Gilligan's Island: Gilligan and the Skipper, a gay couple? The Professor asexual? Ginger a drag queen?

Gilligan's Island (1964-67), the tale of seven nitwits who set out from Honolulu for a “three hour tour” and end up stranded on a desert island,  has become iconic for its ineptness and naiveté. They pull endless supplies from nowhere, build anything they need (except a boat) from bamboo and coconuts, hear endless radio news stories about their situation, and get a steady stream of visitors who promise rescue, but betray them or forget the island's location.  Even Santa Claus dropped by to offer holiday cheer.

But  actually, it was no more inept or naive than other 1960s sitcoms. The Beverly Hillbillies lived as multi-millionaires in Beverly Hills for many years, yet continued to wear hillbilly outfits, eat possum stew, and refer to the swimming pool as a "cement pond." 

In case Gilligan's Island and its endless reruns came  before your time, the seven castaways are, according to the theme song:

Gilligan, a "mighty sailing man" (in red), and the Skipper, "brave and sure" (in blue).  Color tv was brand new, so they used bright primary colors.

They became partners during the War, presumably the Korean War,  and now ran an island tour service out of Honolulu.  

Five passengers sign on for the "fateful trip" that was supposed to last for three hours,  "lunch provided."

3-4. Mr. and Mrs. Howell, "the millionaire and his wife," who for some reason brought suitcases full of money on the tour.

5. Ginger (the redhead), a glamorous Marilyn Monroe-style "movie star," who has a huge number of acting credit in very bad movies.

"And the rest," until the rest complained and got a mention in the theme song.

6. "Mary Anne," a wholesome Kansas farmgirl.

7. "The Professor,"  who has a B.A. from USC, a B.S. from UCLA, an M.A. from SMU, and a Ph. D from TCU, and is an expert on the languages and cultures of the "savage" natives of the area, yet works as a high school science teacher.

Straight Boomer boys had endless debates about which they would prefer to date, Ginger or Mary Anne.  But there was a lot for gay boys to like:

1. Beefcake First mate Gillian (Bob Denver, below) was slim, smooth, and occasionally shirtless.

Lithe, hard bodied Denny Miller, a 1959 Tarzan (top photo, appeared twice, as a "jungle man" and as as a surfer who rode a wild wave all the way in from Honolulu.

 In February 1965, Kurt Russell appeared as a jungle boy, wearing only a loincloth (he counts as beefcake when you're five years old)

Even the Professor took off his shirt a couple of times.

2. Utter lack of heterosexual interest.

There was lots of heterosexism, of course.  When the Professor wonders why headhunters would abduct only the girls, Gilligan quips “Because they’re boys!”  

When Mrs. Howell becomes the recipient of anonymous love letters, she and her husband interrogate Gilligan, the Skipper, and the Professor.  They all claim innocence.  "But that's impossible!" she exclaims.  "We've asked everyone on the island!" Ginger and Mary Anne are omitted.

More after the break

Bronson Pinchot: A gay icon of my childhood turns out to be straight. Then it gets worse. But at least we see his dick

For many years, tv has disguised gay couples as heterosexuals with some other reason for being together -- they work in the same office, or share an apartment, or are brothers.  So censors, skittish network executives, and shrieking homophobic audiences remain clueless, but if you're "in the know," the gay subtext is obvious.

Bronson Pinchot broke into film as Tom Cruise's buddy in Risky Business (1983)..  After several years of playing swishy gay-vague characters, such as Dennis on Sara and Lloyd in After Hours, he was cast in the gay-vague buddy sitcom Perfect Strangers (1986-1993).  He played Balki Bartokomous, an exuberant free-spirit from the faux-Greek country of Mypos, who descends upon his stick-in-the mud distant cousin Larry (Mark Linn-Baker) in Chicago.  You can anticipate the the standard "let's do something wacky"/"but I have a dentist appointment" plotlines.

It's supposed to be a brief visit, but the two end up falling in love, their affection explained as fraternal love, and Balki stays on.

I watched during the first season when Perfect Strangers led into Head of the Class and Night Court on Wednesday nights.  A surprising number of plotlines could be read as negotiating a same sex romance.

Larry: "Balki is cute and all, but how can I build a future with someone who doesn't even know how to fill out an IRS Form 1088-B?" 

Balki: "Larry is good in bed, but he's so shy and reserved. How can I draw him out of his shell?" 

Apparently the network had a problem: the guys were too obviously a gay couple.  So during the second season plotlines increasingly involved dating girls, culminating in steady girlfriends Jennifer and Mary Anne (Melanie Wilson, Rebeca Arthur).

Obviously a screen.  Could they be sitting farther apart on that couch?

More after the break.  A lot more.

The Gay Adventures of Jerry Lewis

When I was growing up, every summer and sometimes at Christmastime, we drove 300 miles from Rock Island, Illinois to Garrett, Indiana, to visit my parents' family.  We usually stayed with my Aunt Nora, whose kids were nearly grown-up: when I was 10, Cousin Ed was 21, Cousin Eva 19, and Cousin Joe, the only one still living at home, 17 .

It was fun staying with Aunt Nora.  Their house was only two blocks from the Limberlost Library, where Cousin Joe let us check out books on his card.  It was three blocks from Sylvan Lake, where we could go swimming and fishing in the summer.

And in the winter, there was another treasure: an attic full of comic books from the 1950s!

Donald Ducks! Ancient chubby Caspers!  Archie going to sock hops! Pre-code horror!



And Jerry Lewis.

At the time I didn't know that Jerry Lewis was a real person, a comedian whose shtick involved blatant gay subtexts.

I just thought that he was a comic book character, a big-jawed, rather dopey, but cute young man who was not interested in women, as many cover gags demonstrated


 However, he had a long-term partner named Dean Martin.

The Adventures of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis title (1952-1957) had the pair traveling around the world, to China, the Middle East, Mexico, sub-Saharan Africa, or Ruritanian countries of Europe, where they became immeshed in intrigues involving spies, bandits, evil cultists, or cannibals, allowing the easily-frightened Jerry to leap into Dean's arms.

Dean often got girls along the way, but Jerry did not.


In the few issues that displayed him shirtless, he had a pleasantly solid physique.

In 1957, shortly after the real-life comedy duo split up, Dean Martin vanished from the comic books, and The Adventures of Jerry Lewis continued for another 84 issues, finally folding in 1971.


Now Jerry was a single parent raising his sarcastic preteen nephew, Renfrew, and still not interested in women, though often they tried to seduce him.  The duo had humorous paranormal adventures with ghosts, witches, werewolves, monsters, mad scientists, and so on.

Eventually Jerry became the headmaster of a school for kids who are "different."

Some nice gay symbolism in my Aunt Nora's attic during the long, dull days after Christmas.

Watching Monty Python's Flying Circus

When PBS came to Rock Island, it brought us a full-fledged British invasion. Sitcoms (Father Dear Father, Good Neighbors), science fiction (The Prisoner, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy), costume drama (Upstairs Downstairs) -- and since they were on PBS, they were all educational, approved even by teachers who derided all other tv as "mindless trash."

Monty Python's Flying Circus was the most bizarre of the lot.  Ostensibly a comedy-sketch show with a regular troupe of performers, like Saturday Night Live, it had sketches that bled into other sketches, or stopped halfway through, weird semi-animated characters commenting on the action, visual puns, in-jokes, moments of sudden chaos.  In Britain, there were antecedents in The Goon Show  and This Was the Week That Was, but in America we had never seen anything like it.


And we loved it.  We repeated catch phrases over and over (I still use "Nudge nudge, wink wink!").

We discussed the inner significance of sketches with the zeal of literature scholars.

We sang "The Lumberjack Song.": "I like to put on lady's clothes and hang around in bars.."

We went to the movies, Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975) and Monty Python's Life of Brian (1979).

In retrospect, we didn't like Monty Python very often.  Many sketches were incomprehensible, too bizarre, too busy savaging British programming conventions that we had never heard of.  And why are men in drag portraying elderly women with Yorkshire accents by definition hilarious?


But some of the sketches were -- and still are --anarchic gems.

Dead Parrot ("This is an ex-parrot!")

Hungarian Translation ("My hovercraft is full of eels.")

Nudge Nudge Wink Wink ("Is your wife...into photographs?")

Spam ("No one expects the Spanish Inquisition!")


There was a fair amount of nudity, many more exposed chests and abs than you would ever see on American tv.  Eric Idle (left) was particularly likely to be displayed in the altogether.

And  there were few swishy stereotyped gay characters, After Graham Chapman came out to the other troupe members in 1967, they were careful to avoid overt stereotyping of gay men, although their distaste for drag queens is often apparent.

In fact, a number of sketches skewered homophobia, as when one character suspects that another is a "poof," and casually shoots him.  Or a "Prejudice Game," in which anti-gay prejudice is placed on equal footing with racial and religious prejudice.

See also: Saturday Night Live.

Yogi Bear and Boo Boo

A few years ago I published a scholarly article outlining the homodomestic relationship between Yogi Bear and Boo Boo. And Ruff and Reddy.  And Spongebob and Patrick.

People immediately started screaming at me.  Even today, every few weeks someone finds the article and starts screaming again:
"It's a kid's cartoon!"
"You're reading too much into it!"
"The cartoonists never intended them to be gay!"
"Can't two guys be friends without everyone thinking they're gay?"
"How can they be gay, when they aren't Wearing a Sign?"

Except I never said that the Yogi Bear and Boo Boo were "really" gay, whatever that might mean for beings with no bodies or minds, who don't exist at all outside of some images painted on celluloid.  Or that the producers meant them to be gay.  I said that their partnership provided a model with which gay kids could identify and validate their own same-sex desires.

A lot of the things I know about the world -- avalanches, duels, Napoleon, gangsters, daffodils, Shakespeare, karate, King Arthur, submarines, Egyptian hieroglyphics -- I probably first heard from the block of cartoons that Hanna Barbera broadcast on prime time in the late 1950s, and aired through the 1960s on Saturday mornings and on late-afternoon kids' programs like Captain Ernie's Cartoon Showboat.

The characters belong to my earliest, preliterate, preverbal memories:

Huckleberry Hound
Lippy the Lion and Hardy Har Har
Pixie and Dixie
Quick Draw McGraw and Baba Looey
Ruff and Reddy
Snagglepuss
Wally Gator
Yogi Bear and Boo Boo






Note that they usually came in pairs who lived together, traveled together, and worked together to defeat the bad guy who wanted to eat or confine them.  I know now that they were reflections of the movie-comedy teams of the 1940s and 1950s, like Abbott and Costello, Hope and Crosby, and Martin and Lewis.

I didn't know then.

I knew only that every adult man in the real world had a wife, and every teenage boy had a girlfriend whom he hoped one day to marry.  I saw no men, heard of no men -- none at all  -- who lived together, who built a life together, who didn't need or want wives. But at "cartoon time," in plain view, there was Yogi Bear and Boo Boo, Pixie and Dixie, Quick Draw and Baba Looey.

See also: The Three Stooges and The Flintstones.

Firesign Theatre: We're All Bozos on This Bus

The youth counterculture of the 1960s listened to JeffersonAirplane, Donovan, -- and the Firesign Theatre.

They were a comedy troupe consisting of  Phil Austin, Peter Bergman, David Ossman, and Philip Proctor. Beginning in 1966, they performed parodies of mass media on L.A. radio --  tv commercials, soap operas, film noir -- switching from sketch to sketch randomly, with a surrealism that presaged Monty Python's Flying Circus.  

Soon they were releasing comedy albums, with seemingly nonsensical titles that actually take on meaning as the story progresses:
Waiting for the Electrician, or Someone Like Him
How Can You Be in Two Places at Once, if You're Not Anywhere at All?
Don't Crush that Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers
I Think We're All Bozos on this Bus
Everything You Know is Wrong

Roller Maidens from Outer Space (1974) is Phil Austin's solo album.

No gay characters per se, but they skewered everything, including heterosexual romance, the heterosexual nuclear family, even American exceptionalism:

This land is full of mountains, this land is full of mud.
This land is full of everything, for me and Elmer Fudd.

And the fluidity of desire was included gleefully, un-selfconsciously:

Ralph: Look at the muscles on that dude!  He's got muscles in his ears!
Babe: That's Steve Reeves.
Ralph: No.
Babe: There he is!  That's Steve Reeves!
Ralph: No, that's Agnes Moorhead.

But their most important contribution to gay boomer kids was the parody itself.  When Peter Bergman died in 2010, one of the tributes on the Firesign website message board said:



"It was hard being a gay kid a backwater part of the country,  and Firesign made me realize that the world is nuts -- that we are all bozos on this bus -- and I was not the only person who perceived it."

In the album Radio Live Now (2001), the troupe decided to make long-term characters Hal and Ray, news anchor partners, a gay couple. Phil Proctor explains: "we were kind of implying that they were committed to one another for life, and they were living together, and treating all that with complete respect, as a normal aspect of the end of the century in American society."

Teen Angels

A year before they caused a counterculture-establishment standoff with their Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour (1967-70), comic duo Tommy  and Dick Smothers starred in an "I've got a secret" sitcom, The Smothers Brothers Show (1965-66).

Dick, the "straight man," plays a young, hip, self-absorbed bachelor in the Bill Bixby mold.  The paranormal event that jolts him out of his heterosexist stupor is not a crashed spaceship, but a knock on the door: his irreverent, anarchic, "queer" brother Tommy, lost at sea two years ago, has returned as "an apprentice angel," assigned to oversee Dick's life and do good deeds.

The plots involved Tommy's good deeds -- reforming gangsters and juvenile delinquents, helping the homeless, helping a musician change his tune -- and Dick's fruitless attempts to continue his skirt-chasing in instead of accepting a supernatural, well-night omnipotent same-sex bond.

I don't remember much about the series -- I was very, very young at the time -- but I remember Tommy's marvelous nonchalance about gender transgressions. To liven up a nursing home, he puts on old-lady drag and cavorts with the old men.

Fast forward thirty years, and the premise was recast in Teen Angel (1997-98), starring Corbin Allred  (left) as Steve, a young, hip, self-absorbed high schooler in the Michael Cade mold.  Again, a knock on the door: his irreverent, anarchic, "queer' best friend Marty(Mike Damus), who died last year after eating a spoiled hamburger, has returned as "an apprentice angel," assigned to oversee Steve's life and do good deeds.

The plots involved Marty's good deeds -- mostly helping Steve pass tests, get on the wrestling team, get the lead in the school play, and so on.  The sibling relationship gone, Marty and Steve become a more obvious romantic couple; though they both display heterosexual interests, they are obviously devoted to each other.

Again, Marty displays a marvelous nonchalance about gender transgressions.  When Steve likes a  cheerleader named Jessica, Marty senses that she will reject him, so he morphs into Jessica to go on the date.

What can we learn about the social changes between 1965 and 1997:
1. MORE heterosexism.  More tongue-lolling, leering, moaning insistence that boys and girls together are the meaning of life.
2. MORE subtext. More touching, more tenderness, more caring.
3. Humorous gender transgressions are ok, but you still aren't allowed to be gay.

Not the Marrying Kind: Gay Burns and Allen

Television was introduced in 1949, just in time for the formative years of the first Boomers (the generation officially started in 1945). Radio performers scrambled to make the transition. Some made it, most didn't.  Burns and Allen, a "married couple" sitcom starring comedians George Burns and Gracie Allen, made it. After 20 years on radio, they transitioned to television in 1950 and stayed on until 1958, stopped only by Gracie's death.

They're shown here with guest star Steve Reeves.

I recently listened to an episode from the end of the radio run, in 1949.

The homophobic silence of Dark Age America was starting to break -- very, very slightly -- as radio sought to compete with television by introducing "racy" content -- hints and innuendos about sex in general, and same-sex desire in particular.  So there are gay jokes.

The plot is about George and Gracie, playing themselves, trying to find a wife for painfully shy next door neighbor, musician Meredith Willson (who penned The Music Man).

 They co-opt singer Eddie Cantor (who was subject to some gay rumors of his own).   He wants to marry off some of his daughters.

So Gracie invites Eddie Canter over, and announces to Meredith, "We've found someone for you to marry!"

After a pause, Meredith says:  "Gee, I had my heart set on a woman."

Later Eddie explains to his potential son-in-law how a wedding works:

"The minister says 'I now pronounce you man and wife, and then you kiss."

"Even if you've just met?" Meredith asks, thinking that he means kissing the minister.

Meredith (or at least the character he is playing) is too shy to talk to women, let alone marry one.  He complains: "I can't get married if a woman is [at the wedding]."

Again and again, joke after joke brings up the idea that Meredith is considering marrying a man.

What's going on?

If same-sex desire is really beyond the boundaries of what can be known, then the characters are playing with an absurdity, a play on words like Abbott & Costello's "Who's on First" routine.

But same-sex desire was known, even in 1949. The Kinsey Report, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) revealed its existence to millions.  George Burns and Gracie Allen knew gay people, worked with gay people in Hollywood.

Their television series often implied that teenage son Ronnie Burns (or at least the character he played) preferred the company of men.

Maybe that's why Meredith Wilson's character trips easily over the boundary between "confirmed bachelor" and "gay."

At the end of the episode, everyone agrees that he "should never get married." At least not to a woman.

Even in the darkest of the Dark Ages, there were still hints and innuendos.

(In real life, Meredith Wilson was married three times.  To women.)

See also: Eddie Cantor: The Craziest Reason for Gay Rumors

The Marx Brothers: Bisexual Groucho and hunky Chico

I first saw the Marx Brothers at a Film Festival during the Summer of 1978 (along with Animal House, Grease, and The Rocky Horror Picture Show: it was a memorable summer).  The anarchic comedians came from Vaudeville, moved onto Broadway, and started spinning their bits into movie comedy with Cocoanuts (1929).  Three of the greatest comedies of all time followed: Animal Crackers (1930), Monkey Business (1931), and Horse Feathers (1933).  Then they made some movies that were merely great.

Zeppo, the youngest, played the "handsome leading man" for a treacly romantic plot.

Groucho engaged in long cons, often involving wooing wealthy dowager Margaret Dumont.

Chico (right)  played an Italian-accented musical virtuoso planning cons of his own.

Harpo played his mute, addled sidekick, who liked to chase women while honking a horn. He also handed  random people his leg.

Wait -- Zeppo falling in love with a woman, Groucho wooing a woman, Harpo chasing women.  Granted, the wordplay came fast and furious, pretensions were deflated, social institutions were mocked -- but wasn't it still heterosexist?

Not at all. You can queer a Marx Brothers movie as easily as Making Love.



1.  You don't expect a lot of beefcake in movies from the 1930s, but there was some. Mostly from incidental players.

In this still from Duck Soup, Zeppo looks pleasantly muscular for the 1930s, and Chico positively buffed.

2. In the heart of the Pansy Craze, there are no pansy jokes  No screaming queens, no effeminate waiters, none of the overt homophobia evident in other movie comedies of the era.

3. Zeppo's hetero-romance is ludicrously over-the-top; it is one of the social institutions that the Marx Brothers are mocking.

Groucho woos Margaret Dumont for her money; elsewhere, his jabs and hints hit men and women both.  "Tell me, what do you think of the traffic problem? What do you think of the marriage problem? What do you think of at night when you go to bed, you beast!"

Harpo hands his leg to women and men both.

Chico doesn't seem particularly interested in women.

All of the Marx Brothers demonstrate an easygoing nonchalance about same-sex desire that is remarkable for the period.

4. In real life, Groucho stated that he was "straight but curved around the edges."

My friend Randall claimed to have been with him at a party in Hollywood in 1958.


Near the end of his life, the 80-year old Groucho fell in love with 30-year old Bud Cort -- who starred in Harold and Maude (1971), about a romance between a teenage boy and an elderly woman.  Bud moved into Groucho's mansion, where the question of whether they became physically intimate is nobody else's business.  "I loved him, and he loved me.  He was my fairy godfather." 

See also: Dick Sargent, Cary Grant, and Groucho Marx in the Same Bed.

Laurel and Hardy: 1930s Gay Couple

One Christmastime in junior high, I happen to be walking through the room while Grandma Davis and her friend are watching an old black and white movie on tv.  Two guys, one fat and one skinny, are getting into a slapstick scrape.

"They don't make movies like that nowadays," Grandma Davis exclaims.

"Nowadays all you see is sex, sex, sex," her friend complains. "Thankfully the boys weren't interested in women."

My ears perk up.  Not interested in women?  Maybe they were interested in each other?

I sit down, but the movie is nearly over.  "Who were they?"  I ask.

"Why, what do they teach in those hippie schools of yours?"  Grandma Davis  asked.  "It was Laurel and Hardy, the greatest comedy team in history!"

Later, in the Washington Junior High library, I read about the bumbling man-child Stan Laurel and the fat blustering Oliver Hardy (reminiscent of Gilligan and the Skipper on Gilligan's Island), who starred together in over 70 shorts and 23 feature films from the 1920s to the 1950s.  But many of their films involved wives, and both were married to women in real life.

Grandma's friend was wrong.

Years later, in Bloomington, I turn on the tv one dull Saturday afternoon, hoping for an old beefcake movie.  Instead, I see two women wearing men's suits.  One is talking on the telephone to Oliver Hardy.  "I'd love for you to meet my husband," she says, glancing at her partner, who smiles.

WTF?

Did I just see a lesbian couple in a 1930s movie?

 Apparently not.  The movie was Sons of the Desert (1933), with Laurel and Hardy as a couple of henpecked husbands who sneak away to go to a lodge convention in Chicago.  Their wives have become wise to the deception, and are planning a comeuppance.  Not lesbians.


But the gay subtexts come fast and furious in the Laurel and Hardy world.

The two often have wives, but only as obstacles to be overcome in their quest to be together.

They often flirt -- literally flirt -- with police officers, boxers, and sundry macho figures.

They often don drag, or act the 1930s "pansy."  And they are devoted to each other, with an obviously physical relationship.

In The Celluloid Closet (1978), Vito Russo discusses the 1932 short Their First Mistake.  As usual, the wives are jealous.  In this case, it's just Ollie's wife, who forbids him from seeing Stan.  So Ollie gives her a baby (somehow) to distract her.  But the plan backfires, and she files for divorce, naming Stan as the "other woman."  The movie ends with Stan and Ollie as a domestic couple raising the child themselves.

Can you get more overt than that?

The Three Stooges: Gay Symbolism on "Cartoon Showboat"

When I was a kid in the 1960s, every day after school I rushed home or to my boyfriend Bill's house to watch Captain Ernie's Cartoon Showboat.  Captain Ernie (later weatherman Ernie Mims) showed old Bugs Bunny and Popeye cartoons, and with the proviso "Don't try this at home," The Three Stooges.

I didn't realize that the comedy shorts were originally shown in theaters 30 or more years before, or that the three "stooges" belonged to a long tradition of comedy teams.  I found them bizarre, somewhat disgusting,  and fascinating.

What was this world of boarding houses, boxing rings, hobos riding the rails, jitterbug music, and machine-gun toting gangsters?

Why did Moe, Larry, and Curly/Shemp have different jobs and living situations in every episode?

Why was their theme song Three Blind Mice?

Why was third member of the trio so changeable, sometimes Curly, sometimes Shemp?

The role of the Third Stooge was sometimes filled by two flamboyantly gay-coded actors, Joe Besser in the shorts and Joe DeRita in the movies (seen here with Samson Burke in The Three Stooges Meet Hercules).  But they never appeared on Cartoon Showboat.

And the most important question: why did the men live together (and sleep together)?  Where were their wives?

All of the adult men I knew, or had seen on tv, or had ever heard of, had wives.  My parents and other relatives constantly talked about the far-off day when I would be "grown up" and "married," as if the two states were identical.

Yet these three men were obviously grown up, and obviously not married.  Men building a life together, not needing or wanting wives (I missed or ignored the scenes where they flirt with women).

I didn't think there was any  romance between them, not even friendship -- Moe was painfully abusive to the others, and they treated him with open contempt.

But, as with the Hanna Barbara cartoons of my earliest childhood (Yogi Bear, The Flintstones), the domesticity itself was evocative.

There was a recast, The Three Stooges, in 2012, with Chris Diamantoupoulos  (top photo) as a rather muscular Moe.  Again, they don't get girlfriends or wives; the hetero-romantic plot is given to a new character.

See also: Samson Burke.

Kenan and Kel: Nickelodeon Gay Teen Duo

I'm not sure why African-Americans are excused from having to demonstrate that they're heterosexual every five minutes, but the Nickelodeon teencom duo Kenan and Kel (1996-2000) were excused.

They were a comedy team, like a teenage Abbott and Costello or Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin.  Kenan, the hefty "straight man," occasionally liked girls -- far less often than the tongue-lolling girl-watchers of other teencoms -- but Kel, the dimwitted "stooge" (left), never.  His physical attraction to Kenan was rather obvious, like Jerry Lewis's to Dean Martin forty years before, with frequent hugs, soulful gazes, complements, and innuendos.

In the beginning, Kenan kept pushing Kel away, trying to draw a boundary between friends and romantic partners, but still, he panicked whenever their bond was threatened.

In the two-part "Bye, Bye, Kenan" (1997-8), Kenan's Dad gets a job as a forest ranger in Montana, forcing the two to split up.  They try to sabotage the job to stay together.

In later episodes, they behaved more overtly like romantic partners.

In "The Honeymoon's Over" (1999), they appear on a game show as a newlywed couple, with Kel in drag.

In their movie, Two Heads are Better Than None (2000), a mad scientist traps them in a spooky old mansion along with several heterosexual couples, and everyone treats them as just another couple.

The duo had rather a nasty breakup; in 2012, Kel told TMZ that "Kenan doesn't want to be seen with me in any form of media, or even have my name mentioned around him."

Maybe it has to do with the direction the actors' careers were taking?

Kenan Thompson has been a regular on Saturday Night Live since 2003, but he also used his girth to comedic advantage in Fat Albert, Snakes on a Plane, and Wieners.  No gay content.

Kel Mitchell, meanwhile, starred in the gay-themed Peoria Babylon (1997) and had an ongoing role as a feminine fashion design student named Freddie Fabulous on The Parkers (2003).  He also played a gay-coded beautician on First Family (2012).

In the episode I saw of the Nickelodeon animated series Wild Grinders (2012-13), about preteen skate boarders, his character, J.J., was shown briefly holding hands with the Goth boy Emo Cries.

Currently Kel is starring in the CW digital series Stupid Hype, as the flamboyant rival to break dancer turned rapper Hype (Wilson Bethel).

Boyce and Hart

Boyce and Hart barely rated a "wow!" in Tiger Beat.  Maybe they were too old, over 30 by 1968.

But they made a splash with gay kids, and not just because of the eye-appeal of their exceptionally tight white slacks.  While other musical duos like Simon & Garfunkel gazed at each other and occasionally placed a hand on shoulder, Boyce and Hart seemed to relish physical contact, always touching: hugging, arms around shoulders, legs draped over thighs.

Both had wives and talked about girls, but still, it wasn't hard to imagine them as boyfriends.

Arizona native Bobby Hart (bottom) and Virginia boy Tommy Boyce  (top) met in Los Angeles in 1958, when they were 19 and 20 years old.  Soon they were writing songs for Chubby Checker, Paul Revere and the Raiders, Del Shannon, and Dean Martin.  

But their biggest fame came in 1965, when they began writing the songs for The Monkees. They left  in 1966, after a dispute with producer Don Kirshner, but they remained close to the Monkees, who graciously gave them credit for writing such hits as "Last Train to Clarksville" and "I Wanna Be Free."

Boyce and Hart also performed, with three albums and five charting singles.  They appeared as themselves on three 1960s sitcoms: I Dream of Jeannie (1967), The Flying Nun (1970), and Bewitched (1970), and wrote the soundtracks of a dozen other programs, including Days of Our Lives, The Ambushers, and Where Angels Go, Trouble Follows.

The songs they wrote for others were often heterosexist, to meet the requirements of the music machiine of the era.  But some, deliberately or not, omitted pronouns:

It's so neat to meet you "Where the Action Is"
Say you'll always be my friend, because "I Wanna Be Free."

And some were about friends:

Just exactly what does trust mean?
Is it about being down with the scene?
Or is it about following your own true heart
And being true to your friends to the end from the start

They wrote over 300 songs together before breaking up in the early 1970s.  They reunited briefly in the 1975-77 to perform with Micky Dolenz and Davy Jones of The Monkees (calling themselves David, Micky, Tommy & Bobby).  But then each pursued his own projects.  They lived on opposite sides of the country, Boyce in Nashville, Hart in Los Angeles.

Tommy Boyce committed suicide in 1994.   Bobby Hart is currently working on a musical about their partnership; Sunshine Pop: Stories from the Boyce and Hart Music Machine.