Denny Miller: Gilligan's Island, Tarzan, Quark, n*de dudes, and moments of gay promise

Link to the n*de photos

Picture it: a blustery October day sometime in the 7th or 8th grade. I am sitting in the living room after school with my brother and sister, drinking hot chocolate and watching a rerun of Gilligan's Island (1964-67), the sitcom about "seven stranded castaways" on a tropical island.  Visitors from the outside world drop by in almost every episode, and promise to help, but something always goes wrong.  This time, in the episode "Big Man on Little Stick" (February 20, 1965), the visitor is Duke Williams, a blond muscleman in bulging cut-off jeans -- he was caught in a tsunami and surfed the 250 miles from Hawaii (just go with it).  

I am overwhelmed by joy.  I have seen shirtless men in comic books, and in Tarzan movies, but never on tv, and Duke Williams is beautiful!  I can't take my eyes off him.

It gets better: Duke could surf back to Hawaii and send help, but he doesn't want to, because he likes the girls, Ginger and Mary Anne.  So the castaways have to convince him that they already have boyfriends.  The Professor has no trouble kissing Ginger, but Gilligan doesn't like girls; Mary Anne has to grab him by the ears to force a kiss.    

(Spoiler alert: when he gets back to Hawaii, Duke hits his head on a rock and forgets about the castaways, so they're still stranded.)

Wait -- my parents, teacher, Sunday school teacher, everyone tells me again and again that someday soon, I will "discover" girls, drop my same-sex pals and pictures of musclemen instantly and without hesitation, and devote the rest of my life to the pursuit of feminine curves and smiles.  It happens to every boy.  There is no escape. Yet Gilligan -- played by Bob Denver, a thirty year old man -- has escaped.  (Interestingly, Bob Denver's earlier character, Maynard G. Krebs on The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, was also "allergic to girls").

Duke Williams, played by Denny Miller, becomes an icon of hope.

I don't remember seeing Denny Miller in anything else, but I probably did.  He has a very full biography on the IMDB: Born in Bloomington, Indiana in 1934 as Scott Miller, grew up in Silver Spring, Maryland and Baldwin, New York, and Los Angeles.  He received a full scholarship to play basketball for UCLA.  He was discovered by a talent scout during his senior year (1956), and cast in Some Came Running (1958) with Dean Martin.

Next came a modern, up-to-date beach boy Tarzan, the Ape Man (1959). It was apparently a poor knockoff that he filmed in eight weeks, with most of the jungle scenes grabbed from Johnny Weissmuller movies.  Still, he bragged that he was the sixth in the grand tradition of movie Tarzans.

Including the silent era, it's Elmo Lincoln (1918), Gene Pollar ( 1920), Dempsey Tablar (1920), James Pierce (1927), Frank Merrill (1928-29), Johnny Weissmuller (1932-1948), Lex Barker (1949-1953), and Gordon Scott (1955-1960), so Denny was #9.

At some point he changed his name to Denny Miller, and got a string of guest spots, mostly in tv Westerns:  Overland Trail, Have Gun -- Will Travel, Riverboat, Laramie, The Rifleman. He may have also made ends meet with physique photography in the burgeoning early 1960s gay subculture (n*de photos on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends).

More after the break.

"The Secret of Boyne Castle": Kurt Russell, a dreary November night, and the smile that changed the world

We usually went to church on Sunday nights, but for some reason I was home one night in the early 1970s to see the last half of the best movie ever made, The Secret of Boyne Castle, on the anthology series Wonderful World of Color.
This was former child star Kurt Russell's only movie as a Disney Adventure Boy (others included Peter McEnery, Tommy Kirk, Tim Considine, and Jeff East) before he moved on to playing oddball outsider Dexter Riley in a series of Disney comedies.

Here Kurt plays Rich, an American exchange student in Dublin who learns that his older brother Tom (bisexual muscleman Glenn Corbett, previously a model for Physique Pictorial and star of Route 66) is not a steel company executive after all, but a spy charged with delivering essential information to Boyne Castle, in the west of Ireland. When Tom is captured by Russian agents, Rich must take over the mission, racing through the quaint villages and lush green hills of Ireland, hoping to elude capture and reach Boyne Castle before the Russians. Fellow student Sean (long-faced, steely-eyed Patrick Dawson) tags along, throwing himself into deadly danger for no logical reason except that he rather likes Rich.

The two are presented as more intimate than mere buddies, framed in tight shots, their faces together in close ups. While they are sleeping on the heather, Rich hears a suspicious noise, and wakes Sean by moving his own body slightly. Although all we see are their faces and necks, to wake someone with such a small gesture means that they must be cuddling together. They rescue each other a dozen times, and are eventually rescued by big brother Tom.

But the most important scene, the scene I have remembered fondly for 40 years:

At an inn, Rich flirts with a waitress.

“You didn’t tell me you had an eye for the ladies!” Sean exclaims, as if he hadn’t anticipated any competition.

Rich responds by asking the waitress if she has any rooms to rent for “for a few hours.” Suspicious, she wants to know why the two boys would need a room for such a short period.

Rich looks at Sean and smiles.

I was entranced by that smile. I knew that it was a clue to the secret. If only I could decipher it, I could find my way to that other world, Oz or Living Island or Middle Earth, the world where boys could fall in love and got married.

How might we account for the not-so-subtle homoerotic bantr between the Rich and Sean? Certainly Glenn Corbett might be a gay ally: he began as a model for the Athletic Model Guild, the Advocate Men of its day, and made a career as a buddy-bonding “man’s man. Kurt Russell was never particularly gay-friendly.

Patrick Dawson works mostly in Irish radio, but his limited filmography includes the gay-vague Ginger in The Jigsaw Man (1983). We should look at the director, Robert Butler, who in the 1960’s specialized in dramas with strong male leads, such as Ben Casey, Dr. Kildare, and I Spy, and later directed such hunk-fests as Remington Steele, Moonlighting, and Lois and Clark. Whether he was working with Bruce Willis, Dean Cane, Pierce Brosnan, or Kurt Russell, Butler neither minimized nor hid their physicality, allowing and even directing them to be open as objects of desire, both to male viewers and to each other.

Les Demi-Deux: Danny Fitzgerald, Richard Bennett, and the beauty of the male form

 

In the days before Stonewall, when gay photography was usually closeted under the guise of fitness magazines, you may have come across Demi-Gods, published by the Demi-Deux studio.  A French import?  Exotic, seductive, and maybe more legal than the American variety.

The Demi-Deux promoted the beauty of the male form itself. You don't have to pretend that you're looking for muscle-building tips.  It's ok to gaze in awe.

You may have been surprised to discover that the Demi-Deux was not a French studio.  It was the work of Danny Fitzgerald, who lived in his parents' house in Carol Gardens, Brooklyn, and his model and collaborator, Richard Bennett.

Born in 1920, Danny Fitzgerald photographed scenes of everyday life during World War II and the 1950s. Some of the subjects had their shirts off, adding masculine beauty to the scene.

 In 1958, Scranton, Pennsylvania native Richard Bennett moved to New York to become an actor/model. He sent his portfolio to Danny Fitzgerald, who invited him to do a photo shoot.  The two became lovers, and stayed together until Danny's death in 2000.

It was a new world.  Allen Ginsberg described gay men in "Howl," 1956.   Truman Capote's Other Voices, Other Rooms, 1958, featured a gay teenager. Why not publish photos for an audience of open, out gay men?

Calling their studio Les Demi Deux, they published photos in many of the gay-closeted physique magazines of the era, such as Physique Pictorial, The Young Physique, and Muscles A Go-Go, and, beginning in 1963, their own Demi Gods.

More after the break

Who is Tony Dow's Boyfriend?

This photo is causing a bit of speculation.

It looks like Venice Beach in Los Angeles (the cabana in the background says "Charter 0").

The guy on the right is Tony Dow, the teen hunk of Leave It to Beaver, shirtless, in his standard white shorts. Sometime in the early 1960s.

He's with a guy who is about his height and age, buffed, with a severe military haircut, wearing a dark t-shirt and cut-off jeans. They're both barefoot, and they both bulge to the left.

Tony is looking at the photographer, while the other guy is facing away, not sure what to do.  It's not a posed photo, it's a candid, two guys caught in an informal moment.  Hanging out together, or on a date.

But who is Tony's boyfriend?

I cropped the photo, but the original doesn't display any more information.  There are three guys sitting on the left, and there's a partial watermark: eart.ltd edit

Three possibilities have been suggested:

1. In "Wally the Lifeguard," a episode of Leave It to Beaver that aired on October 22, 1960, Wally thinks he has been hired as a lifeguard, and is embarrassed to discover that he will be selling hot dogs in a ridiculous outfit instead.  Some scenes are set at the beach, where the real life guard is played by 25-year old Dick Gering. Maybe he and Tony Dow bonded.

Severe military haircut, but the guy in the photo doesn't look like him.

2. Tommy Rettig, the star of Lassie, four years older than Tony Dow, became one of his closest friends during the early 1960s, and starred with him in Never Too Young (1965-66)

The guy in the photo is definitely not Tommy Rettig.

3. John "Butchie" Davidson.  Not the actor, the physique model. He was in Los Angeles for only a few months in the spring of 1965 before shipping out to Vietnam (he died tragically en route).  But during those months, he starred in several Athletic Model Guild films and got the cover of Physique Pictorial.  

Same haircut, same hands, same face.

Tony Dow never appeared in Physique Pictorial, but he mostly likely knew about it.  It's not inconceivable that he met Butchie, and was showing him the sights that day when an anonymous photographer snapped his picture.

There are nude photos of John Davidson on Tales of West Hollywood.

See also: Tony Dow Dating and Hookup Stories

Joe Canoli's canoli: frontal nudity and erotic promise from the groovy 1960s

 

Link to the nude photos

Readers were asking about Joe Canoli, one of the random hunks in the Season 2 Gemstone Memes. 

Walter Kudzincz, born in 1925, began photographing his well-hung buddies and boyfriends, establishing a catalog of guys in skimpy outfits pretending to be cowboys, pirates, or gladiators, trying to avoid being overtly homoerotic, as was required by the strict censorship and intense homophobia of 1950s society.    You could get them via mail order, or in "fitness" magazines like Physique Pictorial and Tomorrow's Man.  

In 1952 Walt met Jim Stryker, an 18-year old recent high school graduate, pranking his friend by urinating on him from a tree branch.  Stryker became his friend, lover, and the top-selling model in the gay male subculture for the next ten years.

In 1962, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that male nudity was not necessarily obscene, and in 1965, magazines began printing frontal nudity, allowing Walt to challenge the "chaste," closeted gay models of the earlier generation.  It was the era of the psychedelics revolution, the sexual revolution, the youth counterculture, and the more open, out gay subcultures that would culminate in Stonewall and the Gay Rights Movement.  The modern gay man was willing to admit that he liked to look at cocks as well as muscles.

So Walt's Champion Studio models got naked.  Sometimes their photos were campy and cool, brightly colored, "mod," groovy.  Sometimes they made fun of the posing-strap cowboys and football players of the uptight 1950s.  Sometimes they were unabashedly erotic.  

I'm covering a lot about the life of Walt Kudzincz because I have found almost nothing about Joe Canoli.  The earliest photo I could find, a black-and-white with rear nudity, comes from between 1962 and 1965. 

More after the break

Joseph Cali: Nude model before Stonewall, John Travolta's disco buddy, soap opera hunk, Adonis Male

  

Link to the nude photos

In 1968, a year before Stonewall, 18-year old Joseph Cali was playing chess and cruising in Washington Square Park in Manhattan when he was approached by George Haimsohn, author of Stories of the Homosexual Life, The Gay Psychedelic Sex Book, The Gay Coloring Book, A Summer on Fire Island, and the book and libretto for the musical Dames at Sea, which was currently playing off-Broadway.

Haimsohn was also a photographer, working under the name Plato, and invited Joe to model. 

His first full frontal photo appears in a 1968 issue of Go Guys.  The text says that Joe is a "fast shooting star on the physique horizon....well equipped to handle himself in any tight spot." Tell me more, tell me more, did he get very far?

  

The photo set and magazine work paid for Joe's tuition at Siena College, where he led anti-war protests, starred in the play Drunkard, and worked as a stage manager for The Gingham Dog. 

 

He moved to Los Angeles in 1973, and continued to pose for the Model of the Month Club and Photozique, while making the rounds of auditions.

Joe's big break came in 1977, when he was cast as Joey, best buddy of John Travolta's Tony in the disco drama Saturday Night Fever

More Brooklyn-disco roles followed, including Flatbush, a tv series about a gang called the Fungos.  Joe starred as Presto opposite Adrian Zmed as Socks.  It only lasted for six episodes.

He got 19 episodes of Today's FBI in 1981-82 as Nick, the "Ethnic" member of the team according to Wikipedia.  I'm not sure what his ethnicity was.

More Joseph Cali after the break. 

Dennis Cole

Most heterosexuals go about their daily lives as if they are alone in the universe.  If asked, they will say "Sure, some men are gay, which means they're into men, not women," but in the next moment, they'll announce "There's not a man alive who wouldn't want a date with Angelina Jolie or whoever.

The IMDB biography of Dennis Cole assures us that "Females couldn't get enough of him," while males idolized his athleticism.  That's right, every woman and no man swooned over him.

What about his early modeling in beefcake magazines, notably the gay-oriented Physique Pictorial and Bob Mizner's Athletic Model Guild?



Or his work as the hustler Cowboy in a San Diego production of the gay-themed Boys in the Band?




Or King Marchand, the man who falls in love with a woman he thinks is a drag queen, in the national touring company of Victor/Victoria?.

He didn't play any gay characters on tv, but really, between 1965 and 1995, there weren't many gay characters to play, especially if you were too muscular to pull off a thin, willowy queen.  But he played around gay and LGBT characters:

"The Fourth Sex" episode of Medical Center (1975), with Robert Reed as a transgender doctor.

"Star Struck," an episode of Three's Company (1983), with Jack Tripper pretending to be gay.

Early in his career, he went the buddy-bonding route, with two homoerotic detective partners: Howard Duff in Felony Squad (1966-69) and Rod Taylor in Bearcats! (1971).

Dennis was married three times, for a few years each (his second wife was Jacyln Smith of Charlie's Angels.)  When his son Joey was killed in a robbery attempt in 1991, he refused to be associated with any violence in movie or tv productions, which limited his options. He acted on screen only a few more times before his death in 2009, though he continued to work in theater.

John Hamill: The First Nude Physique Model

Born in 1947, the boyish, good-natured John Hamill began his career as a physique model, one of the first to pose fully nude.  Sometimes he even had a partner, in explicitly homoerotic scenes aimed at the increasingly visible gay male audience.  He also appeared in both gay and heterosexual "blue movies."

But he aspired to become a serious actor, so he studied at the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Arts and began appearing on stage, notably in the gay-themed Boys in the Band in 1969 (presumably as the hustler hired to become a "birthday present").

His film career began in 1970, with starring roles in the thrillers The Beast in the Cellar (not as the beast), Trog (not as the rampaging caveman), and No Blade of Grass.  He also had some guest spots on tv series such as Paul Temple, The Befrienders, and Crossroads.  

But, like many bodybuilders, especially those with a "gay reputation," John found himself stuck in minor roles as threatening bad guys or inarticulate hunks.  In Tower of Evil (1972), for example, his character is introduced, takes off his clothes, flexes his muscles and gets killed, all in about thirty seconds.

Anxious for work, he agreed to star in the sex comedy Girls Come First (1975), as an artist asked to paint nude models.  Released in both hardcore and softcore versions, it was popular enough to lead to two sequels, and parts in similar movies, like Hardcore (1977).

But nothing else.  After a two-parter on Space: 1999 in 1978, he retired from acting and became a furniture refinisher.

Being so open about sex, and so nonchalant about both male and female partners, limited John's career, but left him -- and his fans -- with many fond memories.

You can see the nude photos on Tales of West Hollywood.

From Muscle Beach to the Cimarron Strip: TV Westerns

By the time I started watching TV in the 1960s, the Western was stale, outdated, staggeringly unhip; my friends and I could stomach only those few that involved a flashy new gimmick, like Wild Wild West or Alias Smith and Jones.  But for the Boomers growing up in the 1950s, they were as iconic as Pinky Lee and Father Knows Best.  

The Western heroes were usually the discovery of gay talent agent Henry Willson, so they were gay, bi, or at least gay-friendly.  They usually wore full leather, buckskin, or other less-than-revealing garb, but they were not averse to revealing stunning physiques for the movie magazines, and even for the AMC’s proto-gay Physique Pictorial.  Guy Madison (who went so far as to pose nude) in The Adventures of Wild Bill Hickock (1951-56)

Rugged movie star Hugh O’Brian in The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp (1955-61);

Clint Walker of Cheyenne (1955-63).

William Smith of Laredo


Plus:
Richard Boone of Have Gun, Will Travel (1957-63)
Robert Horton of Wagon Train (1957-65)
Rory Calhoun of The Texan (1958-60)
George Montgomery of Cimarron City (1958-60)
Scott Brady as Shotgun Slade (1959-61)

The Western hero traditionally displayed little heterosexual interest: dames were characteristic of an emasculating civilization, along with government, education, opera, and church.  Instead, they had a  “sidekick,” a life partner of the same sex, usually someone of inferior rank due to race, age, or socioeconomic class, who provided an emotional or spiritual energy.  The sidekick is an essentially American phenomenon, and its homoerotic import has been noted for at least thirty years, since Love and Death in the American Novel.

Most of the sidekicks of the 1950s were elderly, corpulent, or buffoons, perhaps because clowns minimze the homoerotic impact of their devotion.  The fat, hee-hawking Andy Devine, later on Andy's Gang,  played “Jingles,” Guy Madison’s sidekick in The Adventures of Wild Bill Hickock.  

Or they were father and son, as in The Rifleman.

 But we can locate several same-sex partners whose homoerotic bond was not miminized:

Indian agent Tom Jeffords (future Days of Our Lives hunk John Lumpton), who fell in love with...um, I mean befriended...handsome, muscular Chief Cochise (Michael Ansara) in Broken Arrow (1956-57).

 John Bromfield as The Sheriff of Cochise (1956-60) with Stan Jones his faithful deputy.

John Smith and Robert Fuller of Laramie.

Yancy Derringer (1958-59), an ex-Confederate soldier turned gambler played by Jock Mahoney, and X Brands as his Native American companion.

Joe Dallesandro: Counterculture Icon with the Most Famous Face, Physique, and Bulge of the 1960s

Joe Dallesandro had one of the most recognizeable faces, physiques -- and bulges -- of the 1960s.

When the teenager met Andy Warhol in 1967, he had already had a colorful career as a juvenile delinquent who had run away from two detention centers, crashed a car during a police chase, and was shot by a police officer.  He was currently working as a hustler, and a model for the gay-themed Physique Pictorial.  Bisexual, adventurous, a little dangerous, and devastatingly handsome, he was just the sort of person Warhol wanted for his entourage.










Joe immediately got a starring role in Flesh, directed by Warhol staple Paul Morrissey.  He plays a bisexual hustler who has several frontal-nude scenes and has sex with a number of people, including a transvestite.

During the next few years, Joe starred in five more Warhol movies:

Lonesome Cowboys (1968), a Western spoof which involved a nude wrestling scene, plus Trash, Heat, Andy Warhol's Frankenstein, and Blood for Dracula, sometimes with nude scenes, sometimes without, but his fame as a counterculture icon was sealed.

He appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone, nude, with his infant son.  20 years later, they recreated the iconic photo.

















He appeared on the cover of the Smiths' album The Album.

His bulge appeared on the cover of the Rolling Stones album Sticky Fingers.  Actually, Andy Warhol submitted it from a stack of photos without knowing who it depicted, but Joe has always claimed that it's him.  He should know what his own bulge looks like.

He was referenced in the Lou Reed song "Walk on the Wild Side":

Little Joe never gave it away, everybody had to pay.


(Joe is 5'6", a head shorter than Andy Warhol at 5'11")










During the late 1970s, Joe broke into mainstream cinema, first in Europe (The Gardener, The Climber, Season for Assassins, Je t'aime moi non plus), then in the United States, specializing in gangsters and other tough guys (The Cotton Club,  The Hitchhiker, Cry-Baby, Guncrazy). He also worked in tv, on such series as Wiseguy and Matlock.  

Today, at age 68, he has retired from acting, although he appears occasionally as a commentator in in documentaries about the 1960s, or Andy Warhol, or himself.

Joe has always been a vocal advocate of LGBT rights.  He said that if his sons, Joe Jr. and Michael, were gay, he wouldn't want them to endure the homophobia that he witnessed in the "liberal" 1960s and 1970s.

There's a story about Joe's hookup with Bobby Driscoll on Tales of West Hollywood.

The nude photos are on Tales of West Hollywood

Bob Hover/ Richard Harrison: Muscle Buddies

During the 1950s, when Muscle Beach bodybuilders were being snapped up by the Athletic Model Guild to pose in the burgeoning gay-vague physique magazines industry, buddies Bob Hover (right) and Richard Harrison (left) sometimes posed together.

Born in Salt Lake City, Utah in 1936, Richard Harrison hit the beaches of Southern California in 1954, just after he graduated from high school.  Bob Hover was two years older, but he arrived that same year, after a stint in military (he was a boxer in the Marines).  They became close friends, and maybe lovers (if you believe the sly hints that the muscle mags used to sell copies).

Soon Hollywood came calling.  Bob had several small movie roles in 1956-58, usually with some of the other gay or gay-friendly actors of the 1950s, such as Lafayette Escadrille (1958) with Tab Hunter, and No Time for Sargeants (1958), with Nick Adams.


During the 1970s he starred on several soap operas, including Another World and As the World Turns.  He retired from acting in 1985, and died in 2013.

Richard first appeared on screen in 1957, and in 1961 moved to Italy to become one of the sword and sorcery peplum heroes.  Between 1961 and 1965, he donned the toga nine times, growing a beard in the process.  When the peplum craze ended, he stayed in Italy to make spaghetti Westerns and spy dramas.













In the 1980s Richard returned to the U.S. just in time for the man-muscle craze: Golden Ninja Warrior, Ninja Hunter, The Ninja Squad, Ninja Dragon.  He was over 50 years old, but age never kept a true bodybuilder from flexing and taking out enemy squadrons.   He also moved into writing, directing, and production.

Both Bob and Richard married and had children, but they made an indelible impression on gay men of the first Boomer generation.