From Muscle Beach to the Cimarron Strip: TV Westerns

By the time I started watching TV in the 1960s, the Western was stale, outdated, staggeringly unhip; my friends and I could stomach only those few that involved a flashy new gimmick, like Wild Wild West or Alias Smith and Jones.  But for the Boomers growing up in the 1950s, they were as iconic as Pinky Lee and Father Knows Best.  

The Western heroes were usually the discovery of gay talent agent Henry Willson, so they were gay, bi, or at least gay-friendly.  They usually wore full leather, buckskin, or other less-than-revealing garb, but they were not averse to revealing stunning physiques for the movie magazines, and even for the AMC’s proto-gay Physique Pictorial.  Guy Madison (who went so far as to pose nude) in The Adventures of Wild Bill Hickock (1951-56)

Rugged movie star Hugh O’Brian in The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp (1955-61);

Clint Walker of Cheyenne (1955-63).

William Smith of Laredo


Plus:
Richard Boone of Have Gun, Will Travel (1957-63)
Robert Horton of Wagon Train (1957-65)
Rory Calhoun of The Texan (1958-60)
George Montgomery of Cimarron City (1958-60)
Scott Brady as Shotgun Slade (1959-61)

The Western hero traditionally displayed little heterosexual interest: dames were characteristic of an emasculating civilization, along with government, education, opera, and church.  Instead, they had a  “sidekick,” a life partner of the same sex, usually someone of inferior rank due to race, age, or socioeconomic class, who provided an emotional or spiritual energy.  The sidekick is an essentially American phenomenon, and its homoerotic import has been noted for at least thirty years, since Love and Death in the American Novel.

Most of the sidekicks of the 1950s were elderly, corpulent, or buffoons, perhaps because clowns minimze the homoerotic impact of their devotion.  The fat, hee-hawking Andy Devine, later on Andy's Gang,  played “Jingles,” Guy Madison’s sidekick in The Adventures of Wild Bill Hickock.  

Or they were father and son, as in The Rifleman.

 But we can locate several same-sex partners whose homoerotic bond was not miminized:

Indian agent Tom Jeffords (future Days of Our Lives hunk John Lumpton), who fell in love with...um, I mean befriended...handsome, muscular Chief Cochise (Michael Ansara) in Broken Arrow (1956-57).

 John Bromfield as The Sheriff of Cochise (1956-60) with Stan Jones his faithful deputy.

John Smith and Robert Fuller of Laramie.

Yancy Derringer (1958-59), an ex-Confederate soldier turned gambler played by Jock Mahoney, and X Brands as his Native American companion.

Cowboy and Indian Toys

When I was a kid in the 1960s, cowboys and Indians were has-beens.  Older kids watched Western tv and remembered six shooters and Davy Crockett hats, but my friends and I played at being spies, Jonny Quest and Hadji, or space explorers.  Still, Indians had a penchant for nudity, like Johnny Crawford and his brother Bobby in Indian Paint (1965), or the god Wisakeha, who Bill and I saw in real life at the Pow Wow in 1969, so when a clueless adult happened to give me a cowboy-and-Indian toy, I made good use of it.

Indian action figures were usually naked except for loincloths, making them the second most reliable source of beefcake in toys (Tarzan was first).

Books about Indians were always good for beefcake photos.

Rock Island was the site of Saukenauk, where Chief Black Hawk ruled over the Sauk and Fox Indians, so his picture was everywhere.  This statue, with a phallic spear extending from his belly,  looked over Chippianoc Cemetery ("City of the Dead" in the Sauk language).  It was lit up with red and blue neon at night.

I got in trouble in school for drawing it in my notebook.  My teacher called it "smut," thinking that the phallic symbol was a real phallus.

I didn't really know who the Lone Ranger and Tonto were, but the idea of cowboy-Indian boyfriends was appealing.  Their arms could be bent, so they could put their arms around each other and kiss.

10 Little House on the Prairie Hunks

When I was in high school and college, if I was home on Monday night at all, I was watching a hip sitcom like The Jeffersons or WKRP in Cincinnati, certainly not Little House on the Prairie (1974-83).  But my sister loved it. The historical drama, based on the autobiographical novels by Laura Ingalls Wilder, was about a farm family in frontier Minnesota in the 19th century: Charles and Caroline Ingalls and their daughters Laura, Mary, and Carrie. Other relatives come and go, the daughters grow up, and so on.

I always thought it was a family-friendly drama, like a TGIF sitcom, but my research reveals that it was quite angst-ridden, more "what shall we cry about this week?" than humorous anecdotes about one-room schoolhouses and general stores.  Episodes featured drug addiction, leukemia, child abuse, alcoholism, prejudice, diseases, accidents, murder, robbery, and rape, not to mention an ongoing story arc about Mary's blindness and a series finale that has the whole town of Walnut Grove blowing up!

This was the 1970s, when the top songs on the radio were about people and horses dying and the top "sitcom" was about soldiers being blown to bits in the Korean War.  Still, the pain and anguish seems a bit excessive.

With all the sobbing going on, you wouldn't expect much beefcake and buddy bonding, but apparently producer and star Michael Landon went out of his way to appeal to gay men and boys (and maybe heterosexual girls).  Dozens of 1970s musclemen and androgynous teen idol-types crossed the screen to have accidents, lose loved ones, die of diseases, and take their shirts off.  Here are the top candidates.

1. Michael himself, Charles Ingalls, previously Little Joe on Bonanza, with a famous body and bulge.  Where to begin?  He loses family members and friends, loses houses to fires, loses jobs, deals with infinite pain and sorrow, yet still believes that there is a Divine plan behind all the misery (it's actually the writers, wondering "what horrible thing can happen to the Ingalls this week?")    And he has plenty of time to work out.

2. Jonathan Gilbert as Willie Oleson, the spoiled son of the town shopkeepers (his sister Nellie was the snooty, bullying antagonist to the girls).  He is mostly comedic relief, but he helps out during blizzards, fires, and illnesses.

He grew up, but this is the only shirtless shot I could find.

3. Matthew Laborteaux as Albert, an orphan adopted into the Ingalls family.  Subsequently his girlfriend is raped, he takes to stealing, gets an incurable disease, and becomes addicted to morphine.  He should have stayed in the orphanage.

4. His brother Patrick as Andy, one of Laura's friends whose mother is killed and father (played by Merlin Olsen) becomes an alcoholic.












5. Linwood Boomer (love that name) as Adam Kendall, one of Mary's colleagues at the School for the Blind.  They get married and lose their infant son in a fire.  Eventually he gets his sight back and becomes a lawyer.

6. Jason Bateman (seen here as an adult, pouring lemonade onto his crotch) as James Cooper, who loses his parents in an accident (on camera, naturally) and is adopted by the Ingalls family.  Later he is shot during a bank robbery, but healed by a miracle.

7. Stan Ivar (left) as John Carter, whose wife runs the town newspaper.

8. Dean Butler (right) as Almanzo, who marries Laura and is crippled by a stroke.  Then his house is destroyed, his wife gets sick and almost dies, his brother dies of an incurable disease, his infant son dies....

Just another week in Walnut Grove.

9. Steve Tracy as Urkel...um, I mean Percival Isaac Cohen Dalton, who rejects his Jewish heritage and marries Nellie Oleson.  Perhaps she was attracted to his very blatant bulge.  No angst in his plotlines, but the actor himself died of AIDS in 1986.











10. Radames Pera as John Sanderson Edwards, who dates Mary Ingalls before he moves to Chicago to become a newspaper reporter and is murdered.

Whew!  After all that, M*A*S*H sounds like a lighthearted diversion.

Michael Landon, Gay Ally

Michael Landon arrived in Los Angeles at age 19 and immediately started landing roles as tortured outcasts and juvenile delinquents, such as the gay-vague protagonist in I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957). He also cut some teen idol records and posed for innumerable beefcake shots before landing the role of Little Joe, youngest of the three sons of widowed rancher Ben Cartwright (Lorne Green) on Bonanza in 1959.

For the next 14 years, Little Joe played the part of "teen hunk," strutting about shirtless and bulging, giving thousands of boomer kids their first crushes.  Unfortunately, he had little significant buddy-bonding, as he was constantly consorting with women, culminating in a marriage -- and the tragic demise of his bride -- 1972.

When Bonanza finally ended in 1973, Landon had acquired a reputation as a stable, solid, and "wholesome," a conservative remedy to the endless sexual innuendo found elsewhere on prime time.

But his next series, Little House on the Prairie (1974-83), was not exactly conservative.  It offered cynicism, backstabbing, contemporary social issues -- and an endless supply of beefcake.  According to Alison Arngrim, who played the bitchy Nellie Oleson, Michael Landon was quite aware of the program's gay male fans, and catered to them by mandating that the cute guys on the show often appear shirtless -- and engage in some buddy-bonding plotlines.

Never far from a tv screen, Landon continued after Little House with Highway to Heaven (1983-89), about a wayfaring angel who displays little heterosexual interest and travels with a male companion (Victor French).

He was in declining health, but he lived until 1991, long enough to express his support of his gay son, 16-year old Christopher.

10 Forgotten Musclemen of Movie Serials

Between 1936 and 1955, you didn't just go to a movie; you went to a whole evening's entertainment, with cartoons, newsreels, two features, and a serial -- a cliffhanging, 12-15 chapter adventure, Western, or science fiction series designed to fill the seats week after week as audiences wondered "How will the hero get out of this jam?"

Three main studios, Columbia, Republic, and Universal, churned out dozens of serials every year, so they needed lots of action heroes.  Some became famous later, in feature films and on tv, and others faded away quickly, but they all offered buddy-bonding and occasional glimpses of biceps and bulges.  Here are the top 10 musclemen of the movie serials:

1. Buster Crabbe may have died in 1983, but his fame -- and exceptional physique -- live on. He was a beefcake staple for 30 years, playing Tarzan and Tarzan clones (1933), cowboys Red Barry and Billy the Kid, and futuristic space heroes Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon.  Lots of scripts called for him to get his shirt ripped off.

2. Herman Brix competed in the Olympics as Bruce Bennett, then gave Buster Crabbe some competition with the serials The New Adventures of Tarzan (1935) and Tarzan and the Green Goddess (1938).  He also stripped down to play Kioga in Hawk of the Wilderness (1938).

3. Former college athlete Charles Starrett was best known for the Durango Kid series, but he also got torn out of his clothes in The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932), to be tortured and turned into a zombie (left).

4. Gordon Jones (left) died in 1963, so he isn't well known to the Boomer generation, but in his day he was a well known face and physique.  Catch his exposed biceps in an early version of The Green Hornet in the 1941 serial.

5. Kane Richmond played the adult mentor/boyfriend to teenage Frankie Darro in a series of 1930s "Thrill-o-Ramas," plus some Charlie Chan mysteries, Westerns, and beefcake-heavy boxing movies.   His main serial was the superheroic Spy Smasher (1942).  He retired to open a hair salon.

6. The rugged Tom Tyler had a long career in Westerns, but flexed his muscles as two comic superheroes brought to life in movie serials: The Adventures of Captain Marvel (1941) and The Phanton (1943)

7. Gerald Mohr played a pulp detective named The Lone Wolf (1946, 1947) and narrated the first season of The Lone Ranger series on tv (1949-50). 

8. Speaking of The Lone Ranger, before Clayton Moore became identified with the Masked Man (1949-1957), he had a long career in movies and serials, mostly Westerns, naturally.

9. Kirk Alyn never disrobed on camera, but his muscular frame was displayed in a Superman costume in the only serials about the original superhero, Superman (1948) and Atom Man v. Superman (1950).

10. Jock Mahoney played a rather long-in-the-tooth Tarzan in Tarzan Goes to India (1962), but he also starred in some serials, such as Cody of the Pony Express (1950) and Roar of the Iron Horse (1951).  

The Banned Beefcake Photo of Michael Burns

You may not realize it, but every word and image on Blogger is carefully analyzed by an army of censors to make sure there are no penises.  Bloody, decapitated heads and eviscerated corpses are fine,but God forbid anyone find out that men have dangling parts.

This photo doesn't show one,but it still got me banned from Blogger Advertisements, because he's obviously covering it with a towel.

It happens to be one of the iconic beefcake photos of the 1960s, with handsome, muscular 22-year old Michael Burns hiding his penis behind that towel in That Cold Day in the Park (1969): Michael's character is an innocent, possibly mute,  somewhat addled Boy taken in by the middle-aged, repressed Frances (Sandy Dennis).  She provides food, shelter, nice clothes, whatever he needs, and he provides a coy eroticism.

When Frances' flirtation becomes too aggressive, the Boy leaves, returns to his hippie commune, and we discover that the innocent-addled bit was all an act. He often defrauds the establishment that way, acquiring free food and favors in return for displaying his body and feigning a willingness to have sex.






The Boy represented the desire and dread with which the adults approached the youth counterculture, but he also served as a metaphor for the game gay male teens must play: pretend to be interested in women, let them desire you, but pull back at the last moment. Always remember that your real desires, your real emotions, your real life lies elsewhere.

Born in 1947, Michael Burns was a very busy child actor, with starring roles as an orphan kid on Wagon Train (1960-65) and the kid brother on the overtly homoerotic It's a Man's World (1962-63), plus guest spots on about 30 Westerns, dramas, and comedies.

But other than That Cold Day in the Park, he was most famous for a 1967 episode of Dragnet, in which the deadpan detectives investigate a houseful of hippies who are using the "new drug menace, LSD," and going crazy.  Michael plays Blueboy, who has half of his face painted blue and screeches in paranoia before dying. Again, the desire and dread of the youth counterculture.

Michael retired from acting in 1977 to pursue an academic career.  He became a professor of history at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts, a specialist on the Dreyfuss Affair of 1890s France.

Should I Skip or Stream "Wynonna Earp"?

Wynonna Earp has been showing up on my Netflix feed with an 86% match.  Should I stream it or skip it?

Con: My first instinct: run far, far away.  I hate Westerns, and I certainly don't want to watch a female version of Wyatt Earp gun-slinging down some fake dusty Wild West backlot.

Pro:  Wynonna (Melanie Scrofano) is a modern-day paranormal investigator, no connection to the Wild West (except she's Wyatt Earp's great-great-granddaughter)

Wow.  The title and central characters are so completely misleading that they must have been created on purpose, to draw in Western fans.  But doesn't it scare away all of the fans of paranormal investigation?

Con: Oh, this is still a Western.  Wynonna lives in the modern-Wild West town of Purgatory, where the bars have antler-heads and people still wear cowboy hats.  And she has a six-shooter, a special legacy from her ancestor that allows her to hunt down Revenants, escapees from Hell, and send them back where they came from.

Fortunately, the Revenants can't go farther than the area around Purgatory, called the Ghost River Triangle.

Unfortunately, they are adept at masquerading as humans, and highly organized, with a leader unfortunately named Bobo (Michael Eklund).  You can tell he's evil because of his unfortunate beard and androgynous mannerisms.  Yet another trans villain?

Con: The writers seem to be getting their character names from old John Wayne movies: Shorty, Carl, Red, Hetty, Tug, Skip, Drek

I also find Eve, Abel, and Jesus, but maybe they aren't the Biblical characters.

Speaking of names, what's with the extra "n" on Wynonna? I have to check the spelling every time.  It just doesn't look right.

Pro:  According to the plot summary on Wikipedia, the  mythology gets curioser and curioser.  Everybody has a tragic backstory, and no one is who they seem.

I like complex mythologies, as long as they don't get too ridiculous, like on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, where each season had a much-worse-than-before, Apocalyptic Big Bad.

Wynonna joins a top-secret paranormal-hunting government agency, and gathers up a group of scoobies:

1. Doc Holiday (Tim Rozon), the partner of her great-great-great grandfather, who didn't die of tuberculosis in 1887; he's still alive and kicking and looks about 30.

2. Waverly, Wynonna's sister (name too long to copy).  Well, actually half-sister.  They share a mother, but Waverly's father was an angel named Julian (yes, angels can reproduce).

3. Xavier Dolls (Shamier Anderson), the head of her unit.

4. Purgatory Sheriff Nicole (Katherine Barrell), who starts dating Waverly.

Pro: Ok, a lesbian relationship among the major characters, and they don't even wait until season 8.  That's a plus for inclusivity, but I wish there were some gay guys, too.

Pro: Score!  Jeremy Chetri (Varun Saranga), the Black Badge Unit's Lab Technician, is gay (and dating Agent Dolls?).  He's introduced in the second season.  In Season 3 he gets a boyfriend, Robin Jett (Justin Kelly, below).

Con: The show seems a bit beefcake-deprived.  Of the first 10 actors listed on imdb, 4 are women, 2 have weird beards, and 1 is grizzled.  That leaves Agent Dolls, Jeremy Chetri, and Daniel Onerheim as Paramedic (can't find a photo).

Farther down the list, we find Justin Kelly (6 episodes) and Dylan Koroll (top photo) as Hardy Champ, the boyfriend of Wynonna's sister Waverly before she starts dating Nicole.

So we have 4 Pro, 4 Con.  I need a deal-maker or deal-breaker.

I fast-forwarded through Episode 6: "Agent Dolls' secret comes out when he joins forces with Wynonna to find the Blacksmith, and encounters a family with a voracious appetite."

The Canadian Rockies in winter.  Cowboy hats, fringed leather jackets.  This is a Western.  Doc Holiday has apparently not changed with the times, ma'ama.  Wynonna wishes she could be a girl, buy lip gloss and wear flirty skirts.  Apparently she hasn't changed with the times, either.

Con.  Skip it.

Daniel Boone: a Big Man

Daniel Boone was a man --
He was a big man!

Sounds good so far.  When I was seven or eight years old, I was all for watching tv shows about a man, especially a big man.  Especially a big man who was a "dream come-er true-er."  

But Batman was on the other channel.  No kid in his right mind would pick a cowboy over the Dynamic Duo.  I never saw a single episode of Daniel Boone (1965-70) when it originally aired.

I've seen one since, for research purposes. Not a lot of gay content.  Not a lot of cowboy content, either.

1. Daniel Boone (Fess Parker)  is a family man, with wife and kids.  If you have to be a cowboy, at least hang out with other guys.

2. He has a sidekick anyway, Mingo, one of the least convincing Native Americans on tv, actually played by singer Ed Ames (who, although Jewish, became famous for recording the Chrismas song "Do You Hear What I Hear").

3.  It's not even the Old West.  This is Kentucky during the Revolutionary War.

4. While other cowboys were happily displaying monumental physiques, Fess Parker is kept strictly under wraps.  The only cast member to take his shirt off is Darby Hinton, who plays Daniel's preteen son Israel, and his buddy du jour.

Prior to Daniel, Fess Parker had starred in other Disney productions, notably Davy Crockett, Old Yeller, and The Light in the Forest (ignoring the crush of James Mac Arthur).  Afterwards he retired to run a vineyard and give conservative speeches.

Darby Hinton apparently was the first crush of some gay boys of the Boomer Generation, but he didn't have much of a teen idol career (this photo is from Getty Images, not from a teen magazine).

Post-Daniel, he's best known for the sexploitation Malibu Express (1985), as a Magnum P.I. clone who keeps encountering nude women and swishy gay stereotypes while trying to solve a murder.  At least he looks good semi-nude.

Savage Sam: Disney Adventure Kid

The Disney Adventure Boy was usually a teenager (Tommy Kirk, left, James MacArthur, Roger Mobley, Kurt Russell,Jeff East)    who demonstrated his all-American masculinity by taking off his shirt (as Jimmy Lydon also did inTom Brown's School Days)  and by falling in love with a girl.  By the end of the 1950s, heterosexual desire as as emblematic of "young manhood" as a hard chest and bulging biceps. 

Only a few of the Adventure Boys were preteens, or cast as preteens (Bryan Russell, Kevin Corcoran Ike Eisenmann).  Then the requirements changed: they weren't expected to like girls at all -- the mythic "discovery" was still in the future.  But they still had to take their shirts off, displaying their physiques as blatantly as the teenage musclemen.  And the conflation of semi-nudity and lack of heterosexual interest allowed a space for the recognition of same-sex desire among the preteens in the audience.

Kevin Corcoran was born in 1949 into a family of actors (with six siblings in the business).  By the age of 7, he was starring on The Mickey Mouse Club as one of the singing, dancing, ear-wearing Mouseketeers

In The New Adventures of Spin and Marty (1957), Kevin played Moochie, the tagalong annoyance to the gay-coded couple (Tim Considine, David Stollery).  The name (and the personality) stuck, and soon he was playing tagalong annoyances named Moochie in several Disney productions, often as the little brother of Tommy Kirk, James MacArthur, or both.

But not merely annoyances. The boy exceeds the teenager in masculine bravado, his masculinity becoming even more enhanced by the absence of heterosexual desire. His semi-nudity itself becomes queer, signifying maleness without a feminine gaze. 

In the boy-and-dog Western, Savage Sam (1963), for instance, 14-year old Kevin plays Arliss Coates, his Old Yeller character, now living alone with his big brother Travis (Tommy Kirk). 

Mom and Dad are breezily dismissed, but adult guardian Uncle Beck (Brian Keith, who always wears pink) looks in on the boys from time to time, occasionally bringing along his gay-coded life partner, Lester White (Dewey Martin, who always wears lavender) and daring us to draw conclusions.

Travis does the wimmen’s work, cookin’ and cleanin’ and bein’ purty (the adult men constantly comment on how handsome he is), while Arliss, a scrappin’, ornery cuss, does the man’s chores.

Girl next door Lisbeth (Marta Kristen), responsible for demonstrating that Travis is heterosexual, overdoes it, eyeing him hungrily and bandying about barely-cloaked sexual innuendos. When they ride together, she places her hands not around his stomach, like most back-seat equestrians, but around his belt, a posture that might allow her intimate access to his privates. We can find few more risqué gestures in the Disney opus.
A band of Apaches, unregenerate savages of the old school, abduct Travis, Arliss, and Lisbeth, rip off the boys’ shirts to give the audience what they bought their tickets for, and force them on a cross-country journey back to their village. Butch Arliss squawks and fights, but shy, feminine Travis suggests that they bide their time until they can escape.

As a consequence, the Apaches pretty much leave Lisbeth and Travis alone, but they decide to make a brave out of Arliss. They grab and grope him exhaustively, including hands placed directly in his most intimate areas, suggesting a link between homoerotic desire and savagery, as juxtaposed with the “civilized” heterosexual romance of Travis and Lisbeth

Tommy Kirk was outed a few years later, and fired from Disney.  

Kevin played "the man of the house," his masculinity undiluted by a feminine desire for the feminine, in The Shaggy Dog (1959), Toby Tyler (1960), Swiss Family Robinson (1961), and The Mooncussers (1962).  In adolescence he retired from acting, but continues to work behind the camera, directing episodes of Scarecrow and Mrs. King, Quantum Leap, Baywatch, and Murder She Wrote.  

Humphrey Bogart Comes Out of the Closet

I just watched Casablanca (1942) again, about a suave American exile in World War II Morocco who helps his ex-girlfriend and her husband escape the Nazis, and was impressed by:
1. The war intrigue.  It's as important as the hetero-romance.
2. The gay subtexts.  Every man in Casablanca is in love with Rick, and the fade-out scene shows Captain Renault offering to go away with him, as he quips "This looks like the beginning of a beautiful friendship."
3. The humor.  Humphrey Bogart tosses out sardonic one-liners with the ease of a Woody Allen.  He could easily have been a comedian.

Bogie was the most famous actor of his generation, winning five Oscars for 86 film roles, mostly as suave, sophisticated guys with troubled pasts and passionate hetero-romances.  Also strong gay subtexts, at least in the movies I've seen:

Dead End (1937): Baby-faced gangster (Bogie) and architect (Joel McCrea) compete for the body and soul of a teenage hood.

Angels with Dirty Faces (1938): Same plot, only baby-faced gangster (James Cagney) and priest (Pat O'Brien).

The Maltese Falcon (1941): Detective Sam Spade (Bogie) wrests the mysterious statue from the hands of a gay criminal.

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948):  Gold prospectors (Bogie, Tim Holt) get more than they bargained for.

Knock on Any Door (1949): Attorney Bogie is in love with his hunky young protege (John Derek, below).

I really should see Key Largo, The African Queen, The Caine Mutiny, Sabrina, The Barefoot Contessa, and We're No Angels.

There is also, apparently, a gay connection in real life.  Due to his lisp, sophistication, and feminine mannerisms, Bogie was often assumed gay.  Even if he wasn't, any male Hollywood star was bound to get lots of offers.  He rejected them with good-natured aplomb -- or, according to rumor, sometimes not.  After all, he had a prodigious sexual appetite, and even the most wealthy, talented, and attractive of heterosexual men sometimes has trouble finding enough women.  

The occasional guy amid his thousand or so women made Bogie wonder about his sexual identity, especially when he found himself impotent with second wife Mary Philips (1928-37).  Was he gay?  The thought filled him with self-loathing; he considered suicide.



Wait -- he had no problem with gay people, yet grew suicidal over the thought that he might personally be gay.  Something doesn't add up here.

This all comes from Darwin Porter's obviously fictionalized biography.  One doesn't find any references to Bogie being bisexual in earlier accounts of Hollywood "scandals."

But it's undeniable that Bogie was a gay ally -- or as allied as you could get in that era.  He frequented gay bars and had close friendships with gay men throughout his life, including Charles Farrell, Spencer Tracey, William Haines, Noel Coward, and even a young Truman Capote (who beat him at arm wrestling).

A life full of beautiful friendships.