"Physical" and "Xanadu," the West Hollywood theme songs

 

When I was living in West Hollywood, every gay bar had its own theme song that it played over and over, several times a night.

Mugi, for Asian men and their admirers: "One Night in Bangkok."

The Faultline, for leathermen and bears: "You Spin Me Round (Like a Record)"

Mickey's, the twink disco a few blocks from my apartment: "Physical" and "Xanadu" by Olivia Newton-John.

In the 1970s, Olivia Newton-John was known for easy-listening, feelings-drenched songs appealed mostly to girls. "If Not for You" (1971) and  "I Honestly Love You" (1974) didn't specify pronouns, and  "Have You Never Been Mellow?" (1974) wasn't about romance at all, but I still wasn't a fan.

But after the success of Grease (1977), Olivia's music became as sexually liberated as her character.  Her next big hits included: "Totally Hot" (1979), "Physical" (1981), "Make a Move on Me" (1981), and "Heart Attack" (1982).

 "Physical" (1981), has about the same theme as "You're The One that I Want" from Grease, and for that matter, "Show Me" from My Fair Lady (1964): We've done the dinner and movie thing, and now it's time for the next step.

I'm sayin' all the things that I know you'll like

Makin' good conversation

I gotta handle you just right

You know what I mean

I took you to an intimate restaurant

Then to a suggestive movie

There's nothin' left to talk about

Unless it's horizontally 

Of course, in West Hollywood one typically started out horizontal, then started dating if the bedroom activities were satisfactory.

The music video, which played incessantly on MTV in the early 1980s,  responds directly to gay fans.  Olivia plays a personal trainer whipping men into shape, leering at various disembodied, muscular pecs and arms, and semi-n*de men in jockstraps.

More after the break

Connor Newall: The Hottest Property in Fashion buddies with Alfie Williams, models in gay ads, plays gay guys, shows his....

  

Link to the n*de dudes

Alfie Williams just posted a photo of his 28 Years Later Family, at a table read.  He's sitting between Chi-Lewis Parry, the zombie Samson (not shown)  and Connor Newall, who played Jimmy Shite, the first cultist to come to the rescue as Spike is facing a zombie hoard (and, in Bone Temple, forced to fight him to the death)  Alfie always gravitates toward LGBTQ actors, so it's worth checking him out.

In 2015, Connor Newall was a 16-year old high school student, growing up in the rough neighborhood of Govan, Glasgow, with a dad who worked on the docks and an older brother in the army. He figured that he would join the army, too, until a casting agent visited his school, looking for some scally lads to play in a PSA about knife violence in Scotland: No Knives, Better Lives.

She cast Connor, and then sent his photo to Michael O'Brien at Model Team Glasgow, who called instantly and exclaimed "Get him to my office right now!"

Connor signed on, and had a photo shoot for GQ within a week.  Then "the phone started ringing, and to be honest it never stopped."  He had to get excused absences from his teachers so he could fly off for magazine shoots in London, Paris, and Barcelona.  Every photographer in the business asked for him. He was called "the hottest property in fashion" and "Scotland's Model Teenager." 

What was the attraction?  Connor was shorter than the usual male model, and not muscular, but his striking, angular face could be angelic one moment, demonic the next, move from brooding to whimsical with a glance.

And he was really good at gay-themed ads.

Connor's modeling rarely involves hugging ladies, but the gay themes are everywhere. Here a four page spread for GQ China depicts him and Bradley Phillips as boyfriends.

Playing with a water hose and his d*ck on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends 

Connor's older brother supported his modeling,  and quit his army job to join him on the runway.  His father wasn't so sure.  Modeling careers don't last long.  In a few years, his looks will be gone, the media will go on to the next big thing, and then where will he be?  He should train for a back-up career.

Connor chose acting.  To date he has seven credits listed on his CV:

The short Bunny (2018): A teenager (Connor) wears bunny ears to deal with the trauma of his deceased mother.

The music video Gratitude (2018), by Benjamin Francis Leftwitch, a British Indie folk singer: a very upset Connor parks his car in the dark, punches it a few times, smokes a cigarette, takes off his clothes, and trudges into the ocean.  

Now I know what I'm praying for
Not to waste anytime like I wasted before
Now I know what I'm staying for
No more

It's nice that nothing in the lyrics or the video shows him upset over a girl. 

 More Connor  after the break

"The Other Two," Episode 1.6: Cary goes shirtless, Chase twerks, and there's enough bulges for everyone

 

Link to n*de dudes

The Other Two, on MAX, are the struggling, closeted actor Cary  (Drew Tarver, left) and his sister, failed dancer Brooke.  When their little brother Chase (Case Walker) suddenly becomes the pop sensation ChaseDreams, the Other Two are torn between jealousy, pride, and over-protectiveness: "You can't perform at the White House unless your math grades improve."

I prefer the first season, when the family dynamics take precedence, and we can see some genuine affection between the siblings and their teen idol brother.  In later seasons, delayed due to COVID, Chase is grown up and wacky, and eventually doesn't appear at all, as episodes concentrate on the stardom of the siblings and their Mom Pat.

I'm reviewing Episode 1.6, because of guest star Patrick Wilson, Prince Orm in the Aquaman series. There are two plotlines, featuring Cary/Mom and Brooke/Chase, so I'll review each separately.

Cary/Mom's Plot: Chase recently outed Cary with the music video "My Brother's Gay, and That's OK."  This led to an offer to play Shirtless Bartender on the real-life talk show Watch What Happens Live, hosted by Andy Cohen (playing himself)  

He complains that he doesn't have any lines; they just hired him for his looks.  "Big deal, you'll be seen, and you can meet the guest stars."  Who are they, anyway?  He looks it up: Patrick Wilson...and Mom Pat!  She'll be talking about her children's book based on Chase's rise to fame.  Uh-oh, being shirtless in front of his Mom!  

Plus he was cast without anyone asking him to take his shirt off.  What if he doesn't have the pecs for the job? 

The only gay guy on Earth who never works out, Cary drops into a gym and asks to "get jacked fast" for his Shirtless Bartender gig.   Um..it's going to take at least a year, buddy.  Turns out that the Receptionist (David Arquilla) has been the Shirtless Bartender, too; he's not an actor, but he has pecs.  Uh-oh.

We cut to Cary using the equipment wrong and getting sneered at by muscle studs. The staff will be happy to demonstrate. He wants to give up after one minute, but he can't leave and have the Receptionist see him, so he hides out in the locker room and runs into Lance  (Josh Segarra), his sister's on-off boyfriend.

Lance encourages Cary to pose, and gives him a self-actualization talk: "You are a beautiful man, thin but tight." 

We cut to filming Watch What Happens. Andy Cohen introduces Patrick Wilson as the star of Candy Land, and Pat Dubek, as mother of ChaseDreams -- "I'm obsessed with your son," he admits.  In a non-erotic way: unlike most teen idols, Chase has fans in every age group.  Nearly everyone the siblings meet gushes over him.

Next Andy introduces Pat's other son, the Shirtless Bartender, and asks: "What do you have for us tonight?"

Uh-oh, Cary didn't know that he would have to perform.  He doesn't have anything ready except an angsty monologue from Rosencranz and Guildenstern are Dead: "We are born with an intuition of mortality..."  Ulp, Andy meant what cocktail is he preparing.

As the interviews continue, Cary knows that he's supposed to just look hot and laugh at the guests' jokes, but he can't help interrupting with bits of his own.  Patrick takes pity on him and asks if he has any projects he would like to promote -- but he doesn't.  

Later they bond while waiting for the elevator.  Well, Cary thinks that they bond; Patrick is just trying to get rid of him.

My grade: I didn't feel the stakes, and Patrick suddenly withdrawing support seemed a little forced, but I liked seeing Cary shirtless for the entire scene. B+

Brooke/Chases Plot after the break

Let's Hear it for the Boy

In the early 1980s, I listened mostly to classical music.  I was too old for teen idols,  and adult music was dreadful, all about hetero-romance, hetero-sex, or large breasts.  Especially when MTV began playing music videos to illustrate the songs.

For instance, let's look at the charts for the spring of 1984, when I was working on my master's degree:

Phil Collins, "Against All Odds": a girl left him, and now he's depressed.
Lionel Richie, "Hello": a girl left him, and now he's depressed.
Ultravox, "Dancing with Tears in My Eyes": a girl left him, and now he's depressed.
Julio Inglesias, "To All the Girls I've Loved Before."
Nik Kershaw, "Dancing Girls."  'Nuff said.

But there were exceptions.  A dozen songs of the early 1980s could be appropriated, read as gay-positive regardless of what the performers intended.  Especially "Let's Hear it for the Boy," by Deniece Williams


The lyrics are standard pop hetero-romance, about the female singer's boyfriend, who is not rich, a fancy dresser, or a good singer, but nevertheless provides hetero-romance.  In the music video, however, she praises a variety of boys, starting with with a tap dancing little kid (Aaron Lohr, later photo), who of course is not her boyfriend.

Here's another recent photo of Aaron, in a stage version of  The Full Monty.

The scene shifts to a teenager who plays the piano and dances, badly, then to more teenage boys and adult men, playing chess, playing football, dancing with her, dancing with each other.  Some are athletic, some aren't, some are shirtless, some aren't, but all of them are beautiful due to their exuberance, their energy, and their fun-loving joie de vivre. Who has time to even think about muscles?

 Finally there are thirty men and one woman on stage.  The song has become a paeon to the entire male sex.

And that's not all.  It's the background music in the intensely romantic montage in Footloose (1984) where city boy Ren (Kevin Bacon) teaches redneck Willard (Chris Penn) to dance, and they end up posing, running, frolicking, hugging.

With the absence of a female focus character, it becomes a paeon to men loving men.

See also: Ocho Rios: Tracking Down a Jamaican Bodybuilder.

Frankie Says Relax

March 1985: after several years of subtext songs, the radio was booming with plaints about heterosexual sex:  Madonna living in a "Material World," Phil Collins begging for "One More Night," Tina Turner rasping about being a stripper.  So I should have noticed that the lyrics to "Relax" could be construed as sexually suggestive -- after all, the song was banned in Britain for several months in 1984.

But my acceptance letter from the University of Southern California had just arrived, and I was eagerly planning my crosscountry move to West Hollywood.   The group was named Frankie Goes to Hollywood, so:

Make making it (in Hollywood) your intention.
Live those dreams, scheme those schemes.

Relax, don't do it (play it cool, don't get over-excited)
When you want to go to it ( Hollywood).

I added "Relax" to my list of songs about finding a "good place."

Years later, I saw the original music video (banned in the U.S. and the U.K.), in which Holly Johnson (one of the two gay members) goes to a underground club, hugs a leatherman, gets leered at by a woman, and tames a tiger, to the delight of a decadent Roman emperor.

Then he gets into a nightmarish fight with women, leathermen, and drag queens.

So I changed my interpretation: relax, don't get excited, and you can overcome your aggressive impulses, tame the tiger within.

Or else it's an orgy, and the song is about heterosexual sex, like everything else on the radio in 1985.

Why Everyone in West Hollywood Listened to Madonna

When I first moved to West Hollywood in 1985, Madonna was everywhere, part of the backdrop of everyday life, as universal and taken-for-granted as working out, drinking Perrier, and reading Frontiers magazine.

When a Norwegian con artist stole my boyfriend,  "Material Girl" was playing.

When Alan met my boyfriend Raul, we were listening to "Open Your Heart."

When we ran into Fred and his Cute Young Thing during brunch at the French Quarter, "Live to Tell" was blaring from a car stopped at a red light on Santa Monica Boulevard.

During 300 Saturday nights at Mugi, "One Night in Bangkok" was always followed by "Papa Don't Preach"

When I was teaching  Gay 101 at Juvenile Hall,  three guys at a party started lip-synching to "Vogue."

But in the early 1990s, the Madonna fad started dying down.

In 1992, the book Sex bombed in West Hollywood.  I knew only one guy who actually bought a copy.

By 1993, record store commercials had people complaining "I'm bored with Madonna!", and all of the cars stopped at red lights on San Vicente were blaring "I'm too sexy for my shirt!" instead of "Bad Girl."

Madonna is still expressing herself, still recording songs and performing for millions of fans, but she is no longer an inevitable part of daily life in West Hollywood.

Nearly thirty years later, I wonder why Madonna became a gay diva.  Her songs had no gay subtexts: they were all about heterosexual women being touched for the very first time, living in a material world, picking up boys on the street, and asking "Come on, girls, do you believe in love?"

Maybe her hot male backup dancers, like Victor Lopez, Jull Weber (top photo), and Mihrab (left).  Many of them were gay, and worked out next to us at the Hollywood Spa.  They were family.

Maybe because she was a gay ally, outspoken in her support of LGBT people, a rarity in the 1980s.

Maybe because she was constantly offending 1980s conservatives with her frank lyrics and suggestive dance moves.  Gay people were constantly offending 1980s conservatives just by existing.  It was a match made in heaven.

See also: Mae West, Gay Diva of the 1930s and Let's Hear it for the Boy.

Ocho Rios: Tracking Down a Jamaican Bodybuilder

Sometime during the 1990s, I was walking through the living room, and I caught the end of a music video.  It was about a frizzy-haired musician in a 1970s suit trying to sell his new song.

As he acts it out, we see him in drag, in a blond wig and a muumuu,  in a lush tropical setting, singing to a drag queen chorus

Musician:  I met a Negro in something something (four syllables). I didn't notice the inherent racism of the scenario at the time.

The drag queen chorus squeals as a massive bodybuilder walks by, thrusts out his bulge, and flexes his bicep.
Musician: I met a Negro...

Jamaican-accented bodybuilder:  I'm a Negro...

The bodybuilder then takes the drag musician rowing, where he sings:
Something something...I'll make you mine.

He lowers his swimsuit, and her eyes widen, shocked at his enormous penis.

That's all I remember: no title, no names of performers, not even the full video.  But it kept getting stuck in my head, inappropriate term and all.

I would be at the supermarket, or on the bus, and suddenly catch myself singing I met a Negro in something something.  I got quite a few stares!

Recently I decided to use my internet sleuthing skills to track down the music video, and the Jamaican-accented bodybuilder.  All I had was: 1990s, frizzy hair, Jamaica, drag, and the term "Negro."

Dozens of keywords searches on Google and Bing turned up nothing.

Wait -- this musician was obviously gay and from the 1970s.

"Gay composer" and "1970s"eventually  led me to Paul Jabara (1948-1992), who composed such disco hits as "It's Raining Men" for the Weather Girls, my favorite song of all time, and "Last Dance" for Donna Summer (which won the Academy Award for  Best Song in 1978).

There was a song called "Ocho Rios" in his discography.  No lyrics online.  But the right number of syllables, and Ocho Rios is the name of a town in Jamaica!  Could it be the source of my elusive music video?

Digging deeper, I found an article about a "pop operetta" De La Noche: The True Story," which Jabarra tried to get produced in 1985.  It was about a "lady of the evening" who finds true love with a 7'2", 300 lb  Jamaican bodybuilder!  Their union results in female octuplets, who are stolen and sold on the black market.  She searches for 21 years, and finally finds them, performing as a musical group, the De La Noche Sisters.

Sounds silly; no wonder Jabara couldn't get the funding to make a stage musical.

"Ocho Rios" is a track on the album, also released as a single.  It didn't get much airtime, as the term "Negro" was deemed offensively racist.  So Jabara produced a music video about his troubles, and got it played on MTV.  A least once.

I finally found a synopsis: turns out that there were no drag queens, just bizarrely over-made up women. The lady in the muumuu was Pat Ast, formerly a member of Andy Warhol's Factory.  And "The Negro" was voiced by Paul Jabara himself, feigning a basso-profundo Jamaican accent.

But who modeled the Jamaican bodybuilder?

More searching revealed that in 1973, Paul Jabara wrote and produced a musical, Rachel Lily Rosenbloom (And Don't You Ever Forget It), which folded after only a few performances.  Perhaps it was an early version of De La Noche: there was a song entitled "Oh, Ocho Rios," and a cast member named "That Negro."

Played by Andre de Shields, who would become a renowned stage actor, with credits including Hair, The Full Monte, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, and Ain't Misbehavin'.  

Obviously not the same person as the Jamaican bodybuilder, whose identity remains a mystery.

But at least it's not an ear worm anymore.

You can see the music video on youtube.

See also: Subtext Songs of the 1980s.

Smalltown Boy: Subtext Songs of the 1980s

After the demise of the drag-queen ABBA and the faux-gay Village People, I started listening to popular music more aggressively, looking for "real" gay-friendly songs. Or at least songs with subtexts.  I found no depictions of same-sex romance, anywhere -- the most you could hope for was a dropped pronoun.  But a few Top 40 Hits -- one or two per year -- were about the search for a Good Place, or celebrations of male beauty (with beefcake-heavy music videos), and or just about being proud of your identity.

1. "Physical" (Olivia Newton-John, 1981).

2. "I'm Coming Out" (Diana Ross, 1981).  Ms. Ross claimed that it was about teenage girls "coming out" into high society, but gay teens knew what it was really about:
I'm coming out -- I want the world to know, got to let it show.

3. "It's Raining Men" (The Weather Girls, 1982).  The catchy beat made it easy to appropriate.  I didn't even mind the heterosexism:
God bless Mother Nature, she's a single woman too
She took off to heaven, and she did what she had to do
She taught every angel to rearrange the sky,
So that each and every woman could find a perfect guy.

4. "Self-Control" (Laura Branigan, 1982).  She goes to a mostly heterosexual orgy, screams when hands reach out to grab her, and ends up sleeping with a mysterious man in a white mask and red gloves, but in a era where gay teens had to live in masks, a celebration of the night resonated:
Oh the night is my world. City lights, painted girls.
I must believe in something, so I guess I'll just believe that this night will never go. 

5. "Holiday" (Madonna, 1983). No gay people mentioned, but coming out often required forgetting about years of pain: it's time for the good times -- forget about the bad times.

6. "So Many Men, So Little Time" (Miquel Brown, 1983).  A woman praises heterosexual one-night stands, but you could also use it to praise the joy of boy-watching.
Each new one I meet makes my heart beat faster, when I see them so strong and tall.
So many men, so little time. How can I lose?  
So many men, so little time.  How can I choose?

7. "Relax" (Frankie Goes to Hollywood, 1983).

8. "I Am What I Am" (Gloria Gaynor, 1983) could be read as a response to the bigots (and there were a lot of bigots) who kept screaming that gays were worthless, subhuman, monsters out to destroy the world.
I am good, I am strong, I am somebody, I do belong.
I am useful, I am true, I am worthy, I am as good as you.

9. "Smalltown Boy" (Bronski Beat, 1984).  I didn't realize at the time that the boy was leaving town to escape homophobic harassment --but it could easily be applied to anyone searching for a "good place." (and I liked the music video with the smalltown boy swimmer in tight speedos).

The answers you seek will never be found at home.
The love that you need will never be found at home.

10. "Let's Hear it for the Boy" (Deniece Williams, 1984).

Not much after.  AIDS, conservative retrenchment, and the re-demonization of gay people eliminated even those few songs that could be appropriated.  In 1985, Madonna was singing "Like a Virgin" (about sex, not pride), Wham started making their previously androgynous songs gender specific (I said you were the perfect girl for me), and the vigorously homophobic Eddie Murphy was inviting heterosexuals to "Party All the Time."

See also: Ocho Rios: Tracking Down a Jamaican Bodybuilder; and Culture Club