Sean Flynn: Was the Son of the Legendary Actor Gay?

Born in 1941, Sean Flynn was the son of infamous bisexual superstar Errol Flynn (and uncle of his namesake Sean Flynn, star of the Nickelodeon teencom Zoey 101).

Handsome, muscular, and the son of a superstar, he was naturally pushed into acting, and in 1962 appeared in the swashbuckling Son of Captain Blood, a sequel to his father's Captain Blood (1935).  

Some other actioners followed, with Sean playing Zorro (Duel at the Rio Grande, 1963), a man-mountain of Colonial India (Temple of the White Elephant, 1964), and a James Bond-style secret agent (Mission to Venice, 1964).  But there were lots of better movies with similar characters, and audiences stayed away.

Besides, Sean didn't care for acting.  He wanted to be a real-life adventurer, like Richard Halliburton and Michael Rockefeller.   He moved to Africa to become a hunter and game warden. Then he became a photojournalist, covering the Vietnam War and the 1967 Egypt-Israeli War for Paris-Match.  

In April 1970, while traveling near the Cambodian border, he and colleague Dana Stone (left) disappeared.

His mother spent years searching for him, and eventually found evidence that the two were captured by the Khmer Rouge or Viet Cong, imprisoned for a few months, and then executed.

A tragic end to a fascinating life.

Of course, you're wondering: was he gay or bisexual?










Sean's friend Perry Deane Young (left, the one with the bulge) doesn't say anything about Sean's same-sex interests in his memoir of their Vietnam experiences (published in 1975).  But then, one wouldn't expect him to.

However, it is compelling to note that Sean spent his life surrounded by attractive men.

See also: The Disappearance of Michael Rockefeller; The Disappearance of Richard Halliburton.

The Vietnamese Twink at the Swedish Lutheran College

March 2014, St. Peter, Minnesota

I'm at a conference at Gustavus Adolphus College, a small Swedish Lutheran college in a small town on the Minnesota River.

 It's fun being immersed in my Lutheran roots.  Old Main looks almost like the Old Main back at Augustana, my alma mater.  The chapel is a vast, airy expanse with impressionistic stained glass windows.  The campus bookstore stocks The Presocratic Philosophers and Bainton's life of Martin Luther, just as Augustana did.

 I didn't come here to seek out beefcake, but it keeps finding me.

Even though it's March and quite chilly, there are two shirtless college boys, hard-bodied, Scandinavian pale, walking across the quad (not naked).

And a tanned, very buffed jock in a muscle shirt lounging in the campus library.

The weight room in the campus gym have vast windows that look out onto a basketball court, where a shirts vs. skins game is in progress.


Plus beefcake sculptures everywhere on campus, like this naked man -- yes, that's his penis -- on the facade of the science building.  I guess he's inventing something.

Or several beefcake sculptures by alumnus Grant Granlud: Jacob wrestling an angel, a luna moth with a buffed masculine form inside, and the naked man and woman bouncing a baby in the air (below).

I heard that the Hillstrom Museum of Art has some Grant Woods in its permanent collection, so I drop in.  It's actually just one big room, empty except for the college boy volunteer sitting at a table reading a book on French impressionists: slim, thick dark hair, red t-shirt and short pants.

Asian, probably Vietnamese!   I am surprised to see him.  There aren't very many Asians on the Plains, and even fewer, I assume, who want to go to a Swedish Lutheran college in a small town in the middle of nowhere.

The uncensored story, with nude photos, is on Tales of West Hollywood.