigh-ho"?

The radio series lasted through 1956, but first generation of Boomer kids was most familiar with the tv series (1949-57), starring Clayton Moore and Jay Silverheels.  I've never seen it, but apparently there's no heterosexual interest, and Tonto needs rescuing quite a lot.

Clayton Moore (top photo) was a former circus acrobat who broke into Hollywood in 1937 and starred in many Westerns, detective dramas, and even science fiction before and during The Lone Ranger. Afterwards he didn't do much acting; he didn't want to.  He had already become the idol of kids everywhere.  Apparently he was not aware of the gay subtext.

Jay Silverheels (born Harold J. Smith) was a Canadian Mohawk Indian, who got his start in movies as a stuntman.  He, too, had a long career before The Lone Ranger, playing mostly characters named Black Buffalo, Yellow Hawk, and Spotted Bear. Afterwards he continued to work, playing Indians in Laramie, Branded, Daniel Boone, Gentle Ben, and The Brady Bunch, and a non-Indian on Love American Style.  Apparently he was not aware of the gay subtext, either.

But lots of gay kids were aware.  In The Best Little Boy in the World, a classic gay Boomer autobiography, John Reid states that he first figured "it" out through his fantasies of the Lone Ranger and Tonto riding into the sunset together.

The 2013 re-invention starring Johnny Depp and Armie Hammer effectively heterosexualized both charactersn.

Johnny Depp's Lone Ranger: For Heterosexuals Only

Johnny Depp makes movies by heterosexuals for heterosexuals, positing a gloriously gay-free world of oddball outcasts who both swish and leer at the ladies: Edward Scissorhands, Benny and Joon, What's Eating Gilbert Grape, Don Juan Demarco, The Ninth Gate, Sleepy Hollow, Blow, From Hell, Pirates of the Caribbean, Public Enemies, The Tourist, Dark Shadows, and even Rango all begin and end with The Girl.  He says "all of my characters are gay," by which he means they all have gender-atypical mannerisms. None are gay.  Not even Ed Wood, who wears angora sweaters but falls for The Girl.  Not even The Libertine, who claims to like both men and women, but is shown with only women.

What about the Lone Ranger and Tonto,  the masked vigilante of "yesteryear" and his faithful Indian sidekick, a  classic gay-subtext couple, who roamed the West through twenty years of radio, tv, comic books, and movies without ever glancing at a lady?  In The Best Little Boy in the World, a classic gay Boomer autobiography, John Reid states that he first figured "it" out through his fantasies of the Lone Ranger and Tonto riding into the sunset together.

Nearly 60 years after the tv series ended and 30 years after the last of the cartoons, cameos, and spoofs faded away, Johnny Depp has re-invented the franchise with an origin story that has conservative stick-in-the-mud lawyer John Reid, aka the Lone Ranger(Armie Hammer), and outcast oddball Tonto (Johnny Depp) working together to capture the outlaw Butch Cavendish (William Fitchtner).  Along the way, they will discover that they can't trust anyone, neither the Indians nor the representatives of white government and big business.

To be blunt, the story stinks.  Butch Cavendish is both a spooky paranormal villain who eats the body parts of his victims, and a mercenary who teams up with an evil industrialist to steal silver from Comanche country.

 Tonto is insane, constantly feeding the dead crow perched on his head.

 John Reid is absurdly square, a Dudley Do-Right in a white hat (this beefcake shot is not from the movie).

There are three -- three! -- train-fight scenes, with leaps onto or off moving trains, fistfights atop boxcars, crashes into bandstands or bridges, shooting through walls, and rescues. I don't know why -- by the third, I wasn't paying attention to the plot anymore.

And Johnny Depp has once again heterosexualized everything he touches.  John Reid is in love with his brother's widow; he rescues her; they kiss.  Tonto's heterosexuality is established when he turns out to be a regular at a brothel. Butch drools and slavers over his female hostage.

There is a gay crossdresser: Frank, a member of Butch Cavendish's gang, likes to wear ladies' clothes, and implies that he wants to be "violated" by Tonto. (Played by Harry Treadaway, top photo, with his brother Luke in Over There).

So everyone is heterosexual except for a probably-gay crossdressing villain. Way to reinforce outdated homophobic stereotypes, Johnny!