Pippin: a Gay Piece of the Sky

In high school (1975-78) and college (1978-82), I hung out with the drama club crowd and played in the orchestra, so I spent a lot of time playing in, going to, and analyzing musicals.  I saw Pippin on stage at least three times, including a 1978 performance with a young Chris Young, who would go on to become a Hollywood star. Its bare sets, broken fourth wall, and tinkly songs made it a favorite of high school drama clubs (photo is from an Eagan, Minnesota production starring Jordan Oxborough).

It has a theme similar to that of Peer Gynt: Pippin, son of King Charlemagne, sets out to find where he belongs in the world.   He tries becoming a scholar, a warrior, a hedonist, and a fighter against tyranny -- butting heads with the gay-vague villain Lewis.

None of those work, so Pippin becomes an artist, a religious zealot, and a tyrant.  Then he realizes that the only true happiness lies back home, in being a husband and father to the widow Catherine and her young son Theo.

Same old story: job, house, wife, kids.  Conform. Resistance is futile. Learn to love Big Brother.

The difference: everyone in Pippin knows that they're acting in a play, they and often break the fourth wall.  The Lead Player, a sort of Mephistophiles, keeps admonishing the actor playing Pippin to have his character dream, experiment, achieve things.

When the actor decides that Pippin would be happiest settling down with Catherine,  the Leading Player becomes furious. He orders the troupe and the orchestra to pack up everything, including the sets and the costumes, and leave.  No more play!  But even on a dark, silent stage, with no script and no final bows, Pippin is content.

I'll take the Lead Player's advice and aspire, thanks.

One thing Pippin never tries is same-sex love.  He doesn't even do any buddy-bonding, though sometimes the androgynous, leering, gay-coded Lead Player seems to have a homoerotic interest in him (or a hetero-erotic, when she's a woman).

And there is substantial beefcake.  Pippin and Lewis usually wear sleeveless form-fitting chain mail tunics that accentuate their chest and biceps, and they sometimes go completely shirtless.  You're not going to see many more bare chests on stage, except maybe in The King and I.

Pippin premiered on Broadway in 1972, and ran through 1977, with John Rubinstein (left) as Pippin and Ben Vereen as the Leading Player.

Other Pippins include Barry Williams (1975, above), William Katt (1981 film version), Jack Noseworthy (2000), Matthew Arden and Tyler Giordano (2009, playing Pippin together), James Royce Edwards, and Matthew James Thomas (2012, left).

Greatest American Hero

None of the science fiction comedies that filled the airwaves in the 1970s and 1980s (Automan, My Secret Identity, The Powers of Matthew Star, Misfits of Science) were entirely heterosexist; the bumbling hero is usually "allergic to girls" or "shy around girls."  But The Greatest American Hero (1981-1983) went even farther, portraying not only a lack of heterosexual interest but intense homoerotic buddy bonding.

It starred curly-haired blond William Katt, who had previously displayed ample buddy-bonding (and a pleasantly muscular physique) in Big Wednesday (1979) and the Broadway musical Pippin (1981).

He played mild-mannered teacher Ralph Hinkley.  The show premiered on March 18, 1981, and on March 30th, a man named John Hinkley tried to assassinate President Reagan. Skittish producers fudged on his name for the rest of the season, and finally gave up and changed it to Hunkley.

While driving in the desert, Ralph and FBI Agent Bill Maxwell (Robert Culp of I Spy) encounter a UFO.  Its occupants assign them the task of fighting evil, and give Ralph a special flying suit.  Unfortunately, he loses the instruction book.

Plots veered between the realistic and the ridiculous.  The kids in Ralph's class get a piece of the action, as does attorney Pam Davidson (Connie Selleca), who eventually marries Ralph.  But in spite of the "fade out kiss," Ralph's main emotional connection is with Bill.  And since Bill doesn't have any superpowers, he gets captured by the bad guys quite often, prompting a daring rescue and a "my hero!" moment.

Since Ralph was always putting his uniform on and taking it off, there were many shirtless scenes, revealing a physique quite a bit more muscular than one would expect for any mild-mannered schoolteacher.  Katt appeared fully nude in Playgirl magazine in 1982.

In its second season, Greatest American Hero was put in a Friday night time slot -- when teenagers were usually out -- and opposite the mega-hit Dallas -- so ratings declined, and it was cancelled.

Robert Culp was not dismayed -- he had already been on tv for many years.  William Katt went on to star in the buddy-bonding horror movie House (1986), plus several  Perry Mason movies (his mother, Barbara Hale, played the attorney's secretary in the original series).  He's still working constantly, with eight projects in 2010 alone.

Big Wednesday

Big Wednesday (1978)  covers twelve years in the lives of a trio of goldenboy surfers: troubled Matt (Jan-Michael Vincent, fresh from his homoerotic role in Danger Island); blue-eyed, curly-haired innocent Jack (William Katt, who would go on to star in Greatest American Hero); and joking outsider Leroy (Gary Busey).

Beach scenes in most movies involve slow-motion close-ups of bikini-clad women,  with an occasional guy in the distance, but Big Wednesday lingers over shots of glistening male bodies so tight that you can see the veins running across biceps and count the vertebrae on backsides.  Even scenes set far from the beach are populated chiefly by gorgeous muscleboys.





The trio shares a quiet, subdued homoerotic bond from the first moments, when they awaken on the beach in 1962, wrapped in each other’s arms under blankets, then surf “the morning glass” on a single board.  But Leroy goes even farther, eschewing the girl-grabbing that most buddy movies emphasize to “prove” that the protagonists are all heterosexual.  When they invade the Star Burger Café (still shirtless) and flirt with a pretty waitress, Leroy pointedly ignores her, horsing around with Matt instead.  Later, at a party, dozens of (still shirtless) muscleboys locate girls to grab and kiss, with the exception of Leroy – he’s in the kitchen, half naked, being oiled up by some male friends (to facilitate sexual congress, I presume).

When Matt and Jack get girlfriends, they all head down to Acapulco, and Leroy remains a “fifth wheel” who doesn’t even flirt with the local girls.
Years pass, and the water grows cold.  Matt battles the bottle, Jack goes to Vietnam, and Bear (Sam Rockwell), the South of Market leatherman who runs the beach surf shop, becomes a wealthy surfboard magnate.  All of them (except Leroy) abandon the homoerotic paradise of surfing for marriage.  Yet at Bear’s wedding, he proposes a toast:
Jack: What are we drinking to?
Bear: Only to your friends.  To your friends, come hell or high water.

It is an odd toast for an occasion that usually marks the end or severe circumscription of same-sex friendships in favor of heterosexual bondng, and striking when one notes that Bear’s fiancee appears only in that scene.  It is as if he married simply to celebrate his love of his friends, “the most important thing you got.”

The trio concurs.  Heterosexual practice comes and goes; there are flirtations, sexual interludes, marriages, and divorces (except for Leroy, whose romantic interests are never specified).  But their most important, most permanent bonds are with each other.

In 1974, at the end of the movie, they gather for another “Big Wednesday” at the beach, and the camera lingers again (for a full ten minutes) on their bodies glistening and straining under the bright summer sun.

We don’t have to look far for clues about how the possibility of same-sex desire became so overt into this plot-riddled extension of Endless Summer (1966): director John Milius, a surfer in his own right and sometime workout buddy of Arnold Schwartzeneggar, specialized in the bonding of brawny, heavily-muscled buddies in Conan the Barbarian (1982), Red Dawn (1984), and Flight of the Intruder (1991), and here he cast three goldenboys who would play much the same roles throughout their careers.  Jan-Michael Vincent plays troubled, aging muscleboys. Gary Busey has played soldiers, villains, lunatics, rock stars, and heavily-muscled regular guys, pairing with Willie Nelson in Barbarosa (1982), gay-friendly Corey Haim in Silver Bullet (1985), and Fred Williamson in South Beach (1992), but he is almost always a lost soul aching for love.