Scared to Death Ten Times in Vidor, Texas

Vidor, Texas, population 10,500, is a suburb of Beaumont in far east Texas, near the Louisiana border, where the air is hot and damp as a sauna, it smells like oil all the time, and every second car is a red pickp truck with a confederate flag in the window.  I've been trying to find something nice to say, but it turns out to be one of the scariest towns in the U.S.

Here are the top 10 scares:

1. Trip Advisor lists only 5 "Best Things to Do": two parks, a comic book store, an escape room, and The Texas Maze of Terror.



















The
The full post is on Small Town Beefcake

The Most Depressing Night of Television Ever

The older you get, the more often you spend thinking about the past (because there's so much of it).  Plus this blog sort of forces me to.  And not necessarily in a gushy, "golden age of childhood" way.  I had positive and negative experiences in the past.

So let's take a look one of the negatives, the most depressing night of the most depressing day I can remember, Thursday, January 24, 1985.

Context: In July 1984, I got my M.A. in English and took the only job I could find, teaching Bonehead English in Hell-fer-Sartain, aka Houston (ugh), Texas (ugh).  I spent the entire year trying desperately to find a way out.

6:00 am: January 24th is unseasonably cool, in the 50s, so my horrible 2-room apartment with no air conditioning and no heat is sub-artic. I skip my shower, eat a bowl of cold cereal, and get on the highway.

The usual: 45 minutes to cover 7 miles in the worst traffic I have seen, before or after.  Half the population of the rust belt moved to Hell-fer-Sartain last summer, so everything is packed all the time, and there are construction sites everywhere.

I get flat tires several times a week due to the nails and bolts falling off trucks everywhere.  Fortunately, today nothing mechanical goes wrong.

8:00 am: The horrible, flat, treeless, grassless campus of Bonehead U., where 95% of the students are in remedial classes and the most popular major is Auto Repair (lots of jobs for that in Hell...um,. I mean Houston...in 1985).

9:00: My first class: Bonehead English.  "For my writing project, I compared sports bars, fag bars, and honkytonks."

10:00: My second class: Bonehead English: "My brother's liked to work on car's so thats what I want to do to."

11:00: My third class: Remedial Math.  I failed calculus three times, but this class is all about basic arithmetic.  "What is 3 times 5?"  "Eight?"

12:00: Lunch: macaroni and cheese in the horrible cafeteria.

1:00: My fourth class: Bonehead English Literature.  "So, how did you like the story? Um..who read the story?  Um...who knows the title of the story?"

2:00: I retreat to my office, a grey windowless box with no pictures or books (because I am sharing it with someone else), to grade papers under the soulless glare of a fluorescent lamp.

4:00 pm: 45 minutes of bumper-to-bumper traffic to go 5 miles to Greenwood Mall, which has a Waldenbooks and a Chinese restaurant.

5:00 pm: Dinner: horrible  kung pao chicken in the food court.

6:00 pm: Time to make the last horrible 45 minute trip in bumper-to-bumper traffic to go the 5 miles back to my horrible apartment, where I can turn on my portable black-and-white tv set and escape into the bright, sunny world of sitcoms.

7:00 pm: The Cosby Show: The irritating Bill Cosby as a wealthy Brooklyn physician with an enormous family, only one of whom is a boy: Malcolm Jamal Warner (top photo), not yet bulked up enough to be "dreamy."  In this episode, Bill stays home from work to take care of a sick child. Gross!

I switch to Magnum, P.I..: Tom Selleck as a rakish p.i. leaving the Reagan-era dream in Hawaii.  In this episode, there's a damsel in distress for Magnum to save.  Hetero-romance as far as the eye can see.  Ugh!

7:30 pm:  Family Ties: Liberal ex-hippies clash with their Reagan-era kids, including 23-year old Michael J. Fox as the teenage Alex.  But Alex's role is minimal tonight, as we see Elyse going into labor.

Come on: falling in love, marriage, and now I have to watch the heterosexist mandate that the sole purpose of life is reproduction? Help!

8:00 pm:  Cheers: Bar regular, Dr. Frasier Crane (Kelsey Grammar), has lost his confidence, so bartender Sam (Ted Danson) comes in for therapy, pretending to be depressed.

Depressed? Definitely!

8:30 pm: Night Court: About the wacky going-ons in a "night court" run by the effervescent and reasonably cute Harry Anderson.   But tonight there's a substitute judge played by a geezer, and in the B plot, elderly bailiff Selma rekindles her romance with an old flame (the disgusting Cracker Jacks guy).

Having reproduced, it's time for you to die.  Great! 

I switch to the last half of:

Simon and Simon: Jameson Parker and Gerald McRainey as lovers...um, I mean brothers...who solve crimes. But in this episode they've broken up and gone their separate ways.

Love and death and lost love!

9:00 pm: Hill Street Blues: I never watch cop shows, but it beats turning the tv off and listening to the sounds of a horrible Texas night.  Cop partner-buddies Hill (Michael Warren) and Renko (Charles Haid) deal with a man who has lost his entire family to a hit and run driver.

Come on.  How much depressing tv can a guy take?

I switch to Knot's Landing: A soap-opera spin-off of Dallas, which  I never watch, but any port in a storm.  Gary, JR Ewing's younger brother, tries to help his ex-wife Val regain her memory, but she thinks' he's crazy and tells her new boyfriend, Parker,  that she will marry him.

Parker is played by a country-western singer with the incredible name Mayf Nutter.  Not a great physique, but at least the episode is not depressing.

It's as good as you're going to get in Hell-fer-Sartain.

See also: My Date with Two Brothers and Their Dad

The Bisexual Fairy Godfather of the Summer of 1984

Between 1982 and 1984, I was studying for my M.A. in English at Indiana University.  I did not do well.  I couldn't focus on any one topic, or any one department -- I rushed around in the 3,000+ courses taught every semester, grabbing onto things like Mandarin Chinese and Russian Folklore, and ignoring my actual English classes

Besides, who had time to study?  I had just discovered bar pickups.  My friend Viju and I were out at Bullwinkel's, or a a gay bar in Indianapolis, two or three times a week, and we never came home alone.

Sometimes I brought a guy home, had sex with him, then went back to the bar to pick up someone else.

Meanwhile my classes faltered, and I squeaked by with B's and an occasional C+. But who cared?   I was going to become a book editor, not a literature scholar.

In the spring of 1984, I sent out resumes:130 publishing companies, 48 newspapers,  34 television stations, and 16 translation agencies.   No openings, no openings, no openings, no openings.

Classes ended. I received my M.A..  No job. I spent ten days visiting India with Viju, then a week in Rock Island, then returned to Bloomington.

I couldn't afford our apartment any more, so I got a room in Eigenmann Hall, and went back to my old job in the snack bar.

It was fun when I was a student.  But as my life's work?.  I imagined myself at age 50, still living in that coffin-sized room with the bathroom down the hall, still selling burgers and fries to undergrads.

All of my friends had graduated and moved away.  And any new friends I made would graduate and move away, again and again, an every-changing blur of faces and cocks for the rest of my life.

That summer was an endless cold, dark night.

The lunatic in the White House (not as bad as the Orange Goblin, but still a lunatic) almost ended the world by "joking" that the U.S. had launched nuclear missiles at the Soviet Union.

The AIDS crisis was making national news for the first time, and dubbed "a gay disease."  Fundamentalist churches latched onto it to decry the "clinically insane, disease-ridden homosexuals" coming for your children.

All four of the factories in Rock Island closed, doubling the unemployment rate.  My father and brother were both laid off.  I couldn't even fall back on a factory job.

The movies I saw (by myself) are now hailed as classics, but I found them depressing: Ghostbusters, Gremlins, The Karate Kid, The Neverending Story, Revenge of the Nerds, Bachelor Party, Conan the Destroyer

Laura Branigan's "Self Control" was playing on the radio:

I live among the creatures of the night.

I haven't got the will to try and fight.

I must believe in something, so I guess I'll just believe that this night will never go.


Then came my fairy godfather, aka Ben, who worked in the bank downtown.  He was my teller when I withdrew some money (this was before ATMs), and two nights later I saw him at Bullwinkle's.

About ten years older than me, a chunky redhead with a long face, a smooth chest, and no biceps to speak of.  Not at all my type.

And bisexual -- he mentioned watching Family Ties, not for the hot teen idol Michael J. Fox, but for Meredith Baxter Birney, who played his mother!

I couldn't help imagining Ben screwing the lady.  His butt bouncing up and down, squeezing her breasts, kissing her.  Gross!  Complete turn-off.

But I was depressed, and I would have gone home with Boy George just to avoid going back to my coffin-sized room in Eigenmann Hall.

Ben had a house in Unionville, about 10 miles of dark, scary country roads from campus. An old-fashioned wood-and-plaster living room, a four-poster bed with black sheets, a drawer-ful of porn magazines, both gay and straight.  Very cold for July.

[Sex scene is censored]

Afterwards, it was too early to sleep, and I didn't want leave, so we sat up and turned on Saturday Night Live. I told Ben about my master's degree, my dismal job prospects, and my future at the Eigenmann Hall snack bar.  He said that he was working on a Ph.D. in sociology --- very slowly.  This was his seventh year in the program, and he wasn't nearly ready to start his dissertation.  The job at the bank took up most of his time.  But he still planned to finish, and get a job as a college professor.

"I love being in front of a class -- it's an amazing rush.  Hey, why don't you go to work at a college?  They always need teachers."

"Yuck!" I exclaimed.  "I taught during my first year.  Ssurly students who didn't read their assignments, didn't know even the basics about...well, anything, and made homophobic comments."

"It beats making hamburgers, I bet.  Besides, just think of the beefcake!"

"But it's July.  Won't they have all the teachers they need for the fall?"

"Let's find out."  Ben walked naked into the next room and came back with The Chronicle of Higher Education.  5 English teaching jobs available in the fall that required just a M.A.

A month later, I was heading for Hell-fer-Sartain, Texas, an English instructor. It would be horrible, but later, I would teach as an adjunct, then get my Ph.D. (not in English), and spend the next twenty years standing in the front of classrooms.

It definitely beats making hamburgers

The full story, with nude photos and explicit sexual situations, is on Tales of West Hollywood.

Male Nudity in Italian Class

The only good thing about Hell-fer-Sartain, Texas, where I taught at a horrible state college after getting my M.A. in 1984, was the free tuition for faculty.  There wasn't a lot at that I wanted to take, but the did offer Italian.

It didn't start out well:
Roger e un ragazzo americano. Maria e una ragazza italiana. Roger e Maria sono amici. . .

Roger is an American boy visiting Italy. He goes to a café and tries to pick up a local girl. In the first lesson we learned “What is your name?”, "Your country is beautiful," and "How old are you."

Roger learns the time so he won’t be late for the cinema, learns the names of food so he can order in the restaurant, gets an overview of national history as they tour the museums.  In Chapter 10, we learn the Italian word for "kiss" (bacio).

Why do even language-learning dialogues have to be about a boy and a girl?  No men in Italy?

I never thought of Italy as a "good place."  The only fiction about Italian boys in love was The Little World of Don Camillo, and movies set in Italy seemed to involve mostly horny heterosexuals: Roman Holiday (1953), La Dolce Vita (1960),  Island of Love (1963), Avanti (1972).  Pasolini was entirely heterosexist. I had never seen Ernesto (1979).

I knew about Thomas Mann's gay obsession in Death in Venice, and about Wilhelm Van Gloeden's homoerotic photographs of Sicilian youth, but they were German.

But one weekend I drove two hours into Houston, to the Wilde-and-Stein Bookstore, and bought Ganymede in the Renaissance, about how Renaissance artists used the myth of Ganymede, a mortal boy swept up by Zeus to become his catamite.

And I discovered a whole gay world in Renaissance Italy, artists, writers, statesmen.

1. Leonardo Da Vinci. He got a girlfriend on Rocky and Bullwinkle.

2. Michelangelo.  As portrayed by Charleton Heston in The Agony and the Ecstasy (1965), he got a girlfriend.

3. Donatello, who sculpted the famously effeminate David, a counterpart to Michelangelo's more macho version.

4. Benvenuto Cellini.  His Autobiography was on the list of recommended readings in my class in Renaissance History in college.  But not a word in class.

5. Caravaggio, played by Dexter Fletcher and Nigel Terry in the 1986 movie.

6. Aretino, who wrote Il Marescalco, about a gay man forced to marry a woman, but she turns out to be a man.

7. Ariosto.  I bought his Orlando Furioso in a Ballantine Adult Fantasy edition, but had no idea.

8. Matteo Bandello, who wrote 12 Novelle, one about a gay man.

9. Dante.  Ok, he was probably heterosexual, and from the Middle Ages, but he wrote the beefcake and bonding classic, The Inferno.

10. The painter Giovanni Antonio Bazzi, nicknamed "Il Sodoma"

11. Giovanni, the foreign exchange student I had a crush on at Rocky High.

Frank Hamer and Maney Gault: The Brokeback Couple Who Brought Down Bonnie and Clyde?

I walked into the living room in time to see the last few minutes of The Highwaymen, about the Texas Rangers Frank Hamer and Maney Gault, who tracked down legendary spree killers Bonnie and Clyde in 1934.   Basically all I saw was the bloody car being paraded through the streets of a small Louisiana town, one of the guys refusing an interview, and the two driving off together.  The closing credits stated that they were buried in the same grave.

Driving off into the sunset together!  Buried in the same grave!  Were they a romantic couple?  Time to do research:








Born in 1884 in Fairview, Texas (near Dallas), Frank started out as a cowboy, then joined the Texas Rangers in 1905.  He resigned several times, most notably in 1932, because Texas had just elected a female governor, and he couldn't stand the idea of being bossed around by a woman.  He also worked as a federal marshall, cattle theft specialist, prohibition enforcer (tracking down bootleggers during Prohibition), and strike-breaker.

In 1917, he married Gladys Sims, who was on trial for her husband's murder.  The husband's brother-in-law, Gus McMeans, ambushed them, and in the ensuing shootout McMeans was killed.  There was no investigation.

Frank also stalked and threatened José Tomás Canales, a state representative who was investigating corruption in the Texas Rangers.  He was not charged.

And that's just the summary on wikipedia.  Quite a piece of work.

Frank was married twice, and had two kids, Billy Beckham Hamer and Francis Augustes Hamer (that's how it's spelled).  He died in 1955.





Maney Gault (left, with Frank in 1932) doesn't have a wikipedia article, but I read an article in True West magazine.  He was born in 1886, and worked as a dairy farmer before the Depression; then he found a job in a sawmill.  Frank was his neighbor in Austin, Texas.

They sat up many nights playing cards and playing bluegrass music and um...such.

Frank got Maney a job with the Texas Rangers, and they started going on cases together.  They continued to work together until the Bonnie and Clyde case, whereupon Frank moved on to other jobs.  Maney stayed on as a Ranger  until his death in 1947, finally supervising a vast territory in west Texas.

He was married, too, to Rebecca Johnson Gault (1886-1955).  Two kids, Leona Gault Pannell and Johnson Gullette Gault. 

But marriage and children don't preclude same-sex loves.  Maybe Frank  and Maney had a Brokeback Mountain thing going on. Can you imagine them saying "I won't quit you"?

Ok, I looked up the movie's end credits again.  It says "same small tract," not "the same grave."

Find-a-Grave says that they are buried in the Austin Memorial Park Cemetery. They are the ones with crosses: Maney's grave is in the foreground, and Frank's a row back and to the left, about 10 feet away.

Were then 10 feet apart in life, too?

Or closer?

   

Why I Stopped Reading "Doonesbury"

Gary Trudeau's Doonesbury  first appeared in national syndication in 1970.  I had heard of the strip, but knew nothing about it until the summer of 1982, right after my college graduation, when I found a copy of The Doonesbury Chronicles (1975) at a garage sale.

It came along to grad school in Bloomington with me, along with my Greek New Testament and the copy of The City and the Pillar that I bought in West Hollywood.

I was mesmerized by these 1970s college students, who live together on a commune outside Walden College, and form an alternate family, with heterosexual romance virtually absent.

Mike Doonesbury, the level-headed, somewhat naive central character.
The radical hippie Mark Slackmeyer.
Pot-loving "freak" Zonker Harris
Conservative all-American B.D.
And especially Joanie Caucus, a housewife who abandoned a heterosexual life for the wild freedom of the commune.

In Bloomington in 1982, I started reading the strip in the Herald-Times.  The politics bored me, and I disliked the custom of using weird icons for political figures, like a cowboy hat for Ronald Reagan.

But hetero-romance was still virtually absent, and there were occasional glimmers of the same-sex friendships that once fueled Walden Pond.

From January 1983 to October 1984, Trudeau took a hiatus from the strip.  When it returned, I was in Hell-fer-Sartain, Texas, the worst place in the world, and to my consternation, the characters had "grown up."  That is, most of them had acquiesced to the heterosexist life trajectory of husbands and wives.  Mike married J.J. , B.D. married Boopsie, Joanie married Rick Redfern.

So I abandoned them as relics of the Straight World.  I haven't read Doonesbury since.

But I have researched the gay story lines.

1. Andy Lippincott appeared in January 1976 as a fellow law student Joanie is crushing on.  In February, he tells her that he's gay.  She's shocked -- she asks "are they sure?", certain that he must have gotten several doctors to diagnose such a serious condition.

Then Andy vanishes.  In the late 1980s, he appears again, to die of AIDS.  Many newspapers refused to run the continuity, stating that the topic of gayness was "inappropriate for the comics page."

2. In 1977, Joanie decides to spend the night with her boyfriend, Rick.  No gay content, but many newspapers refused to run the "morning after" strip because they thought it was two guys in bed together.

3. In the 1990s, Mark realizes that he is gay.  By that time, he is an adult, the host of a call-in political radio program.  He and his co-host, the conservative Chase, begin dating, and finally marry in 2007.  They have since divorced.

Not a lot, but still, more than most newspaper comics.

See also: Escape from Hell fer Sartain

Escape from Hell-fer-Sartain

I spent a year (actually 210 dreadful days) in Hell-fer-Sartain, Texas, teaching bonehead English to homophobes at a horrible college about 15 miles north of Houston (which means an hour's drive on the parking lot they call a highway).  I don't remember a moment of joy, happiness, or contentment during that entire year, just anger, frustration, anger, embarrassment, loneliness, and anger.

The most minor task -- going out to eat, getting gas --was a nightmare, with problem piling onto problem, complication onto complication.

Even hookups.

"Why do you want to know my name? Are you a cop?"

"There was a car in the driveway of a house three doors down, so I got scared and bailed."

"Meet me at the public restroom somewhere far away, and we'll do it there."

The happiest day of my life was May 8th,1985, when I finished grading my last horrible final exam, walked the final grades to the horrible dean's office, and left those Brutopian concrete slabs forever. I walked through the sweltering Sahara of a parking lot, slid into my car, and started driving.

The quickest route home would take me north, but that would mean five more hours in Texas, so instead I drove south on the I-45 toward Houston.

12 miles.  Fortunately I turned onto the I-610 before it became a parking lot, so the traffic was just horrible.

10 miles around the eastern edge of Houston in traffic that was just horrible, mostly surrounded by roaring trucks, nothing to see but nondescript Brutoian warehouses

I-10 east in horrible traffic through horrible Houston suburbs: Jacinto City, Cloverleaf, Channel View. Greens Bayou, Marwood.

I hooked up  with a guy in Jacinto City once.  I felt like the town's first  mayor, a guy named Inch Handler.

The suburbs went on endlessly. Nothing to see but billboards, car dealerships, nondescript Brutopian warehouses, and the occasional fast-food restaurant.

Past Burnett Bay, the traffic thinned out,  and the highway narrowed.  I was out of Houston's clutches, but still in Texas, in a swampy no man's land,without even a billboard.

Or a rest stop.  I didn't care. I wasn't stopping until Texas is a distant memory.

At the small redneck town of Winnie, home of the Texas Rice Festival, the I-10 veered northeast.

East Chambers High School in Winnie promises "photo galleries," but all they have are three photos from 2015, all of cheerleaders.

When I searched for "Winnie Texas wrestling" online, this photo popped up. Apparently his video of "wrestling with a dead Christmas tree" made it to the tv show America's Funniest Home Videos.

Another few miles of scrub grass, and I was in Beaumont, Texas, a sizeable town of 100,000, all oil refineries blinking like cyclopses and giving off an unpleasant smell.


Today Beaumont has some interesting sights:the Art Museum of Southeastern Texas, the Dishman Art Museum on the campus of Lamar College, the McFadden-Ward Museum, the St. Andrew Basilica,Temple Emanuel. There is a gay bar, and Beaumont High School has a Gay-Straight Alliance

But in 1985 it was a concrete-and-steel nightmare.  Not as bad as Houston, but bad.

The I-10 curved northeast, past the town of Cheek,  past Beaumont High and the Tyrell Park Church,  heavy traffic at the junction of I-69, and then downtown.  No skyscrapers, just low concrete buildings and restaurants with names like Luby's.

Across the Natches River, and then more wilderness

I saw a country boy standing ankle-deep in the swamp, maybe fishing for crawdads.  A fleeting glimpse of beauty, but not enough to make up for 9 months in Texas.

Not by a long shot.

At 5:00 pm, I was passing through Orange, Texas, population 18,000, "a small town with big city culture."  Its culture involves a small art museum devoted to the Wild West, a historic home, and a confederate monument.

But it has one benefit that other towns in Texas do not:  it's next to the border.

A sign for St. Mary Catholic School.  "Hail, Mary," I said.

Five or six miles of scrub grass, and a sign said "St.Charles 35."

That's in Louisiana!

A few more miles, and the Sabine River, aka the River Styx. But I was leaving the Underworld behind.  On the other side was the Promised Land, Louisiana, aka Anywhere That Was Not Texas.

I crossed the border carefully, worried that someone -- the police, demons -- would drag me back, or that I would end up in a "No Exit" situation, back where I came from.

And suddenly, I was driving through Vinton, Louisiana.

I stopped to go to the bathroom and grab a hamburger at a fast-food place across from Vinton High.   The high school boy behind the counter (dark hair, wrestler's build) asked where I was heading.

"The Land of the Living," I said.

Ok, not really. But it sounds good.

This post with nude photos is on Tales of West Hollywood

Next: A Glory Hole at a Rest Stop in Arkansas

Hap and Leonard: Gay, Black, and Angry in East Texas

I would never in a million years have believed  that Joe R. Lansdale, a writer and martial arts expert who grew up in Gladewater, East Texas and now lives in Nacogdoches, East Texas, would have written a series of novels about two buddies who solve mysteries.

In East Texas. While driving a pickup truck, drinking beer, voting Republican, and listening to Dwight Yoakum and Patsy Cline.

 And one of them is gay.  And not even a swish.

The duo consistso of:

Hap Collins, a working class  guff who served time in prison in the 1960s due to refusing to go to Vietnam.  He's been working at odd jobs, drinking heavily, and pursuing an off-and-on relationship with girlfriend Brett Sawyer ever since.

Leonard Pine, a Vietnam vet, lives with Hap or sometimes Hap-and-Brett, or when he comes into money, Hap lives with him. He's gay and black and very angry. His anger issues cause trouble with his relationships and jobs.

Recently Lansdale discussed why he decided to make Leonard gay: while he was fiddling with the characters, there was a series of murders of gay men across East Texas (wait -- there are gay men in East Texas?), and people generally dismissed them: "it's what they deserved for being gay."  Lansdale had a lot of gay friends, and he was furious.

He had already created the character of Leonard as a tough, angry black man, so why not add being gay to the mix?:  He met a lot of tough, aggressive gay men through his martial arts work, yet all you saw on movies and tv were swishy queens.  Leonard would be unique.

The two first appeared in Savage Season (1990), the cover of which shows a big-breasted woman pointing a gun at you, suggesting that the intended audience is definitely not gay men.   Hap is now 40 years old.  His ex-wife Trudy shows up and enlists the duo to retrive some bank-robbery money from a riverbed.  Her radical leftist group wants to use it to save the whales or something. 

Hap and Leonard are both Republicans, by the way, so they find liberal causes ridiculous.

A gay black Republican!  Leonard must cause quite a stir at GOP meetings.

In Mucho Mojo (1994), Leonard's homophobic uncle dies, and while cleaning out his house, the duo finds a dead child wrapped in child porn buried under the floorboards. They discover that at the time of a local fun festival every year, a child always vanishes.  The book won the British Fantasy Award.

In Two Bear Mambo (1995), Leonard sets fire to a crack house, again, and the duo ends up sparring with the Ku Klux Klan in Florida.  And, finally, Leonard gets a boyfriend, Raul.

In Bad Chili (1997), Raul dumps Leonard for a biker named Horse Dick, who is murdered.  Leonard, of course, is the prime suspect.  Then Raul is murdered, too, and the Duo run afoul of a gangster who sells videotapes of gay-bashing to interested homophobes.

 There are eight more novels, three novellas, and three short story collections. The most recent, The Elephant of Surprise (2019), Leonard has a boyfriend, a cop named Pookie, but he's out of town during the adventure involving rescuing a girl.

Three seasons of a Hap and Leonard tv series, covering the first three novels, are now streaming on Netflix.  James Purefoy and Michael Kenneth Williams star.

In the first episode, Leonard's gayness is referenced frequently.  Hap is asked if they are married, the homophobic uncle makes homophobic jibes, the duo locker-room flirts, and so on.  Leonard's boyfriend Raul (Enrique Murciano) is in the cast list for later.

It's still set in East Texas.

Missouri City: 2 Hours from Hell-fer-Sartain

I follow the twitter feed of former Disney teen Doug Brochu.  I don't remember why -- maybe a gay subtext in one of his Disney performances.  He doesn't tweet much, but last night he retweeted a plea from someone named Billy to patronize his father's donut shop, Billy's Donuts in Missouri City, Texas.

Missouri City?  Never heard of it.

Turns out to be a southwest suburb of Houston Hell-fer-Sartain, just beyond the South Houston Tollway, 18 miles from downtown (which, given the worst traffic congestion in the known universe, means about a 2 hour drive).  Named  "Missouri City" to draw settlers from Missouri, which never happened.

74,000 people, up from 50,000 in 2000, mostly refugees from Houston who still drive there to work.  50% black, 16% Asian.  Median family income $81,000.  Full of ritzy subdivisions with names like Williams Grant, Grant Lake, Colony Grant, Colony Park, Lake Colony, Heritage Colony, and the Enclave.

With all that money floating around, you'd expect some classy shops and restaurants.  But the main street, which has the pedestrian name Highway 5, features Taco Bell, Wendy's, Denny's, Chipotle, Papa John's Pizza, Pizza Hut, and of course Billy's Donuts.

The churches seem rather on the fundamentalist side: Maranatha Full Gospel Church, Christ Temple of Deliverance, the Abiding Faith Center, the Living Word Faith Center.

Plus two Indian Orthodox Churches.  The Malankara Orthodox Church, rooted in south India, has 30,000 members in the U.S., most in  Texas.

Life in Hell-fer-Sartain takes a lot of divine intervention.

Other points of interest: According to Wikipedia, the "Missouri City Antenna Farm," a group of radio and tv towers all clustered together.

Sounds desolate.

No colleges, but lots of high schools.  It was hard to tell where the city limits ended,but I think I counted Stafford, Dulles, Thurgood Marshall, Willowridge, Lake Olympia, Hightower, Progressive, and Willow Creek.

This is an athlete at Elkins praying before a match.  Or after.

I think this swimmer is from Dulles.

I was interested in Progressive High School, but an internet search revealed conflicting information.  Is it public or private?   Is it for advanced students or "at risk" learning-challenged students?  Is transgender wrestler Mack Beggs a student there, or not?  Are these swimmers students there, or not?

I don't know where this powerlifter is from.  Maybe Missouri City, Missouri.

That's right, there's another one.  Missouri City, Missouri, on the banks of the Missouri River, about 20 miles east of Kansas City, Missouri, where you can go to Missouri City High School.

Please tell me it's not in Missouri County.

The High School Named after Bozz-Well

When I was in grade school, there was a kid in my class with the last name Boswell.  He had dark sunken eyes with white eyelashes, which made him look sick all the time. He buttoned the top button of his shirts, wore white socks and "high water pants." And he had gross eating habits, like putting ketchup on potato chips.  Kids made fun of his name, calling him Bozz-Well. Today he seems rather sad, but at age 10, all I could think of was "dork."

Later I learned about James Boswell (1740-1795), the intimate of Samuel Johnson who chronicled their tour of the Hebrides, and wrote his biography. The friendship was apparently not romantic: Boswell had a wife and a number of extramarital girlfriends, plus he was a devotee of ladies of the evening.

And John Boswell (1947-1994), the Yale historian whose Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality (1980) changed the way we think about the Christian response to gay people.

But still, I associated Bozz-Well with "dork."  The name just sounds ridiculous.

Imagine my surprise when I learned that there was a W. E. Boswell High School in Fort Worth, probably so named because it was on West Bailey Boswell Road.

I have not been able to discover who either of those two people were.  I assume not the athlete Bailey Boswell, who is on trial for the murder of a Nebraska woman who disappeared after going on a date with her in 2016.

Boswell High is in the far northwest of Fort Worth, near the town border (it draws students from nearby suburbs), and surrounded by religious fundamentalism: The Table Community Church next door, Eagle View Church next door on the other side, the Lake County Church a few blocks west, Fellowship Baptist Church a few blocks east, the Trinity Baptist Temple on the south side,   Whoa.

1,600 students, no Gay-Straight Alliance, but a Fish Head Mentor Program and a Super Who Lock Club (for fans of conjoined Supernatural, Doctor Who, and Sherlock).  The sports team, named The Pioneers, features this cute swimmer.

More Boswell swimmers in speedos.

It's one of the few high schools in the U.S. with a men's gymnastic team.

And men's powerlifting.

A surprising amount of cuteness, for a high school named Bozz-Well.

By the way, I looked up my Bozz-Well (on the right). He still has the sunken eyes. He works at a car dealership and wins bowling trophies.  He has never been married.  I wonder if....