An Old Steve Reeves Movie

20 years before Arnold Schwarzenegger personalized the bodybuilder, a decade before William Smith brought bodybuilding Western heroes out of the closet, Steve Reeves became an icon for gay and straight men -- but mostly in Italy, with his voice dubbed in by someone else.

Born in 1926 in Montana, Reeves developed a massive physique during the 1940s, when it was still considered a weird affectation.  After minor roles in U.S. movies and tv sitcoms -- and physique shots in Bob Mizner's pro-gay Physique Pictorial -- he moved to Italy, where the peplum or sword-and-sandal genre promoted Italian nationalism through man-mountains in togas who wandered around the ancient world, fighting oppressors.

Reeves' Hercules (1957) became a sensation, even after it was released in the U.S. in 1959, and spun Reeves into a sequel, Hercules Unchained (1959), as well as a Hercules fad in comics and on tv.

 Soon Reeves was playing every ancient hero the studio could dig up or invent, 15 in all: Goliath (not the Biblical Goliath), Glaucus (from The Last Days of Pompeii), Morgan the Pirate, The Thief of Baghdad, Agi Murad,  and Phidippides  (I've never heard of most of them, either).

The plots were similar: Hercules, or Goliath, or Agi Murad fights to help a civilization throw off the yoke of a tyrannical oppressor, gets captured and tortured, rejects the advances of an evil black-haired woman and rescues and marries a good blonde-haired woman.

His lines were dubbed in English in post-production, so no one heard his real voice except in two American movies, the bodybuilder-exploitation Athena and the police drama Jailbait.

There is minimal buddy-bonding, as in the original Hercules, where the demigod tags along with Jason and the Argonauts.  But both Hercules and Jason fall in love with women, and at the end of the movie they part.

In Romulus and Remus (Duel of the Titans, 1961), Romulus (Steve Reeves) and Remus (Gordon Scott) are raised as brothers, and fight the evil oppressors together.  But then one becomes good, and the other evil, and they must duel to the death.

Gay fans had to make do with Steve Reeves' superlative musculature, which was displayed extensively in every movie.

He retired in 1967 after an injury,  and devoted the next 33 years to promoting fitness and raising horses on his ranch in central California.  No information on whether he supported his gay fans, but since they were an integral part of his fame, one imagines that he enjoyed  the homage in The Rocky Horror Picture Show , where Dr. Frank-N-Furter tells Brad and Janet:

If you want something visual, that's not too abysmal,
We could take in an old Steve Reeves movie.

An Interview with Spartacus: Gay Characters, Gay Subtexts, and His Wife

Spartacus (111-71 BC) was a gladiator who led a slave revolt against the Roman Republic, and became an inspiration for rebels of all sizes and shapes, from Toussaint Loverture to Bulgarian soccer teams.  He has appeared in many novels, movies, and tv series, most recently in Spartacus (2011-2013), a popular series on the STARZ network.  I heard it was the "gayest show on television," so I caught up with Spartacus to see just how gay it was.

Thank you for taking the time from your busy slave revolt to talk to me.

Happy to be here.  Give my regards to your wife.

Um...tell me about your life in Thrace before you were sold into slavery.

It was Paradise!  My wife and I spent all our days gazing into each other's eyes!  Every moment with my wife by my side was ecstasy!  Every moment without my wife was unspeakable agony!  I only wish that your readers could know the ecstasy of a man and his wife!

Well, most of my readers are gay.

Oh.  Ok, that's fine, too.  To each his own, I always say.  Did I mention my wife?

Yes, five times so far.  So you were both sold into slavery.  You ended up in Capua, in the gladiator-training school run by Batiatus.  How did you like it there?

Every moment without my wife was unspeakable agony, of course, but I took solace in the fact that Batiatus agreed to find my wife for me.  Every match that I won brought me closer to that moment when I would be reunited with my wife.  Did I mention my wife?

Yes, you did!  Did the Romans generally treat you well?

They gave me the honors befitting a champion.  But their customs were barbaric.  Men didn't spend every moment gazing into the eyes of their wife.  They slept with whoever they wanted, not realizing that the bond between a man and his wife is sacred.  Like my bond with my wife.  Every moment without my wife was unspeakable agony.  Did I mention my wife?

Um...I believe so.  Did you make any friends among the other gladiators?

My best friend was Varro.  He was amazing!

Strong gay-subtext buddy-bond, huh?

No, it's not that.  I respected him. He sold himself into slavery in order to support his wife and child.  Every moment without his wife was agony, of course, but he did what he had to do.  His only goal in life was to make his wife happy.  Just as it should be for all men.  What good is a man without a wife?  My wife was my reason for living! Did I mention my wife?

Any gay guys among the gladiators?

Well, there was Barca, the Beast of Carthage.  Instead of a wife, he hooked up with the young twink Pietros -- I even stumbled upon them having sex one night when I was moaning about my wife.  But then he was killed, and Pietros committed suicide.  They were nice guys.  Did I mention my wife?

Were they major characters?

Not really.  Only a few scenes, and they died rather quickly in the first season.

You were eventually reunited with your wife, but she was mortally wounded, and died in your arms.

The worst moment of my life!  Life is meaningless without a wife!

Did you move on, to concentrate on your profession, meet other women, and so on?

Oh, no!  I moaned about the memory of my lost wife in every episode, and I would never consider looking at another woman.  The bond between a man and his wife is eternal!  I just wish that you readers could know the ecstasy a man feels when he gazes into the eyes of his wife!  It is the reason for existing!  It is Paradise! It is...

Um...remember, most of my readers are gay?

Oh, right.  Whatever turns you on!  Barca had a boyfriend before Pietros, you know.  I wasn't around, but you hear about it in the second season, a prequel, set before I was sold into slavery, when I was still gazing into the eyes of my wife!   A man and his wife....

Got it!  So, is there any other gay content in the ludus?  Any beefcake?

Sure, lots.  We all have bodybuilder physiques, and we work out in posing straps with gigantic bulges -- the ladies in the audience really like it, you see.  And some of the gladiators who don't know the infinite joy of having a wife are assigned to sleep with Roman women.  You see full frontal nudity as they are inspected.

So there's nudity, but only in the context of women's desire for men?

Right.  I mean, it's not the infinite joy of having a wife, but it's what men and women do.  What man would give up the opportunity to sleep with a beautiful woman, except those who have wives?

Gay men generally aren't interested in women

Oh, right, your readers.  I keep forgetting.  The topic just never comes up in the ludus.  Most of the men spend all their time talking about the beautiful women they've been with, or want to be with.  I, of course, moan over the loss of my wife.  My wife!  My wife!  My wife!

Ok, calm down.  So I take it there's a lot of heteronormativity in the series?

Of course not! We don't discriminate!  There are several gay characters.  Agron, one of my top aides in the rebellion, is in love with Nasir.  They last until the end of the series. There's Castus, Nasir's friend. And...and...well, that's about all.  But more than you'll see on 300.  

Besides, isn't every good tv series really about a man and his wife? The only thing that gives life meaning is a man gazing into the eyes of his wife! Without a wife, you're nothing! My wife!  My wife!  My wife!  My wife!

Um...ok, that's all we have time for today.  Thanks for coming in. 

My pleasure. Give my regards to your wife.

See also:  Spartacus: From Tony Curtis cruising Olivier to "House of Ashur," with gladiators, gay guys, gore, and a lot of penises

The Dandy and the Gay Cult: The Last Days of Pompeii

When I was a kid, my church didn't like anything "worldly," not even literature.  Novels were at best a waste of time, and more likely they would promote heresies like atheism, Catholicism, and witchcraft.

But they made an exception for historical dramas set in or around the time of Christ: Ben-Hur, Quo Vadis, The Robe, The Big Fisherman,  Barabbas, and even Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton's Last Days of Pompeii (1834).

Later I discovered that Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873) was gay, and a member of the Dandy movement, about well-sensitive, highly refined gentlemen who obsessed over fashion and grooming, swooned over opera arias, enjoyed hedonistic vices, and wrote poetry.  During last days of the Romantic Era (1770-1830) and the first days of the Victorian, "dandy" was code for "gay."

Most of the Dandys weren't great writers; in fact, Bulwer-Lytton gave his name to a contest every year to see who can write the worst opening for a novel.  I only got through a few pages of the purple-prosed Last Days of Pompeii. But apparently, if you slog through the romance between Roman citizen Glaucus and the "beautiful" Ione, you'll meet the evil Egyptian sorcerer Arbaces, who seduces and "destroys" Ione's brother Apaecides -- he sings a song of "love" and then leads him to "a curtain on the other side of the chamber."

Now Apaecides is a priest for the evil cult of Isis, which engages in all sorts of decadent activities.  Not to worry, he renounces Isis and converts to Christianity before Arbaces murders him.

At least the destruction of Pompeii is not caused by God's wrath against the sodomites.

There have been several film versions, mostly skipping the gay subplot.  In the 1959 peplum version, Glaucus (bodybuilder Steve Reeves) gets a gay subtext with his best friend Marcus (Mario Berriatua), but the character of Apaecides, renamed Antonius (Angel Aranda, left, from a Spanish movie) is insignificant.

In the 1984 tv miniseries, Nicholas Clay (left) plays Glaucus, Ernest Borgnine Marcus, and Benedict Taylor Antonius, in a minor plotline that gets him a girlfriend.  There's also a new hunk, the gladiator Lydon (Duncan Regehr, top photo, posing with phallic symbol).

See also: The Flowers of Evil

Ben Hur: A Gay Tale of Christ

Ben Hur (1959), based on the 1880 novel Ben-Hur: A Tale of Christ, by Lew Wallace, was one of those big-budget epics with "a cast of thousands" that studios in the 1950s hoped would draw people away from television.  And it worked: 11 Academy Awards, second-highest grossing movie of all time to date (after Gone with the Wind), re-released in 1969, broadcast on tv in 1971.  With a palpable gay subtext.

Gore Vidal, the gay author who wrote the screenplay, apparently included a gay text: around the time of Christ, the Roman Messala (Stephen Boyd) is made tribune of the province of Judea, and looks up his boyhood lover, Judah Ben-Hur (Charlton Heston, previously seen in Peer Gynt).  But Ben-Hur refuses to rekindle the romance, and the enraged Messala tries to destroy him.

The gay text was removed -- you can't have lovers on screen in 1959 -- but the subtext was strong enough, with Messala and Ben-Hur gazing into each other's eyes and linking arms to drink out of each other's cups.  The only problem is, there's no real explanation left for why Messala suddenly turns evil: when a stone from Ben-Hur's roof accidentally falls and injures the Governor of Judea, he seizes on the incident to sell his former "friend" and his mother and sister into slavery.

After three years as a galley slave, Ben-Hur makes a new "friend," Roman Consul Arius (Jack Hawkins), who brings him back to Rome, trains him as a charioteer, and adopts him.

But Ben-Hur wants revenge, and he wants to find his mother and sister.  So after a few years of domestic bliss with his older boyfriend,  he heads back to Judea and challenges Messala to a chariot race.  Messala dies, Ben-Hur is reconciled with his mother and sister.

Ben-Hur gets a girl along the way, but no fade-out kiss.  The final scene shows Ben-Hur and his family witnessing the Crucifixion, where they learn to forgive the Romans.








"Admitted heterosexual" Charlton Heston (Ben-Hur) was no gay ally: "I find my blood pressure rising when [President Bill] Clinton's cultural shock troops participate in homosexual-rights fund-raisers..and claim it's time to place homosexual men in tents with Boy Scouts."

But Stephen Boyd (Messala) was gay. Here he buddy-bonds with David Wayne in another gay-subtext movie, The Big Gamble (1961).

See also: Ramon Novarro, who starred in the 1925 version of Ben-Hur.

Spring 1981: Gay-Free Great Books: The Modern British Novel

Even after my dreary experience with Modern Literature during a freshman course in Fiction Writing, I had to take courses in Modern American Literature and The Modern British Novel.  Both assigned works that were deadly dull, all about heterosexual courtship and marriage, with same-sex relationships, even friendships, absent (the same might be said for my upper-division French, Spanish, and German classes).

Sons and Lovers, by D. H. Lawrence (1913), is about a man attempting to choose between a farm girl, a feminist, and his mother, with no men in sight.

My professor claimed that, if civilization ever ended, we could reconstruct it with nothing more than Ulysses (1918), by James Joyce.  But such a world would be gay free.  The day in the life of Stephen Dedalus includes a visit to a prostitute and lots of descriptions of ladies, but only one mention gay people once, when Buck Mulligan warns Stephen Dedalus that the guy ogling nude statues at the British Museum might be a "sodomite."

In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1931), sex is the chief recreation in a near-future dystopia, yet no one considers anything but straight sex.




One novel  did evoke same-sex practice, as a symbol of debauchery and moral decay, but so subtly that at the time I didn't even notice.

In I, Claudius (1934), Robert Graves assigns the decadent, insane Emperor Caligula a laundry-list of sexual practices, including bestiality and incest, but only hints at his interest in men, as if it is by far the most disgusting of the lot. (And it's not mentioned at all in the 1976 miniseries).




No wonder I stuck to the Victorians, where same-sex relationships were portrayed with depth and poignancy, if only in subtext.