The Gay Tease of "Always Be My Maybe"

Netflix recommended this movie for me with a 98% match: Sasha and Marcus had a brief romance in high school.  15 years later, Sasha has become a celebrity chef, while Marcus is still living in his parents' basement.  They feel the spark of attraction again, but can they adapt to each other's worlds?

I sat stunned.  Blurbs about movies with gay people don't include the terms "romance" or "spark of attraction."  They say "forbidden love" and "attraction that threatens to destroy their lives."

And the title would never be Always Maybe.  It would be something like Alex Strangelove.    But the illustration -- it's hard to see from across the room -- seems to show two men.  And Sasha and Marcus are both boys' names.

Remember Sasha Mitchell, sitcom star turned martial artist (top photo)?

And Marcus Schenkenberg, the Swedish model who was popping up all over the tv screen in the 1990s?

Could a gay romance be presented so nonchalantly, as "a romance"?  Could gay people be just....people?  How come we overcame, and nobody told me?

Just to be sure, I checked the byline: Ali Wong, Randall Park, James Saito.  Two of those people are Sasha and Marcus, and all three are men.

So I turned it on.

More after the break.

Netflix's "Tales of the City": Not Your Grandfather's San Francisco

I thoroughy dislike the Tales of the City series of maudlin angst-ridden melodramatic novels, so watching the Netflix tv series wasn't near the top of my list.  But when I found out that the series was set in 2019, I was curious.  Mary Ann Singleton was in her mid-twenties when she moved to San Francisco in 1976, and got an apartment in the building of "feisty old broad" Anna Madrigal.  43 years later, Mary Ann would be in her 60s, and Anna Madrigal over 100.  How would they handle that?

So I sat down to watch two episodes.

They retconned all of the characters' ages and streamlined the melodramatic plot complications. Now Mary Ann (Laura Linney) moved to San Francisco in the 1990s, met Anna Madrigal and gay man Michael rather than a cast of thousands, married Brian, adopted a daughter, Shawna, and vanished in 1999 to pursue a career in tv journalism.  20 years later, she and her horrible estranged husband return for Anna's 90th birthday party.  Things have changed.

In the San Francisco of the 1970s (or I guess the 1990s), you were gay or straight, mostly straight.  Anna is a transwoman, but it was a deep secret, a big reveal far into the series.  Now San Francisco is a glittering, rainbow-flashing collage of nonchalant gender fluidity and pansexual queerness that make cisgender masculine-presenting gay men like Michael seem quaintly old-fashioned. 

And the old-guard residents of Barbary Lane are mostly there to provide advice and problems for the new generation.

The San Francisco of the novels was as white as a 1950s sitcom.  Now black people exist.   And East Asian, South Asian, Hispanic.  Actually, all of the new generation except Shawna are nonwhite post-racial "um...I guess my ancestors came from...IDK who cares?"

1. Shawna (Ellen Page), now 25 and working as a bartender in an eclectic queer bar, is so traumatized by her mother's disappearance that she can't commit to a relationship, but doesn't mind going out to the back alley for hookups with various gender-fluid people (Ida Best, her laid-back drag queen boss doesn't mind her leaving in mid-shift).  Eventually she starts dating the polyamorous couple Eli (Benjamin Thys) and Inka (Samantha Soule)

2. Wren (Michelle Buteau) is the neighbor/bff of Shawna's dad, Brian (Paul Gross, left, photo from when he was part of the new generation).

Paul is having trouble getting over Mary Ann (after 20 years?).  He has a Tinder full of women who are Mary Ann lookalikes, but he never swipes any of them, so Wren takes matters into her own hands.

3. Ben (Charlie Barnett of Russian Doll) is dating the much older Michael (Murray Bartlett), who no one ever calls Mouse.  He has to deal with the implications that he is a "boy toy," as well as the fact that Michael doesn't understand twentiesh culture.

Michael, meanwhile, finds in Ben a constant reminder of his own mortality.

I've dated a lot of guys 20-30 years younger than me, and never once did I get upset over the fact that they would probably outlive me.

4. Jake (nonbinary actor Garcia) has just transitioned, which bothers his partner Margot (May Hong) because now everyone mistakes them for a heterosexual couple, and what's the point of being queer if no one knows that you're queer? 

Margot also misses being in a lesbian relationship, while Jake, exploring an interest in guys, begins dating Flaco (Juan Castano).

5. Twins Ani (Ashley Park) and Raven (Christopher Larkin, left) are Instagram performance artists who change their identities regularly.

There are many other members of the new generation, some of whom are masculine-presenting, so beefcake is not a problem.  lots of bare chests and bare butts.  The sex scenes are mostly same-sex.

And the things I hate about the novels are mostly absent: no convoluted interconnections, no existential angst, no gloom-and-doom. At least in the new generation.  The old guard has secrets to be revealed.

Still, I'm not sure I find the new generation engaging enough to want to know more about their lives.  Maybe if there are more bare chests and butts.

My grade: B.

See also: Tales of the City, Gay San Francisco, Who Cares?

Tales of the City: Gay Guys, San Francisco, Who Cares?

Year after year, people tell me "The Tales of the City books are stupendous!  Amazing!  Wonderful!  The best thing every written!"

"And they're historically vital!  Gay author Armistead Maupin originally published them in serial form in the San Francisco Chronicle, back when gay characters were unheard-of in mainstream literature!"

"And you lived in San Francisco! They will resonate strongly with your experiences!"

"And they're hilarious!  You've never laughed so much in your life!  You'll love them!"

So, again and again, I pick up the first volume, Tales of the City (1978).  Midwesterner Mary Anne Singleton comes to San Francisco on vacation, converses with her old college friend Mona Ramsey, and decides to stay.

This is not the least bit humorous.  It's dull, dull, dull!

She moves into 28 Barbary Lane, where her free-spirit landlady, Anna Madrigal, tells her, "My dear, I'm not opposed to anything," and gives her a marijuana joint as a housewarming gift.  Mary Anne is determined not to be shocked.

My life in San Francisco was nothing like this!

She goes shopping, sees two guys, and wonders if they might be gay.  She's determined not to be shocked, if they are.

Maupin eases into the revelation of their gayness.   I guess he had to be very, very careful, writing for heterosexuals in the 1970s.

I can't go on.  I'm so very, very, very bored.

But sooner or later someone will start praising the books again, and I'll try again.

I already know what happens next: Mary Ann befriends a gay man named Mouse.  He starts dating A-gay gynecologist Jon Fielding, who is dying, Mona Ramsey dates D'Orothea Wilson, and Mary Anne has an affair with Beauchamp Day. Anna Madrigal turns out to be a MTF transwoman, who has an affair with Beauchamp's father-in-law, who is dying.

Got all that?

 Through eight books and thirty years, Mary Ann, Mouse, and their huge group of friends encounter angst and tragedy as life hits them with unemployment, failed romances, homophobia, transphobia, death -- lots of death -- and AIDS -- lots of AIDS.

This by you is humor?

More recently, the characters have been getting way old -- like, they remember the 1960s old -- and starting to ruminate on their mortality.  Yes, they are going to die.  So am I.  Why would I want to read about it?

Why would anyone think it was funny?

The tv miniseries (1993, 1998, 2001) were a bit more palatable, maybe because they were not so episodic, and they got into the gay characters right away, instead of hinting around for weeks and weeks.

Besides, there were naked guys. (Pictured: Thomas Gibson as Beauchamp Day.)

I can't think of any other reason to care about Tales of the City 

See also: Netflix's 'Tales of the City': Not Your Grandfather's San Francisco

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, and appeared 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 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 made 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.

Deadly Class

Deadly Class (2019), based on the American comic book series, is set in a weird dystopian Reagan-era, gay-free San Francisco.  Marcus (Benjamin Wadsworth) lost his parents in a freak accident, was put in an orphanage, and then went on the lam when he was blamed for blowing it up (with the orphans inside).  Seeing potential in him, the mysterious, brutal Master Lin (Benedict Wong) sponsors him for the King's Dominion, a training school for murderers.

The curriculum is rather brutal: in Poisons class, some of the kids actually get poisoned to demonstrate how they work.

Meanwhile Marcus has the usual "poor kid in a snob school" hijinks, including a snarling enemy, a doofus best friend, romancing the Girl (who, of course, finds him "arrogant"), negotiating between feuding gangs,  and avoiding being murdered as part of another student's final exam.


I don't know which made me more nauseous, the extreme violence or the constant girl-on-boy cruising.  These girls are ludicrously horny.  They act like stars in a porn movie, who pounce on any man who comes within 10 feet.

Or the racism.  The school is stratified into rival gangs: the nerds, the preppies, the losers, and various racial minorities displaying their own stereotyped violence (black, Hispanic, and Asian).  Marcus is half-Hispanic, so he doesn't know where he belongs.

I saw a little bit of reflection of heteronormativity in the outcasts, who don't really want to be killers, but were forced into the academy by their parents.  When I was in high school, just a few years before 1986, boys had to pretend to be girl-crazy.  Forget to stare, drool, and moan at the big breasts bouncing by, or to make a statement suggesting lack of interest, and your friends would simply not believe  you.  Your enemies would attack: "Fairy!  Fag!  Girl!"

But it's only a reflection.  The producers envision a world where gay people do not exist.  Two gay characters from the comic books have been erased.  This series is about violence, cliques, and female horniness


1. Benjamin Wadsworth

2. Benedict Wong (right); I don't know who the boyfriend is)

3. Ryan Robbins as Rory, Marcus' first kill, a homeless guy who preys on other homeless guys.

4. Willie (Luke Tennie), Marcus's sidekick, a member of the First World Order gang. a black guy whose girlfriend is a neo-Nazi white supremacist. I guess she just likes him for one thing.

5. Billy (Liam James, left), son of a punk rocker and aspiring murderer.

6. Chico (Michel Duval), the snarling enemy, leader of the Soto Vatos.  His girlfriend Maria kills him and starts dating Marcus.

7. Viktor (Sean Depner), a celebrity at the academy, the son of Joseph Stalin's top assassin (Stalin died in 1953, and this is 1988, so the dates sort of work out).

8. Juan (Juan Grey), a member of Maria's Soto Vatos.

9. Chester "Fuckface" (Tom Stevens), the Big Bad of a series about Big Bads in training.

10. Shabnam (Isaiah Lehtinen, left), portly, gay-coded, and a rich banker's son, three strikes against him, so he tries too hard to make friends.

"You'd Be Perfect for My Daughter!" A Gay Character Revelation on "Fuller House"

When I heard that Neflix was rebooting Full House as Fuller House, featuring the second generation of the Tanners, a blended family in a gay-free San Francisco, I thought, why? Nobody I knew would be caught dead with the original series on, and this one is bound to be worse.

A gay-free San Francisco was annoying then, but now it will be downright offensive.

 But with the star, Candace Cameron Bure (DJ Tanner) being a fundamentalist Christian, she was bound to put the kibosh on any attempts at inclusion.  Besides, who was watching this show?  Elderly people wearing MAGA caps and reading church newsletters about gays trying to destroy society.  Surely they would not approve.

Well, it took a few years, but two of the show's writers were gay, and finally decided to go out on a limb and pitch a plotline with a gay character.  Candace reputedly "loved" their idea, and was happy to give it a green light.

Um...she wouldn't have to actually appear in any scenes with the little fairy, would she?

 So in Season 4, released in December 2018, Episode #11, "It's Always Open":

Kimmy (Andrea Barber), DJ's wacky, exuberant housemate (think Kramer on Seinfeld) hires 17-year old Casey (Ben J. Pierce, internet personality Miss Benny) as an intern in her party planning business.

She loves the boy's fashion sense and campy "in your face" femininity, and, being unaware that gay people exist, think he would be a perfect match for her daughter Ramona (Soni Bringas).

In spite of living in San Francisco in 2018, Casey agrees to a date with a girl.

Ramona instantly figures out that feminine=gay, so this is obviously a non-date.  But the two have a lot in common, mostly a dislike for their mothers, so they become besties.

In the B and C plotlines,  the buffed but stupid Jimmy (Adam Hagenbuch, top photo) wants to raise the baby in Nepal, which he pronounces "Nipple," and DJ and Stephanie join a dodgeball class.  Yeah, that's the problem with modern tv series -- if you don't watch in chronological order, you're lost.

Episode #12: "Prom."

Jackson (Michael Campion), dressed as a gorilla, asks Rocki (Landry Bender) to the prom. She is leery because "Prom is an embodiment of the heteronormative jock culture with a dress code that targets girls in order to control our bodies."

No one knows that gay people exist, but they know the word "heteronormative"?

At the prom, Jackson tries to impress the other football players by talking trash, which gets him in trouble with Rocki.

Casey and Ramona go to the prom together, too (gay-free San Francisco, remember?  No one else for Casey to ask).  While they are dancing, a cute boy gives him the eye, and Ramona the Helpful Heterosexual encourages him to strike out on his own and make a connection.

Casey then vanishes from the series forever, and Ramona gets together with her ex-boyfriend Bobby (Isaak Presley)

In the B and C plotlines, DJ is a chaperone at the prom (but she never interacts with Casey), and back home, some guys I couldn't identify have a cooking contest.

That's all.  Sort like a show from the 1990s, where revealing that someone is gay was enough, and the gay characters were usually gender-nonconforming.

What else do you expect from a Full House reboot?

I hear that Brian has been cast as the lead in the upcoming CW series Glamorous.  He plays a gender-noncomforming gay teen who disses a cosmetics company on his blog, and is rewarded with an internship.

It worked for George Costanza in 1994.



See also: The10 Hunks of Fuller House

John Stamos

Gay boys all but ignored 20-year old John Stamos when he was playing streetwise Blackie on General Hospital (1983-84).  Not many watched soap operas, and his pleasantly slender physique seemed bit too androgynous as Nautilus-toned man-mountains came into style. Besides, he had a girlfriend.

Some started to notice when John starred as aspiring rock star Gino Minnelli on Dreams (1984-85), which aired after Charles in Charge on Wednesday nights.  It offered lots of shirtless shots -- by this time John had joined a gym -- plus buddy-bonding episodes like "Friends" and "Boys are the Best."  But it only lasted for 12 episodes.

After 25 episodes of You Again? (1986-87), playing Jack Klugman's estranged teenage son -- which was switched around so often that no one saw it -- John finally found a place in gay teenagers' hearts in Full House (1987-95) on the TGIF ("Thank God it's Friday) block of kid-friendly Friday-night shows. 

He played Uncle Jesse, who moved in with his brother-in-law Danny (Bob Saget) and another male friend, Dave (Joey Gladstone), to help raise Danny's three daughters after his wife died.  

Alternative families are a standby on tv, but aside from the basic non-heteronormative family structure -- and John's smile -- there was little for gay teenagers to like.

He rarely took off a shirt -- when he did, the moments were mostly cute rather than hot. Only one episode showed him in a swimsuit.

 Nor did the friendships result in much buddy-bonding.  The guys all got girlfriends, and the daughters got boyfriends, and gay people were not mentioned, ever, even though the show was set in gay mecca San Francisco.  

In an Advocate interview, John states that he wasn't really aware that he had gay fan at the time -- "people weren't as out back then."  But he's made up for it since, as one of the most gay-friendly actors in Hollywood, even when depicted in TV Guide.  He played a gay wedding planner in the tv-movie Wedding Wars (2006).  He engaged in a same-sex kiss for charity at the GLAAD Awards.  

When The Office refused to air a joke in which a character pretends to be gay by imagining that he was "in a steam room with John Stamos," the blogosphere assumed that the screen hunk had objected -- but he quickly proclaimed that he had nothing to do with it, he loved the joke, and he would be more than happy to film any attendant fantasy sequence.

There's a John Stamos sausage sighting on Tales of West Hollywood.

My First, Second, and Third Time with David from San Francisco

San Francisco, June 2018

One of the problems with being an academic is constantly moving from job to job, which means you make a lot of new friends, then move away, then make more friends, and so on and so on.  Every summer is a flurry of activity, as you fly across the country to visit them, and they fly out to visit you.

This summer I was in Indiana (Tyler and my relatives), New York (Troy and his relatives), Virginia (Jonathan), North Carolina (Verne), and San Francisco (David).

David is 65 years old, a bald, buffed Daddy with craggy features, a moustache, a tight hairy chest, thick biceps, and extra-thick beneath the belt gifts.  A Baptist preacher from conservative small-town Arkansas, married with children, he  didn't have his first same-sex experience until his 43rd birthday, January 6th, 1996.

Within a week he had come out, resigned from his pulpit, filed for divorce, and moved out of the parsonage.

Within a month he had moved to San Francisco, the only place he had ever heard of with gay men. He got an apartment, a job, a new wardrobe, and a gym membership, and began cruising.

David vowed to have "make up for lost time" by having sex with 5 different guys a day until he reached the goal of 5,000.  Soon that proved impossible, even in San Francisco, if he wanted to do anything else, so he reduced the goal to two, then one.  The rules were:

1. It had to be a new guy, one he hadn't been with before.

2. He couldn't go to a sex club or bath house and get a whole week's worth at once.  One per day.

3. Except if he was too sick to have sex, he could make up for it later.

4. Any sexual activity counted.  No orgasm was necessary.

During my visit in June, I asked David if he actually kept track.

"Absolutely!" he exclaimed.  Every night, or if the guy spends the night, the next morning, I record his name and pertinent details in my Little Black Book."

"It must be a Big Black Book by this time."

"Actually, it was written at first, but around 2000 I moved it all to an Excel Spreadsheet.  I record the guy's name, where I met him, and any pertinent details."

"Rating, on a scale of 1 to 5?"

He laughed.  "No, nothing like that.  Just their size, what we did, that sort of thing.

"What if it's a sex party or a bathhouse?  Do you record a dozen guys?"

"No, just one guy per day."

Suddenly I had an idea.  "Hey, let's look up me.  Our first time together, back in 1996.  See what you said."

He agreeably opened his laptop, pulled up his spreadsheet (it really was titled Big Black Book), and searched for Boomer.  15 entries, mostly guys annotated with lines like "Shared with Boomer" or "Boomer's roommate."  But the first Boomer entry, the first time we had sex,  was Tuesday, June 25th, 1996:



Boomer.  Met at work. Nice chest.  Interfemoral





.

"I remember that night," I told him.  "It was first week at the AIDS Foundation.  I was working in publications and publicity, and you were in prevention services.  You offered to take me out for "a drink" after work.  We ended having dinner, talking about the deprivation of a fundamentalist childhood, then having sex."

"Interfemoral," David says.

"But I didn't spend the night -- I went home after.  I don't remember why."

"You were babysitting your friend Buzzy's dog."

"Right...he was going away for the weekend."  I thought for a moment.  "For the weekend...it must have been a Friday night, not Tuesday."  I checked the spreadsheet.

"Oh, I must have mixed up the dates when I was transcribing all this," Dave said.  "Maybe the sex club Daddy was on Tuesday, and you were..."

"Or I was the previous Friday."

Friday, June 25th.  Haldor.  Waiter at Almost Home.  From Denmark.

"That was our dinner!  Almost Home, because you wanted to be reminded of home.  Haldor was our waiter.  He was from Denmark, and I went to a Swedish Lutheran College, so I won him over.  Did you go back after our date and pick him up?"

The rest of the story, with nude photos and explicit sexual content, is on Tales of West Hollywood.

The Mysterious "North Atlanta High Boys' Swim Team" Photo

This photo was entitled "Good luck to the North Atlanta High Boys' Swim Team."

I'm all for fluidity in gender, but I could swear that this boys' team consists of six girls, a baby, and a single boy.

Looking at the original website didn't help: it's devoted to "finding synonyms and antonyms."  "Swim team" is a synonym of "Diving team."

So I searched for the original phrase, and found it on "Talk Up APS," the official blog of the Atlanta Public Schools, in February 2011.

This illustration is a little more conventional.Four guys named Rehan, Sam, Neal, and Dillon.

North Atlanta High, in the Paces neighborhood about 10 miles north of downtown,  has 1,800 students.  It offers swimming and diving as separate sports, plus wrestling, basketball, and cross-country.

The phrase also appears on a webpage entitled "What to talk about with a boy in middle school cupboard design," whatever that means (I can't link to it; the danger signs go up).

Ok, I'm game.  I searched for middle school boys' cupboards, and came up with three 8th graders displaying the superhero-style scooters they built in shop class.  It beats birdhouses.

They go to Amery Middle School in Amery, Wisconsin, about 50 miles east of Minneapolis, the home town of this guy named Hunter, who is now wrestling for the University of Wisconsin Badgers.

What about the original image, wrongly identified as the "North Atlanta Swim Team."  A google image search reveals it as the "Sir Francis Drake High School Dive Team" in San Anselmo, California, in Marin County, about 20 miles north of San Francisco.

This is half of the water polo team (I picked the side with the weird hair).

And the one guy on the team, amid six girls and a baby?  His name is Rick.   He also played football and baseball, and took AP Language, American History, and Statistics.  He graduated in 2017, and is now at the Air Force Academy, majoring in mathematics.

And the point of all this is?

I got to conduct fun research and look at photos of cute guys.

You got to marvel at the inanity of the google search algorithm, and look at photos of cute guys.

Time well spent.

Searching for Acalanes

This photo was just captioned "Acalanes."   Was it a person or town?

I googled it, and found more Acalanes.  Maybe it means "swimsuit" in Catalan.

Or "embarrassment of riches."

Turns out it's a high school named after Rancho Acalanes, which in turn is the Spanish pronunciation of a Native American tribe in the East Bay, the Saklan.  

It's in Lafayette, California, just east of Berkeley, a wealthy suburban community with winding roads, expensive houses, five-star restaurants like Postino (fancy steamed clams for lunch?), and guys with abs.

Not just twinks.  Lafayette, California offers muscle men of all ages.

All ages.  Anybody want a date with a 61-year old competitive bodybuilder?

But mostly twinks.