Clark Brandon: No, we didn't date

The 1970s was awash with androgynous teen idols, soft and slim with wavy hair, pretty faces, and flamboyant pastel outfits, girlish in tone and gesture.  They didn't do a lot of acting or singing, but nevertheless they were featured incessantly in Tiger Beat and Dynamite, and posted on millions of bedroom walls.










Clark Brandon was the prettiest and most flamboyant of the lot.  He didn't have to do much to rate "fave rave" status. He starred in some after-school specials; The Fitzpatricks, a family-angst drama (with Jimmy McNichol); the short-lived Out of the Blue (with Rad Daly).

Mr. Merlin (1981-82) was about a boy who finds the sword Excalibur in a modern-day auto garage, and becomes an apprentice to the mythical wizard Merlin.  The hunky Jonathan Prince played his gay-subtext best friend.

He had a small role in The Chicken Chronicles, with Steve Guttenberg. Later he played the butch Jo's boyfriend on The Facts of Life.

All he really had to do was look pretty, so gay boys and their straight gal pals could discuss his dreaminess.

In the 1990s he moved into writing and directing, a common career path for grown-up teen idols. 

Today he's the Dean of Students at the Arete Academy in West Los Angeles. In a relationship, but he won't say with who.

The Unexpected Beefcake of Steve Guttenberg

I've never met Steve Guttenberg, but after seeing him in so many movies, tv series, and off-Broadway plays,  he seems more familiar than some of the celebrities that I've actually met.

His physique is especially familiar, since he displays his muscular chest, shoulders, and biceps in nearly every movie, often to indicate confusion or embarrassment.

He's got nothing to be embarrassed about.

At last count, I've seen twenty of his movies, beginning with The Chicken Chronicles (1977), when the 19-year old transformed the teen sex comedy into something more, and The Boys from Brazil (1977), where his character is killed in the first scene.

Comedies like Police Academy (1984), where his Carey Mahoney gleefully pretends that he had sex with the uptight police captain.(For more homoerotic subtexts combined with homophobia, see Bachelor Party, by the same director).









Science fiction like Cocoon (1985), about a group of senior citizens who use alien technology to rejuvenate themselves.








Dramas like The Bedroom Window (1987), where his Terry Lambert has an affair with the boss's wife and becomes the main suspect in a murder.




Not a lot of buddy-bonding roles, but lots of gender transgressions that give his characters a gay-vague subtext even as they pursue women.  And he forms a lot of alternate families, as Short Circuit (1986), 3 Men and a Baby (1987), and Home Team (2000).

And lots of gay-positive roles, like Can't Stop the Music (1980), where he plays the gay-vague manager of the gay-vague Village People (and incidentally wears the tightest shorts known to Disco).

To Home for the Holidays (1995), where a gay couple is invited to the festivities.

To P.S. Your Cat is Dead (2002), where he plays a homeowner who captures -- and kisses -- a gay burglar..

To Mojave Phone Booth (2006), about various people affected by a phone booth in the desert, including a lesbian couple.

In his memoirs, The Guttenberg Bible, Steve talks about his early naivete (he didn't realize that the Village People were supposed to be gay) and about the shock of realizing that some men found him attractive.

He's gotten over it since.

Can't Stop the Music

My brother, who is heterosexual, was a big fan of The Village People (also Barbara Streisand, Liza with a Z, and Olivia Newton-John).  During the winter after Grease, when their "Y.M.C.A." hit #1 on the pop charts, he kept asking me "Why don't you like them?  They're gay, aren't they? Like ABBA?"

That's the problem.  They weren't about being gay, they were about innuendo.

During the 1970s, the old stereotype of the gay man as a mincing, lisping queen received some competition from the stereotype of the Castro Clone: slim, hairy, with a Tom Selleck moustache, a lumberjack shirt, and tight jeans.  The Castro Clone had three passions: disco, drugs, and sex, and he partook of vast quantities of all of them.  So they were pure ids rather than prissy superegos.  It caught on, and even today, students tell me that "Gay men can't control their sex drive" about as often as "Gay men think they're women."

Record producer Jacques Morelli capitalized on the new stereotype by designing the Village People, a mismatched group of Tom of Finland cartoons solicited from the streets of Greenwich Village: The Soldier, The Cop, The Construction Worker, The Cowboy, The Leatherman, and The Indian (wait -- Tom of Finland never drew any Indians).

Only The Indian (Felipe Rose) was gay in real life, and even he gave interviews with teen magazines talking about the kind of girls he liked.

They were all straight pretending to be gay, or rather hinting that they might be gay (except the Indian, who was gay pretending to be straight hinting that he might be gay).

The lyrics to their songs seemed perfectly innocent and uplifting.

"In the Navy": Can't you see we need a hand, come and join your fellow man.
"Y.M.C.A.": They have everything for young men to enjoy, you can hang out with all the boys

But the fun for listeners was in realizing that the lyrics could be read as dirty, feeling marvelously knowledgeable about the nasty, decadent world of the Castro Clone.

I didn't find it fun.

I still went to see the fictionalized account of the rise of the Village People, Can't Stop the Music (1980), because it starred Steve Guttenberg (who starred in The Chicken Chronicles) as record producer Jack Morel, who wears incredibly tight pants as he roller-discos through life.

And athlete Bruce Jenner (now Caitlin Jenner) as Ron White, his business partner and apparently his boyfriend.

There are ample shirtless and underwear, plus full frontal male but no female nudity, and no heterosexual sex scenes.  But there's a heterosexual love story, all of the Village People are presented as heterosexual, and no gay people appear.

Or rather, everyone is gay.  The fun is in seeing how open they could get without actually having to admit that they are aware that gay people exist.

See also: Culture Club.

The Chicken Chronicles

The movies have been portraying teenage boys as "girl-crazy," unable to think of anything but curves and breasts, since Mickey Rooney's Andy Hardy series of the 1930s, but the "teen sex comedy," about tongue-lagging teenage virgins trying desperately to find willing partners for heterosexual intercourse, is characteristic of the 1980s.  The Chicken Chronicles is arguably a precursor, but far superior.

1. The teen sex comedies minimize beefcake. Occasionally a boy takes his shirt off, but it's hard to tell because you're busy hiding your eyes from the endless closeups of the breasts of girls in bikinis walking along the beach or squirting each other with water as they wash their cars.  But The Chicken Chronicles minimizes cheesecake to give us shot after shot of the shirtless, nude, and underwear-clad David (19 year old Steve Guttenberg, in his first credited role), not to mention a shirtless shot of the surprisingly muscular Gino Baffa as his younger brother, Charlie.

And teen idol Clark Brandon.

2. The teen sex comedies minimize buddy bonding.  Best friends exist, but only to act as sounding boards, confidants, and instigators.  In The Chicken Chronicles, David actually seems to care for his best friend, Mark (Branscombe Richmond).

3. The teen sex comedies are about trying to get laid.  Although David has the usual choice between the hot girl he pines for and the plain girl who cared for him all along, the main plot threads involve his job at the chicken joint and the threat of being shipped to Vietnam (the movie takes place in 1969).

4. In the teen sex comedies, the teenagers spend a lot of time competing to see who is the most homophobic. Every third word they say is "fag."  In The Chicken Chronicles, anti-gay slurs are absent.  Gay people don't exist, but erasure is a lot better than hatred.


Unfortunately, the movie has been almost forgotten; it is not available on DVD.  And Gino Baffa made two more movies and dropped out of sight.  But Steve Guttenberg has had a long and extraordinarily gay-positive career.