Dino Martin: Bisexual Rat Pack Kid

Dino, Desi, & Billy was a 1960s teen trio formed from the sons of two celebrity musicians, Desi Arnaz Jr. and Dino Martin, and their friend Billy Hinsche.  They released five boy-band style albums between 1964 and 1969, plus a lot of singles.  Some of them charted, mostly because the guys were famous and rather cute.

Dino was Dean Paul Martin, the son of Rat Packer Dean Martin.  He was very rich, very famous, and sort of talented, but not very focused.  He was good at so many things that he couldn't decide on one.

After his group disbanded, Dino played professional tennis and semi-pro football; he got his pilot's license; he studied medicine; joined the National Guard.  He started calling himself Dean Paul instead of Dino. He changed into a blond. He developed a spectacular physique.

And he acted, of course.  Not a lot -- he was too busy.  7 movies, mostly in roles as playboys or a woman's illcit lover; some guest spots on tv shows (including his Dad's Dean Martin Comedy Hour), and some "as himself" appearances on talk shows and game shows.

His most substantial role was in Misfits of Science (1985-86) as Dr. Billy Hayes, the hetero-horny scientist who drives around in an ice cream truck with a group of rowdy teenage superheroes. Kevin Peter Hall (left) had the ability to shrink. A pre-Friends Courteney Cox played a juvenile delinquent with telekinetic powers

More after the break

Gays Next Door in 1972: The Doris Day Show

In 1972, when I was 11 years old, my friends and I liked a sitcom called The Doris Day Show, mainly because it was squeezed between the beefcake-heavy Here's Lucy and Sonny and Cher.  

It was a Mary Tyler Moore clone, a workplace comedy centered on Doris Martin (Doris Day), a hip, sophisticated journalist for Today's World magazine, living in San Francisco and dating a number of cute guys (including Patrick O'Neal and bisexual rat packer Peter Lawford, left).

And, in a television first, there was a gay couple living next door!

Lance and Lester (Alan Dewitt, Lester Fletcher) were often referred to, but appeared just once, in a meeting of tenants in the November 27, 1972 episode, "The Co-Op."  I didn't catch the flamboyant stereotypes, and no one used the word "gay" -- I wouldn't hear the word on tv until 1976 -- but I saw that two men had found a way to live together, escaping the heterosexist mandate .  Could San Francisco be a "good place"?

Doris Day got her start in the light musical comedies of the 1940s, but she made her mark as a liberated woman in a series of Camelot-era sex comedies with suggestive titles: Pillow Talk (1959), It Happened to Jane (1959), Lover Come Back (1961), That Touch of Mink (1962), The Thrill of it All (1963), Move Over Darling (1963).  Her usual costar, gay actor Rock Hudson, helped her tiptoe around the boundary between not knowing that gay people exist and knowing but not saying.

But her sitcom began as a hayseed comedy!

In its first season (1968-69), The Doris Day Show was basically Green Acres: City girl Doris, a new widow, moves to her father's ranch with her two sons, Toby (Todd Starke) and Billy (Philip Brown, below, who would go on to a successful career as a soap hunk), plus a ranch hand (James Hampton, right) and a housekeeper.  It aired on Tuesday nights, just after another relic of the 1950s, The Red Skelton Show.

Doris hated hayseed -- she didn't even know that her husband Martin Melcher had signed her up for it.

So in the second season (1969-70), she pushed for some changes: although still living on the ranch, Doris commuted into San Francisco, where she worked as a secretary for Today's World magazine.

Today's World: Modern, hip, with it.

She got two quintessentially urban coworkers, played by  McLean Stevenson and Rose Marie.

In the third season (1970-71): Doris and her sons lived in an apartment over an Italian restaurant in San Francisco (Ranch?  What ranch?), where she got a gay-vague next door neighbor (Billy DeWolf).

In the fourth season (1971-72), the transition was complete: Doris was a sophisticated career woman, Ms. instead of Mrs., who had always been single (Kids?  What kids?).

And she managed to finagle some gay neighbors out of the network, something Mary Tyler Moore was never able to do.

The Gay Rat Pack

Between 1960 and 1965, when all-American beefcake was giving way to suave, sophisticated, and cool, The Rat Pack ruled Las Vegas.  They were five actors and singers, performing regularly at casinos like the Sands.  They were famous for living the Cool Life, drinking, gambling, sporting, chasing dames, and having fun. They were famous for their connections to the mob and the Kennedys.  But mostly they were famous for being friends. When one appeared, he was asked about the others.  Their spats and reconciliations made front page news.

The homoerotic subtext of the Rat Pack bond is obvious -- today, anyhow.  They were all about male bonding, with the intensity and physicality of romance.  And audiences cheered them for it.

Some of them were bisexual in real life.  Others were homophobic -- even more than what one expects in the homophobic 1960s.  In order, from least to most gay-friendly, they were:





5. Frank Sinatra, age 45 in 1960 (top photo), The Chairman of the Board, a teen sensation of the 1940s, still releasing old standbys and finding a whole new generation of fans. Although he starred in the gay symbolism-heavy On the Town, he also starred in one of the more homophobic movies of the 1960s, The Detective (1968), and was reputedly so homophobic in real life that he threatened reputedly-gay Johnny Mathis.

4.Joey Bishop, 42-year old comedian, sitcom star, later talk show host. Married during the days of the Rat Pack womanizing, kept to himself a lot.  Bff of future talk show host Regis Philbin.

3. Dean Martin (left), age 43, whose comedy act with Jerry Lewis in the 1950s had distinctive, perhaps intended homoerotic undertones.  In the 1960s he released some popular songs, had a comedy-variety show and starred in the detective-spoof Matt Helm series. His son, Dean Paul Martin, was bisexual.

2. Peter Lawford, 37 year old former child actor, later a tv star (he was on The Doris Day Show).  Everyone thought he was gay; Louis B. Mayer went as far as to order testosterone injections as a "cure." Got married to Pat Kennedy, the future President's sister, over the objections of her father -- he didn't want his daughter married to a gay guy. Reputedly had relationships with Tarzan Gordon Scott, Rock Hudson, and Merv Griffith.

1. Sammy Davis Jr., age 35, "Mr. Show Business," dancer, singer, actor.  Converted to Judaism.  Kissed Archie Bunker on a famous episode of All in the Family.  Bisexual, tended toward men, preferred clean-cut all-American types.  Closeted to the other Brat Packers (except maybe Peter Lawford), but opened up to teen idol Paul Anka, whom he thought was gay (everyone did at the time).  Mentioned being bisexual in print as early as 1978. Died in 1990.

See also: Dean Paul Martin

The Gay World of Frank Sinatra

The first teen idol, Frank Sinatra (1915-1998) had bobby-soxers and gay greasers swooning  with syrupy-voiced romantic ballads like "Night and Day" (1942), "Begin the Beguine" (1946), and "I've Got a Crush on You" (1948).  















Like all teen idols, his fan base aged with him, so by the late 1950s, his songs had become "old favorites," the songs middle-aged couples danced to while they reminisced about when they first met: "My Blue Heaven" (1961), "I Love Paris" (1962), "It Was a Very Good Year" (1965)

By that time, he was making a splash in Hollywood, as the romantic lead in buddy musicals like Anchors Aweigh (1945), On the Town (1949), and Guys and Dolls (1955), in serious dramas like From Here to Eternity (1953), The Man With the Golden Arm (1955), and Von Ryan's Express (1965).

By the 1960s, he had re-invented himself as a fast-talking middle-aged sharpie who loved the fast life and had connections with disreputable types.  He played parodies of himself in Robin and the 7 Hoods (1964), Tony Rome (1967), and The Detective (1968), which apparently contains some savage homophobia, even by 1960s standards.








He was also in Las Vegas, singing, boozing, and clowning around with the fabled Rat Pack: Sammy Davis Jr., Dean Martin, Peter Lawford, Joey Bishop.



















He continued to perform though the 1980s, although more and more often as a relic of the past, an American institution whose work was revered rather than enjoyed.  His last studio album, released in 1994, included "Come Fly with Me," "The Best is Yet to Come," "Embraceable You," and "My Funny Valentine."  One imagines that the elderly couples who first danced to his songs as teenagers fifty years before were sitting on rocking chairs, reminiscing.

The gay connection: Frank was quite homophobic in real life, but he had strong emotional ties with the mostly-bisexual Rat Pack, he starred in many gay-subtext movies, like On the Town, and his daughter Nancy Sinatra is a gay ally.  She tweets: "Tell me if you are homophobic and I will unfollow you.  Don't like bigots."

See also: The Gay Rat Pack; On the Town

Paul Anka: The Gay Next Door

Paul Anka was the first teen idol to be known for his physique as well as his music.  Other teen idols of the 1950s -- Bobby Rydell, Bobby Darin, Ricky Nelson, Pat Boone -- may have been dreamy, but the teen magazines emphasized their cool threads, not their muscular chests. Paul not only had a face and a voice, he had a body, and he knew how to use it to his advantage.

His first single, "Diana," hit the top of the charts in 1957,  pushing hits by Jerry Lane Lewis and Elvis Presley out of the way.  "Puppy Love," "Put Your Head on My Shoulder," and "Lonely Boy" followed, all chart toppers, mostly about lost or unrequited love.








In the early 1960s, as the British invasion limited the appeal of the 1950s-era teen idols, Paul re-invented himself as an adult contemporary performer, and continued to enjoy a string of hits: "In the Still of the Night," "You're Having My Baby," "One Man Woman."

And he made movies that required more underwear, swimsuit, and semi-nude shots than any other teen idol of the era.  Look in Any Window (1961) is particularly memorable.

Craig Fowler (Paul), the teenage son of dysfunctional parents, has a paralyzing "sexual abnormality."  He goes to a youth center and ogles the buffed athletes working out.

Then he spies on his hunky neighbor (Jack Cassidy, David Cassidy's dad), kissing his wife in the swimming pool.

Meanwhile rumors of his sexual deviance run through the neighborhood.  Two teenage boys chase him, yelling threats, and the cops are on his trail.  "Let me get my hands on any guy that isn't normal!" one grunts.

Craig tries to pursue a "normal" life by courting girl-next-door Ellen (Gigi Perreau), but eventually even "true love" can't repress his aberrant desires.

Nope, Craig's not gay -- that would have been too controversial for Hollywood in 1961. There are still almost no gay teenagers in mainstream film.  Craig's a Peeping Tom.  But the gay symbolism is obvious.

Assumed gay in real life, Paul was actually heterosexual, though he was friends with gay teen idol Sal Mineo and bisexual Rat Packer Sammy Davis Jr..