The Boys and Men of Oz

I know, all gay men are supposed to get all starry-eyed over The Wizard of Oz, the 1939 movie starring Judy Garland, but I don't care for it.  As a child I was terrified of the flying monkeys, the man-eating pigs, and the homicidal Wicked Witch. As a teenager, I ridiculed the saccarine songs and the corny "It was all a dream" bit.  And why would anybody want to go back to Kansas?

I had no idea that the movie was based on a novel, one of a series, until I read something about Ruggero the Nome King in Lin Carter's Imaginary Worlds..  A check of the children's room at the Rock Island Public Library revealed 14 books written by L. Frank Baum and 20 by others, extending from 1900 through the 1940s.  I checked out the first five.  And then the next, and the next.  I had found a "good place."

There was little beefcake: the protagonists, boys or girls, were drawn in the same style, as delicate and pretty as cherubs yet tough and hardy, able to endure long wilderness treks and fight monsters.

There was little buddy bonding. The protagonist traveled with a melange of talking animals, magical objects, and adult companions. I found only two significant homoromances:

 In Ojo in Oz, between Ojo and the bandit Realbad, but in the end Realbad turns out to be the boy's father, ruining it.

And in Rinkitink in Oz (1916), the jovial king Rinkitink discovers that his talking goat companion is really an enchanted prince named Bobo.  The two walk into the sunset together.





There were many disturbing, horrible elements.

1. No one ages in Oz, so babies stay babies and kids stay kids forever.

2. No one can die, so if you cut someone into pieces, each piece remains alive and conscious.

3. Inanimate objects can easily be brought to life, and they stay alive and conscious forever.

4. There is casual racism, sexism, and class-based bigotry.  Rude comments and unpleasant mannerisms are presented as endearing. Kids are often threatened by sinister adults.

So why was Oz a good place?

1. The delicate, pretty boys in their flamboyant costumes are all gay-coded. Every boy in Oz is gay.

2. Adult men and women follow a strict division of labor, with women who hoped for equality ridiculed.  But the boys and girls have precisely the same interests and activities.  A boy named Tip is transformed into Princess Ozma.

3. The boys and girls never express any heterosexual interest.  Occasionally an adult does, but only minor characters in side-plots irrelevant to the main story.

4. There are few if any nuclear families.  The main family structure in Oz is single parent and child.

5.The outsiders who find their way to Oz are the odd, the unusual, the outcast, the "queer."  And they always find a home.

See also: The Wizard of Oz

Oz, the Great and Powerful

Frederick Koehler: Chip from "Kate and Ally" grows up, shows his d*ck, plays some psychos, and vanishes. With bonus Beau Mirchoff

Link to the n*de Chip and Mirchoff

Viewers who saw this guy's d*ck in a 2004 episode of the prison drama Oz were shocked.  Not by the d*ck -- there were lots of them on Oz.

Not because he was Andrew Schillinger, 20-year old son of the white supremacist prisoner Vern Schillinger.

 

Not even because he was a heroin addict who would be given a batch by an unscrupulous guard and die of an overdose.

Because we were looking at a grown-up Chip.

Although he had appeared in Judging Amy, Ally McBeal, Profiler, Gideon's Crossing, Charmed, and A Kiss Before Dying,  Fred Koehler was famous for Kate and Allie (1984-89), a sitcom starring two recognizable 1970s tv stars, Jane Curtin and Susan Saint James, a free spirit-stick in the mud couple living together. Fred Koehler played their 10-15 year old son, Chip

No, they weren't lesbians, although they pretended to be in an early example of a "let's pretend to be gay to get some of their incredible privileges" episode. 

After Kate and Ally -- I have to keep checking, but I'm pretty sure it's "ally," not "allie" -- Fred attended Carnegie-Mellon University, got a degree in theater, changed his stage name to Frederick, and returned to Hollywood.

To quote Sally in Peanuts, isn't the grown-up Frederick "the cutest thing"?   Short, rather husky, with a round, handsome face and a befuddled expression that makes him perfect for roles as oddball outsiders with no heterosexual interests.  Instead, they are gay-vague, yearning for love, acceptance, and family.

Like Ben Sharpless, teenage son of the obsessive sheriff Nolan in Birdseye (2002).

Or the mentally handicapped Pemon in Little Chenier (2006).

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.

10 Things I Hate About the Wizard of Oz

From 1959 to 1991, The Wizard of Oz, was shown on tv every year, on CBS until 1968, and then on NBC.

Nazarenes weren't allowed to go to movie theaters, but watching movies on tv was fine, so our parents sat us down every year and forced us to watch the "beloved children's classic."

Apparently it was shown in November or December, but I remember it in the springtime, one of the traumas of the end of the year.

It's old-fashioned, outdated, incomprehensible, and...well, horrifying.

1. 10-year old Dorothy, played by 16-year old Judy Garland, the queen of angst, lives a horrible life on a Depression-Era Dustbowl farm in black-and-white Kansas. Her parents are dead; her elderly Uncle and Aunt appear to be raising man-eating pigs.

 Her only source of joy is her dog Toto, but the evil Miss Gulch is planning to take him away and have him killed.  So Dorothy dreams of going to a place where there "isn't any trouble."

2. A giant tornado destroys her home and zaps Dorothy off to Oz, where at least things are in color, but the main residents are disturbing munchkins.  They look like little adults with mouth deformities, and walk like they have cerebral palsy. Could this be the place with no trouble?

3. Dorothy has accidentally killed the dictator of Munchkin land and stolen her ruby slippers, which apparently are powerful.  The Wicked Witch of the West, the dictator of Winkie Land, shows up.  She thinks Dorothy is hot ("I'll get you, my pretty")  But she wants to kill her anyway, get the slippers, and take over Munchkin land.

In Oz five minutes, and Dorothy has already started a war and gotten a death threat. No wonder she wants to go home to Kansas.

4. She goes on a journey through an empty postapocalyptic Oz to get to the Emerald City and ask the assistance of the great and powerful Wizard.  Along the way she picks up adult male companions, mutants with their own quests: a brain, a heart, the "noive."

She's uncomfortably intimate with the Cowardly Lion.

Meanwhile the Witch burns, poisons, and otherwise terrorizes the group.  I hated the poppy field -- that's opium poppies, the source of heroin -- where Dorothy and company are almost smothered to death.

Incomprehensible: when the Scarecrow's body is torn up and scattered around, the Tin Man says "That's you all over," punning on a 1930s slang phrase meaning "That's just like you."   Who makes a joke about a friend being torn to pieces?

5. At the Emerald City, where the bourgeoisie live in glorious excess and ignore the deprivations of the proletariat, Dorothy and company enjoy a spa day.  Dorothy asks about getting her eyes dyed, which is disgusting.  There's an incomprehensible reference to "a horse of a different color": another pun on a 1930s slang phrase meaning "that's different."

6. After trying to terrorize the Fellowship of the Ring for awhile, the Wizard says he'll help, but only if they steal the Witch's broom.

They undertake a second long and perilous journey to the Witch's castle, where they are captured.  The flying monkeys are horrifying, as is the hourglass that counts out the minutes Dorothy has to live.  Nightmare time!

After almost being murdered, Dorothy melts the witch, frees her slaves -- at least in The Wiz, they were hunky guys in speedos -- and brings the broom back to the Wizard.

7. Who has no power at all!  He's a complete fraud!  He sent her on the quest assuming she would be killed, and his secret would be safe. Too cowardly to commit your own murders, Wiz?

The Wizard suggests that, instead of real skills, the companions defraud their way through life.  For instance, the Scarecrow gets a diploma he didn't earn and spouts some gibberish that sounds brainy but isn't.  He'll probably become a math professor.

Unfortunately, Dorothy can't defraud her back to Kansas.

8. Glinda the Good Witch, the dictator of Gillikan Land, shows up and, with an infuriating smirk, tells Dorothy that she always had the power to go home.

Why not tell her this before she went through all of the agony and terror, you sadistic jerk?

Were you trying to get her to do your dirty work for you, assassinate two world leaders so you could consolidate your power?  Were you the brains behind this whole trip?

And why is the matra that takes you back to Kansas "There's no place like home"?  That is, don't stay in Oz.  Is Glinda worried that if Dorothy sticks around, she will be a threat to her power?

9.  Upon arriving back in Kansas, Dorothy discovers that it was all a dream that occurred when she hit her head during the tornado.  All of that trouble, pain, betrayal, fraud, and behind-the-scene machinations for nothing.  Besides, the plot about Miss Gulch taking away Toto is never resolved. Dorothy's life is still horrible.

10. After all that, there are no same-sex relationships, and there's no beefcake. Where's the gay content?  (The "dandy-lion" line doesn't count.)

Oh, well, here's a picture of a shirtless guy.

See also: The Wiz; The Boys and Men of Oz

The Wiz: Gay Manhattan in the 1970s

Dorothy is a 24-year old kindergarten teacher  living with her Aunt Em and Uncle Henry in 1978 Harlem, New York.  They were happy to raise her, but now they're dropping broad hints: "You're grown up, practically middle aged.  Move out!"

But Dorothy is paralyzed by fear.  She's never been south of 125th Street, which means that she's never been to the Museum of Modern Art, about a mile away, or the Empire State Building, or to the gay village of Chelsea.  Like everyone in America in the 1970s, she has heard horrible things about Manhattan: skyrocketing crime, economic decline, a failing infrastructure.  It's a cesspool of corruption, misery, and perversion.  There are gay people there.

Then she follows her dog Toto out into a snowstorm, and gets lost in Manhattan -- which she calls Oz.

She encounters raw racism -- taxis invariably refuse to take her fare -- and  many of the urban evils that 1970s critics bemoaned: graffiti, prostitutes, gangs, drugs, gay people.

But she still visits sites that are both beautiful and powerful -- the New York Public Library, the World Trade Center, Cony Island, and the glittering emerald fantasy of Park Avenue.


She makes more friends than she ever had before in her life: a Tin Man, a Scarecrow (played by Michael Jackson), a Lion.

And she is surrounded by beefcake.  Cute "numbers runners."  Munckins frozen in graffiti.  Sweat-shop workers who escape their masks and uniforms to reveal muscular bodies, naked except for jockstraps. Many, if not most, are gay-coded.

In the end she defeats the evil Evilene, debunks the shyster Wizard, and goes back home to Harlem.

But she is no longer afraid. She knows now that for all its dangers, squalor, and decay, Manhattan is a beautiful, magical place, where you can find friends, where difference is accepted, where you can be free to be who you are.  Where being gay is ok.

The Wiz is not a great movie.  It's way too long, the acting is awful, and paralyzing fear is not the best attribute for a heroine -- Dorothy has none of the resourcefulness of her counterpart in the Baum books, none of the courage of the Judy Garland version. One gets the impression that she should be talking to a therapist rather than going on a heroic quest.

But I liked the fantasy versions of New York landmarks, the soul-inspired score, the black/urban adaption of  the all-white Oz of Frank L. Baum and Judy Garland.  The utter-lack of hetero-romance. The beefcake.

And the gay symbolism.

When I saw The Wiz in the fall of 1978, during my freshman year in college, I had visited 17 U.S. states and 5 foreign countries, but still, my world felt as constrained as Dorothy's.  Faced with constant heterosexist pronouncements about my future wife and kids, I felt, like Michael Jackson's Scarecrow, that:

You can't win, you can't break even
And you can't get out of the game

The Wiz suggested that home might be a "good place" after all.  All you needed was a copy of the Gayellow Pages.