The 3 1/2 Gay Couples of "Jaws 2"

The summer of 1978: I was 17 years old, a new high school graduate working at the Carousel Snack Bar at the mall and getting ready for college.  I had just figured "it" out, but I hadn't yet met any gay people.  I went to a lot of movies: Big Wednesday, Corvette Summer, The Cheap Detective, Foul Play, The Revenge of the Pink Panther, Hooper, Animal House.  But I didn't see Jaws 2, in spite of its iconic tagline: "Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water."

I figured it was just another 1970s disaster movie like The Towering Inferno, and probably infused with the heterosexual male gaze. Who wants to watch a bunch of bikini babes getting chomped?

Turns out that the original is a masterpiece of gay subtext, While tracking a rogue shark, Police Chief Brody (Roy Scheider) and impish grad student Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) sizzle with "will they or won't they?" erotic intensity. They don't actually kiss in the final scene, but close enough.

I recently watched the sequel to see if the homoeroticism continues.  Steven Spielberg chose not to direct, so Jeannot Szwarc stepped in.  He did mostly tv dramas and horror, like A Summer Without Boys (well, that sounds like horror to me).

 Hooper is absent, off doing research in Antartica (aw, does he send love letters back to Brody?), and Chief Brody is more heterosexual, actively involved with his wife.  But he has little to do besides yell "You kids get off the beach!"  The star is his teenage son, Mike (Mike Gruner), who goes sailing  in spite of the admonitions, and has to rescue his friends from getting chomped.

As several reviewers note, it's like the prototype of a 1980s teenkill, with ineffectual adults, horny teenagers off by themselves, and a psycho-slasher shark.

But let's take a closer look at those kids. 10 boys and 3 girls in four boats.  One boat contains a boy-girl pair, and another Mike's so-called "love interest" and his little brother.  The others are mixed among the boys without any male-female pairings.

Hardly a heterosexual outing.

And the boys (excluding Little Brother) are divided into bff dyads, guys who put their hands on each other a lot, grab each other a lot, and don't necessarily express any hetero-horniness.  They can easily be read as gay couples.

Couple #1: Juvenile delinquent in training Mike and wisecracking sidekick Andy (Gary Springer)

Couple #2: Nerds Timmy (G. Thomas Dunlap) and Doug (Keith Gordon)

Couple #3: Teen operator Eddie (Gary Dugan) and spoiled rich kid Polo (John Dukakis).

Only Eddie , who leaves his bff to go off with a girl , gets chomped .  I guess having a girlfriend is a major transgression in a homoerotic world

Couple 3.5: Although the Chief is more heterosexual this time around, he does take the time to put his hand on the shoulder of Larry (David Elliott).  Feeling lonely for Hooper, Chief?

There is surprisingly little beefcake ; this beach has no shirtless studs walking around . But no bikini babes either , which only adds to the homoerotic vibe.


See also: Jaws and Gay Romance

Dave Draper Doesn't Get the Girl

Dave Draper, "The Blond Bomber," was the go-to guy for movie bodybuilders during the 1960s, when most of the bulkers had moved to Italy to do sword-and-sandal flicks.

He never appeared in the gay-vague Physique Pictorial or similar physique magazines; in fact, some of his magazine covers are rather heterosexist, sandwiching him between two women, who are lusting after his biceps.  Inside, however, we see some homoerotic subtexts, as when fellow bodybuilder William Smith gazes at Dave's biceps.

After a minor role as a guy who takes his shirt off in Who's Been Sleeping in My Bed (1963), he capitalized on the sword-and-sandal crazy anyway, showing old Steve Reeve movies as Dave the Gladiator on local L.A. TV (1964-65).

In 1966 he landed a starring role in Lord Love a Duck, a comedy about a gay-vague Mephistophiles, Alan Musgrave (gay actor Roddy McDowall), who concocts wild schemes, including murder, to grant the wishes of his friend Barbara (Tuesday Weld).  Dave was one of her wishes, but not the man she married. Alan is supposed to find him intimidating, but instead approaches him with barely-restrained eye-bulging desire.

After more minor roles as guys who take their shirts off and scare people in Three on a Couch and Walk Don't Run, Dave starred in Don't Make Waves (1967), about New Yorker Carlo Cofield (Tony Curtis), who moves to Southern California to "Turn on!  Stay loose!  Make out!"  and romance a skydiving model named Malibu (Sharon Tate).  Dave played her boyfriend, Harry Holland, who also befriends Carlo.  There's a significant gay subtext, as in most of Tony Curtis's movies.

In 1967, Dave appeared as musclemen on episodes of The Monkees and The Beverly Hillbillies.  No significant gay subtexts, though it is interesting to watch the lesbian actress Nancy Kulp pretend that she is swooning over his physique.

Disillusioned at always been cast as bullies, objects of derision, and guys who don't get the girl, as if the bodybuilder was somehow inadequately masculine, Dave retired from acting to concentrate on bodybuilding and writing, and on managing World's Gym in Santa Cruz.  His personal website features many interesting articles on the history of bodybuilding, but doesn't mention gay people.

Swinging Bachelor Detectives of the 1960s

The early 1960s was overloaded with tv shows about "swinging bachelors" who dug the ladies but found their deepest emotional bonds with each other: Route 66, Follow the Sun, Bourbon Street Beat, It's a Man's World, Hawaiian Eye, 77 Sunset Strip, Surfside 6.  (Sea Hunt was an exception, about a solo scuba diver.)

They usually had a female friend who worked the switchboard or sang at the local bar and provided opportunities for leering, but few if any plots involved them finding heterosexual romance.

The bachelors were often discovered by gay talent agent Henry Willson, so they were often gay, bisexual, or gay friendly.

77 Sunset Strip (1958-64) paired Efrem Zimbalist Jr. (straight) and Roger Smith (straight) as detectives who lived in Los Angeles. Edd Byrnes (rumored to be gay) played Kookie, a hipster who worked at the nightclub next door, and eventually became a business partner. Jacqueline Beer played Suzanne, their telephone operator.

Bourbon Street Beat (1959-60) paired Richard Long (rumored to be gay) and Van Williams, left (rumored to be gay), detectives who lived in New Orleans.  Cal Duggan (straight) was their business partner.  Arlene Howell played Melody, their secretary.

Hawaiian Eye (1959-63) paired Anthony Eisley (rumored to be gay) and Robert Conrad (straight) as detectives who lived in Hawaii.  Connie Stevens played Cricket, who sang at the Shell Bar.

Surfside 6 (1960-62) paired Van Williams (just before he played The Green Hornet),  with Lee Patterson (gay) as detectives who lived on a houseboat docked at Miami Beach.  Troy Donahue, left (rumored to be gay) played their friend, a wealthy playboy who lived on the yacht next door.  Margarita Sierra played a woman with the odd name "Cha Cha," who sang at a bar with the odd name "Boom Boom Room."

Follow the Sun (1961-62) paired Brett Halsey (rumored to be gay) with Barry Coe, left (straight) as writers who solve crimes in Hawaii. Gary Lockwood (bisexual), who appeared shirtless in The Magic Sword, played their assistant.  Gigi Perreau played their secretary.

What are we to make of this abundance of beefcake and buddy-bonding?

An idolization of the unmarried and unattached heterosexual swinger, after years of 1950s Family Men.
A fear of the feminine: women were portrayed as a pleasant distraction from the important things in life. But inadvertently it gave Boomer kids a glimpse of homodomesticity, men who lived together, loved each other, and didn't need a woman to fulfill them.

"Malibu Rescue":: A Beach, No Girl-Craziness. What Else Do You Need to Know?

Most teen movies are usually unwatchable, with all adolescent passions and intrigues omitted in favor of "Girls! Girls! Girls!  If we win this race (or whatever the Maguffin is), we'll get Girls!"  But Savage Steve Holland's movies tend to go easy on the girl-craziness, so I was happy to review his new Malibu Rescue (2019), which happens to be the pilot for a new Netflix tv series.

Teen operator Tyler (Ricardo Hurtado), a grinning Zack Morris type from Valley, plays one too many pranks, and is assigned Junior Lifeguard training at Malibu Beach.  His co-Valley kids are woefully unprepared.  Have they ever actually seen a beach before?

Meanwhile, the rich townie snobs look down on Valley kids, and resent their intrusion into "our beach."

So it's on, nerds vs. jocks in a battle royale to see who gets to become real Junior Lifeguards.

Wait -- do they really choose lifeguards via team competitions?

There is, indeed, a pleasant lack of heterosexual interest.  No boy (that I remember) gawks at any girl, even for an instant.  There is no Girl of His Dreams for Tyler to pursue, nor a Girl Next Door Who Supported Him All Along for him to end up with.

However, there are no gay subtexts, either.  Tyler appears to have no friends.  There is no buddy-bonding, anywhere.

And the beefcake!  This is a beach.  These are lifeguards.  Where are the muscular physiques?

Every guy on the beach, child, teenager, or adult, lifeguard, junior lifeguard, or civilian -- every guy -- wears a t-shirt and shorts.  Even in crowd scenes.

Have you ever heard of a beach where no male chests on display?  It's like the 1930s, when taking off your shirt in public would get you a citation for public indecency.

Ricardo Hurtado has about a thousand physique pictures on the internet, but here he takes off his shirt exactly once, in a rescue scene where you can't see anything.

The lack of girl craziness is nice, but sometimes you need a little more than that.

My grade: D.

Beach Volleyball

Beach volleyball has a sleazy, heterosexist reputation, all about girls in bikinis jiggling while men leer.  But actually it's a legitimate sport, more difficult than regular volleyball because the sand is so soft. 

It began in the 1920s on the beaches of California as a "family fun" sport.  Tournaments began in the 1940s, spreading out from California to Hawaii, Florida, Europe, and eventually around the world.

Beach Volleyball became an Olympic sport in 1996.  In 1997, world tours began, with prizes up to $400,000.

It's a big deal.


 Beach volleyball is offered by many colleges and high schools in Florida, Hawaii, North Carolina, Kentucky (yes, there are beaches in Kentucky),  and other states.

The Georgia State Panthers


















But of course California is the mainstay.

San Marcos High School.   I don't know why red trunks are so appealing.  Maybe they stand out against the sand better.

Santa Monica High School.

Even Catholic schools get into the act.  Mater Dei High School in Santa Ana.












Private clubs have their own teams.

The uniforms aren't quite as evocative as swimsuits, but you can't beat the beefcake.

10 Reasons Not to Visit St. Tropez

I don't understand St. Tropez. You fly all the way across the ocean to France, and you go to Paris, with the Louvre, the Musee d'Orsay, Notre Dame, and about a dozen bathhouses, right?  Or you tour the chateaux on the Loire.   Or you go out to Brittany to see the Carnac Stones built by Mesolithic tribes.

Why would you want to go to the beach?

Or if you have to go to the beach, I suggest Deauville or Dinan.  Definitely not St. Tropez, the heterosexual capital of Europe.

Here are 10 reasons to stay away.

1. St. Tropez was a sleepy fishing village until the 1950s when it became a favorite of the French New Wave Cinema, which showed heterosexual women taking their clothes off.  The most famous of them was And God Created Woman, 1956, with Brigitte Bardot as a heterosexual woman who takes her clothes off and has sex.

The topless one in this case is her director, Roger Vadim.

2. There was also a kurfuffle over real topless swimmers at the beach, resulting in a comedy, The Troops of St. Tropez (1964), in which uptight police officer Cruchot (Louis de Funes) tries to stamp out female nudity, and ends up foiling robbers. 

It spawned innumerable sequels: The Troops in New York (1965), The Troops Get Married (1968), The Troops on Vacation (1970), The Troops Meet Aliens (1979), and so on, as well as a museum in St. Tropez (which actually covers all of St. Tropez as visualized in the movies).

3. Going topless is now acceptable on St. Tropez beaches.  As are revealing bikinis.  You'd be subjected to whatever is behind the black box a dozen times a minute.


4.  In the 1970s, when I was in high school, there was a series of commercials in which a very thin white woman with a very dark tan applied suntan lotion to herself, while a sultry voice sang "Bain de Soleil for a St. Tropez tan."

Apparently men in the 1970s didn't worry about melanoma.

You can still get Bain de Soleil, and the commercials still show thin white women with very dark tans.

5.   The art museum of St. Tropez is the Musée de l'Annonciade, a former chapel with a rotating series of 20 paintings, and a statue of a naked lady.

6. There's also a butterfly museum, the collection of 35,000 specimens donated by painter Dany Lartigue, in the former home of his mother.  He explains his interest:  "I had fallen in love with a butterfly that was so beautiful I had just been touched by grace.  This feeling of supreme happiness at the sight of a butterfly I have kept all my life."

So he killed as many as he could find and took them home to affix to paper and mount on his wall.

Actually, that sounds sort of interesting.  And Dany definitely sounds gay.

7. For architecture, you have Église Notre-Dame-de-l'Assomption de Saint-Tropez, which is...well, orange and yellow.   I'm not sure what's heterosexual about that, but I'm on a roll.

8. For men, instead of 20 bathhouses and gay bars with darkrooms, you have a gay-friendly beach, the Plague de Pamplonne.

Just gay-friendly?  I can get totally-gay back in Paris.

9. Of course, it's probably the only place in France, other than Cannes, where you can regularly see American celebrities.  Like Patrick Schwarzenegger.

He's heterosexual.

10. And European celebrities, like soccer star Cristiano Ronaldo.

He's heterosexual too.

The Boys of Carson Beach

This photo says: "Carson Beach, South Boston, 1940"

My only question is, why didn't they have classes like that when I was a kid?

"First, kneel in front of your partner.  Use his legs to steady yourself.  Then..."

Ok, it's actually "Learn to Swim Week" in the summer of 1940.  The Boys' Club held three classes a day at Carson Beach.

South Boston or "Southie," 3 miles from Boston Common (15 minutes by car), is traditionally a working-class Irish neighborhood (the site of Boston's St. Patrick's Day Parade). It's also the site of the first public housing in the U.S. and the Irish Mob, the first major gang in the U.S.

A list of "Things You Didn't Know about South Boston" includes: don't go to Sully's Castle Island (a burger place) on weekends, when it gets too crowded; a "spuckie" is a local term for a submarine sandwich; it's the inspiration for the Edgar Allan Poe story "The Cask of Amontillado"; and Good Will Hunting is an accurate depiction of Southie guys, "cute, scrappy, and devilishly charming."

Sounds colorful.

I imagine generations of Southie guys cooling off at Carson Beach.  In the 1970s, photographer Nicholas Nixon, a professor at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, captured several beach hunks in the background of his photos of women.

In the 1920s you could also cool off at the L-Street Baths.  Apparently many people didn't have bathtubs in their apartments, so they used the baths for hygiene as well as hookups.

Carson Beach winds around Old Harbor,  across from Joe Moakley Park (named after a Congressman who served the district from 1973 to 2001.  Here he's going to Carson Beach with two buds (I think he's the one on the right).

It's near the University of Massachusetts Boston and Boston College High School (a Jesuit all-boys prep school), so lots of Southie guys to choose from.

Parker Stevenson and the Big One

In the fall of 1977, the question most gay boys were asking was: "Shaun or Parker?"

Most chose Shaun Cassidy, the fey, impestuous Joe on The Hardy Boys Mysteries (1977-79), the legendary gay-subtext tv adaption of the Hardy Boys books.

But many chose 25-year old Parker Stevenson (right), who played his older, cautious boyfriend. . .um, I mean brother, Frank.  He was just as dreamy, with brown wavy hair and piercing eyes, and he looked just as good in a Speedo.  Maybe better.

Besides, Parker had already played gay-vague characters twice: Gene, who falls in love with Finney in the boys boarding school drama A Separate Peace (1972); and Chris Randall, who is mentored by the older Rick (Sam Elliott) in Lifeguard (1976).

After Hardy Boys, Parker did the soap opera-softcore porn-thriller of the week thing (Not of This Earth, Are You Lonesome Tonight, Terror Peak, Trapped).  I haven't seen any of them.  His only movie with significant gay interest was Shooting Stars (1983), where he played an actor-turned-detective who buddy-bonds with the gruff Billy Dee Williams.

During the 1990s, he returned to the semi-nude beach shots as an aging lifeguard on Baywatch (1989-99).

In 1991, he came into the spotlight again when his then-wife Kirstie Allie won an Emmy for her work on Cheers.  She thanked Parker for giving her "the big one" for the last eight years.  All of his former fans immediately began scanning old teen idol pin-ups, and going through Baywatch in slow motion, looking for signs of "the big one."

I hadn't noticed anything noteworthy before, but now that she mentioned it....

Parker has been the subject of frequent gay rumors, but he hasn't made any public statements.

Bobby Darin: Dream Lover of the 1950s

Bobby Darin (1936-1973) grew up in East Harlem, New York.  His first foray into the music business was as a songwriter, paired with future radio great Don Kirshner.  But he hit the big time in 1958 with "Splish Splash" (I Was Taking a Bath), a humorous take on the teen dance crazes of the era.

Splish, splash, I was taking a bath
On about a Saturday night

Bing, bang
I saw the whole gang
Dancin' on my living room rug.
Flip flop
They was doin' the bop
All the teens had the dancin' bug.

He illustrated the song with a nude, censored photo of himself in the shower, a rarity in 1958.

More songs, humorous, romantic, and just weird, appeared, six albums in 1960 alone.  Perhaps the weirdest is "Mack the Knife," about a murderer:

Now on the sidewalk, sunny morning,
Lies a body just oozin' life,
And someone's sneakin' 'round the corner
Could that someone be Mack the Knife?

Well, at least it's not heterosexist.

In the 1960s Bobby moved into moved into jazz, country-western, and folk, became a dramatic actor, and ran a successful music publishing company.

In 1960 he married Sandra Dee, the star of Gidget (1959), a gay icon and role model to young lesbians of the era, here being wooed by James Darin (no relation) and some other beach hunks.

The couple divorced in 1967, leaving a son, Dodd.

Bobby was married again, briefly, in 1973.

He was politically liberal, and heavily involved in the campaign to elect Robert F. Kennedy as president.

There's not much evidence of Bobby being gay in real life.  The 2004 biopic Beyond the Sea, starring Kevin Spacey, contains a few gay jokes:

Sandra tells Bobby that if he thinks acting is so easy, he should try kissing Troy Donahue (who was rumored to be gay).  Bobby smiles, as if he's considering it.

But that may be a take on Kevin Spacey himself.

On the other hand, most of Bobby's songs drop pronouns, and could apply equally to male and female lovers:

You're the reason I'm living
You're the breath that I take
You're the stars in my heaven
You're the sun when I wake.

The nude photo is on Tales of West Hollywood.

See also: Ricky Nelson

The Men and Boys of Coney Island

Coney Island is a peninsula in southern Brooklyn, about an hour by subway from Penn Station.  It consists of four neighborhoods (Seagate, West Brighton, Brighton Beach, and Manhattan Beach).  Beginning in the 1870s, thousands of New Yorkers tried to escape the summer heat by heading out to the beaches of Coney Island every weekend.

When they weren't swimming, they could walk along the boardwalk for snacks (hot dogs with chili were invented there), and eventually other attractions: side-show acts, carnival rides, burlesque shows, bodybuilders.

Coney Island had its own muscle beach.

Two amusement parks developed, Luna Park and Dreamland, with rides, games, and carnival acts.

It was the place to go for working-class New Yorkers.  They have included fond memories of Coney Island into dozens of movies (Brighton Beach Memoirs, The Wanderers) and tv programs (Seinfeld, The Golden Girls), in songs and poems and novels.



And, of course, photographers roamed the crowds, capturing the joy and pain of the young men who came for momentary relief from the drudgery of everyday life.

These boys are doing some sort of feat of strength on Muscle Beach in 1905.









Why no swimsuit? Was this a spur-of-the-moment outing, or couldn't he afford one?

This guy seems to have lost his pants.  Nice bulge.

Harold Feinstein (1931-2015) was born on Coney Island, and began photographing Coney Island boys and men at age fifteen.

This is Muscle Beach, 1967, aka two guys holding hands.

More after the break.