The Wizard of Id

During the early 1950s, Brant Parker, a political cartoonist living in Binghamton, New York, befriended high school student Johnny Hart, and encouraged him to submit his cartoons to magazines.  Hart placed a few in The Saturday Evening Post, but his big break came in 1958, when B.C., a comic strip about sarcastic cavemen (modeled after his friends), was picked up by Comic Creators’ Syndicate.  Soon he was being lauded as the most promising of the new crop of hip young comic artists.  Always an iconoclast, he presaged Doonesbury in introducing political satire into his daily strips, and even had characters voicing his evangelical Christian beliefs, a taboo during the period.  A few years later, Hart approached Brant Parker, who had remained a close friend, and again breaking tradition, asked him to collaborate on a strip about the sarcastic residents of a Medieval kingdom; The Wizard of Id and the partnership has endured ever since.    

Though named after the inept Wizard,  Brant Parker and Johnny Hart’s Wizard of Id is an ensemble strip, involving the daily interactions of many strongly drawn characters: tiny, blustering King Id; Troub, a hippie troubadour; Bung, the drunken court jester; Spook, who has been in the dungeon for so long that he is a mass of  hair; the Lone Haraunger, who scrawls his slogan, “The King is a Fink,” under the King’s nose; Robbing Hood, who “takes from the wretch, and gives to the peer”; and Rodney, a cowardly knight.  Id is a decidedly male preserve where women are demonized or simply ignored: the Wizard’s wife Blanche is the fat, ugly harridan who figures so prominently in the sets of Borscht Belt comedians, and the Lady Gwen has no strong personality traits, and seems to exist simply to express an unrequited love for Rodney.  Eschewing the heterosexual hijinks that preoccupy the minds of most characters in non-nuclear family strips, from Peanuts to Garfield and even Johnny Hart’s earlier B.C., residents of Id spend most of their time buddy-bonding.  When Rodney is released from a curse that turned him into a statue, it is Bung, not the Lady Gwen, who joyfully reunited with him.  Yodey, a dumb but massive squire, treats Rodney with an admiration that treads the line between hero worship and romance.  Even the King, who never expresses interest in women, rarely appears without Rodney or the Duke at his side.

The buddy-bonding alone would make The Wizard of Id a rarity on the comic page, where men usually treat each other as competitors and enemies in their incessant quest after feminine smiles.  But during the 1970s, Rodney failed to express much heterosexual interest.  In The Wizard of Id: There’s a Fly in My Swill (1973), a shapely woman passes him in the castle courtyard, while he stands oblivious.  She turns back and slaps him.  “I didn’t do anything!” he protests.  She exclaims “Don’t let it happen again!”

The Lady Gwen spends her life ardently pursuing Rodney, who acquiesces to a few dates, but otherwise displays no interest in her.  Generally in comic strips unrequited love is the domain of crude, fat, and ugly women, but Gwen is quite shapely and sophisticated.  In a world where every man is explicitly attracted to every women (except for fat and ugly ones), Rodney’s lack of passion is singularly puzzling.  In The Wizard of Id: Long Live the King (1975), Rodney takes Gwen out for a movie and a sundae, and “in appreciation,” she kisses him.  He walks away unimpressed, thinking “Now I wish I’d gotten the butterscotch.”  It is a puzzling punchline.  Does he wish that he had ordered a superior flavor to make up for Gwen’s tepid kiss, or does he believe that he might have avoided the kiss altogether by ordering for a different sundae flavor?

In The Wizard of Id: The Peasants Are Revolting (1971), at the end of another date, Rodney refuses the kiss.  Exasperated, Gwen exclaims “I’m a girl, you’re a boy!  Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”  Rodney responds: “Yeah, you can beat the draft.”  He nicely demolishes the presumption that the desire must adhere in sexual difference, that if we are boys we can only ever be attracted to girls.

  Of course, Rodney’s distinguishing character trait, cowardliness, has been code for gay since before the Cowardly Lion sang about being a Dandy in The Wizard of Oz (1939), but occasional strips go beyond code or a simple lack of interest in the other sex to suggest more overtly that Rodney’s interests may lie in men. In The Wizard of Id: Yield (1974), Rodney and Gwen are sitting in a bar when a tough approaches them and asks “How about a kiss?”  Rodney asks him to step outside.  We assume, of course, that he is going to fight the tough for flirting with Gwen.  But he returns a short time later, sits down, and says “If I had kissed him in here, people would have laughed at me.”  Did Rodney merely misunderstand the request? But he is never characterized as stupid, and besides, the tough would certainly have objected if he wanted a kiss from Gwen and got Rodney instead.  Did he kiss the tough because he was too cowardly to fight him?  Again, surely the tough would have objected.  The most logical conclusion is that the tough was flirting with Rodney, not Gwen, and Rodney knew it.

The Adamites: No Private Property, Marriage, or Clothes

The Adamites were an early Christian sect that tried to restore the innocence of Adam and Eve by not wearing clothes, especially during their religious services, and by abolishing marriage and  having sex with whoever they wanted.  We don't know much about them; they appear in only a few scattered references by later Christian authors like  St. Augustine.

But during the Middle Ages, Renaissance, and Reformation, new Adamites arose:

1. The Taborites in Bohemia (now the Czech Republic).  Followers of Pietist Jan Hus (founder of the Moravians), they abolished marriage, the priesthood, and private property.  They didn't abolish war, though, and used their walled city of Tabor to fight the other Hussites and the Crusaders.

Today there's a Tabor College in Kansas, founded by the Moravian Church, which does not practice casual nudity anymore.  In fact, the church is quite conservative.  This is probably the only picture you will ever see of a Moravian in a swimsuit. 

2. The Brethren of the Free Spirit, a movement of "lay brethren," men who lived together but didn't take holy orders, in the Netherlands and Germany.  They believed that the world was ending soon, so why bother with work?  Or the Eucharist? Or marriage?  Or clothes?

No doubt a lot of same-sex romances were going on.

The naked men shoving flowers into each other's butts in The Garden of Earthly Delights were probably Brethren of the Free Spirit.

3. The Beghards, male counterparts of the Beguines, men who refused marriage and lived communally, but did not take on holy orders.  They lived by begging, and devoted themselves to spiritual life.   Although repeatedly condemned by mainstream Christian churches, they lasted until the 19th century.












4. The Neo-Adamites of Bohemia started in 1781, and lasted until they were repressed by the Austro-Hungarian government in 1849.

Several artists have used the Adamites as an excuse to draw or paint penises.

Night Meeting of the Adamites, by  Francois Morellon la Cave (1696-1768)

The Doom of the Adamites, by Frantisek Zenisek (1846-1919)

Adamites, by the Union of Bulgarian Artists

Pasolini's Canterbury Tales: Gay Characters and Nudity

The Canterbury Tales (I Racconti di Canterbury, 1972) is my favorite of Piers Paulo Pasolini's Trilogy of Life (others include The Decameron and The Arabian Nights), maybe because the set-up and many of the stories are familiar from my college class in the summer of 1981, so I don't get lost in the abrupt sedgeways.

And because I saw it last of the three, so some of the cast was familiar: Pasolini's lover Ninetto Davoli as a comic-relief buffoon, Franco Citti as someone morose and frightening,  Although I'm still annoyed by the closeups of random people with bad teeth grinning at the camera for no apparent reason, and the groups of people sitting around singing for no reason.

There is less full-frontal nudity than in the others, but for some reason the penises on display are much more impressive. The biggest of the lot -- probably the biggest portrayed in any film anywhere -- belongs to John McLaren, whom the Internet Movie Database identifies as a 61-year old American actor.  Must be someebody else -- that guy is around 30.

Pasolini includes adaptions of 8 stories:

1. The Merchant's Tale: An old man gets a young wife, who is unfaithful, so two naked teenage gods (left) decide to have a little fun with them. While a naked boy plays the flute.

2. A new tale: A professional blackmailer, who has just turned a man over to the authorities for a same-sex relationship, meets the devil.  The execution of the sodomite is uncomfortable to watch, especially when one considers that similar atrocities are still happening in the world today, but at least the blackmailer gets his comeuppance.

3. The Cook's Tale: The foolish Perkin (top), channeling Charlie Chaplin, invades a wedding, hangs out with the guys, and has a three-way relationship with a man and his wife.

4.The Miller's Tale: A woman finds a way to meet her boyfriend without her husband finding out.  Meanwhile another suitor hangs around with his shirtless, buffed boyfriend (left).

5. A new tale, based on the Wife of Bath: A woman marries her fifth husband, but gets mad when he won't have sex with her.

6. The Reeve's Tale : Two students, who appear to be lovers, visit a miller, and have sex with his wife and daughter without him finding out.

7.The Pardoner's Tale: Three friends (including Robin Askwith, left, the star of many British sex comedies) visit a brothel, and then kill each other over a treasure.

8. The Summoner's Tale: A greedy friar goes to hell.

Notice that there's a lot more same-sex romance than in The Arabian Nights, and for that matter the original Canterbury Tales, although most men have sex with women too.   The result is more gay-positive and not nearly as morose as the rest of the Trilogy of Life

Georgia Boys are Always on My Mind

Remember the Beatles' song "Back in the USSR"?

Well, Ukraine boys really knock me out
They leave the rest behind
Moscow boys make me sing and shout,
And Georgia boys are always on my mind....

If you're like me, you've often wondered why there is a country named Georgia in the Caucasus mountains, with no connection to the U.S. state of Georgia.

Georgia the state was named after King George II.  Who was Georgia the country named after?

Nobody.  The official name of the country is  Sakartvelo.  Georgia comes from the Persian name for the people, gurgan ("wolves"), which entered Arabic as jurjan, and European languages as georgian.

If that's not confusing enough, its ancient name was Iberia, which has nothing to do with Spain or the Iberian Peninsula.

The capital is Tbilisi, which is easier to pronounce than it looks.

If you're interested in languages: Georgian, aka Kartvelian, is in the South Caucasian family (which has nothing to do with white people). The family is an isolate, connected to no other languages on Earth.

English: I have a big sausage.
Georgian: Me mak’vs didi dzekhvi

English: Come to my room.
Georgian: Modi ch’ems ot’akhshi

If you're interested in religion: Georgia is dotted with ancient monasteries, some carved right into the mountains.  Of course, the strong religious conservatism has resulted in some virulent homophobic, similar to the U.S. in the 1950s.  There is some gay activism, but it's been met by widespread and violent opposition.

If you're interested in literature:  The Knight in the Panther Skin, a Medieval epic by Shota Rustavelli., tells of the love of two warriors, the civilized Avtandil and wild, skin-clad Tariel.  Sort of like the Gilgamesh and Enkidu in ancient Sumeria.

If you're interested in sports: Eldar Kurtanidze has won five world wrestling championships and represented Georgia at the Olympics twice.  He's now a politician.  Sort of like Arnold Schwarzenegger.

More after the break

Clark Brandon

The 1970s was awash with androgynous teen idols, soft and slim with wavy hair, pretty faces, and flamboyant pastel outfits, girlish in tone and gesture.  They didn't do a lot of acting or singing, but nevertheless they were featured incessantly in Tiger Beat and Dynamite, and posted on millions of bedroom walls.










Clark Brandon was the prettiest and most flamboyant of the lot.  He didn't have to do much to rate "fave rave" status. He starred in some after-school specials; The Fitzpatricks, a family-angst drama (with Jimmy McNichol); the short-lived Out of the Blue (with Rad Daly).

Mr. Merlin (1981-82) was about a boy who finds the sword Excalibur in a modern-day auto garage, and becomes an apprentice to the mythical wizard Merlin.  The hunky Jonathan Prince played his gay-subtext best friend.

He had a small role in The Chicken Chronicles, with Steve Guttenberg. Later he played the butch Jo's boyfriend on The Facts of Life.

All he really had to do was look pretty, so gay boys and their straight gal pals could discuss his dreaminess.

In the 1990s he moved into writing and directing, a common career path for grown-up teen idols. 

Today he's the Dean of Students at the Arete Academy in West Los Angeles. In a relationship, but he won't say with who.

Western Wind: How We Learned that Literature Was About Heterosexuals

August 28th, 1978, the first day of my freshman year at Augustana College.  I was 17 years old, newly out.   I didn't know any gay people, but I hoped that would change.  Surely at a big, modern college, there would be a mention of gay people somewhere, in class, on the quad, in a student group.

My first class was Introduction to Literature, at 9:00 am: 30 students, almost all freshmen.  The professor, an elderly white-haired woman, passed out the syllabus and told us about the textbook: Western Wind: An Introduction to Poetry, by John Frederick Nims.   It was first published in 1974, and had become the go-to book for college English instructors.

Then she read the first poem, "Western Wind," anonymous, from the Middle Ages:

Western wind, where wilt thou blow?
The small rain down can rain.
Christ!  If my love were in my arms,
And I in my bed again.

"The first two lines are easy to understand -- it's raining and windy.  The western wind always brings rain.  What about the last two?"

"The guy wants to get laid!"  a jock exclaimed.

The class erupted into laughter, but the professor said "That's exactly right.  This is a poem about a man missing his lady, and all of the pleasures she offers."

The first moment of my first class of my first day in college was about heterosexual sex!

And it didn't end there.  Poems about heterosexual sex, heterosexual romance, boys gazing at girls, girls gazing at boys.

The sole purpose of literature was to express heterosexual longing, with not a single moment of same-sex intimacy, or a single acknowledgement of the possibility of same-sex desire.

It's been nearly 40 years since that long-ago class.  John Frederick Nims died in 1999.  But Western Wind, now in the fifth edition, is still the go-to book for the ubiquitous Introduction to Literature class.

But surely in modern editions there's an acknowledgement of same-sex desire, some masculine beauty, some references to gay people?

I checked.  A lot of William Carlos Williams, E.E. Cummings, Robert Frost, and Ezra Pound. The horrifyingly incomprehensible "Emperor of Ice Cream" and "Our Bog is Dood."

A few poems by gay authors, but none that mention same-sex desire or relationships.  Sappho's is entitled "There's a Man":

There's a man I really believe is in heaven ---over there, that man. 
To be sitting near you,
knee to knee so close to you, hear your voice, your cozy low laughter,
close to you - enough in the very thought to put my heart at once in palpitation.

They found the one Sappho poem that wasn't about lesbian desire.

A sample of titles:
"Loose Women"
"Blue Girls"
"Upon Julia's Clothes"
"To Helen"
"To a Fat Lady Seen from the Train"
"A Poem for Emily"
"A Woman"

Heterosexual desire abounding.

John Frederick Nims, by the way, wrote about:

Woman mostly, as winter moonlight sees,
Impetuous midnight, and the dune’s dark trees.

The cover photo, with a half-naked man (the titular wind), might provide a bit of beefcake.  But he's carrying a bare-breasted woman in his arms.

And it's actually part of Boticelli's Birth of Venus (1484-86), the famous painting of the emblem of hetero-romance rising from a clamshell:

Introduction to Literature classes are still entirely heterosexist.

Maybe I'd have better luck with the Eastern Wind.

Dierich Bouts: Medieval Beefcake Painter

A scary monster is carrying away a naked guy.  I guess we're supposed to feel terror, but when I was a kid and saw this painting in my friend Greg's house, the only thing I could think of was "I can see his wiener!"

It was just a small painting in his father's study, so I didn't see it often, but it was memorable, probably because my reaction was so different from the one expected of me.

I just tracked it down: A segment of  La chute des damnes (The Fall of the Damned), paired with L'Ascension des élus (The Ascent of the Elect), painted between 1468 and 1470 by Dieric the Elder, now in the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Lille, France.

But don't get excited. There are a few butts, but no more wieners.

We don't know when Dieric Bouts was born (probably between 1410 and 1420), or where he studied (his work suggests the influence of Flemish painter Rogier van den Weyden).

We know only that he became the "official painter of Leuven" (now in Belgium) in 1458 or 1459, that he was commissioned to do a lot of portraits and religious art, that he married twice and had four children, and that he died on May 6th, 1475.

And that he was interested in muscular male bodies.








Check out The Martyrdom of St. Hippolyte, the center panel of a tryptich that Dierich painted for the altar of the Sint Salvator Kathedral in Brugge about 1470 (now in the Groningen Museum).

Looks like the same guy as the one being carried away by a demon.

His beefcake model got a monk's haircut in The Martyrdom of St. Erasmus, the central panel of a tryptich in the Sint-Pieterskerk in Leuven.

Dieric definitely had a type.

His two sons, Dieric the Younger and Aelbrecht, both became painters.

The Chronicles of Narnia

When I was in high school, the neopagans, anarchists, stoners, and dungeons-and-dragons players all read The Lord of the Rings.  The fundamentalists, Young Republicans, cheerleaders, and Junior Achievers all read The Chronicles of Narnia.  

C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien were friends, but Tolkien never let his Roman Catholicism intrude into Middle Earth, while Lewis was a conservative Christian apologist whose Chronicles of Narnia (1950-1956) was distinctly theological, even though it was set in a Medieval fantasy world with swords and dragons.

I liked the first four books of the series, which starred the Pevensie children, Peter, Edmund, Susan, Lucy, and eventually their cousin Eustace.  They enter Narnia in various ways to deal with the crisis at hand -- usually an evil woman who has wrested the throne from its rightful male heir -- and  on the way one or the other experiences a personal redemption.

The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe: the White Witch, who has made it "always winter and never Christmas"

Prince Caspian: Caspian's evil uncle.
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Caspian (played by Ben Barnes, left, in the movie version) leads a quest for the end of the world.
The Silver Chair: a witch with a subterranean lair, who tries to convince them that there is no world outside.

I didn't like the last three:
 The Horse and His Boy: anti-Muslim prejudice.
The Magician's Nephew: a silly tale of the creation of Narnia
The Last Battle: everybody dies!

Unlike Tolkien, C.S. Lewis was aware that gay people exist.  One of his works (I forget which) discusses the proliferation of "the third sex" as a problem of modern culture, and in another, he states that maybe they don't all, necessarily, choose their "disability."

Maybe for that reason, there is no buddy-bonding or male-male rescueing in Narnia. The adventurers come in boy-girl pairs, which effectively eliminated buddy-bonding. Edmund (played by Skandar Keynes, left, in the movie version) and maybe Eustace  are gay-vague: soft, prissy, non-athletic, beset-upon by allergies and the other problems of modern culture -- but they are redeemed, and become exact replicas of the other boys in the series.

But there is no hetero-romance either.  The children -- and most of the adults -- remain blissfully asexual, lacking romantic or erotic interests of any sort.  Marriages sometimes occur in afterthoughts ("And later he got married"), but in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, the four Pevensie children grow into adults, and become co-rulers of Narnia, without ever experiencing or desiring romance.

Those few people who are attracted to someone are evil --in  The Magician's Nephew, evil Uncle Andrew finds the Witch "a dem fine woman."  Or doomed -- in The Last Battle, Susan's interest in dating and romance bars her from Paradise.






The first few of the Chronicles have been filmed twice.  The 1988-89 BBC series starred Richard Dempsey, Jonathan R. Scott, David Thwaites, and Samuel West.  I didn't see it.



The 2005-2010  movie series starred William Moseley (left), Skandar Keynes, Will Poulter, and Ben Barnes.  Executive producer Perry Moore (who died in 2011) was gay, and added some buddy-bonding between Eustace and Caspian.  Not enough to incite audience interest.

See also: Shocking the Nazarenes with C.S. Lewis

Summer Beefcake at the Renaissance Faire

In 1963, Los Angeles teacher Phyllis Patterson and her husband hosted a week-long "Renaissance Pleasure Faire" in Irwindale, California, modeled after the "Living History" exhibits then popular in historic sites.  People walked around pretending to actually be living in the Renaissance, wearing the costumes, performing the crafts,  talking the lingo.

The practice gained momentum during the Medieval mania of the 1960s and 1970s, when thousands of hippies, organic food devotees, and Tolkien-philes longed for a cleaner, simpler, more colorful world.

Where gym-toned guys took their shirts off.

I'm not sure where in Renaissance Europe these dancers came from.

When I dated a guy from the Society for Creative Anachronism, they told me that their character could be anyone who could have been in Europe from 500 to 1500 AD.  So no Native Americans or Pacific Islanders, but East Asians and sub-Saharan Africans were ok.

Maybe these guys are from Renaissance India.

Renaissance Faires are not popular in Europe: when there's a castle on every hillside, and your house dates from the 16th century, you don't really need to evoke the Renaissance.  It's already there.

But there are hundreds in the United States.  Some draw as many as 500,000 visitors per year.

I studied the Renaissance.  They had lice and fleas, bathing was infrequent, dinner consisted mostly of bread, and the homicide rate was ten times what it is today.  You were likely to be burnt at the stake for being Jewish, Catholic, a gypsy, or a sodomite.

And without modern nutrition and bodybuilding techniques, there were few physiques like this around.

But the Renaissance Faires are about the Renaissance we wish existed.

They tend to be a bit on the heterosexist side, all about men and women gazing into each other's eyes (heterosexuals never believe that gay people existed in the past).  But they're worth it for the beefcake, the food, and the costumes.

See also: Codpieces

Raoul Bova: Don't Come Out, Think of the Children!

Italian heartthrob Raoul Bova has been the subject of many gay rumors over the years.  There has even been a Facebook petition asking him to "please come out!"  But he refuses.

"If I were gay, I would not say it.  I would not come out.  I hate being labeled."

Any label except heterosexual, that is.

What about these grainy photos of him in a underwear-clad lip-lock with Marco Bocci?  It seemed so real!   He explained that in the upcoming Scusate se esisto (Pardon Me for Existing, 2014), he plays a married heterosexual who has an affair with a gay guy.  You can play gay characters without being gay, you know.

He goes on to explain that he can never come out because of the horrible damage it would do to children.  His kids are  already getting taunted in school: "Your father is sick, your father is gay!"

To quote Helen Lovejoy: Don't come out, think of the children!

Who knew that Italian society was so homophobic? Or maybe it's just Raoul Bova.

The 43-year old Bova got his start as a competitive swimmer, and broke into acting with the sex comedy Mutande pazze (Crazy Underwear, 1992).  He quickly put his amazing physique to use in movies about men who excite uncontrollable passion in women, sometimes comedies, sometimes tragedies (as in La Lupa, 1992, based on the story by Giovanni Verga).

More recently he changed slightly to movies about men who bring romance rather than horniness, as in Under the Tuscan Sun (2003).

But not wanting to be known as just a bicep and bulge, he also sought out fully-clothed roles as police officers, soldiers, and terrorists, which permit some buddy-bonding in spite of his fear of being labeled gay.

Look for Il Quarto Re (The Fourth King, 1997), a German movie about a young bee-keeper who is shanghaied by the Three Kings to help them deliver the gifts to the Christ Child.  He keeps griping about his wife back home, but the other Kings (including a gay-vague Gaspar played by Billy Dee Williams) display n heterosexual interest.

And I cavalieri che fecero l'impresa (The Knights Who Start a Business, 2001), about five Medieval knights (including Raoul Bova, Edward Furlong, and Marco Leonardi) who buddy-bond during their quest to find the sacred Shroud of Turin.

Dante's Inferno: Beefcake and Buddy-Bonding in Medieval Italy

The Divine Comedy gets a bad rap.  It's not incomprehensible, elitist, or heterosexist, like many other "great" works of literature (Ulysses and The Sound and the Fury spring to mind).  Granted, Purgatorio and Paradiso are a little dry, but what could be more interesting than the Inferno? 

 It's a tour of hell with the feel of a Dungeons and Dragons quest, or maybe the Wizard of Oz, with two guys, Dante and Virgil, buddy-bonding en route.

They have to find some way to get past Cerberus, the giant three-headed dog.  

They fight giant winged Furies.   

They tame a monster with scorpion-stingers to fly you down a treacherous cliff.   

Finally they reach the center, where Satan, a monster embedded in ice, is chewing on three traitors, one with each of its gigantic mouths. 

And how they you escape from Hell?  They have to climb down Satan's fur through the center of the Earth.

There actually is a Dante's Inferno video game, but it's much more heterosexist than the original.

Of course, the original isn't entirely free from heterosexism.  He journeys through Hell, then through Purgatory and Heaven, at the request of Beatrice.  He spent his life "deeply in love" with here, even though they only met twice (when he was 9, and again when he was 17), and on both occasions she merely said "hello."

She sounds more like an evocation of the divine, a sort of Blessed Virgin, than a real object of Dante's heterosexual longings.

And he's not nearly as homophobic as other Italians of the Middle Ages.  He did put the sodomites (gay people) in the Seventh Circle, farther down than the murderers, but not as far down as the fraudsters.   But when he meets his old teacher and guardian Brunetto Latini among them, Dante treats him the utmost of love and respect.

He also paints some sympathetic portraits of sodomites in the Purgatorio.  

Get a bilingual edition -- the original Italian is far superior to any translation.  And be sure it has the beefcake-heavy illustrations by Gustave Doré.  Or buy the illustrations separately.

Alan Tudyk: Gay-Positive, Muscular, and Funny

Alan Tudyk plays mostly comedic roles, so you're laughing too hard to notice when his shirt comes -- or all of this clothes come off. But pay attention next time, and you'll see one of the most unexpectedly muscular physiques in Hollywood, with a tight, hirsute chest and impressively ribbed abs.

Born in 1971, the Texas native first drew attention on Broadway, when he starred in Epic Proportions (1998), about two guys in love with the same girl during the filming of a 1920s Biblical epic.  Theater is still his first love; he has appeared in Wonder of the World, The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told (with a gay Adam and Steve),  Spamalot and Prelude to a Kiss.  But he's best known for movies:

Gay German drug addict Gerhardt in 28 Days (2000).

Gay-vague sidekick Wat in the Medieval farce A Knight's Tale (2001).

Simon in the gay-themed farce Death at a Funeral (2007).

Drew, gay business partner of straight Derek (Josh Cook) in Fourplay (2008).

Gay-vague hillbilly harassed by college kids in Tucker and Dale vs. Evil (2010).

And television:

Navigator-sidekick Wash on the sci-fi-Western Firefly (2002-2003).

Sardonic dentist Noah on the suburban sitcom Suburgatory (2011-2014).

Though he's played gay characters several times, Alan is not personally gay.  Or a hillbilly.  Or a dentist.