"Klaus": A Silver Daddy, a Twink, and a Bagful of Toys

I'm not usually one for Christmas movies.  All tinsel and holly and heteronormativity. But Klaus (2019) promised a gay (or gay subtext) romance: 

Jesper (indie star Jason Schwartzman) is a 19th century entitled Generation Z twink.  Son of the Postmaster General of an unnamed European kingdom (probably Sweden), he deliberately screws up every job he's given, content to live it up on Daddy's money.  Finally Dad puts his foot down: Jesper must start a working postal service in the far-north town of Schmeerensburg, and personally stamp 6,000 letters, or he'll be cut off.

Upon arriving in Schmeerensburg, Jesper encounters Klaus, a gigantic hermit who makes toys.  He gets the bright idea of distributing the toys to any child who writes a letter requesting one, thus fulfilling his obligation and re-integrating Klaus into society.  Complication, complication, reform, and voila!  Santa Claus and boyfriend!  The stark, clear, homoerotic image of Silver Daddy and twink in a sleigh riding off into the future.

Yes, I do imagine what their bedroom activities might be like.  "So, Klaus, are you big...everywhere?"

But I've been fooled by gay teases before.  To be on the safe side, I watch the trailer.  No women appear except for the elderly crone Mrs. Krumm.

I read a few reviews.  No mention of hetero-romances, just the two guys.

So I start watching.  The animation is striking, like old watercolors;  the detail of a 19th century Swedish town amazing.

Dad mentions a few of Jesper's hedonistic pleasures: galas, music halls, no women.

So far, so good.

Mogens (Norm MacDonald) ferries Jesper to the island.  And hits on him.

So far, so good.

Schmeerensburg is a grey, rotting, decrepit old fishing village.  Crime, violence, and general creepiness are rampant. The children are Wednesday Addams-gloomy.  A bell rings, and everyone starts fighting.  Ring the bell again, and they freeze in place.

Jesper seeks refuge in a decrepit school turned into a fish shop, and meets...

The Girl.

No one mentioned a Girl!

Well, she does appear at the bottom left of the poster, but separated from Jensen. Maybe they're just friends.

I fast-forward to the closing scenes, to make sure.

Klaus and Jesper's  scheme of distributing toys in exchange for letters has turned the town around.  It's brightly colored now, and there's no crime (if you're naughty, you don't get a present).   Everyone is happy.

Jesper is married to Alva.   They have two children. They kiss.

You couldn't leave it alone, could you?  The pristine beauty of two men together wasn't good enough.  You had to separate them, throw in a heterosexual romance.

But what about Klaus? Surely he's gay?

12 years into the Christmastime toy distribution, Klaus hears a wind blowing, says "I'm coming, love," and vanishes (but continues to deliver the toys).

Razzle-frazzing hermit was mourning a lost wife all along!

Tis the season for gay teases.

Alexandria, Minnesota: Not the Home of the Vikings

Every year Dad got a two-week vacation.  We spent the first week visiting relatives in Indiana, and the second...ugh... camping.  Five days and six nights in a horrible camper or drafty cabin with no tv, with nothing to do but go fishing (ugh!), splash around in the muddy, gross water with the fish (ugh!), and paddle around in boats (how deep is this lake, again?).

Sometimes it took two days to get there, but we camped on the way.  Ugh.

The highlight of each trip was driving into town for supplies (and hopefully comic books) and driving to the nearest Nazarene church on Sunday morning.  Anything to overcome the boredom and discomfort.

But once, during the ten or so camping trips I remember, my parents came through.  Accidentally or on purpose, they signed on for a cabin in a lake near Alexandria, Minnesota, home of the Kensington Runestone.

Discovered in 1898 by Swedish immigrant Olof Ohlman, the runestone purports to tell the story of Vikings who made it all the way to Minnesota in the year 1362.

Later studies have determined the stone to be a hoax, but who cares?  Vikings, pre-Columbian voyages to America, ancient runes!   It sure beat paddling around in boats!

I bought a replica of the Kensington Runestone, which I still have.  It's paste, so very fragile.  My most treasured possession, a memory of how my parents tried, that one time, to find a campsite that would appeal to their bookworm son.

Alexandria pushes its runestone to the hilt.  There's a runestone museum in town now, and a gigantic statue of a Viking named Big Ole.  There are a dozen businesses named Viking, including a bank, a pawn shop, an office supply company, and a bookstore.

Strangely, the local high school sports team is the Cardinals, not the Vikings.













Even more strangely, they don't wear red.












Even more strangely, they seem a little young for high school.

See also: The Kensington Runestone

The Kensington Runestone

Every summer from kindergarten to college (when I decided to stay home), my parents dragged me on a week's camping trip somewhere up north, to Minnesota, Michigan, Wisconsin, or Canada.  Other than the roadside beefcake, it was usually pretty dismal, with no tv, no museums, no historic sites, nothing to do but hunt, fish, swim, and mess around in boats.

But during the summer after eighth grade, we went camping in Alexandria, Minnesota, site of the Kensington Runestone.

Young Swedish immigrant Olof Ohlman discovered the 200-pound slab of sandstone covered with Medieval runes in 1898.  It tells about a group of 30 Vikings who left Vinland "on an exploration journy" in 1362, and somehow made it to Minnesota.  One day some of them went fishing, and returned to find the men they left behind "red with blood and death," probably attacked by Skraelings (Indians).

My junior high history textbook stated categorically that no Europeans made it to the New World before Columbus, so this was a startling discovery, and immediately controversial.  The academic establishment decreed the runestone to be a fake, carved by Ohlman for financial gain.

In 1907, a young historian named Hjalmar Holand bought the runestone, and spent the rest of his life trying to prove it genuine, describing how Vikings could well have made it to Minnesota in books like Westward from Vinland (1940) and A Pre-Columbian Crusade to America (1962). 

The jury is still out on whether the runestone is authentic, but Alexandria loves its claim to fame.  There's a runestone museum and gift shop, and a 28-foot statue of a Viking, Big Ole.

Today, regardless of whether they believe that the Vikings got as far as Minnesota, all historians recognize that they reached the New World before Columbus, and established a permanent settlement in L'Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland.

What's the gay connection?

1. The Vikings who explored Minnesota were all male.

2. Olof Ohlmann was rather cute.

3. My junior high history textbook was wrong.  The adults either didn't know about the Viking exploration of America, or they were lying about it.  What else were they hiding? Maybe the upcoming "discovery of girls" that everyone at Washington Junior HIgh was always evoking was a lie, too.

See also: The Top 12 Public Penises of Minnesota

10 Things You Should Know About Scandinavian Beefcake

Ten things you should know about Scandinavian beefcake

1.  Norwegian, Swedish, and Denmark are so closely related that if you learn one, you can make yourself understood reasonably well in the others.

I want to go to your room and see your sausage.
Norwegian: Jeg vil gå til rommet ditt og se pølsen din
Swedish: Jag vill gå till ditt rum och se din korv
Danish:  Jeg vil gerne gå til dit værelse og se din pølse

2. Icelandic strives to stay as close to its Old Norse roots as possible, so it's a little different:

Ég vil fara í herbergið þitt og sjá pylsuna þína

3. And Finnish is a Finno-Ugric language, with no connection.

Haluan mennä huoneeseesi ja nähdä makkaraasi

 But not to worry, most Finns under the age of 50 speak English, and over 50, Swedish:

4. It's not all blond Nordic types.  Only around 70-80% of ethnic Swedes, Norwegians, and Danes have blond hair, and between 5 and 15% of the population has ancestry in the Middle East, Africa, and East Asia.

5.  Norway has won many swimming records.

6. Martin Kjelstrom, a bodybuilder from Sweden, was part of a gigantic doping scandal that resulted in over 60 arrests.  (Doping is using illicit drugs to enhance your performance.)

7. Thomas Stellander, a Norwegian bodybuilder, has won three national championships.

8.  Icelanders aren't much for swimming, but they're into wrestling.  This is the Icelandic wrestling team from the 1912 Olympics.

9. Lauri Kallma is not a wrestler or bodybuilder, he's a Finnish track star.

10. When I searched for "Lapp bodybuilder," this guy popped up.  His name is Jerry Johnson, and he won a bodybuilding competition in Melbourne in 2015.  I highly doubt that he's from Lapland.

Hans Christian Andersen: the Gay Writer of Fairy Tales about People Dying

Of all the authors that teachers foisted upon me as a kid to embrace Rock Island's Scandinavian heritage, the absolute worst was Hans Christian Andersen. I hated fairy tales anyway -- who needs fairy godmothers, when there are rocket ships blasting off to Jupiter?  -- and these were grim, morbid, horrible:

"The Little Mermaid": A mermaid sacrifices her life to save a handsome prince.

"The Brave Tin Soldier."  Yeah, he's brave, until he gets too near a fire, and melts to death.

"The Snow Queen." A cold person keeps kidnapping children and freezing them to death.

"The Little Match-Seller."  A girl selling matches..um...freezes to death.

Is it like cold in Denmark, or is this some sort of metaphor?

"The Garden of Paradise."  A prince dies.

One or two of his cautionary tales were ok -- "The Emperor's New Clothes" and "The Ugly Duckling."  But really, who wouldn't rather be watching Fractured Fairy Tales on Rocky and Bullwinkle than reading about people dying?

Later I discovered that Andersen was gay or bisexual in real life.  In fact, his psychiatrist invented the term homosexual from the Greek homo (the same) and the Latin sexualis in order to diagnose his condition.

Gay but depressed.  No wonder his characters keep dying.

I've never seen any of the film versions of Andersen's fairy tales, but I understand that Disney let The Little Mermaid, Ariel, live, in the 1989 animated version.

And displayed Prince Eric shirtless, although probably not as suggestively as this fan art from Lucien-Christophe on Deviant Art.com.

If you want to see beefcake in the Hans Christian Andersen oeuvre, you need to seek out the occasional stage version of "The Emperor's New Clothes" (above), or The Little Mermaid stage musical.

Eric doesn't display much, but King Triton, Ariel's father, is bare-chested.

Although sometimes the actor wears a ridiculous beard.

Kon-Tiki: 6 Guys on a Boat

Boys growing up in the 1960s were encouraged to read High Adventure, tales of exploration and conquest: Robert Peary's expedition to the North Pole; Roald Amundsen's expedition to the South Pole; Edmund Hilary's ascent of Mount Everest; Stanley Livingston's trek into Darkest Africa.  

All of this was somehow supposed to prepare us for a future confined to small square offices by day and small square houses by night.

The only tale of High Adventure that I actually liked was Kon-Tiki, about Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl's quest to prove that Polynesia was settled by the early Incas -- or could have been.

So he and five companions built a raft of balsa wood, the only material available to the native peoples, and set out from Callao, Peru on April 28, 1947.  Four months and 4,000 miles later, they ran aground on Raroia, near Tahiti.  To international acclaim.

Who cares that contemporary anthropology disputed his theory?  He had been on a High Adventure.  Every boy I knew read the book, named his toy boat Kon-Tiki, and planned extravagant sailing adventures.  Mine started down the Mississippi, across the Gulf of Mexico to Florida, and then followed the Gulf Stream to Europe.

I especially liked reading about six guys together on a small raft, their bodies nude and bronze in the sun, helping each other, rescuing each other, learning to care for each other.

Many more recent expeditions have attempted to recreate the journey, such as the Tangaroa in 2006, with Heyerdahl's grandson Olaf in the crew.

Naturally the 2012 movie ruined it!  What is this obsession for making every movie scream "Gay people don not exist!"   I know heterosexuals hate us, but still, can't they leave one moment of our childhood alone? 

Thor Heyerdahl was married to women three times, but he wasn't married in 1947, and there was no mooning over half-naked babes.  This was a gay men's adventure, like Donald Duck and his nephews seeking out the Seven Cities of Cibola.

See also: Donald Duck's Double Life.

Zachery Ty Bryan: Home Improvement Also-Ran

Born in Colorado in 1981, Zachery Ty Bryan was hired to play the oldest brother on the TGIF sitcom Home Improvement (1991-1999).  As he grew into adolescence, he became more and more muscular, but his spectacular physique never made a splash in teen magazines -- they were all agog over Jonathan Taylor Thomas.  For most of the series' run,  JTT was the standout star, Zachery a background player.

But he never became bitter over his second-banana status; ZTB and JTT remained on friendly terms.  Instead, he used his free time to star in movies and tv series:

1. First Kid (1996), about a regular guy who lands a date with the President's daughter.

2. "Mr. Muscles," a 1997 episode of Promised Land about steroid abuse.
3. Principal Takes a Holiday (1998), about a teen operator who gets a drifter to stand-in as his school principal.
4. Held for Ransom (2000), which allowed his character to buddy-bond with Jordan Brower.

Afterwards he mostly played athletes whose plots involve winning the championship, not getting the girl.  The Game of their Lives (2005), for instance, is about the U.S. soccer team beating Britain in 1950.

Code Breakers (2005) is about a cheating scandal at West Point Military Academy, with no girls in the cast.

In Hammer of the Gods (2009), he played a man-mountain, the Norse god Thor, who wields a mighty hammer and saves his friends (there's a girl, too, but it's most about his friends).

Today Zach has moved into independent film production.

Benjamin Lasnier, the Shirtless Internet Sensation and His Hot Male Friends

Danish teenager Benjamin Lasnier started his internet career two years ago, and quickly acquired over 6 million followers on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter (400 likes in 10 seconds).

His songs, available on youtube, itunes, and tunein, include "Love You Out Loud" (2015). "Everythang" (2016), and "Somebody to Hurt" (2017).


He's been called "The Hottest Young Singer Out Now" and a "Justin Bieber Looklike," but I think he looks better than the contemporary tattoo-covered Bieber.

He's got a professional album out now, and has won a Nickelodeon Kids' Choice Award.

He's also good at posting physique pics on his social media sites.

And he has some hot male friends.

Well, actually, quite a lot of hot male friends.

I don't know if he's gay or not, but the lyrics I saw weren't heterosexist.

And he has A LOT of hot male friends.

Nude Norse Gods

I went to a Swedish Lutheran college, where we were proud of our Viking heritage.  Our team was the Vikings, our radio station was WVIK.  There was a quote from the Icelandic Hamaval over the circulation desk in the library.  The courses in Norse Mythology was well populated.

Ancient Greek and Roman myths seemed somehow decadent: wandering around the bucolic Mediterranean half-naked, eating grapes and having erotic encounters.  The last story is about Venus and Cupid.  But the North was harsh, with frost giants and battle-hammers, and it ended with Ragnarok, the Apocalypse of the gods.

But Greek and Roman myths had a benefit: nudity.  The gods were portrayed naked, with hard, thick chests and abs and even penises on display.  You had to did deep to find a Norse god with his shirt off.

Ok, it was cold in the north, but still...

Thor was the most popular of the Norse gods among the college students, due to his appearance in comic books and fantasy illustrations.  Here Boris Vallejo shows him fighting some very buffed giants.

But Freyr or Frey seems to have been the most popular among the real Vikings.  He was the god of fertility and prosperity.

Some phallic images of Freyr have survived.

Some phallic images have survived, and modern Neo-pagans have produced many more.

My favorite myth is of Baldur the Beautiful, so beautiful that all the gods were in love with him.  His mother went around to ask every animal, plant, and natural object to agree not to hurt him, so the gods played a game of throwing things at him, to see them bounce off harmlessly.  But Mom forgot to ask mistletoe.

The evil Loki convinced the blind god Hodur, here portrayed as a muscular Classical beauty, to throw a sprig of mistletoe at Baldur, thus killing him.

For punishment, Loki was chained beneath a giant serpent that sprayed venom onto him forever.

We don't see a lot of myths about Odin, the leader of the gods, but here he, plus archaic gods Villi and Ve, are creating the world.

See also: Loki.

Guys Naked in the Snow

The other day it was 24 degrees out, with a biting wind.  As I walked through the gym parking lot as fast as I could, shivering in the cold, I saw a high school kid standing there, waiting for a ride, in gym trunks and a t-shirt.

Not shivering.

How could he do that?

There's something undeniably erotic about guys with their shirts off, or naked, in the snow.  Maybe it's the incongruity -- I would never dream of going outside like that in the cold, not even for a second.

Certainly not lying around in it, trying to make a snow angel.

Maybe it's the toughness.  This guy is impervious to the cold.  He must be made of iron.

In Scandinavian countries, it's traditional to take a hot sauna, then run out into the snow.  The juxtaposition of hot and cold is supposed to be good for you.

More after the break.