The Explosive Generation: Billy Gray in Love

In spite of the beefcake on the posters and lobby cards, The Explosive Generation (1961) doesn't offer many swimsuit, underwear, or locker room scenes, though there are lots of clean-cut 1950s teens in tight pants.

It does offer some significant gay subtexts, as rich kid Bobby (Billy Gray of Father Knows Best, right) moons over basketball star Dan (the muscular Lee Kinsolving, left), and invites him to a wild party at his parents' beach house.

They dance, drink beer, and Bobby tries to talk Dan into having sex with his girlfriend Janet (Patty McCormack, center, best known as the murderous little girl in The Bad Seed). 

 Wait -- why does Bobby care so much about whether Dan has sex with a girl?  What kind of vicarious pleasure can he get from. . .oh, right, the subtext.

That's why this poster shows the two of them dragging her toward a three-way triangulation.

Janet is reluctant -- how far should a girl go to prove her love to a boy?

So she brings up the subject in class.  Fortunately, she has one of those hip, caring, hunky teachers who are always trying to make a difference: Peter Gifford (William Shatner), who is as horny as Captain Kirk meeting an alien princess, making every statement a double-entendre and putting his hands all over the bodies of both male and female students (not to mention dragging a boy out of a girl's arms so he can have him for himself).

Gifford decides to conduct a survey about students' attitudes toward sex.  Parents find out, and become apoplectic with outrage.  The principal starts screaming.  The cops get involved.   Gifford is asked to apologize (that's all?)

Bobby leads a student protest  -- but not one of those loud protests of the hippie generation.  They give the teachers the silent treatment.  And the principal backs down. Problem solved.

The Explosive Generation is not very explosive, but it provides an interesting view of how histrionic parents got -- and still get -- over the idea of their teenagers having sex.

Star Trek

Star Trek (1966-69) represents the beginning of a franchise that eventually encompassed 6 tv series, 12 movies, and an infinite number of tie-in novels, comic books, games, and toys. But at the time I didn't notice.   Either my parents watched something else, or it aired past my bedtime, so I only watched when I slept over with a friend who was a fan.

And I didn't have a lot of friends who were fans.  I didn't see most episodes until reruns started appearing in the 1980s.

I only remember one moment of joy: in the 1966 episode "Naked Time," the space explorers contract a virus that makes them act irrationally. Navigator Sulu (George Takai), imagining that he is D'Artagnon of the Three Musketeers, rushes down the corridor, sword in hand, his chest hard and bronze and gleaming.  

And later, cured, he returns to the room he shares with Ensign Chekhov (Walter Koenig).  Chekhov, already in bed, rises on one elbow.  "Are you ok?" he asks.  "I was worried."  "I'm ok now," Sulu says, sitting next to him.  They smile.

Like the smile shared by Rich and Sean in The Secret of Boyne Castle, it became an iconic memory of my childhood.  I wanted that smile more than anything.

Except the scene never happened.  Chekhov wasn't even in the episode, and he and Sulu were never shown sharing a room.  I invented the memory.

So, what are we left with:

1. A universe where heterosexual desire is a constant.  Remember when they meet early explorer Zephram Cochrane (Glen Corbett), trapped on a planet with an alien energy cloud.  It's female, and in love with him.  

2. An endless supply of alien babes for Captain Kirk (William Shatner) to smash his face against: "Kiss?  What is kiss?"

3. Some beefcake: Kirk got his shirt ripped off in many episodes, occasionally Kirk or another character (such as Frank Gorshin) bulged, and occasionally an alien dude, such as David Soul or Michael Forest,  wear a revealing outfit.  

4. No significant buddy-bonding.  Some people see a spark of homoerotic desire between Kirk and Spock (Leonard Nimoy), but I don't see it.

5.  No gay characters, ever.  Ok, we can forgive the 1960s series, but what about The Next Generation, Voyager, or Deep Space Nine?  Obviously this is a world where gay people are unknown and unwelcome. No wonder my friends and I spent our time watching something else, or listening to The Monkees.  

Top 10 Beefcake Horror Movies: The 1970s

Horror movies in the 1970s upped the blood, guts, and overall grossness content to compete with tv, but unfortunately backed away from the nonstop nudity of the swinging 1960s.  Still, there were plenty of muscular guys around, taking showers, climbing into bed, or being strapped to tables for weird experiments.  You just had to know where to look.  Here are the Top 10 Beefcake Horror Movies:

1. Daughters of Darkness (1971): John Karlen, the gay-vague Willie Loomis of Dark Shadows, plays a hip artist who stumbles upon a couple of female vampires.  You get a lot of butt shots, and a glimpse of Willie's willy in a shower-sex scene.

2. Malpertuis, aka The Legend of Doom House (1971): A Belgian movie about an androgynous sailor (Matthieu Carrier), who is abducted and brought to a creepy house populated by Greek gods, all of whom have sexual designs on him.

3. Frogs (1972). About homicidal frogs.  Sam Elliot (left) doesn't seem to own a shirt, and beefcake model Nicholas Cortland gets frogged to death in the shower.

4. Flesh for Frankenstein, aka Andy Warhol's Frankenstein (1973): Baron Von Frankenstein tries to build a sex-machine monster out of Srdjan Zelenovic (top photo), while his nude boyfriend, Andy Warhol regular Joe Dallesandro, tries to save him.  But be careful -- there are an awful lot of bare breasts on display.

5. Devil Times Five (1974). Five crazy kids, including future teen idol Leif Garrett, invade a winter resort and cause mayhem.  But guest Taylor Lacher still has time to strip down and make out with his wife.  There's also a seduction of a mentally-challenged handyman.

6. The Devil's Rain (1975).  If you didn't get enough of a shirtless William Shatner in his early teen idol days or on Star Trek, you can see him here as a guy battling small-town Satanists.  Look for the film debut of John Travolta as "Danny."

7. The Reincarnation of Peter Proud (1975): Michael Sarrazin, who took off his clothes frequently in 1970s dramas, here hangs out in the swimming pool a lot while figuring out that he's the reincarnation of his girlfriend's murdered Dad.

8. Track of the Moon Beast (1976).  If ever a movie was tailor-made for the Mystery Science Theater 3000 riffs....College student Chase Cordell gets hit by a meteor fragment and goes on a rampage.  He also took off his shirt in the grindhouse Sins of Rachel (1972).

9. Eaten Alive (1977).  A hotelier in the South handles unhappy guests by feeding them to a giant crocodile.  Robert Englund, who would go on to play Freddie Krueger in the Nightmare on Elm Street series, displays rather a nice physique as a victim named Buck.

10. Coma (1978).  Half-naked musclemen (and women) are being kept in comas to harvest for organs. Among them is Tom Selleck, a few years before he became Magnum, P.I.

The Hunks of the Millennium's Worst TV Series, 2010-2018

And now on to the clickbait list of the worst tv series of 2010-2018, and the mega-hunks who (almost) made them worth a look:

2010.  Mental: A psychiatrist (Chris Vance) can see into his patients' heads, but is worried about becoming schizophrenic himself.  Vance isn't bad, I suppose, but he pales in comparison to Nicholas Gonzalez as his horndog coworker.

2011.  S*** My Dad Says.  Star Trek fans tuned in to see William Shatner playing a crotchety, conservative Archie Bunker clone, head-butting with his liberal, middle aged sons (Jonathan Sadowski, Will Sasso).  Sasso is a little chunky (he played the chubby one of the Three Stooges), but Sadowski is rather hunky.

2012. Charlie's Angels.  Did anyone really want a retread of that 1970s show about female private detectives being told by an unseen voice to go undercover at bikini ranches?  The main cast consisted only of the angels, the voice of Victor Garber, and Ramon Rodriguez as the assistant Bosley.  The original Bosley was asexual, but this one was hetero-horny, and partied with the angels.  Not a bad physique.










2013. Guys with Kids.  Three guys raising their babies.  None are gay; in fact, they all have wives or ex-wives.  So the hilarity comes from the bizarre spectacle of men actually being fathers?  The three are played by former teen idol Jesse Bradford, Anthony Anderson of Black-ish, and comedian Zach Cregger.  I've seen a hundred pics of Bradford, and Anderson is a bit homophobic, so here's Cregger.

2014. Dads.  Two guys living together (one married, one single) are befuddled when their dads (not gay) both move in . Talk about strained premise.  The two guys are played by the cute but homophobic Seth Green, and the formerly cut but now sort of mousy Giovanni Ribisi.  Which to choose?

Ribisi has better abs.

More after the break

The 39 Dumbest Things You See on TV

I've watched a lot of tv, mostly sci-fi and sitcoms.  The set was on all the time when I was a kid.  In adulthood, it's like comfort food, warm, predictable, mildly amusing.  But is it really necessary to have so many plot conventions that strain credulity?  Plus are sexist, heterosexist, or downright homophobic?  Almost makes you want to pick up a book instead.

1. No one ever says a complete sentence; everyone takes turns.  "This looks like the work of..." "Two killers."  "So we should..."  ",,,get backup."

2. Whenever someone says "It's possible that...", as in "It's possible that the signals are coming from Mars" or "It's possible that the killer worked for the FBI," they mean "It's an absolute certainty."

3. Whenever someone says, "The chances against this working are a million to one," they mean, "It will absolutely work."

4. You cannot discuss the plan on the way to the site, even if it takes two hours to get there.  You must always wait until you have arrived.

5. All discussions of plans must begin with the phrase: "And that's the plan.  First we...."

6. Whenever someone asks "What's for dinner?", the answer must always be "Your favorite."

7. The only people who can eat dinner at home are heterosexual nuclear families: The Man in a lumberjack shirt, a son and a daughter under age 10, and The Woman, usually blond.  The Man always says "Great meal, honey."

8. The only people who can eat in restaurants are four young adults, divided into male-female couples.  One is always shown shoving a forkful of food into someone else's mouth.  Sometimes this happens in groups, too.


9. Whenever anyone turns on the tv, they must  hear a news story pertaining to their situation.

10.  If they are shown watching tv alone, it should be an old black and white movie, usually a Western.

11. Except for kids and serial killers, who must always watch public domain cartoons from the 1930s.

12. The only people who can watch tv in groups are heterosexual nuclear families, and they are always cuddling while holding a gigantic bowl of popcorn.  No one in the real world eats popcorn while watching tv.

13. If someone wants to talk to you, they can't call, they must drive across town to get there.

14. And the drive is extremely short.

15. And the door is unlocked, so they just walk in.

16. Whenever you enter a scary place, someone must say "This place gives me the creeps."  But no one in real life ever says this.

17.  People always complain that they don't have enough money to pay bills, but have thousands to spend on expensive props.

18. Poor people live in huge, well-appointed houses.  Middle-class people live in mansions. There is no such thing as an apartment, except in New York.

19. Men may not be shown engaging in any housecleaning activity.  Ever.  They can be asked to cook, to "help their wives out," but they must flub the job and take the kids to McDonald's.

20. The main characters must be white, but the captain, chief, or judge who appears in just one episode should be black, to demonstrate that racism no longer exists.

21. Everyone belongs to a huge number of clubs and organizations, but only for one episode apiece.  Then the club is never mentioned again.

22. Funerals always occur in the rain.

23. All college classes, even advanced seminars, must be taught in giant lecture halls, with never an empty seat.

24. College professors must all be elderly, wear bow ties, and have gigantic offices and personal secretaries.

25. All high school teachers must be bitter and depressed, or sadistic jerks who, in real life, would be fired in 30 seconds.

26. You can struggle with failing grades throughout high school and still get into a top college.  Even the Ivy League.

27. Action-adventure series must always begin with a flashback in which the central character's heterosexual romantic partner is killed.

28. Movie trailers must always contain a heterosexual kiss, even if there aren't any in the actual movie.

29. When a male character dresses in drag, he always does a horrible job, with chest hair and moustache, and he must have a startlingly deep voice.

30. Preteens must always be portrayed as heterosexual and boy- or girl-crazy, no matter what their age.

31. All teenage boys must be portrayed as crazy about sports, rock music, and girls.

32. Single adult heterosexuals must make jokes about how horny they are every five seconds.

33. Married heterosexual men hate their wives, especially having sex with them, and will do anything to avoid it.

34. A transwoman should always like women before transitioning and men after, to ensure viewers that everyone on Earth is heterosexual, regardless of gender identity.

35. Gay men must always be portrayed as swishy queens obsessed with fashion, skin-care products, and show tunes.

36. They rarely have gay friends, but they are crazy about hanging out with heterosexual women.

37. There are no lesbians, just "girls gone wild" who can easily "switch back" to heterosexual again.

38. Men with feminine traits are always evil.

39.  Space explorers always get their shirts ripped off.

See also: 10 Gay Movies I Hated; and 12 Songs I Hated.

Wilton's First Time was with Captain Kirk

Millions of Baby Boomer kids got their first glimpse of beefcake on Star Trek (1966-69) where, week after week, Captain Kirk  would take his shirt off to fight alien monsters or kiss alien babes. I didn't find him attractive -- he was too smug, too leery, and way too hetero.

Shatner continued to play Kirk in movies and parodies for 40 years, but he also appeared in a wide variety of movies and tv series, including starring roles in T. J. Hooker, Boston Legal, and Sh** My Dad Says.

Married four times, with a notorious eye for the ladies, Shatner has no gay rumors, that I know of.  George Takei, who played Sulu on Star Trek, reveals that the entire cast and crew knew that he was gay, except Shatner: "it went right over his head."  For him, gay people simply did not exist.



But in his early days, Shatner was quite different.

Montreal, September 1947

Wilton was 16 years old (model is over 18), a sophomore at West Hill High School in Montreal, and an aspiring journalist -- he had already published a poem about the War.

Physically, he was not so hot --  a tall stringbean, pushing through puberty with oversized hands and feet, oily skin, and constant horniness.

He didn't know that gay people were defined as "criminal psychopaths" in the Canadian penal code.  He didn't even know that gay people exist.

But he knew that Johnny Sheffield in a loincloth in Tarzan and the Huntress made him feel all hot and flushed.

And he had a picture of Alan Ladd with his shirt off hidden in a desk drawer in his room.

And he liked looking at the football players.  Some of them were nice, saying "hello" to him in the hallway and collaborating with him on class assignments,  but many of them were jerks.

Bill Shatner was a jerk.

Wilton had to admit that he was cute, with that curly reddish-brown hair and that bright Pepsodent smile. But he was a money-hungry, mercenary, soulless cog in the Cold War machine.  He wasn't interested in acting then, although he had done some children's theater.  He was all about money and getting rich -- offensive to Wilt's artistic sensibility.  He planned to get a football scholarship to McGill, major in economics, then start his own business.

But it wasn't just our difference in temperament.  He strutted around like he owned the place.  He wasn't even a star...he played an offensive end -- that's a minor position, but it made him a regular Jim Thorpe, in his own mind anyway.  Wilton had him in bio and French together, but you'd never know it.

When he was in a good mood, he ignored Wilton, walked right past like he was a ghost.  And God forbid he was in a bad mood -- he'd make with the nonstop jokes about Wilton's height, his acne, calling him ugly and a fruit, asking if he had pubic hair yet.




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

Adam West: Playing Gay before Batman

In the 1960s, when my friends and I watched the camp superhero series Batman (which, by the way, we didn't realize was camp), we zeroed in on Burt Ward's Dick Grayson/Robin, because he was a teenager, and because of incredibly bulgeworthy costume.  We all but ignored Adam West's Bruce Wayne/Batman.

During the decades since Batman ended, Adam West has had a substantial career playing quirky, out-of-touch parodies of himself on everything from The Adventures of Pete and Pete to Family Guy (where he plays "himself" as the Mayor of Quahog). Delightfully quirky, but not much in the muscle department.

But before Batman, the future Caped Crusader was a bona fide beefcake star.

Born in 1928 in Walla Walla, Washington, West started his career in comedy, as the host of a live children's show in Hawaii and someone named "Ham Ector" on the Philco Playhouse, but in 1959 he moved to Hollywood to join the beefcake craze -- dozens of hunky actors, many discovered by Henry Willson, were tearing up the screens with shirtless and swimsuit shots.

He became very busy immediately, with 10 roles in 1959 alone, notably in The Young Philadelphians, as a man who cannot consummate his marriage for unspecified reasons (i.e., he's gay). He rushes off and dies in an auto accident.  His wife has sex with someone else, and his "son" grows up to be Paul Newman.

 During the next few years, West guest starred in Westerns -- Sugarfoot, Cheyenne, Bronco -- notably fighting "Tarzan" Jock Mahoney on Laramie.  He starred in swinging detective dramas and sitcoms, and in 1961 he got his own tv series, The Detectives.  His movie credits included Tammy and the Doctor, the gay-subtext classic Robinson Crusoe on Mars, and the hunk-meets-feral-girl Mara of the Wilderness.

Then came Batman, and everything changed.  Beefcake roles were hard to come by: West played Cleander opposite William Shatner's Alexander in Alexander the Great (1968), and a two-fisted adventurer in The Girl Who Knew Too Much (1969), but his presence alone made them campy.

Like many men of his generation, West was somewhat homophobic; in the 1980s, he was flown to London to appear at an event, but when he discovered that it was gay-themed, he refused to appear.

More recently he commented on the gay undertones of Batman: "gay, straight, whatever.  Add them to the ratings.  If gays like the show, wonderful!"

He died on June 9th, 2017.

See also: Lane's Hookup with Batman, RObin Joker.

Doug McClure: From Physique Pictorial to The Simpsons

One of the supporting characters in the "my secret" teencom Out of This World (1987-91), about a teenage alien, was Kyle X. Applegate (Doug McClure): a bumbling, dimwitted has-been tv star.  In 1991, a bumbling, dimwitted has-been movie star began appearing on The Simpsons with the schtick "Hi, I'm Troy McClure.  You may remember me from such movies as..."

Who was this Doug McClure, and how did he get typecast as a bumbling, dimwitted has-been?

A little research reveals quite a different character:

A fitness model who appeared in the gay-vague Physique Pictorial in 1957 (here pinning Clint Eastwood).

Appearances in nearly 100 movies and tv shows, playing cowboys, detectives, and adventurers, usually in gay-subtext buddy pairs.

1. Jed Sills, partner of Don Corey (Anthony George) in the swnging 1960s detective series Checkmate (1960-62).

2. Engineering student Chuck Manning in The Lively Set (1964), who teams up with young mechanic Casey Owens (teen idol James Darren) to build a jet-powered car.  He's not interested in girls, but his sister hangs around to provide Casey with the fade-out kiss.

3. John, brother to Beau Geste (Guy Williams of Lost in Space) n the French foreign legion adventure (1966).

4. Trampas, head farm hand on the Shiloh Ranch in Wyoming run by The Virginian (James Drury) (1962-71).  This was his most famous role.  Apparently he knew how to fill out a cowboy suit, especially with a rifle handy.

5. Cash Conover, partner of 19th century secret agent Boomer Cable (William Shatner) on Barbary Coast (1975-76).

Doug continued to play cowboys, detectives, secret agents, and adventurers through the 1980s, but he never had another starring role. Maybe that's where he got the "has-been" image.

 All of that buddy-bonding fueled some substantial gay rumors, even though he was married to women five times.

See also: James Shigeta.

William Shatner, Teen Idol

William Shatner will forever be remembered as Captain James T. Kirk, who taught alien babes how to kiss and got his shirt ripped off by alien demigods on the first incarnation of Star Trek (1966-1969).

Or maybe as T.J. Hooker (1982-86), the veteran cop paired with rookie Vince Romano (Adrian Zmed).  But in a 50-plus year career, he's played hundreds of characters, including some beefcake and buddy-bonding roles.

Especially early in his career:

 Billy Budd, the young cabin boy who draws the erotic interest of the captain in a 1955 tv adaption of the Herman Melville novel.

The kind, sensitive, gay-vague Alexei in The Brothers Karamazov (1958), with Yul Brynner as Dmitri.

Peter Gifford in The Explosive Generation (1960), who causes a scandal by teaching sex ed in high school (his students include Lane Kinsolving, Billy Gray of Father Knows Best, and a very young Beau Bridges).

The gay Greek emperor Alexander the Great in a 1968 tv movie (heterosexualized, of course).

In Vanished (1971), a powerful presidential adviser (Arnold Green) vanishes.  The White House tries to cover up the fact that he was gay. Shatner plays a reporter trying to uncover the truth.

Not a lot of gay roles, but he did appear on the drag queen-friendly Madame's Place in 1982, and he played a homophobic lawyer on a 2007 episode of Boston Legal, assigned the case of a judge who is suing a company for not "curing" his "same-sex attraction disorder."

And in his 2010-2011 sitcom $h*! my Dad Says, his Ed has a gay assistant.