Alice's Queer Wonderland

I first encountered Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) when I was 8 or 9, in a scene from a ballet that appeared for a few minutes on tv at my grandmother's house one summer.  Later I found the text in a volume of the Junior Classics called Stories that Never Grow Old (along with such oddities as The King of the Golden River and Jackanapes).  I didn't understand most of it , and what I did understand was either horrifying or deadly dull.  Alice falls into a constantly-changing world where bizarre characters quiz her on her knowledge of arithmetic and poetry.  Most of them want to kill her. And it turns out to be a dream.

Besides, there were no cute boys or muscular men in it, although movie adaptions often feature hot actors, like Andrew-Lee Potts as the Mad Hatter (2009), left, or Jason Byrne as Pat the Gardner (1999), below.  Lewis Carroll liked little girls (a lot), but he detested boys.

Give me a nice, normal science fiction novel, like The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet or The Spaceship under the Apple Tree.

But in the spring of 1985, just before I moved to West Hollywood, the music video of Tom Petty's "Don't Come Around Here No More" used an Alice motif.  I reread Alice and its sequel, Through the Looking Glass, and found ample gay content.

1. No character displays even a hint of heterosexual interest. Lewis Carroll was utterly baffled by romance in general, and looked in horror at the day when Alice would grow up, and marriage would "summon to unwelcome bed a melancholy maiden."  Although there are occasional s*xual threats, such as the Duchess, who digs her sharp chin into Alice's shoulder as they walk (begin Freudian analysis here).

2. Male characters often come in domestic duos: the Mad Hatter and the March Hare, the Mock Turtle and the Gryphon, the Walrus and the Carpenter, the Lion and the Unicorn.

3. For all of Lewis Carroll's fear of romance, he populates his Wonderland with phallic symbols (the Caterpiller's mushroom, the swaying flamingo mallets, Alice with the elongated serpentine neck) and castration motifs (the Red Queen's constant cry of "Off with his head!").  He is very interested in the power and threat of s*xual potency.

4. The adult characters, with their lessons and demands, are trying to force Alice into the constraint of a proper Victorian girlhood, but she will have none of it.  She mangles her lessons, rejects advice, and fails utterly at domesticity when the child in her charge turns into a pig.  Gay kids understand, perhaps better than others, the malice of adult constraints, the "what girl do you like?" chant, the "when you grow up and get a wife" threats.

5. Like The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Wonderland uses madness as a substitute for the queer, the marginal, and the outsider.  "We're all mad," the Cheshire Cat tells Alice.  "You must be [mad], or you wouldn't have come here."

See also: The Answer to the N* de Man's Question

Michael Seater: The "Life with Derek" guy grows up, gets a boyfriend, and displays a Derek d*ong

"The Package": A movie about a penis, with bonus penis pics. What could go wrong?

 

You recall that Adam Devine rarely goes more than a sentence or two without mentioning his penis?  In 2018, he and the guys produced The Package, a movie about a penis.  He didn't write or direct, but still, it' about a penis.  I can't wait. 

Link to NSFW version

Scene 1: Sean (Daniel Doheny) is carefully putting on his pants while in the kitchen, Mom slices up an eggplant (foreshadowing, anyone?).  His bud Donnie (Luke Spencer Roberts, ginger) picks him up for a camping trip.  Uh-oh, he's hacked into the family's tv to show them fat lady porn.  Gross!  He then criticizes Sean's shorts, which cover "your belly button but not your balls."  Sean criticizes his moustache, but Donnie counters that with the 1980s nostalgia craze, he'll be "swimming in puss."  Ok, these guys are hetero, but...a penis!

Left: Google says that this is Luke Spencer Roberts.  I think it's really someone else named Luke Roberts.  But I've never heard of either of them before, so what's the difference?   

Scene 2: Next they pick up Jeremy (Eduardo Franco, who you may know from The Binge).  They criticize him for being a virgin, and counters by pretending to jerk off with a walking stick.  He invited some girls!  Donnie is irate; he wanted it to be guys only.  I hear that.  They happen to be Donnie's ex and Jeremy's twin sister/

By the way, Jeremy has a girlfriend, too, but only online.  The guys think he's being catfished by a guy.  Ten to one he'll come out as gay.

Top photo: When you google "Eduardo Franco" and "nude," you get Nino Ceperkovic.  I don't understand why.

He insists that Sean have sex with his sister, because as twins they share a psychic bond, and he'll feel it too.  Sean finds this disgusting, but only because it would be psychic-incestuous, not because it would be homoerotic.

Scene 3: On the way to the campsite, they make fun of Donnie for sharting during blow jobs.  Donnie counters by sending Sean a photo that makes it look like he is giving a blow job to his crush's ex boyfriend.  Thankfully, Sean is not offended; he laughs. 

Jeremy leads them "deep up Mother Nature's puss."  I don't care for the vagina references.  Let's hear more about cocks!

Left: Daniel Doheny, who apparently played a gay character in something called Alex Strangelove.  I haven't seen it.  Who wants to be told that gay love is weird, bizarre, abnormal, strange?

They set up camp and divide into boy and girl groups.  Everyone is obsessed over getting Sean to screw his crush.  He had a chance with her at the Rent cast party: she touched his thigh and invited him onto the roof for sex, but he couldn't stand up because he had a boner: "You were cock blocked by your own cock!"  Rent has gay characters.  These guys know that LGBT people exist. 

The pressure for Sean and his crush to screw continues into the night.  Finally they are eating s'mores around the campfire.  Jeremy goes off to piss; the guys follow to mess with him.  For some reason, he is slicing through his stream with the knife he showed them earlier...and when the guys distract him, he accidentally slices his dick off!  It flies off against the full moon.  

Sean climbs to a cliff, calls 911, and orders a medevac.  Now they just have to keep Jeremy from bleeding out, and find the penis!

Complications:  They find it, but it suffers a lot of damage before the medevac comes.  One of the girls throws up on it.  Another tries to roast it over the campfire (idiot!).  Finally they put it on ice. 

Then the medevac leaves, but they send it off with the wrong ice chest!  They still have the penis!  They have to get it to the hospital within the 12 hour time frame.

Mishap after mishap.  Their cellphones are destroyed.  They get lost hiking down the mountain. They fall into a river.  They run afoul of a hetero-sleazy little boy (Chance Hurstfield, who has grown up a bit).  His Dad attacks, thinking that they molested him.  The penis is bitten by a snake, so Sean has to suck the venom out (fortunately, there are no homophobic "giving a blow job" references).  

A convenience store clerk helps them clean the dick, thinking that Jeremy was a soldier injured in the line of duty.  When he discovers that they are high school students, he goes ballistic and shoots arrows at them. "The only dicks I touch are mine and my husband's."  This is apparently a "gay people exist!  hilarious!" joke.

Then the penis is attached to a redneck (Blake Anderson): his own was cut off by his girlfriend!  I don't think that's possible. Fortunately, she comes in and cuts it off again, so they can gie it to Jeremy.

Conclusion: The two couples reunite.  Jeremy's on-line girlfriend is real after all.  Darn, I thought he was going to come out as gay.  The end.

My Grade: This movie is not about penises, it's about three heterosexual couples falling in love.  Watching disgusting things happen to a 3-inch cylinder is not as homoerotic as I thought.  Not at all funny.  No gay characters or subtexts -- well, except for the convenience store guy, and he was only gay as the punchline of a joke.  A big, big disappointment. F

The bonus penis pics (still attached to the guy) are on the NSFW version of this review.

Shock-headed Peter: Castration and Gay Panic in a German Children's Story

When I was in Germany a few years ago, my friend Doc took me to a restaurant called the Struwwelpeter Apfelweinwirtschaft (The Slovenly Peter Apple Wine Tavern).

Its logo was a boy with wild blond hair and long sharp nails like Edward Scissorhands.

Nearby there was a statue of the same boy, along with some other children.

"You've never heard of Struwwelpeter?" Doc asked.  "He's a national hero, like Bart Simpson in America!"









Turns out that all German schoolchildren read Der Struwwelpeter, written and illustrated by Heinrich Hoffmann (1809-1894), about children who misbehave and get their comeuppance -- usually a violent retribution.

A girl who plays with matches burns to death.
Kaspar, who won't eat his soup, wastes away and dies.
Hans, whose "head is always in the clouds," falls into a river.
Robert, who goes outside in a storm, blows away.

Hoffmann was a psychiatrist, though he lived before Freud's discovery of the unconscious, and many of his stories have been analyzed for their psychosexual undertones

The most obvious gay connection is in the story of Konrad, der Daumenlutscher (the Thumb-Sucker).  

Though his mother warns him to not suck his thumb, Konrad persists in the bad habit.  Then he encounters the Tailor with the Scissors (in modern versions, the monstrous Scissor-Man), who cuts both of his thumbs off.  

Oral fixation, symbolic castration, gay anxiety, and a 19th-century Freddie Kruger!

The stories have been translated into several languages.  They were adapted into a 1955 movie (available on youtube), an operetta (1992) and a musical (1998).  

In 2010, Richard Mansfield filmed an explicitly homoerotic shadow-puppet version,  of the Daumenlutscher story, "Suck-a-Thumb." It made the rounds of the gay film festivals.

In an even more explicitly gay sequel, Konrad is sent to a psychiatric hospital for a brutal "cure."

Don't worry, that's a door handle, not what you're thinking.

Sergi Lopez: Gay Characters and Frontal Nudity in Three Languages

You probably remember Sergi Lopez as the evil Captain Vidal in Pan's Labyrinth (2006).  The polyglot actor (fluent in Spanish and French as well as his native Catalan) has appeared in over 60 movies, specializing in psychotic killers, amoral conmen, and other evil types.

But he also plays gay-subtext characters.  In With a Friend Like Harry (2000), his Harry reunites with high school friend Michel (Laurent Lucas), seduces him, and takes over his life.

In Parc (2008), a chance meeting between two married heterosexual men in the park (Sergi, Jean-Marc Barr) turns into a cat-and-mouse game of manipulation and desire.

And gay characters.  In Les derniers jours du monde ("Happy End," 2009), as the end of the world approaches, Theo (Sergi) confesses his love for his straight friend Robinson (Mathieu Almaric), and then commits suicide. I know, the gay gay always dies, but to be fair, Robinson and everybody else on Earth also dies.  And there's a frontal-nude shot of Sergi that's more than worth sitting through the angst.

Sergi doesn't play a gay character in Pa negre ("Black Bread," 2010), but he does play the mayor of a town where a gay boy uncovers a dark secret.