Mid90s: Drugs, Suicide, Homophobia, and Pedophilia

Jonah Hill says "It was important to tell the truth" in Mid90s, his directorial debut, and hopefully his swan song.  I think it's more important to not make viewers sick.

When I searched for one of the cast members, Gio Galicia, this photo came up, with the caption "Screenshot of Bohemian Rhapsody."    It's obviously from Mid90s, not Bohemian Rhapsody, nor is Gio Galicia in the shot.

Goes to show how f*ked up this movie is.

Oh, sorry, we're being real.  The movie is fucked up.  It's a piece of shit.  It is especially offensive to gay viewers, even though producer Scott Rudin is gay.

It's a Kids reboot about a little boy named Stevie, 13 years old but played by 12-year old Sunny Suljic.  Apparently Jonah Hill cast him deliberately to get someone who looked "young."  He's living with his neglectful mother and abusive older brother (Lucas Hedges, top photo) in Los Angeles in the mid-90s.

I lived in Los Angeles in the mid-90s.  It was great.

Stevie tries to alleviate his pain by hanging out with some older kids at a skate park.

Way older.  Their leader, Ray, is played by 25-year old Na-Kel Smith.

Stevie learns to smoke marijuana, fight, get drunk, and use racist and homophobic language (every other word is "fag"),

I agree that it's "real"  There are real racist, homophobic assholes in the world.  Why make a movie about them?

Of course Stevie has sex (with a girl played by a 23-year old actress).

That's a Class 1 Felony. Even pretending to have sex with a 13-year old is inappropriate.

But Stevie's newfound drug abuse and prepubescent sexual activity does not bring happiness.  He gets two head injuries, one in a skateboarding accident and the other in a car accident, and attempts suicide.

One would expect at least some buddy-bonding among the skateboarders.  But they mostly argue, posture, and fight.  .

\No beefcake.  We see Stevie's prepubescent body, of course, and Ian (his older brother) briefly in his underwear as he's beating up Stevie. 

Here's the only shirtless photo of a cast member I could find, Olan Prenatt, who plays  Fuckshit.

My rating:Is there anything lower than F-?

How about fuckshit?

"Vida": Queer Characters, Female Empowerment. What's Not to Like?

In Vida (2019-), two estranged Mexican-American sisters, party girl Lynn and responsible Emma, reunite at their estranged mother's funeral in Boyle Heights (a Hispanic neighborhood just east of downtown Los Angeles).

 They discover that Mom has willed them each a third of her financially unsuccessful bar and apartment building, so they have no choice but to drop whatever they were doing and move to Boyle Heights to become bartenders and apartment managers.  They rename the bar Vida, after Mom (and, of course, it's also Spanish for "this is life, the one you get, so go and have a ball").

The other third of the bar and apartment building goes to Mom's extremely butch roommate, who has the extremely butch name Eddy.  Are we surprised to discover that Mom was a lesbian, and Eddy her wife?  The girls are.

Are we surprised to discover that Emma was estranged from her Mom because she is bisexual?  Turns out that Vida was gay and homophobic at the same time.  It happens.

After the initial sexual identities are established, Eddy, Lynn, and Emma, along with their friend Mari, settle down to their various crises: keeping the bar afloat, cleansing the apartment building of evil spirits, suffering from homophobic and anti-Hispanic discrimination, and especially fighting gentrification: they want to keep Boyle Heights the way they remember from their childhoods.

Meanwhile, they start telenovela-style romances, with lots of sex, lies, and videotape.

1. Mari has a troubled on-off romance with  Tlaloc (Ramses Jiminez).

2, Lynn has a troubled on-off romance with Johnny, Mari's brother (Carlos Miranda; this might not be the right one, but who cares?).

3. Later she moves on to city councilman Rudy (Adrian Gonzalez).

4. Emma has a troubled on-off romance with Cruz, a woke lesbian bartender, but she also hooks up with Baco (Raul Castillo) the building's handyman.

5. Eddy hooks up with Nico (a woman, of course).  Do all Hispanic lesbians have masculine names?

Two of the four central characters are queer, which is groundbreaking, and the Hispanic culture is pleasant (they even speak Spanglish, switching back and forth between English and Spanish as the mood strikes).

But this is definitely a woman-oriented, women-centric series, with men definitely in the background.  Not that there's anything wrong with that -- Goddess knows there are plenty of series with women in background roles.  But it makes the beefcake options sorely limited.  And would it kill them to have a few gay men wandering around?

"All-American": Beach Hunks Who Play Football

This Netflix icon is obviously meant to draw the attention of gay men to the tv series, with a shirtless hunk gazing at another shirtless hunk with homoromantic ardour.  But I've been burned by Netflix bait-and-switch before, and besides, I don't know what an "all-American" is (some sort of hamburger?).  So it's on to wikipedia.

All-American is based on the life of Spencer Paysinger, who I never heard of.  Spencer James (Daniel Ezra, the black guy in the top photo) is "star wide receiver at Crenshaw High School who transfers to Beverly Hills High to play football, but is switched to playing Quarterback."

So he isn't playing football anymore, he is demoted to another game called Quarterback?  But I always thought that Quarterback was a player type.  And not a humiliating demotion, an honor:  "He's the star quarterback, swoon."

The wikipedia page is all mixed up, but I think I got the basic plot: South Crenshaw is the Hood, and Beverly Hills is the ritzy neighborhood where Will goes to live with his Uncle Phil and Cousin Carlton on Fresh Prince of Bel Air.

This South Crenshaw, a portmanteau of South L.A. and Crenshaw, is a hotbed of gang violence. Spencer leaves behind:
1. His mother (Karimah Westbrook)

2. His father (Chad L. Coleman,  left), the football coach at Crenshaw High.

3. His younger brother Dillon (Jalyn Hall), who wants to play football but is stuck with degrading basketball instead (now it's basketball that's degrading?)

4. His bff Coop (Bre-Z), a lesbian who gets kicked out of the house when she comes out to her homophobic Mom.

5. Some girlfriends of both Spencer and Coop

6. Some teammates (Spence Moore II, Mitchell Edwards, left)

7. Some  gang members (Jay Reeves, Demetrius Shipp Jr., Kareem J. Grimes).  Coop is interested in keeping out of the gang or something.

In Beverly Hills, Spencer gets:

1. His coach, Billy (Taye Diggs), who he moves in with.  All is not what it seems: Coach Billy graduated from Crenshaw South High School, where he dated Spencer's Mom.

2. Coach Billy's son Jordan (Michael Evans  Behling), who is conflicted because his mother is white, so he doesn't feel that he fits into black culture.  He hates Spencer, both because of the football competition and because his girlfriend Layla is into the dangerous bad boy from the Hood.

3. Coach Billy's daughter Olivia (Samantha Logan), who is dating football player Asher (Cody Christian, left), but dumps him because she's into Spencer, too.

Is this guy, like made of pheremones, or something?

4. Billy's father (Brent Jennings), a former football coach, the only person in the family who is not trying to get into Spencer's pants. 

5. 1980s hunk Casper Van Dien as Asher's father (Asher is the ex-boyfriend of Coach Billy's daughter Olivia, remember).  Like all parents on this show, Casper is a former football player and coach.

6. Some other teammates, such as party boy JJ (Hunter Clowdus).

7. Some miscellaneous girls who fawn over Spencer.  Apparently the show bible states that "all the girls are interested in Spencer," and the writers took it literally.  Come on, he's not even hot.

All this teen dating intrigue and father-son baggage was too complicated for me, so I just fast-forwarded through a few episodes, looking for the homoromantic scene, or any buddy-bonding of any sort.

Gay Subtexts:  I couldn't find any.  Most male characters seem to be disagreeable jerks.

Sports:  There's at least one football game in every episode.

Beefcake:  There's a beach scene, hot tub scene, or strip poker scene in every episode, dozens of mega-hunks wandering around looking at girls.  You want to yell "Open your eyes! There's a hot guy standing right next to you!"

Heterosexism:  Yep.  In spite of the lesbian bff back home.

"Now Apocalypse": Beefcake, Gay Romance, and Reptilians at the End of the World

Well, the first episode was free on Amazon Prime.

Now Apocalypse (2019) begins with a slacker named Ulysses or Uly (former Disney teen Avon Jongia channeling Johnny Depp) wandering through a bleak urban wasteland done up in surreal colors.  A man approaches him!  Dark, sinister music plays.  Is this an assault?  Nope --  in the next scene, Ulysses is hooking up with him -- a glimpse of the trick's muscular naked body.

Any tv series that begins with a hookup and a brief glimpse of anal sex is fine in my book.

But then Ulysses goes home to his grim Brutopian apartment to find his roommate Ford (former Disney teen Beau Mirchoff, right) having sex with his girlfriend.  She bounces up and down on him, facing the camera so we see everything she has.  An entire conversation ensues.  No fair! Uly gets five seconds, the girl three minutes.

Uly informs us that Ford is a Kinsey 0, totally straight, but that doesn't stop him from fantasizing about his hunky roommie.  Uly himself is a Kinsey 4, bisexual tending toward gay.  But hookups make him feel "gross and pagan" afterwards, so he's looking for love at the end of the world.

It turns out that this bleak urban landscape is the Los Angeles that lies beneath the sunshine and palm trees, and everyone is looking to get into show biz somehow.

Ford, an aspiring screenwriter, is approached by a producer with the odd name Barnabas (Kevin Daniels).

Their other friend, Carly, an aspiring actress, also runs an online BDSM service, where she forces a clients to read lines with her.  She's dating a guy with the odd name Jethro (Desmond Chiam, left).

Now I'm looking through the cast list for other names from 1960s and 1970s pop culture.  I find Leif (Garrett), Magenta from the Rocky Horror Picture Show, Daphne and Velma from Scooby Doo, and Cat Woman.

Back to Ulysses, wandering around the bleak urban wasteland, looking for love.   He meets Gabriel (former Teen Wolf teen Tyler Posey, tatted up also channeling Johnny Depp.  At first I thought Ulysses was hooking up with himself).  They hit it off, proclaiming that "not to be all stalky psycho," but it seems that fate brought them together.

On the way home, Ulysses is smoking a giant doobie, when he falls off his bicycle.  The next scene may be a dream or a vision: he sees a homeless man being raped by a reptilian humanoid.

Oh, no, this isn't going to be another Naked Lunch, is it?  Where disgusting reptilians are infiltrating the world, but maybe it's just a despondent end-of-the-world nightmare.

Then I saw that Gregg Araki wrote this.  He specializes in grim, bleak, nihilistic dramas about lost souls in urban wastelands.  It's not that they're despondent over the approaching end of the world.  It's that the end of the world has already happened, and there's nothing for them to do but get high and have sex and be really sad all the time.    The titles tell you everything: The Long Weekend o'Despair, Totally F*** Up, The Doom Generation, Nowhere, This is How the World Ends, Kaboom...

There are always gay characters, in that postmodern, post-gay, pansexual, "if it's alive I'll screw it; if it's dead, I'll think about it" way.  But the potential for beefcake and gay romance is not worth the Gregg Araki weirdness.

I won't be buying the full season on Starz.

The Beverly Hillbillies

The Beverly Hillbillies, one of the 1960s line of hayseed comedies (others included Petticoat Junction, Green Acres, Gomer Pyle, and The Andy Griffith Show), slogged on from 1962 to 1971, and your parents watched every week, so you couldn't avoid it.  It was amazingly popular with adults: some of the regular episodes -- not even Christmas specials -- became the most watched episodes of all time.

The basic premise: a hillbilly from Bugtussle, Tennessee or Arkansas, Jed Clampett (Buddy Ebsen), becomes unbelievably rich when oil is discovered on his property, so he moves to a mansion in Beverly Hills, along with his crotchety mother-in-law Granny (Irene Ryan), his daughter Ellie Mae (Donna Douglas), and his dumb-lunk nephew Jethro (Max Baer Jr.).

Though they became marginally assimilated after nine years, they still wore hillbilly clothes, ate possum pie, and referred to their swimming pool as a "cement pond."  Plots usually involved big city types trying to dupe and manipulate them, but their backwoods wisdom, orneriness, or dumb luck win out in the end.

The message: big city life is dehumanizing.  Only in the country can real be real.

Other plots involved Ellie Mae's dating, Jethro's get-rich quick schemes (odd, since he already was rich), and Granny's dislike of all things big city.

There was never much beefcake in hillbilly comedies.  Max Baer Jr., son of the famous boxer Max Baer, had a nice physique, but rarely showed it on camera.  We were supposed to laugh at his dopiness, not sigh over his muscles.

Bonding was also rather uncommon.  Most of the primary relationships were platonically male-female: Jed and Granny, Ellie Mae and Jethro, bank president Mr. Drysdale and his secretary, Miss Hathaway (Nancy Culp, who incidentally was gay in real life.)









But gay-vague was everywhere.

1. Mr. Drysdale's son, Sonny (Louis Nye) is sophisticated, well-educated, and not interested in girls.  His parents keep trying to hook him up with Ellie Mae (so he will eventually inherit the Clampett millions), but he will have none of it.  He and Ellie are just friends.










2. Hollywood star Dash Riprock (Larry Pennell), a parody of Rock Hudson, is handsome, suave, and not interested in girls.  He vaguely courts Ellie Mae, but his heart isn't in it,  regardless of how much his studio pushes them together.


Apparently the producers thought it hilarious to keep having Ellie Mae run into men who were not interested in girls.







3. Jethro had a "twin sister," Jethrine.  She stayed back in the hills, and didn't show up often, but when she did, it was obvious that it was Jethro in drag.  I got the distinct impression that everyone was just playing along, responding to his drag persona as if she was a different person.

See also: Petticoat Junction; Green Acres

Edmund Teske, the Gay Photographer of East Los Angeles

Edmund Teske (1911-1996) was born in Chicago.  Trained as a pianist, he began to work in photography in 1933, when Frank Lloyd Wright hired him to do photographic montages of the relationship between architecture and the visual arts.

He also liked photographing men, catching them in moments of power, joy, erotic desire, or quiet reflection.

Richard Soakup, 1940 captures his first lover, whose parents ran a music studio in suburban Chicago.  Teske would photograph Soakup in many more nude and semi-nude poses.

During World War II, Teske was was rejected for military service for being gay, instead assigned to become a photographer for the Army Core of Engineers in Rock Island, where he photographed many of his friends, lovers, and coworkers nude.  They weren't physique photographs, however; he was trying to capture spirit, not muscle, the human condition rather than the human body.

In 1943 he moved to Los Angeles and went to work in the photo stills department at Paramount Studios.  He immersed himself in the gay life of 1950s Hollywood, befriending Christopher Isherwood, Joel McCrea, Man Ray, Rock Hudson, Anais Nin, Montgomery Clift, George Cukor, and Jim Morrison.

He began to experiment with photo montages, combining images of nude men to explore time and memory, beauty, decay, and erotic desire.

Don Mills and Jerry Kahn (1954-55) are photographed nude and clothed among abandoned ice boxes in Cornell, California (near Malibu).

The folk singer Ramblin' Jack Elliot, nude with guitar (1952)

During the 1960s and 1970s, Teske's work was on display at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art, and in galleries around the world.

He lived alone in East Los Angeles, with lovers but no permanent partner.

In 2004, there was a retrospective exhibit at the Getty Museum.

To be on the safe side, I'm putting the photos with frontal nudity on Tales of West Hollywood.

The Shield: TV From the 2000s, Homophobia from the 1960s

You already know the most homophobic contemporary movie -- Chuck and Buck, the savagely homophobic "comedy" by Mike White.

Outside of Fox's animated sitcoms, TV series tend to go for erasing gay people from existence rather than excoriating them, but I found an exception.  Excoriations of gay people week after week for six years.

It's The Shield (2002-2008), a police drama set in contemporary Los Angeles.

Contemporary?

In the real L.A. in the 2000s, there were gay police offices.  The LAPD advertised for recruits at gay pride festivals.  Police cadets got  training in LGBT issues.

But on The Shield, all of the cops are intensely homophobic.  "Queers" and "fags" drop from their lips every five seconds, along with the usual heterosexism that we find everywhere on tv.

The key character, Detective Vic Mackey (Michael Chiklis)  is a blustering homophobe -- but so is everybody, so not a problem.  But he is also boorish, stupid, vulgar, racist, sexist, violent, corrupt, and unfamiliar with the concept of "due process."

Oh, he loves his wife and kids -- so much so that when they leave him and go into hiding, fearing for their safety, he pays private investigators $20,000 to track them down.  Then he bursts in and starts yelling.

I guess that's supposed to be positive?

One of his nemeses is detective "Dutch" Wagenbach (Jay Karnes), who's actually intelligent and therefore the butt of constant jokes.  He grinds my gears by offering far-out psychoanalytic interpretations of every suspect, proclaiming that he "studied criminology."

Um...criminology doesn't teach you that nonsense.

But even Dutch is a first rate homophobe.  He asks, "What do they think causes people to be queer?  Is it biological, so they can't help themselves.  And if so, should we condemn them?"

Who's condemning them, Dutch?  I suppose the writers' perception of the intended audience as homophobic.

Criminals are homophobic too -- way homophobic.

There are occasional gay characters -- swishy queens who all have AIDS.
"Are you sure he has AIDS?"
 "Just look at him."

One of the cops, Julian Lowe (Michael Jace), happens to be gay.  Completely angst-ridden, overcome by guilt: it's a terrible urge inside him that he hates and can't get rid of.

He participates in a brutal gay-bashing with his fellow cops, tries to commit suicide, then tries to become "ex gay" through prayer and sex with a woman.

Oh, and he's also being blackmailed -- Vic is threatening to reveal his gayness to the precinct, where he will certainly be fired in disgrace.

Um...anti-discrimination laws for police officers have been in place in L.A. for 30 years.

By the way, the cops are uniformly racist, too.  When a Muslim asks why he is a suspect when he hasn't done anything, he is told: "Because a group of men who look like your twin brothers killed 3,000 Americans."

Um...there are Muslim Americans....

Even though I can't find shirtless shots of the regulars, there is a lot of beefcake on the show.  Criminals -- mostly drug dealers and gang bangers, with an occasional serial killer thrown in -- are often shown lounging around shirtless or in their underwear.  Danny Pino, a drug dealer that Vic extorts and then kills, always finds a way to cover up the bulge in his black briefs.

But, really, a precinct full of racist, sexist, homophobic jerks -- who writes this stuff?

Ok, it was created by Shawn Ryan, who was born in 1966 and grew up in Chicago, and was a staff writer on Nash Bridges and Angel.   In an interview, he said that the "Boys in the Bar" episode of Cheers, in which the bargoers recoil in homophobic horror from two guys that they think are gay, influenced how he "thought about homosexuals."

Homosexuals?  Is this, like, 1973?

On The Shield, it is.

See also: Chuck and Buck.

The Conflicted, Confused Gay Teen of 90210

Gay teens on tv are always "conflicted" and "confused."  They can never make the logical conclusion: "I like guys...I'm gay."  Heterosexuals want them to struggle, moan, complain, try their best not to be gay, as if they're coming to grips with some horrible disability.

It's been that way ever since Jodie Dallas on Soap switched between gay, bi, and transgendr as he slept with every woman he could find (including lesbians) but no men.  Since Steven Carrington on Dynasty had multiple romances with women while saying "I've got a pretty face.  I must be gay!"

One of the latest renditions is Teddy Montgomery, a "confused" and "conflicted"  high school tennis star on the Beverly Hills 90210 revamp 90210 (2009-2012), played by Trevor Donovan (seen here with a woman's hands groping him).

In Seasons 1 and 2, Teddy is a "regular guy," aka heterosexual, in fact a "player" who is juggling several girlfriends at one time.

In Season 3, he's still gawking over girls, grabbing at girls, and falling for girls, but one night he gets drunk and hooks up with Ian (Kyle Riabko).

Ian thinks he's "on the downlow" and promises not to tell anyone, but Teddy insists "I'm straight!" and tries to beat him up.  Later Teddy admits that he's been feeling "confused" for years.

What's to be confused about?  He obviously likes guys, and he has had endless sexual exploits with girls.  It's pretty clear that he's bisexual.

Nope, he's gay.  His heterosexual years were just "lying to himself."

But...he didn't just pretend to like girls.  He had sex with them-- a lot.

That was a lie, too.

He kisses Ian.  Someone snaps their picture, and tries to blackmail him!  Yes, people are still blackmailed, lest their horrible secret is revealed.

At least in Beverly Hills, which is awash in pre-Stonewall homophobia.

No gay community.  Nothing but bars.   Reminds me of the Manhattan of Will and Grace.

In Season 4, Teddy comes out to his father, who has a pre-Stonewall explosive homophobic reaction.

And being gay threatens the campaign of his Uncle, who is running for Congress.

Um...having a gay nephew will cost you the election?  In California?  In 2010?

In Season 5, Teddy's ex-girlfriend Silver wants to have a baby, and asks him to be a donor.  He agrees, and they realize that there's still a spark between them.

So is he bisexual now?

Nope, still gay.  He just gets "sparks" for girls now and then.  Doesn't everybody?

Victorious: Almost a Gay Victory

Like all tv programs aimed at a juvenile audience, Nickelodeon's Victorious (2010-2013) was set in a decidedly gay-free world: a high school for the performing arts in Hollywood (yeah, right, I'll believe that).

 Of course, the producers, writers, directors, and actors all knew that gay people existed, and they threw in occasional hints.














A love-hate gay subtext  between Tori (Victoria Justice, right) and frenemy Jade (Elizabeth Guilles, second from left), in spite of their respective boyfriends (and the rumor that Victoria Justice is homophobic).


The metrosexual Beck (far left), played by Avan Jogia, #5 on my list of Unexpected Nickelodeon Teen Hunks, who co-founded the gay-allied Straight But Not Narrow group with his bud Josh Hutcherson.

Leon Thomas III (second from right), who played Andre, is another Hollywood teen who is Straight But Not Narrow.  Here's a link to a video he made for the SBNN youtube page.

Ventriloquist Robbie, who doesn't really like girls, in spite of his girl-dating episodes, is played by Matt Bennett, who posted his own SBNN video.

Compare the utter silence about gay people from the cast of ICarly.

The nerd Sinjin (Michael Eric Reid) has a fairly obvious crush on him.

Gay-friendly cast, gay subtexts, gay references.  By this point, we have to start blaming the audience for a stubborn refusal to know.

When one of the teen characters mentioned visiting "my uncle and uncle" in San Francisco, fan boards went wild with hysterical protests that she couldn't have meant a gay couple.
"She has two uncles in San Francisco.  They're obviously two brothers living together, not gay!"
"She just means that she's going to visit one uncle, and then another one.  Not that they're gay!"
"Just because you live in San Francisco doesn't mean you're gay!"

And my favorite:
"Get a life!  This is a children's show!"
If it's aimed at an audience of kids, then by definition, they believe,  it can't have any references to gay people.

Beverly Hills 90210

Soap operas are traditionally about beautiful people having heart-wrenching problems in affluent surroundings.  Beverly Hills 90210 (1990-2000) became a huge success by moving the formula to high school (then college, then young adulthood). It had never been done on American tv before, and certainly not with such gossip-page delight, on and off screen.

The premise: Minnesota teens Brandon and Brenda Walsh (Jason Priestly, Shannon Doherty) are transplanted to uber-ritzy Beverly Hills, California, where they become involved with a group of friends and lovers at West Beverly High.  The cast members, and their problems:

1. Brandon (Jason Priestley, top left).  Alcoholism, gambling.
2. Steve (Ian Ziering).  Generally ok.
3. Brenda (Shannon Doherty).  All-around evil.
4. Kelly (Jenny Garth). Drugs, rape, amnesia, another rape, stalked, becomes a murderer.
5. Dylan (Luke Perry, left).  Alcoholism, drugs, Dad in prison, wife murdered.

6. Andrea (Gabrielle Carteris). Generally ok.
7. David (Brian Austin Green, left). Alcoholism, depression.
8. Scott (Douglas Emerson). Abuse, suicide.
9. Donna (Tori Spelling). Drugs, abuse, stalked, attempted rape.

10. Noah (Vincent Young). DUI, girlfriend killed, kidnapped, nearly killed.

Makes Degrassi Junior High look tame.

In addition to the nonstop beefcake, Beverly Hills 90210 offered two same-sex bonds with enough intimacy and emotional intensity to provide gay subtexts:  Brandon and Steve, and David and Scott (left).  David's depression, in fact, was caused by the loss of his friend Scott to suicide.

And there were also a few gay-themed episodes of the "helpful heterosexual" variety: noble heterosexual swoops into help tragic gay victim of homophobia. David Lascher played a gay teen.

Several of the stars have gone on to gay-positive work, notably Jason Priestly and Ian Ziering (who stripped with the Chippendales in the spring of 2013). Most of them have come out in favor of gay marriage.

Die Hard: The Gay Connection

New York cop John McClane (Bruce Willis) is having a very bad day.  He flies to L.A. to visit his estranged wife, Holly (Bonnie Bedelia), during her company's Christmas party in the ritzy Nakatomi Tower.  But then a band of terrorists armed with heavy artillery take the partygoers hostage.  McClane, hiding, contacts the LAPD, but at first they don't believe him, and when they finally investigate, they think he's the bad guy.  It is up to McClane to single-handedly take out the terrorists (who are actually burglars with a very convoluted scheme).

McClane is in radio contact with the portly African-American sergeant Al Powell (Reginald VelJohnson), the only LAPD officer who believes his story.  They chat, joke, and rather openly flirt with each other, and when the crisis is resolved, McClane leaves his wife to rush into Powell's arms.  A homoromantic hug capstones the movie.  The primary emotional bond in Die Hard (1988) is not between McClane and Holly, estranged or not, but between McClane and Powell.

But that's not all.

In the sequel, Die Hard 2 (1990), it's another Christmas Eve, and McClane goes to Washington's Dulles Airport to pick up Holly.  But terrorists take over the airport and forbid any planes from landing.  McClane must take them out before the plane carrying Holly runs out of fuel and crashes.  He commandeers the mousy African-American communications specialist  Leslie Barnes (Art Evans) for the adventure.  Buddy-bonding and some gender-role transgressions occur.  In spite of the obligatory "I love you so much" hug with the wife, the primary emotional bond comes between McClane and Barnes.

In the next installment, Die Hard with a Vengeance (1995), a terrorist has planted explosives around New York to coerce McClane into participating in risky nursery-rhyme "games."  Black-separatist shopkeeper Zeus Carver (Samuel L. Jackson) is accidentally involved, and the two go off on a wild ride full of love-hate buddy-bonding and "I'm not leaving without you!" speeches.

When the crisis is resolved, Carver continues to stick around.  In spite of the obligatory reconciliation with the again-estranged Holly (this time in the form of a telephone call), the primary emotional bond is between McClane and Carver.

Live Free or Die Hard (2007), about cyber-terrorists who have taken the entire country hostage, gives McClane a white partner: a young hacker named Matt Farrell (Justin Long).  This one ups the physicality of the bond, and makes Matt (along with McClane's daughter) the object of rescue.  Plus there's a promise of continuing relationship that the other installments lack.

4 installments, four homoromantic buddy-bonds, 3 with African-Americans.

Why?  Bruce Willis is no gay ally, and directors John McTiernan, Renny Harlan, and Len Wiseman are not known for their gay-positive filmmaking.

 But many recent buddy movies, aware of the possibility of gay subtext, pair a white man-mountain with a soft African-American comic relief character, hoping that because the relationship is interracial, no one will "read" it as romantic.  And Matt Farrell?  Maybe they thought that the 23-year age difference between Justin Long and Bruce Willis would make people "read" them as father-son figures, not older-younger boyfriends.

It didn't work.