"Klaus": A Silver Daddy, a Twink, and a Bagful of Toys

I'm not usually one for Christmas movies.  All tinsel and holly and heteronormativity. But Klaus (2019) promised a gay (or gay subtext) romance: 

Jesper (indie star Jason Schwartzman) is a 19th century entitled Generation Z twink.  Son of the Postmaster General of an unnamed European kingdom (probably Sweden), he deliberately screws up every job he's given, content to live it up on Daddy's money.  Finally Dad puts his foot down: Jesper must start a working postal service in the far-north town of Schmeerensburg, and personally stamp 6,000 letters, or he'll be cut off.

Upon arriving in Schmeerensburg, Jesper encounters Klaus, a gigantic hermit who makes toys.  He gets the bright idea of distributing the toys to any child who writes a letter requesting one, thus fulfilling his obligation and re-integrating Klaus into society.  Complication, complication, reform, and voila!  Santa Claus and boyfriend!  The stark, clear, homoerotic image of Silver Daddy and twink in a sleigh riding off into the future.

Yes, I do imagine what their bedroom activities might be like.  "So, Klaus, are you big...everywhere?"

But I've been fooled by gay teases before.  To be on the safe side, I watch the trailer.  No women appear except for the elderly crone Mrs. Krumm.

I read a few reviews.  No mention of hetero-romances, just the two guys.

So I start watching.  The animation is striking, like old watercolors;  the detail of a 19th century Swedish town amazing.

Dad mentions a few of Jesper's hedonistic pleasures: galas, music halls, no women.

So far, so good.

Mogens (Norm MacDonald) ferries Jesper to the island.  And hits on him.

So far, so good.

Schmeerensburg is a grey, rotting, decrepit old fishing village.  Crime, violence, and general creepiness are rampant. The children are Wednesday Addams-gloomy.  A bell rings, and everyone starts fighting.  Ring the bell again, and they freeze in place.

Jesper seeks refuge in a decrepit school turned into a fish shop, and meets...

The Girl.

No one mentioned a Girl!

Well, she does appear at the bottom left of the poster, but separated from Jensen. Maybe they're just friends.

I fast-forward to the closing scenes, to make sure.

Klaus and Jesper's  scheme of distributing toys in exchange for letters has turned the town around.  It's brightly colored now, and there's no crime (if you're naughty, you don't get a present).   Everyone is happy.

Jesper is married to Alva.   They have two children. They kiss.

You couldn't leave it alone, could you?  The pristine beauty of two men together wasn't good enough.  You had to separate them, throw in a heterosexual romance.

But what about Klaus? Surely he's gay?

12 years into the Christmastime toy distribution, Klaus hears a wind blowing, says "I'm coming, love," and vanishes (but continues to deliver the toys).

Razzle-frazzing hermit was mourning a lost wife all along!

Tis the season for gay teases.

The Top 10 Hunks of "Stranger Things," Season 3, Plus Some of the Plot

The tv series Stranger Things, now in its third season, is an homage to 1980s Goonies movies, with monster-fighting kids in stereotypic small-town Indiana. I watched some of the first season, but couldn't figure out what was going on -- it was a mishmash of psychic powers, alternate worlds, missing children, and parents with histrionic backstories.

So I am starting Season 3, Episode 1 fresh,  mostly looking for gay characters and beefcake, but also trying, once again, to figure out the painfully interrelated characters and endless back stories in this monsterized Peyton Place.

Prelude: A top-secret underground lab in the old Soviet Union, where scientists are trying to break on through to the other side.  When they finally manage to blast a crack in the wall, something slithery and horrible comes out and kills them, then goes back in.  The experiment was a failure.  "You have one year!" Colonel Klink growls.

1. In stereotypic small-town Indiana, Sheriff Hopper (David Harbour, top photo) is annoyed about his daughter and another girl kissing.

A lesbian couple!  Score! When they pull back, I find that they're not lesbians after all, but it's still cool that they're so gender-atypical.  The more masculine one is the girl, El (Millie Bobby Brown), and the more feminine one is:

2. Mike (Finn Wolfhard).

Great name, although he looks less like a Wolf Hard than anyone I can imagine.

Sheriff Harper doesn't want his masculine daughter having sex with a feminine boy, or anyone, for that matter, so he asks advice of Joyce (Wynona Ryder), his old girlfriend, who runs a local drug store that has fallen on bad times since the opening of the mall.

Joyce suggests a heart-to-heart talk; but when the Sheriff tries the talk, the teens laugh at him, so he drags Mike out to his truck and threatens to kill him.

3. Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin) is at the new mall with his girlfriend Max and another feminine boy, Will (who looks like Mike's brother but isn't).  Finally Mike and El show up, apologizing for being late -- the sex took longer than they expected.

They are sneaked into the movie Day of the Dead by:

4. Steve (Joe Keery), the ex-boyfriend of Nancy (Mike's older sister), who works at a horrible ice cream place in the mall.

Afterwards Steve tries to pick up every female customer in sight, but usually fails.  His coworker Robin is keeping a tally (spoiler alert: Robin turns out to be a lesbian.)

By the way, Nancy (Steve's ex, Mike's older sister) is now dating:

5. Jonathan (Charlie Heaton), the older  brother of the androgynous Will, who was waiting at the mall with Lucas and Max.

Both Jonathan and Will, by the way, are sons of Joyce, the ex-girlfriend of Sheriff Hopper who works at the drugstore downtown.

Jonathan sneaks Nancy (Mike's older sister) out of the bedroom, and she goes to work at a horrible job bringing hamburgers to the local newspaper staff and having them make fun of her ideas.

Turns out that Mom Joyce is aware of Jonathan's sexploits, and fully approves.  His heterosexuality established, she turns her attention to:

6. Will (Noah Schnapp). the androgynous boy who looks like Mike's brother but isn't.  "You'll meet a girl someday, yada yada yada."

 "I'm not gonna fall in love!" he exclaims.  So he's either asexual/ aromantic, or he means "with a girl," and he's gay.

Spoiler alert: later on, during a fight, Mike exclaims that Will doesn't like girls, and he gets all upset.  But he doesn't express any interest in boys or girls this season.  Maybe the writers are ok with lesbians but skittish about gay men.

After Joyce's "what girl do you like?" interrogation, Will meets up with his friends (El, Mike, Max, and Lucas), where they use El's magical powers to arrange a welcome-home surprise party for:






7. Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo), who has been away at summer camp. He got a girlfriend there, so instead of doing something fun, he insists that they all trek to a mountaintop to install a makeshift radio tower, so he can call her via short wave (what, no telephones in Utah?)

There's no answer.  They hang out all afternoon, abandoning him one by one, until he's all alone.  Then finally he gets a message -- but it's in Russian!

Call back to the first scene.  He's getting transmissions from the Soviet lab where they had "one year" to break through to wherever the slithery thing is from.

8. That night, Joyce, having rejected Sheriff Hopper's dinner invitation, is eating microwaved lasagna and peas and watching Cheers.  All of a sudden Sean Astin is sitting next to her, laughing at Cheers and asking whether  Sam and Diane (the "will they or won't they" couple) will ever get together.  Apparently this is a metaphor for Joyce, who has been rejecting Sheriff Hopper for quite some time.  But I have no idea what Sean Astin was doing there.

9. Billy Hargrove (Dacre Montgomery), the older brother of Max (one of Mike's friends, the girl who is dating Caleb) works as a lifeguard, where lots of middle-aged women are lusting after him.

He tries to pick up Karen Wheeler, the mother of Nancy and Mike.  Initially she resists, probably due to his horrible 1980s double-entendre talk: "I could give you a...private lesson...I know some...moves...the breast stroke...."  But then she agrees. That night she gets dolled up, and leaves her husband and youngest child asleep on the couch to head out for her hookup.

On the way to the hookup, Billy hits something slithery that drags him into an old abandoned iron mill.  Call back to the Russian blasting experiment?

That's all for this episode, but see how nicely everyone is interconnected?

10. To get to 10, I had to go to Episode 2, where Grigori (Andrey Ivchenko) shows up, a Russian agent assigned to beat up Sheriff Hopper and otherwise cause mischief.

I don't think I'll be watching.

My grade: B for the gender-atypical and queer characters, D for the plot.

"Revenge of Wonderland": Run Far, Far Away

I'm a sucker for all renditions of Alice in Wonderland, especially those that try to create a coherent fantasy world from Lewis Carroll's disjointed dream-journeys through the looking glass.  So when Comixology recommended Revenge of Wonderland, I immediately said "Ok, let's see a plot synopsis."

It's been a long time since Alice Liddle's daughter Callie escaped the twisted world that her mother was pulled into many years ago.  But the insanity of Wonderland has returned, and this time around things are much more dangerous and horrifying than ever before.  

Alice Liddell Hargreaves, the inspiration behind Alice in Wonderland, was born in 1852, so any daughter of hers would be 120 at the youngest.

And, in the comic book, Alice is Lewis Carroll's daughter. Nope, she was the daughter of Dean Henry Liddell, Carroll's colleague at Oxford, and his...um...girlfriend or fantasy girlfriend.  So I'm already not happy.

But I still buy the book.  I still want to know about this rendition of Wonderland.

Boobs.  Women's breasts everywhere.  Closeups.  Filling entire panels.  Women otherwise reclining in slinky catwoman costumes, their long, shapely legs in the air.  Butts and breasts and thighs and legs.  God help me, I'm in a 1940s pinup.









Help!  I need masculinity, stat!  I don't care who or what, tattoos, rings, weird beards, whatever, just get me a chest with pecs!

Whew, that's better.  Ok, I'm ready to continue.

There are four main sets of boobs:
1. The boobs belonging to Callie, Alice Liddell's daughter, rate the cover of Time magazine because she's a bestselling author (who apparently thought she was going to a photo shoot for Playboy). Her stories are all about Wonderland.  Fans have no idea that they're real.

2. The boobs belonging to Violet, Callie's daughter, who is trying to get her mother to admit that Wonderland is real.

The only male character who gets more than a tenth of a panel is Benny, who works with Violet's boobs at the auto garage. She comes the rescue when he is being harassed by some bullies for being mentally disabled.  But after two pages, he vanishes, and it's more boobs, boobs, boobs.

I'm not going to be able to make it.  More lady parts than I've ever seen in my life, filling every panel.  I'm going to be sick.  More beefcake, now!

This photo contains 21 penises (some are hidden, but I know that they are there).  Just keep thinking about the penises.

Right, I was going through a rundown of the main boobs...um, I mean characters.  Callie's, Violet's, and...

3. The boobs belonging to a girl who suspects their secret, and is trying her hardest to find a way into Wonderland while wearing underwear.  She eventually gets there.

4. The boobs belonging to the White Queen, who is kidnapping people from our world to turn into her slaves, after modifying them to have no eyes or mouths.  So they can't look at her boobs?

Ok, that's it.  I've gotten through the entire disgusting volume, including the last 20 pages, devoted to pin-up pictures of the 4 main sets of boobs.

We never did get to Wonderland.

One more penis to tide me over, and then I need a shower. 

Who's responsible for this travesty?

Art by Allen Otero, who has drawn a lot of other boob comics.  He lives in Acapulco, Mexico.  When he's not drawing boobs, he's posting memes of Bible verses.

So he's doing the Lord's work? Of course, I look at a hundred penises before breakfast...but it's not my life's work.

I also found a quote about how you should be allowed to try to change your "sexual preference" if you want to.  Why should we assume that you're stuck?  Why not give people hope?

Allen has a wife and six daughters, no sons.  I imagine he's never seen a penis before, not even his own.

Now about that shower...

What Happened to Gay Italy?

In the summertime I usually make the Paris-Brussels-Amsterdam run, but this year I'm going to Italy. It's been 30 years since my ill-fated graduate studies in Renaissance Italy, so I am prepping by reading some books.

I'm looking for the lushly homoerotic Italy that I remember from grad school: the nude photographs of Wilhelm Von Gloeden, the androgynous prettyboys of Caravaggio, the musclar bodies of Michelangelo.

I'm looking for the glittering gay-positive Renaissance, when  Leonardo Da Vinci sought out male lovers, and Aretino wrote about same-sex marriage.

And the  20th century, with Moravia's Two Adolescents, Umberto Saba's Ernesto, Visconte's Death in Venice, and Pasolini's many homoerotic masterpieces.

Instead, I'm finding a lot of praise of beautiful women, and the erasure of gay people from the world.

1. Dianne Hales, La Bella Lingua: My Love Affair with Italian, the World's Most Enchanting Language (2010) is not actually about the language, but about the culture, with chapters on Dante, film, food, and so on.  Ms. Hales mentions her husband every five seconds, which is annoying but understandable.  But she makes a concerted effort to heterosexualize everyone and everything.  

She learns to appreciate the Italian vocabulary from Niccolo Tommaseo, a 19th century essayist "whose passions included women and words."  Why was it necessary to tell us that, except to make Italy feel unwelcome to LGBT people.

We learn the words for a boy who starts going after girls before he grows a beard, a man who lets ladies walk all over him, a lady-killer, and an elderly man who still longs for women but can't get any.   I'm sure I'll never need any of those words.

How about the word for a man who wants you to come back to his room?

The frescos of Pompeii apparently contained only scenes of men and women coupling.

Lorenzo de Medici extolled "the joys of youth: women, falconry, and the Tuscan countryside."

How on Earth are those the joys of youth?  I was young, and didn't like any of those things.

AND Lorenzo liked men.

Five pages on Michelangelo's relationship with his elderly patron Vittoria, hinting that they were lovers, but no hint that MICHELANGELO WAS GAY.

Is this the same Dianne Hales who wrote a human sexuality textbook with two paragraphs on 'homosexuals':  "Homosexuality threatens and upsets many people because homosexuals are viewed as different."

They're called "gay," and saying that "they upset many people," you assert gays aren't people, you bigot.

2. Tim Parks, A Literary Tour of Italy (2016) actually is no travelogue. It consists of short essays on various Italian writers, all of whom are...you guessed it...straight.

If I have to hear how much this writer "wrote about beautiful women" just one more time.

Aretino is in the book, but he's straight.  Pasolini is not.

Tim Parks, by the way, is the elderly bald-headed guy on the far right.  The other two are Mark Krotov and Alex Shephard, senior editors at Melville House Books.   As far as I know, not a gay couple.

3. Seeking Sicily, by John Keahey.  Ok, Sicily, you're my last hope.  Home of the Taormina nudes in the 19th century and a gay governor today.

Keahey interviews a lot of people, mostly women and elderly men, who reminisce about the beautiful women of their childhood.

Apparently Sicily is a land of "beautiful women."  Old men sit in the cafes, looking at the "pretty girls."  Breasts.  Breasts.  Breasts.

Ok, I get it.  He grew up in Idaho and graduated from the University of Utah a thousand years ago.  He's one of those elderly men who sits in cafes looking at pretty girls and grumbling.  It's understandable that he is unaware that gay people exist.

Keahey visits Racalmuto, the home of "writer Leonardo Sciascia and famed opera tenor Salvatore Puma." Wait -- a gay couple?

No.  He means they both were born there, Scascia in 1921 and Puma in 1920, not that they were a couple.

He does not visit Taormina or interview the governor.

Is it too late to change my trip to Paris-Brussels-Amsterdam?

Big Mouth: The Hormone Monster Strikes Again

Big Mouth is an adult animated sitcom a 7th grader named Nick Birch (co-creator Nick Kroll), who is going through puberty with the help or hindrance of Maurice the Hormone Monster and, in the second season, the Shame Wizard.

This is the puberty of your sex ed books, with nothing to do with voice changes or body hair in weird areas, and everything to do with "discovering the opposite sex": awkward boners, boobs, wet dreams, boobs, masturbation, boobs, and boobs.  Did I mention boobs?

Nick has a coterie of male friends, allies, and frenemies, all of whom are facing their own Hormone Monsters and Shame Wizards as they negotiate their own awkward boners, wet dreams, boobs, masturbation, boobs, and so on.  The major players are:

1. Best bud Andrew Glouberman, left (co-creator John Mulaney), who masturbates every chance he can get, but also gets some girlfriends, with whom he engages in the Princeton Rub.

2. Jay Bilzarian, right (Jason Mantzoukas), who is a bit more advanced in the masturbation and boobs department.  He lusts after older women and has sex with pillows, along with dating girls and hinting about liking guys.  He accepts the offer of a blow job from Nick, for instance, as long as he doesn't "make it gay." (They don't follow through).

Meanwhile, the girls are also dealing with puberty, although theirs is less overtly erotic: cute boys, menstruation, cute boys, gossipy best friends, cute boys, first kisses, cute boys, women's empowerment, cute boys, and cute boys.  Did I mention cute boys?

1. Jessi Glasser, left (Jessie Klein), who is interested in both Nick and Jay.

2. Missy Foreman-Greenwald, a girl with braces who is everybody's "just friend."

3. Gina Alvarez (Gina Rodriguez), who has big boobs and knows how to use them.

So basically the distaff side of Nick, Andrew, and Jay.

These tightly balanced heteronormative boy-girl pairs experience sexual arousal or romantic desire in episodes with titles like "Requiem for a Wet Dream,"  "Girls are Horny, Too,"  "What is it about Boobs?" and "Steve the Virgin," with occasionally other pitfalls of adolescence appearing:  sleepovers, failing grades, bullying big brothers, juvenile delinquency.  Is there any room for same-sex desire?

Well, a little.  Early on, Nick wonders if he might be gay because he likes Andrew -- a lot.  But he realizes that he can love a guy without wanting to see his weiner.

Then there's Matthew (Andrew Rannels), a swishy, snarky, "let's do brunch" gay kid.  Of course, only the swishiest of kids stands a chance of overcoming the masturbation, boobs, erections, boobs, boobs, and boobs of the dominant puberty discourse. 

He appears in only a few episodes, as a supporting player and snark, taking center stage only twice, in Season 2:

In the Season 2 episode "Guy Town," he finds himself having a "gay-off" with a gay resident of a seedy apartment complex (Harvey Fierstein), who suggests that he tone down the snark if he wants to have any friends.

In "Smooch or Share," the Season 2 finale, Matthew and Jay have to kiss during a spin-the-bottle type game.  Later both reveal that it was their first kiss, and Jay surprises him with another. 

So maybe the two will be dating in Season 3.