David Lascher

The 1990s was the decade of the teen hunk; they appeared on Saturday morning, on Saved by the Bell and its clones (California Dreams, Breaker High), on the teen-heavy nuclear family sitcoms on ABC's TGIF (Sabrina the Teenage Witch, Boy Meets World, Teen Angel), and on the material-starved kids' networks, Disney and Nickelodeon (Welcome Freshmen, Salute Your Shorts, The Adventures of Pete and Pete).

With all the teen hunks wandering around, it was easy to get lost in the crowd, even if you have a killer smile and a fantastic physique. David Lascher almost did.

Born in 1972, David hit Hollywood in a series of Burger King commercials and two failed network series before landing the role of teen operator on Hey, Dude  (1989-91), about the employees of a faltering dude ranch.  He hatched crazy schemes, competed with laconic Native American Danny Lightfoot (Joe Torres), gasped and  moaned over girls, and was nominated for a Young Artist Award.  But no one really noticed, not even when he took his shirt off.  Not that his smooth, muscular chest wasn't appealing, but if you changed he channel, you got Mark-Paul Gosselaer and Michael Cade.

 Next he was hired to play Vinnie Bonitardi on the TGIF series Blossom, as Blossom's wrong-side-of-the-tracks boyfriend.  He lasted through two seasons (1992-94), plus a special two-part call-back, but again, no one really noticed, not even in his swimsuit, shirtless, and underwear shots.  He was pleasantly muscular, but his co-star was the incredible Joey Lawrence.

In the fourth season of the TGIF "I've got a secret" comedy Sabrina the Teenage Witch (1999-2000), the teen witch went to college.  David played the manager of the coffee shop where she worked, and eventually competed with long-term boyfriend Harvey for her affection, which didn't make him popular with Sabrina-Harvey shippers.  He lasted for 3 seasons, then vanished, with viewership at an all time low.

But when he played a gay-vague or gay role, David had no trouble being noticed. His three-episode story arc as a gay high school jock on Beverly Hills 90210 was memorable, not at all shadowed by the regular cast of Beverly Hills musclemen like Jason Priestley and Ian Ziering (left).


In White Squall (1996), he has to contend with an incredible number of shirtless hunks, including Scott Wolf, Ryan Philippe, Jeremy Sisto, Ethan Embry, Balthazar Getty, and Jason Marsden -- and he doesn't even take his shirt off  -- yet his performance stands out as quiet, dignified, and touching.

Note to David Lascher: gay characters from now on.

Toy Soldiers: Muscle on Parade

Every once in a while, a movie producer hires all of the teen hunks he can find, puts them in an all-male environment, and orders a script that involves fighting a common adversary with their shirts off, thus ensuring the avid interest of every gay boy in the world: Tom Brown's School Days, Lord of the Flies, White Squall.  In 1991, the movie was Toy Soldiers.

The plot: terrorists take over an elite prep school for the sons of the wealthy and powerful, and take the boys and their headmaster hostage.  The boys use their troublemaking skills to gather intel on the terrorists, and wise-cracking operator Billy Tepper (20-year old Sean, left) sneaks out to brief the adults.

When they turn out to be ineffectual, Billy and his friends, including comic relief Snuffy (21-year old Keith Coogan, middle) and surly bodybuilder Ricky (19-year old George Perez, right), go on the offensive, incapacitating several terrorists, disabling their bomb, and leading the  younger kids to safety, just in time to be "rescued."

Other boys include the rich "jerk" Joey (19-year old Wil Wheaton, well known for playing Wesley Crusher on Star Trek: the Next Generation).

And T. E. Russell as the pragmatic Hank.

Sean Astin (Billy) was a major teen idol of the period, with roles in The Goonies, The War of the Roses, White Water Summer, and Rudy).  

Keith Coogan (Snuffy) was a former child star with credits in Adventures in Babysitting and The Book of Love.  

There's some buddy-bonding between Billy and Snuffy, but with a large ensemble cast, it's not well developed.

However, heterosexual interest is absent, except for a scene in which Billy confiscates a Playboy from one of the younger kids.  There are references to getting laid and masturbation, but no one mentions a girlfriend or a desire for girls.

Absence of expressed heterosexual desire is almost unheard-off in a teen movie of the 1990s, giving viewers permission to read one or more of the boys -- or all of them -- as gay.

And the parade of underwear-clad, towel-clad, and shirtless teenage muscle (or rather young adult muscle, since all of the actors were over 18) didn't hurt.

Spin and Marty: Summer Camp Boys in Love

In the spring of 1955, William Beaudine began casting an adaptation of the novel Marty Markham, about a wealthy mollycoddle who learns to be a regular fella at summer camp.   When buzz-cut jock Tim Considine auditioned, he was deemed too macho to play Marty, but far too charismatic to pass on, so a minor character in the novel, Spin Evans, was expanded for him.

 Marty was cast with David Stollery, a fey redhead who starred with Tim in Her Twelve Men (1954).

The Adventures of Spin and Marty premiered in November 1955 as a serial segment of Disney’s late-afternoon kiddie show The Mickey Mouse Club.

Though the original novel contains no homoromance, the tough-sissy contrast seems tailor-made for a revival of Tom Brown’s School Days or Cadets on Parade, and the series wastes no time in meeting the beefcake quota, displaying both stars' muscles and the respectable physique of an older boy (Sammy Ogg).  (Kevin Corcoran starred as tagalong annoyance Moochie.)

However, there is no instant camaraderie, no moment of falling in love.  In the first twenty episodes, Spin and Marty despise each other.  They often stare at each other, but they come face-to-face only for pranks, insults, and fights.  Late in the season, as counselors break up their latest fight by holding them upside down, Spin and Marty seem to really see each other for the first time.  Their shield of rage vanishes; they grin, and then laugh, and suddenly, inevitably, they are “together.”

In the remaining episodes, their fellow campers and the adults behave as if they have always been inseparable companions.  Intimacy appears, and passion when each tries to sacrifice himself for the other.  They even achieve homoromantic permanence: in the last scene, as the other campers prepare to go home, they are invited to stay on as ranch hands.

Viewers – grade schoolers and no doubt not a few high schoolers – were mesmerized by this hostility melting into love, and they responded with an urgency unknown in the days of Tom Brown’s School Days.  Books, comics, sheet music, and 45-rpm records flew off the shelves, continuing to evoke the homoromantic Arcadia for two years after the series ended.  Today, when the other live-action segments of The Mickey Mouse Club have faded into obscurity, many Boomers recall Spin and Marty fondly, as icons of their childhood.  Many recall them, clearly and unequivocally, as a gay couple.

In November 1956, Tim Considine and David Stollery returned for The Further Adventures of Spin and Marty.  Now Spin has an impressively tight, hard-lined chest and stomach, while Marty is lean and lanky (and decidedly feminine).  They are on display often and earnestly, as are all of the boys, presented in swimsuit and underwear shots as often as in Toy Soldiers decades later. But their homoromantic idyll is threatened: a girl’s camp has just opened up across the lake, and after some initial hesitation, they spend the series posturing, competing, and arguing over who gets to date Annette Funicello.  Then, when Marty is drowning, Spin rushes to the rescue.  The crisis makes them realize how much they care for each other and they renew their commitment, swearing off trivial distractions like girls.  Homoromance has triumphed.

But not for long.  In The New Adventures of Spin and Marty (November 1958), seventeen-year old Spin is dating Annette, and Marty is dating her fellow Mousketeer Darlene Gillespie.  Whatever passion they once felt for each other has been forgotten; they are not now, nor ever have been, more than buddies.

A fourth season of Spin and Marty was scripted, but never filmed.  Instead Tim Considine went on to star as in a Hardy Boys adaption with Tommy Kirk and Kevin Corcorran. and as the eldest of My Three Sons on television before retiring, and David Stollery left Disneyland to become an automobile designer, and marry once. They still run into each other from time to time, at fan conventions, but they have not stayed in touch.

River Phoenix: Running on Empty

River Phoenix died on Halloween night, 1993, at the Viper Room, a Sunset Boulevard hotspot a few blocks north of my apartment in West Hollywood.  Over 20 years have passed, but he remains a gay icon.

Though he had been performing for several years, including a starring role in a tv version of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1982), he first drew the attention of gay fans at the age of 14, in Explorers (1985), as the buddy of a boy (Ethan Hawke) who finds an alien spaceship.

After the heterosexist "coming of age" movie Stand by Me (1986), River starred in The Mosquito Coast (1986), as the son of an eccentric inventor (Harrison Ford of Star Wars).  There he moved perceptibly from child star to teen idol, revealing a smooth muscular chest and abs.

Most teen idol vehicles are fluffy, lightweight, feel-good concoctions, but aside from the teen sex comedy A Night in the Life of Jimmy Reardon (1988), River's movies were serious, even dark.  His characters in Little Nikita (1988), Running on Empty (1988), and I Love You to Death (1988) rarely smiled; they were in pain; they were searching, exhausted from searching, "running on empty."

And they ached with desire.  Like fellow teen idol Brad Renfro, like Leif Garrett a decade before, River Phoenix imbued every relationship with a unstated but intensely erotic desire.  Unvariegated, sometimes for women, sometimes for men, usually older men. Twice for Dermot Mulroney (in Silent Tongue and This Thing Called Love). 

Even his frequent shirtless and semi-nude scenes presented him more as someone aching with loneliness rather than as an object of desire.  He gazes at the camera, confused, wondering who is out there looking at him, asking, with Allen Ginsberg, "Are you my angel?"

Twenty years ago, the only gay teenagers in the movies were bisexual hustlers who abandoned their "gay lifestyle" for a girl (such as Jonathan Taylor Thomas in Speedway Junkie and Lukas Haas in Johns), but in My Own Private Idaho (1991), Mike (River) is gay, going with women only when necessary for his job, and he falls in love with an unresponsive straight hustler (Keanu Reeves). 

River enjoyed being an object of desire for both men and women, and he desired both men and women.  He had girlfriends and boyfriends throughout his life.  The rumor mill paired him with nearly every actor rumored to be gay at the time, including Keanu Reeves, Leonardo DiCaprio, and talk show host Merv Griffin.  Many of the twinks I knew claimed to have been with him.  Maybe some of them were telling the truth.

 But it wasn't his male partners that made River Phoenix a gay icon.  It was his combination of sexual knowledge and vulnerability, his neverending search not only for sex but for love.

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.

Captains Courageous: Boys Alone on a Boat

Literature is full of poor little rich boys, kids raised in unutterable wealth who nevertheless are missing something essential, something elemental -- and find it, either by design or by fortuitous accident.

Rudyard Kipling's 1897 novel Captains Courageous sends snobbish, practical-joking 15-year old Harvey Cheyne Jr. over the side of a steamship.

He is rescued by Captain Disko Troop, a Newfoundland fisherman, who refuses to take him to a port until the season is over -- and forces him to work alongside the rest of the crew.  At first Harvey complains, but then he learns the joy of work and the camaraderie of working men, and especially bonds with the Captain's teenage son, Dan.

When Harvey finally returns to his parents, he brings Dan along. Both go to work for his father's shipping line.  There are no women in the novel except for Harvey's mother.

There have been three movie versions that modify the romance in odd ways.

The 1937 version decreases Harvey's age (played by 13-year old Freddie Bartholomew), and minimized the role of Dan (Mickey Rooney, left and top photo), instead having him saved by an adult fisherman, Manuel (Spencer Tracey).  Their friendship becomes intense and intimate, but it is doomed: during a race with another ship, Manuel is entangled in the rigging and pulled under the water, where he drowns. The movie ends with Harvey back in civilization, throwing a wreath into the sea to honor Manuel's memory.

The 1977 tv version restores Harvey to adolescence (played by 17-year old Jonathan Kahn, right)  and minimizes both Dan (Johnny Doran) and Manuel (Ricardo Montalban), although Manuel still dies.  Harvey doesn't get a romantic partner, just a father figure in the Captain (Karl Malden).

The unwatchable 1996 tv version restores Harvey and Dan to prominence (Kenny Vadas, Kaj-Erik Eriksen), but this time Dan is entangled in the rigging and dies. By the way, the Captain (Robert Ulrich) gets a wife.

I can't even begin to speculate on why the writers or directors decided to transfer the gay subtext from peer to older-younger, but I know why they decided to have Harvey's partner die: to emphasize the heterosexist conceit that same-sex bonds are temporary, mere adolescent fancies.  Just as the Captain has a wife back home, when Harvey returns to port, he will abandon childhood romances and marry.

Tom Brown's School Days

I saw Tom Brown’s School Days (1940) on Matinee at the Bijou, a 1970s tv series that replayed classic movies.   I had never heard of the original novel by Thomas Hughes (1857), about the agonizing love between two boys in an elite British boarding school, but later I sought it out.  Robert Drake writes that it became “one of the more influential texts for emerging gay writers, or writers with a gay sensibility."  The same can be said for the movie.

A tall, slim seventeen-year old named Jimmy Lydon plays Tom, “the typical American boy” even though he is still scripted as upper-class British.   He expresses his typical American boyhood by being stoic, courageous, and adventurous, by taking off his shirt to reveal a slim physique.  And by ignoring girls.  The daughter of a local shopkeeper plays a pivotal role in the plot, but Tom never gives her a second glance.  Instead, he falls in love with an aristocratic upperclassman.

East (Freddie Bartholomew, previously in Captains Courageous), tall, thin, brittle-looking, and as feminine as a young Quentin Crisp,  takes the initiative in the courtship, approaching Tom the moment he gets off the train, showing him around, taking him by the arm or shoulder, and gazing at him with rapt ardor.  He gives Tom a picture of two ancient Greek warriors shaking hands -- a 19th century beefcake poster -- and marks them as “Brown” and “East."

East carefully dismisses or outwits Tom’s other suitors.  When they go out for “murphys” (baked potatoes sold as a snack), he protects Tom from a groping, leering boy named Tadpole.
Tadpole: Is this the new fellow? Nice looking, isn’t he?
Tom: How do you do?
Tadpole: (Looks him up and down.) Hungry, thank you.

A more violent threat comes from Sixth Formers (high school seniors), led by the bestial Flashman (Billy Halop of Dead End, shown here playing Humphrey Bogart's gunsel).  He offers several shirtless and semi-nude scenes, with a more muscular physique.

Flashman bullies Tom, and forces him to endure dangerous hazing.  Their fight, oddly, serves as the subject for the lion's share of lobby cards and posters.

When Tom is accused of “telling tales,” the worst crime in the boys’ honor code, East breaks up with him, tearing up the picture and sending him his half.  Even after Tom is found innocent, East refuses to take him back, using oddly romantic rhetoric: “I’m not interested in you or anything about you!  I never want to see you again!”

Adult women in movies of the era rely on the phrase “I never want to see you again” to angrily break up with their boyfriends, but this is nearly the only example of its use among "buddies."  The implication, of course, is that Tom and east are not buddies, but homoromantic partners: their relationship is emotionally intense, physically intimate, and exclusive, and but for their breakup, it would be permanent.

The movie ends years later, when Tom and East encounter each other by accident at the tomb of their beloved headmaster.  Tom asks “Can’t we be friends?” and East grudgingly shakes his hand, thus giving closure to their romance.  In the original story, Tom stands at the tomb alone. Only in the 1940 are Tom and East homoromantic partners, so only in 1940 do they require closure.

Bartholomew and Lydon were paired again in Cadets on Parade (1942). Rich kid Austin Shannon (Freddie Bartholomew), an eighteen-year old military cadet, is bad at sports and reviled as a “sissy” by his self-made-man father, so he runs away and encounters street tough  Joe Novak (Jimmy Lydon).  The two set up housekeeping together (in a flat with only one bed).  Joe never mocks his partner's sissiness, but he does gently suggest that success at school may depend on an increased manliness.  Austin’s salvation, his return to middle-class society, comes through learning to box and play football, not through heterosexual experience: no girls appear or are mentioned in he movie.  But Austin draws Joen into civilization through the same rubric that girls use with jungle boys, through teaching him to read and use proper table manners.  In the end they both enroll in the military academy.  The tagline is: “The Story of Two American Boys…On the Road to Being Men!”

 The last of the Jimmy Lydon - Freddie Bartholomew pairings was The Town Went Wild (1944):  gangly sophisticate David (Freddie) and blue collar Bob  (Jimmy) are best friends, but they do not share a homoromantic bond.  David is dating Bob’s sister, but there is no hint at triangulation: he really does spend all of his time with her, while Bob is relegated to the status of third wheel.  It is interesting that the sissy gets engaged, while the he-man never expresses any interest in girls, but still, one must wonder why the scripted homoromances between Freddie and Jimmy ended so abruptly.  Perhaps the subtext was becoming too obvious, veering too close to conscious thought.

White Water Summer/Stand By Me

Although panned by the critics and ignored by most heterosexuals, White Water Summer (1987) became a hit among gay kids and teenagers, maybe for the same reasons that they ignored the critically acclaimed Stand by Me the year before (1986).

 The plot of Stand: four boys (Will Wheaton, River Phoenix, Jerry O'Connell, Corey Feldman) brave a suburban wilderness on a weird quest to see a dead body.  En route they confront their anxieties and bond with each other.

The plot of Summer: four boys (Sean Astin, Jonathan Ward, Matt Adler, K.C. Martel) brave a wilderness on a white water rafting expedition, led by the brutal, abusive Vic (Kevin Bacon).  En route the confront their anxieties and bond with each other.
















The differences:

In Stand, the conflicts involve parentage, family, bullying, and heterosexual destiny.  In Summer, the conflicts involve the boys' relationships with each other and their dismay at the brutality of the adult world.

In Stand, the male body is a site of anxiety and despair; a boy is too fat, or has poor eyesight; leeches attack their crotches.  In Summer, the male body is a thing of beauty. The characters compliment each other, gaze at each other, lie prone against each other.







The boys of Stand are aggressively homophobic, throwing around the term "faggot" and challenging each others' "masculinity."  They are also aggressively heterosexual, discussing boobs, girls, having sex with girls, not having sex with girls.  The boys of Summer mention neither "faggots" nor girls.

Stand ends with the boys parting, and the adult narrator telling us what happened to them -- mostly involvng marriage and family, the "inevitable" loss of boyhood bonds.

Summer ends with the boys together, still friends, the same-sex bond intact.

Chris and Patrick Petersen: 1970s Ninja Kids

During the late 1970s, as networks scrambled to find enough child actors to fill their "after school special" kid-angst movies, Brothers Chris and Pat Petersen (no relation to the 1950s teen idol Paul Petersen) were important players.

Chris, the oldest (born in 1963), was everywhere in 1978 and 1979, on tv (Little House on the Prairie, The Incredible Hulk, The Baxters) and in movies (When Every Day was the Fourth of July, The Swarm).   His roles often  involved buddy-bonds:

1. Playing baseball with Larry B. Scott in The Rag-Tag Champs, an ABC Afterschool Special (1978)

2. Lost in the Colorado Rockies with Guillermo San Juan in Joey and Redhawk on CBS Afternoon Playhouse.  This one had a "boys alone" gay subtext.

3. Karate-kicking with younger brother Pat in the precursor to the 1990s ninja kid craze, The Little Dragons (1979).

4. Fighting racism with Moosie Drier in The House at 12 Rose Street (1980).

When Chris hit his teen years, the roles dried up, and he retired from acting.

His brother Patrick (born in 1966) had a longer career, starting with the tv series The Kallikas (1977), How the West was Won (1979), and Shirley (1980), plus some gay-subtext after school specials of his own:

1. The Ransom of Red Chief (1977, 1979), an ABC Schoolbreak Special about a boy terrorizing his kidnappers.

2. The Contest Kid (1978, 1979), an ABC Schoolbreak Special about a boy who enters contests, and his best friend (Ronnie Scribner).

In 1979, he landed the role of Michael Fairgate on the evening soap Knot's Landing.  Michael provided shirtless teen-idol photos and tight jeans as the teenage son of Sid and Karen Fairgate, who worked in an auto garage and kept getting dumped by girls.

When Knot's Landing ended in 1991, Pat retired from acting and opened a health food store.

Scott Wolf

Scott Wolf became famous for Party of Five (1994-2000), a teen drama about some kids being raised by their older brother (Matthew Fox) after their parent die.  Bailey (Scott Wolf) was the teen hunk, who had a drinking problem. Two recurring gay characters added to the angst; Ross (Mitchell Anderson), a teacher, and Victor (Wilson Cruz), a nanny.

Though Bailey didn't do any significant buddy-bonding, Scott Wolf did quite a lot in his movie appearances.  He was also quite willing to provide shirtless, underwear, and nude shots.

  

Double Dragon (1994) was an entry in the mid-1990s martial arts craze with an post-Apocalyptic edge: two brothers who looked nothing alike, Billy (Scott Wolf) and Jimmy (Mark Dascascos) search for a magical medallion.  Like most movies based on video games, it wasn't great, but it featured some buddy-bonding and last-minute rescues, minimal hetero-romance, and lots of shots of beautifully sculpted physiques.

 White Squall (1996), like White Water Summer, amassed a group of muscular teens (Jeremy Sisto, Ryan Phillipe, Eric Michael Cole, Jason Marsden), gave them a hunky mentor (Jeff bridges), and shipped them out to sea for a story involving survival, hugging, and near-nudity.

In Go (1999), a caper movie told from four different points of view, Rashomon-style, Scott went beyond buddy-bonding.  Lovable drug dealers Adam (Scott Wolf) and Zack (Jay Mohr) are a gay couple.  They don't even die at the end.

Entertainment Weekly reported that the subsequent rumors that the actor was gay in real life "made him squirm," but he "didn't' find them offensive."  Why would something make you squirm if you didn't find it offensive?

At any rate, Scott has not played gay characters -- or engaged in significant buddy-bonding -- since.  Though he hasn't slacked off on the beefcake.

Lord of the Flies

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