"Welcome to Wanderland": Beyond Gay-Inclusive

Welcome to Wanderland, a 4-issue limited series by Jackie Ball and Maddie Gonzalez, is set in a Disney-style theme park that has fallen on hard times.  Middle schooler Bel has practically grown up there, and her older brother/guardian Mike works there as a costumed character, the Princess Lark.

Mike is gay; although his romantic interests are referenced only once, he says things like "I swear to Gaga" and spends most of his scenes in drag.

Thanks to a magic door, Bel finds herself in the real Wanderland, a magical sword-and-sorcery world ruled by the tyrannical Sylvia.  The real Princess Lark, who prefers the kick-ass name Riot, is in exile.

Riot and Bel become buds, and use the magic door to travel between their worlds whenever they want. Mike assumes that they are a couple, but Bel explains that she is not interested in anyone in that way.  Presumably asexual.













But Riot is gay.  She has a crush on a female pirate captain, who shows up to help them in the final battle (to restore the rightful king to the throne), and then becomes Riot's girlfriend, kiss and all.

Heterosexual romance is only referenced once in the entire series, when the minor character Keith mentions his "girlfriend."

This is a world I can get behind.

I only have a few quibbles:

1. Apparently Bel has the ability to make magical changes to the theme park. But that plotline is underdeveloped; the few changes she makes are uninteresting.

2. There are several loose ends left hanging.

3. Mike doesn't get a boyfriend.  Granted, he only appears in a few scenes to "big brother" Bel, and then to participate in the climactic final battle.  But an occasional flirtation with a hunk would be nice.

The Top 10 Hunks of "The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance"

I never saw the original Dark Crystal movie. In December 1982, I was in the middle of my first year in grad school at Indiana University, and I didn't have time for "The Lord of the Rings with Muppets."  Seriously, why didn't the estate of J.R.R. Tolkien sue? 

And I'm not actually planning to watch the prequel series, The Dark Crystal: Age of Reason  (2019).  The opening monologue is ridiculously long and complicated, the Hobbits....look ridiculous, the characters are impossible to keep track of, and the plot is the standard yawn-inducing defeat the Darkness.  

As far as I can figure, the plot involves capitalist vulture-monsters called Skeezix or something, who oppress the gentle, nature-loving Hobbits...um, I mean Gelflings, who don't even realize that they are being oppressed  (talk about false consciousness!).  The Skeezix are all dying, but they've found a way to stay alive by eating the pink soup that is the Gelfling life-essence.

Meanwhile Darkness is coming, some sort of eco-catastrophe, and it's up to the Chosen One and her ragtag band to defeat it and the Gelfling-eating vulture-monsters.   The maguffin is the Dark Crystal, which used to be the source of all life on the planet, but has recently gone over to the Dark Side.  

I read ahead -- at some point between the end of the series and the start of the movie, all of the Gelflings are killed.  No parallels with the Holocaust there.

But apparently the tv series is gay-positive.  Deet, one of the main characters, has two dads, and there's a lesbian relationship between Tavra and Onica.

No beefcake in a show featuring Muppets, of course, but I thought maybe some of the voice actors or puppeteers would exude some hotness.

1.Harris Dickinson (top photo) as Gurjin.  He previously starred in Beach Rats, about a teenage boy who identifies as straight but has sex with men.

2. Charlie Condou (left), previously of the British soap Coronation Street as Mitjan.  Charlie is gay, adding to the long list of gay actors in the series, everyone from Harvey Fierstein to Benedict Wong.

3. Taron Egerton as Rian.  He played a young Elton John in Rocketman (2019), and is apparently gay, also.

4. Jason Isaacs, best known in a blond wig as Lucius Malfoy in the Harry Potter series, as the Skezix Emperor.

5. Victor Yerrid, shown here in the midst of furry S&M cosplay, as the puppeteer who portrays Hup.

6. Theo James as Rek'yr (don't worry, the apostrophes don't have any phonetic significance, they just look cool).  He played Four in the Divergent-Insurgent-Allegiant movie series.

7.  Ralph Inerson as The Hunter.  Apparently he has a frontal nude scene in The Witch (2015)

8.  Shazad Latif  as Kegan.  

That's only 8, but I'm too busy to finish.  I have to figure out why this tv series is getting so many rave reviews.

And what's up with all the beards.

See also: The Muppet Show

"The League and the Lantern": Let the Buyer Beware

I love heroic fantasy -- fantasy set in Medieval lands with wizards, dragons, trolls, magic swords, Dark Lords, and heroes foretold in ancient prophecy -- but not the stuff aimed at adults, like Game of Thrones.  Too many heterosexual shenanigans and boy-girl fade-out-kisses.

It's in the fantasy aimed at children that you can find the gay subtexts, passionate buddy-bonding, the last-minute rescues, the touching of hands, the fade-out walk into the future. 

Recently my Amazon.com recommendations led me to The League and the Lantern by Brian Wells, advertised as a combination of Harry Potter (the boy who attends wizard school) and Percy Jackson (the boy who hangs out with ancient Greek gods).

It began with:
"Is he dead?"
The voice was muffled and fuzzy.  It sounded like a girl to Jake, but he wasn't quite sure.  Everything was black and spinning.
"No way. Not dead."
Definitely a guy's voice this time, and getting closer.

If I know my fantasy, Jake has just been transported to Eldorar or Faradon, where he will be lauded as the hero mentioned in the ancient prophecy.  The guy reviving him will become his companion on the quest to find the magic sword and banish the Dark Lord, and at the end of the story Jake will decide to stay with him instead of returning to Earth.

So I bought an $18.95 copy.

No, no, and no.

Jake is recovering from a mishap irrelevant to the plot, and the guy who revives him soon vanishes.  He's at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicgo for a "welcome to seventh grade" sleepover.

Almost everyone there is from the University of Chicago prep school, where the elite send their kids, so they already know each other..

So, when is Jake getting zapped to the fantasy world?

He hooks up with two other outcasts, T.J., who is tall, black and into fencing (fencing?  Medieval swordplay later on!), but not otherwise described, and Lucy, who is multilingual and has the "most piercing eyes Jake had ever seen."

Great, boy-meets-girl lo-oo-ove is in the offing for the 12 year old, once they make it to the fantasy world.

They wander off into the museum.  Suddenly there's an explosion, and everything goes black.

Fantasy world now?

Nope.  Vunmen broke in to look for a special artifact: the gloves Abraham Lincoln was wearing when he was shot.  The other kids are evacuated and not in danger, but guess who found the gloves?

Soon everybody is trying to kill them and get the gloves  Even the police.

I'm 50 pages into this thing, and no hint of magic doors to the other world, just a lot of annoying contemporary references to Harry Potter, the X-Men, and so on.

The trio take refuge in Jake's apartment in the mysterious, old-fashioned Greystone hotel (ok, there must be a wardrobe to Narnia in there). 

He lives with his eccentric adopted father Gabe, who prefers to be called "Uncle."  The bellhop Artie also big-brothers him.

Aha!  No doubt Jake is the son of the King of Baraliel, and Uncle Gabe is his trusted advisor, who promised to keep him safe when the Darkness took over the kingdom.  Artie must be a comic-relief sidekick, maybe an elf or a fairy.

No, no, and no.  When the trio tracks Gabe and Artie (not a gay couple) to Springfield, the capital of Illinois and a much bigger Lincoln tourism spot thatn I remember, we finally uncover the mystery.  It has ore to do with the Illuminati than the Wood beyond the World.  Think The DaVinci Code, but with Abraham Lincoln instead of Jesus.

I start reading very quickly.  A donut place.  Hot-wiring a jeep.  A parade. Fighting Abraham Lincolns.  Jumping off a sky tram.  Fighting with a government agent who is not what he seems. Nepali Kung Fu.  The Big Bad, whose name is Anarchus, screaming about how bad Lincoln was.  

And suddenly the book is over.  There were some science-fictiony elements (cough -- cloning John Wilkes Booth -- cough).   BUT NO FANTASY.

I checked the book jacket.  Nowhere does it actually say that it is a heroic fantasy, but the marketing department at RepublicInk certainly worked overtime trying to fool you into thinking it was.

What else could this cover illustration possibly signify but a boy crashing through to a fantasy world?

Well, on the bright side, there is very little heterosexism. None of the adult characters display any particular heterosexual interest.  Neither does TJ (plus he's a fan of Taylor Swift -- gay coded?).    Jake doesn't actually fall in love with Lucy, although he has a moment of jealousy when she is hit on by a teenage cowboy with muscular arms (dude, she's twelve).  

Of course, no one expresses same-sex interest either, but I'll take what I can get.

I checked to see if Brian Wells is gay or gay friendly.  Nope: the appendix of his novel thanks about a thousand people, including 38 husband-wife pairs and no husband-husband pairs.

Disenchanted: A Gay-Free Heroic Fantasy Spoof

I'm not very happy with Matt Groening's (or his writers') inclusion of gay characters.

 The Simpsons has a very occasional homophobic stereotype prancing about, plus Smithers (who finally came out after 17 years) and Patty (28 years). Neither have the slightest inkling of gay history and culture.

They don't even get the offensive gestures right.  Remember when BOTH Patty and Smithers flashed limp wrists to demonstrate they are gay?  Patty?  Really....

On Futurama, Groening's science fiction spoof, gay people were mentioned exactly twice, both times disparagingly, and same-sex desire was dismissed as ridiculous once.

So I didn't have high hopes for Disenchanted (2018), Groening's parody of the fairy tale genre.

In the faux Medieval kingdom of Dreamland, teenage Princess Bean (Abbi Jacobson) is a drunken wastrel who rebels against the constrained princess life imagined by her father, King Zog (John DiMaggio).  Her partners in crime are:

1. The demon Lucie (Eric Andre, left).

2.  The naive, goodnatured elf Elfo (Nat Faxon, top photo and left).  I'm not sure, but think this is a photo of Faxon's character having sex with a guy (notice the bald spot on top).

Nice triceps, Nat.

Together Bean, Lucie, and Elfo have a sort of Leela-Fry-Bender dynamic.  Elfo even has a partially requited crush on Bean.

Other characters include:
1. King Zog, a brash, easily perturbed Archie Bunker type.
2. His second wife, Queen Oona, a snakelike creature who speaks with an Eastern European accent.
3. His sorcerer, Sorcerio (Billy West), who believes that elf blood holds the secret to immortality.

Various courtesans, advisors, and knights that it's hard to keep track of.

The society is sort of fun, a juxtaposition of magical-realm and the horrors of real Medieval life.

I like the fact that their religion isn't Christianity.  They worship the "one god who is the brother to the other one god," and there's a female high priestess.

The plotlines are rather predictable:  Bean rebels against an arranged marriage; Bean tries out a number of new jobs, including executioner; Lucie is captured by an exorcist; Elfo makes up a girlfriend to avoid admitting that he likes Bean.

I liked the episode where the witch from "Hansel and Gretel" turns out to be innocent, the victim of the murderous children.

But there are overarching plots inside of plots.  Elfo is not what he seems.  Bean's mother, who was turned to stone 15 years ago, is not what she seems, either.  Nor is Bean.  And some dark wizards are watching the activity in a magic flame and commenting on how well their plan is progressing.  It becomes quite complex, not to mention surprisingly dark, and ends on several cliffhangers.

The artwork is competent, the visual tropes pleasantly familiar from 30 years of Springfield, and there is a quite a lot of beefcake.  Even the portly King Zog was a muscular warrior, as shown in a flashback to his youth.

Gay references:  Not many.  When Bean decides to cozy up to invading Vikings, she says "I'm changing teams," and Lucie yells "Called it!"  He thinks that "changing teams" means turning lesbian.

You'd think a demon would know that you can't turn lesbian.

Generally in fantasy stories, when you encounter sirens, female creatures whose beautiful songs lure you to your death, only the men have to stop up their ears.  Women are immune.  But when Bean and the gang encounter them, Bean has to stop up her ears, too.  Nice for the myth to be somewhat less heterosexist.

And that's it.

Gay characters: Sorcerio refers to another guy as his ex-lover.  So he's gay.  I suppose.  But when they encounter a hippogriff, a horse-eagle-human hybrid that claims to be female but asserts that "gender is fluid," Sorcerio offers to have sex with it.

And that's it.

The Gay Weird Tales of H.P. Lovecraft

When I was in high school in the 1970s, a series of paperbacks appeared at Readmore Book World with weird, evocative titles: The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath; The Doom that Came to Sarnath; At the Mountains of Madness.

They weren't actually heroic fantasy, they were "weird tales," dark fantasies by H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) originally published in the 1920s and 1930s, mostly about slithering, tentacled things that lurk just beneath the surface of idyllic small towns.

Such as Azazoth, "who gnaws hungrily in inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time and space amidst the muffled, maddening beating of vile drums and the thin monotonous whine of accursed flutes."

That's the way he wrote.

And "unspeakable knowledge" uncovered in long-forgotten grimoires: De Vermis Mysteriis, the Book of Eibon, Unaussprechlichen Kulten.... and, of course, the Necronomicon, written by the "mad Arab Abdul Alhazred."

I loved that sort of thing.  Especially because there was:

No heterosexual romance anywhere.
Lots of descriptions of masculine beauty.
Lots of male bonding.
Lots of muscular men discovering the horror behind the  heteronormative job-wife-house trajectory.

In "Beyond the Wall of Sleep" (1919), the narrator hears a disembodied voice speaking from a sleeping man: "I am your brother of light, and have floated with you in the effulgent valleys.  You have been my friend in the cosmos  We shall meet again -- perhaps in the shining mists of Orion's Sword, perhaps in some other form an aeon hence, when the solar system shall have been swept away."

Talk about soul mates!

In “The Quest of Iranon”(1921), a man wanders a stern, unfriendly world in search of the city of Aira, where there are “men to whom songs and dreams. . .bring pleasure.”  He meets “a young boy with sad eyes” who also dreams of escape.    They travel together, happy in a way yet always longing.  They grow old together and finally die, never finding their true home.

Might I suggest West Hollywood?

Randolph Carter, Lovecraft's most famous hero, has been played on screen by Mark Kinsey Stephenson, Art Kitching, Toren Atkinson, Adam Fozard, and Conor Timmis.

In real life, Lovecraft was rather a jerk.  He was even more racist than most in his era, loudly criticizing the "decadent, half-ape" immigrants who were "overrunning" New England.  He particularly disliked Jews, although he married a Jewish woman (his frequent anti-Semitic ranting was the cause of their breakup).

And he was even more homophobic than most, loudly criticizing gay people as "effeminate" and a danger to civilization.  Yet he had many gay friends, such as Hart Crane (author of The Bridge), Samuel Loveman (author of Hermaphrodite and Other Poems), and Robert Hayward Barlow (who became executor of his estate).

In fact, one might say that he found his strongest emotional bonds among gay men.

Michael Copon: Power Ranger, Gay Ally

Born in 1982, Michael Copon got his start on the most recent of the Power Rangers series, Power Rangers: Time Force (2001-2002).  

He also starred on the evening teen soap One Tree Hill (2004-5) as Felix, a homophobe who writes an anti-gay slur on the locker of his sister's girlfriend.

And on Beyond the Break (2006-2009) as Vin Keahi, the boyfriend of two female professional surfers.

But it's in movies that the bonding -- and the beefcake -- really shines.  He specializes in movies about female bonding:
All You've Got (2006): volleyball players
Sideliners (2006): cheerleaders
Bring It On (2007): cheerleaders

But there's also some male bonding.  He also goes on a quest with Peter Butler in the Vin Diesel prequel, The Scorpion King: Rise of a Warrior (2008).

And he starts a BoyBand with Ryan Pinkston (2010).

No gay characters, but he's a gay ally, so maybe someday.

Joe Dempsie: From Gay Skin to Gladiator

The two boys checking out each others' packages are Chris and Max (Joe Dempsie, Mitch Hewer) of the British teen drama Skin (2004-2007), which was controversial for its portrayal of teenage nudity, and sex.  Max is gay, and Chis is straight, but a sexual opportunist, up for anything that will help him accomplish his devious plans.

The actors are friends in real life, both Straight but Not Narrow.  Mitch Hewer has played gay characters several times, and Joe has played a gay teenager in the British radio play Once Upon a Time (2010), and several gay-subtext characters.

1. Clive on an episode of Doctor Who.

2. Will, an old friend of Merlin's














The villain John in The Fades is heterosexual, but at least he gets naked.

From 2010 to 2013 he played Gendry in the heroic fantasy series Game of Thrones.   He didn't expressed any romantic interest in anyone for many episodes, giving gay fans the opportunity to "read" him as gay.  But it was a "tease."  Gendry eventually fell in love with a woman.

J. Allen St. John: The Beefcake and Phallic Images of Tarzan

In spite of his aristocratic name, J. Allen St. John was born in Chicago in 1872, when it was still a small town, and lived there throughout his life, except for studying in New York and Paris.


But his imagination went far afield beginning in 1916, when he was offered the cover and interior illustrations for Edgar Rice Burroughs' Beasts of Tarzan

An opportunity to draw muscular, half-naked men?  He had found his dream job!










One that lasted for the next thirty years, through dozens of Tarzan books, plus some of the Venus and Mars series.

St. John's extremely-muscular, mostly-naked men and blatant phallic imagery also enlivened the covers of Weird Tales, The Blue Book, and Amazing Stories.

He influenced a generation of beefcake science fiction and fantasy artists, such as Frank Franzetta.










He only wrote one novel of his own, The Face in the Pool: A Faerie Tale (1905).  It's a standard Medieval "boy meets girl" fantasy: "He came to the tower where the Princess Astrella's golden head at the window served as a gleaming beacon to those who would rescue here."

So her head revolves, or what?

Better stick to illustrations.











St. John always tried to get his male figures as naked as possible, negotiating as many phallic images as possible.  Is this a giant snake or a penis come to life?

But not his female figures.  Here the titular Cave Girl, fully clothed, rescues her semi-naked boyfriend from a semi-naked Neanderthal.

St. John was hired to do the cover art for Weird Tales, but fired after a few issues when he refused to provide enough female t. and a. to titilate the straight male audience.  Who wanted to look at naked men?

This is a cover of Mystic Magazine, November 1953, probably to illustrate the article "The Secret Kingdom: Secret Rules of Earth and the Coming Armageddon!"  Armageddon is presaged by a naked redhead with a scythe, his penis cleverly hidden by Father Time's head.

But that didn't stop him from including THREE phallic images












St. John was married to a woman named Ellen from 1904 to his death in 1957, but his interest in the male physique and the penis is obvious.  I'd be surprised if he wasn't gay.

Peter Pat, the Preteen Powerhouse with Plentiful Pro-Gay Plotlines

I've never heard of Peter Pat, but who wouldn't want to read about a toddler with an adult head beating up a loincloth-clad gorilla?

Apparently he was the star of a newspaper comic strip launched in 1934 by someone named Mo Leff.  It lasted only a year, but was reprinted in comic books in both the United States and France.

Peter Pat, aka just Pat, was carried off by a winged warrior to Pagoland, a sword-and-sorcery fantasy world, where he proved to be a superb fighter -- for a three year old.

Notice that there are no word balloons. Descriptions and dialogue appear at random places in the panel.

What's up with the oversized Dick Tracey head?

Pat has a sidekick named Pom, a even younger toddler (is he wearing a diaper?) with an old man's head.

Is Mo Leff just inept, or is there some reason for this weird phenomenon?  Maybe in Pagoland heads get older and bodies get younger.

Pat displayed a respectable teenage physique, but the giant head grafted onto his body would probably deter all but the most avid beefcake fans.

I don't know why his shorts and belt changed color.

The people of Pagoland had a preference for "p" sounds.  Pat's prim pony Pepper promenades in Pagoland pastures.

Mo Leff was also the ghostwriter for the Joe Palooka strip.

Kaptara: Will and Grace in Space

I heard that Chip Zdarsky, who wrote the "Jughead" reboot for Archie comics with Jughead as asexual, was doing a new graphic novel series, Kaptara, about a gay space hero, so I bought the first volume.

Expecting a gay action hero cruising through the galaxy.

Instead I got Will and Grace in space.

Keith (left) is a thin, fashion-obsessed, sex-obsessed, limp-wristed, sarcastic queen, the bitchy best friend of a hundred straight women in "chick flick" comedies who somehow got selected for a mission to Mars.

He's also lazy and a major coward.

His ship goes through a space warp.  Separated from the rest of the crew, he ends up in the faux-Medieval kingdom of Endom on the planet Kaptara, where all the men dress like Conan the Barbarian and don't mind being drooled over by screaming queens.

Naturally, Keith doesn't want to leave, but there's a problem: the evil Skullthor plans to use the space warp to travel to Earth and conquer it.  The queen's son Manton, who Keith has a crush on, and Danton, an effeminate muscleman, are going to try to capture Skullthor.  Keith opts out - he doesn't care about anybody back home, so why should he help?  But after looking at a mysterious photo of a heterosexual nuclear family, he decides to join the expedition.

En route they join forces with She-La, famed tracker and hunter; Melvon the Wizard, who lives in the Unchanted Forest; and Laurette from the original crew, who has become an insect-person.

They never get around to finding Skullthor, at least not in the first volume, but they have lots of picaresque adventures on the strange alien planet.

As you can tell, it's rather tongue-in-cheek, parodying The Lord of the Rings and Masters of the Universe far more than science fiction stories. The visuals are creative.  And everyone on Kaptara being nonchalant about gay people is a step forward.

But I would prefer a gay hero who isn't a throwback to the screaming queens of yesteryear.