"The Almighty Johnsons": Norse Gods Kissing Girls in New Zealand

On the eve of his 21st birthday,  Auckland boy Axl Johnson (Emmett Skilton) and his mates are out buying beer, when they stop to watch a meteor shower.  Suddenly a car almost runs him over.  A lady emerges to "apologize" (the viewer sees that it was intentional).  Instead of yelling "You stupid bitch, watch where you're going!", Axl flirts with her and invites her to his party.

Next scene: Axl's older brother Mike (Tim Balme) and his wife emerge from their house to look at the meteor shower.  They discuss lovey stuff and hug and kiss.  

Two establishing-that-they-are-heterosexual scenes in a row? 

But...The Almighty Johnsons, on Amazon Prime, got good reviews.  A mythological-fantasy-comedy, an amiable take on the old "supernatural beings living among us" trope.  It's set in New Zealand, which automatically makes it interesting.  And the tiniest of googles of the cast members reveals countless beefcake photos.  I'll keep going.

Next scene: Axl's quiet, shy brother Ty (Jared Turner)  is being rejected by a girl, who wants to be "just friends."  

Ok, I get it.  He's not gay, either.  Geez, do you have to shove it down my throat?

Next scene: Axl's final brother Anders (Dean O'Gorman) is kissing a girl.

Really?  Four of them?  Is this heterosexual porn?  Five seconds of Norse gods stuff, ten minutes of sex?

Apparently so.  The next three scenes:

1. Axl is having sex with the woman from the car accident, when they are interrrupted by an earthquake.

2.Mike is having sex with his wife, same thing.

3. Anders is having sex with the girl, same thing.  The girl jumps up from the bed.  Naked girl butt.

Lord have mercy!  I'm outta here!

If you have the stomach to continue, you'll find Axl's improbably buffed grandpa having sex with a girl (of course!), then tearing himself away long enough to tell Axl that he is the reincarnation of the Norse god Odin.  

All of his family, and a good number of his mates, are also reincarnated Norse gods, but Axl is the Chosen One: he is destined to find the reincarnation of Frigg, his wife back in Asgard, and thus restore the gods to power.

That's right, it gets even worse: the goal of the quest, the theme of everyone's dreaming, is the Everlasting Feminine.

There are apparently some gay and bi characters, such as Bryn (John Leigh), an exceptionally short giant, and Jacob (Arthur Meek), an exceptionally tall dwarf, the adopted parents of Axl's flatmate/girlfriend Gaia.  Or maybe they're just pretending to be gay to fit in.  The plot synopsis is confusing.

And Zeb (Hayden Frost), Axl's other flatmate, a mortal who isn't aware of the Big Secret.  Or at least he dates girls only when under a spell.

Again, the plot synopsis is confusing.  And I'm definitely not sticking around to find out.

Ralph N. Chubb: The Mythology of the Teenage Boy

If you're familiar with Romantic poet William Blake, you know he's not just about "Tyger, tyger, burning bright."  Through many complex poems and drawings, he spins a vast mythology: Albion the primeval man, whose fall from grace results in the four zoas: Urizen (law), Tharmas (emotion), Luvah (rebellion), Urthona (creativity), each of which has a "fallen" form: Urthona's fallen form, for instance, is Los the Prophet, who creates the city of Golgonooza, where he and his female consort create the spirit of discord, Orc, who is actual an emanation of Luvah.

Got all that?  It goes on and on.

Ralph N. Chubb (1892-1960) created a similar canvass of poems and paintings evoking a vast mythology, except that his were overtly homoerotic.









He had a conventional childhood and education and served in World War I, but upon his return, he became involved with the occult community of 1920s Britain, as well as the underground gay movement.  For awhile he produced conventional paintings, but after spending some time with the gypsies of the New Forest, he moved to the village of Curridge, in Berkshire (with his brother Lawrence, who would be his benefactor and guardian for the rest of his life), and let his imagination roam freely.

Chubb self-published his illustrated poems on a home-made printing press, and sent copies privately to friends and correspondents: Manhood, The Sacrifice of Youth, The Book of God's Madness, The Sun Spirit, The Heavenly Cupid, Water Cherubs, the Secret Country.

They are heavy reading, full of obscure references to personal events in Chubb's life and symbols that only he understands, but we get the idea that a series of boy-messiahs has arisen throughout history, with one still to come, the redeemer of Albion,  the boy-god Ra-el-phaos, of whom Chubb was the prophet.

Many of the boys and men who he had met during his life were various emanations of Ra-el-phaos.












Although he drew his inspiration from Blake, Chubb was not a very good poet, as you can see from this description of an encounter between mortal man and boy god:

He a fully form’d human being in his way,
Myself a fully form’d human being in my way;
No patronage between us, mutual respect, two equal persons;
He knowing the universe, I knowing the universe, equal together;
I having every whit as much to learn from him as he from me;
From him to me, from me to him, reciprocal sexual spiritual love.

And later on:

O burning tongue and hot lips of me exploring my love!
Lave his throat with the bubbling fountain of my verse!
Drench him! Slake his loins with it, most eloquent!
Leave no part, no crevice unexplored; delve deep, my minstrel tongue!
Let our juices flood and mingle! Let the prophetic lava flow!

I want to yell "You had an orgasm.  Everybody has them.  Get over it!"

Chubb's paintings, which he usually sent to galleries without expecting payment, depict the past and future paradise of Albion, a world populated almost entirely by naked boys.

I'm surprised that his family (brother Lawrence, sisters Olive and Muriel) indulged his homoerotic and ephebophiliac interests.  I can only imagine how scandalous they would have been, if anyone outside of his circle of occult fellow-travelers actually read the poems and figured out what they meant.














None of his books have been published, but some of the poems and a lot of the artwork is available online.  After his death, his papers were donated to Cambridge University, to wait for some future scholar.

Donald De Lue and the Male Nudes of Public Art

The Boy Scout Memorial, on the Ellipse in Washington DC, gives visitors quite an eyeful.  A muscular man who has apparently just stripped is walking beside the boy scout.

He represents nothing more arcane than "American Manhood."  There's a fully-clothed woman, also, representing "American Womanhood."

It is particularly surprising because it was sculpted in 1963, when male nudity was not commonplace in public art, even with the penis covered.

The sculptor was Donald De Lue (1897-1988), who grew up in Boston and studied in Paris, like many artists of his generation.  After eleven years as assistant to sculptor Bryant Baker, he pushed out on his own, specializing in public art.

Stately,  muscular male nudes, gods and other mythological and allegorical figures.

Like this Babylonian-style frieze "Law and Justice," on the Federal Building in Philadelphia, is from 1941, just before the U.S. entered World War II.

Or The Rocket Thrower, created for the 1964 World's Fair, now at Flushing Meadows-Corona Park in Queens, New York.

Among his most famous sculptures is The Spirit of American Youth Rising from the Waves, in the American Cemetery at Normandy (1956).

















Most of his public art hides the penis, but his smaller pieces don't.  The Sun God (1937) is now at the Dallas Museum of Art.

Icarus (1934) is at the Smithsonian.

Of course, drawing artistic inspiration from the bodies of naked, muscular men doesn't necessarily mean that you are gay.  But it doesn't mean that you are straight, either.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and the Blacksmiths with Brawny Arms

One of the poems parodied on Rocky and Bullwinkle was "The Village Smithy," by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1840):

Under a spreading chestnut-tree the village smithy stands.
The smith, a mighty man is he, with large and sinewy hands;
And the muscles of his brawny arms are strong as iron bands.

Actually, it was parodied everywhere, in cartoons and comedy sketches throughout my childhood.   It must have been a recitation assignment for generations of squirming schoolkids, and a hated memory for comedy writers of the 1960s.

If you read the entire poem, you find that the smithy has a wife and kids, but I only ever heard the part about how the village children come around every day to gawk at his muscles.

I could relate.

Although the poem doesn't really have a plot -- the blacksmith flexes his muscles, children gawk, he goes to church -- it was spun into movies in 1897, 1908, 1913, 1922, and 1936.

In the days before factories, the blacksmith had the job of forging tools and other instruments from iron. There were several blacksmith gods, including Vulcan in Graeco-Roman mythology and Ilmarinen in the Finnish Kalevala.

Unfortunately, they rarely worked shirtless -- too many sparks.

But early cinematographer Eadweard Muybridge filmed two naked blacksmiths for his study of Animal Locomotion.

There are still blacksmiths today.  They even have World Championships.  40 blacksmiths from the United States, Canada, Australia, and Britain competed in the 2014 Horseshoeing Contest in Eureka, Nevada.  Trey Green of Lakeside, California was the winner.

Looks like they still have "large and sinewy hands."

See also: James Whitcomb Riley: Even a Dull, Depressing Poet Can Be Gay

Top 10 Public Penises of Africa

In South Africa in 2000, I met the Hottest Man in the World, and investigated the mystery of the Bushman penis.  I'm not sure I want to visit anywhere else in the subcontinent.  Rampant poverty, a soaring AIDS epidemic, corruption, political unrest, and some of the most horrific homophobia on the planet, including rap artists whose bestselling music videos contain nonstop chants of "kill the gays."  I might stick with my regular Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam circuit.

Then again, the beefcake is spectacular.

There's not a lot of public art in sub-Saharan Africa, except for statues of this or that military leader in khakis, but if you're willing to dig, you can find some interesting muscular, nude male forms.

Here are the top 10 public penises of West Africa:

1. The Reunification Monument in Yaounde, Cameroon, shows a nude giant holding a torch aloft and clutching five babies to his chest.

2. West Africa was, of course, the site of the Atlantic Slave Trade, and there are several monuments of slaves breaking their chains, like this one in Conakry, Guinea.

3. And another in Dakar, Senegal, with a muscular, nude male slave being grabbed by a female slave.

4. African public art often puts men and women together, as in the African Renaissance monument in Dakar.  It's 160 feet tall, if you include the baby bouncing on the man's bicep.

5. And this Dakar monument.


More after the break.

Wlastimil Hofman: Gay Polish Artist

Wlastimil Hofman (1881-1970), was born in Prague but spent all of his life in Krakow,  except for studying in Paris and the period 1942-1945, when he fled both the Nazis and the Soviets and ended up in Tel Aviv.

He was one of the most famous painters in Poland, specializing in religious topics such as "The Way of the Rosary" and "The Way of the Cross," but in his youth he was heavily influenced by the symbolist movement.

The street he lived on has been renamed Hofman Street in his honor.

Although he was married to a woman throughout his life, he has a considerable gay connection.  For one thing, he changed his name from the Czech Vlastimil to the Polish Wlastimil due to his friendship with painter Jacek Malczewski (1854-1919).

In 1914, he met Jiri Karasek ze Lvovich (1871-1951), a Czech literary critic, occultist, and author of several gay-themed novels, such as Sodoma (1895) and A Gothic Soul (1900), as well as collection of homoerotic poetry.  Hofman began painting homoerotic scenes, which were displayed privately among Karasek's friends.  They display naked young men, humans, mythological figures, and gods, wandering an eerie desolate landscape of archetypes and dreams.

The Return (1918) shows a man or angel taking off his human costume and releasing the horse that brought him to this world,w hile two satyrs watch.

I'm not sure about the age of the male figure, so I censored his sex organs.

Lost Happiness (1919) shows two satyrs leading an angel away toward a world of Dionysian pleasures of the flesh, his celestial joy dying.

Bird's Funeral (1918), an allegory with a human boy and a satyr, again shows celestial joys dimming and dying in the face of carnality.

Poetry and Nature (1923) shows three mythological beings fascinated by the sight of a mother dog and her puppies. Nature, birth and death, reproduction, is alien to their world.













Untitled (1926).   Boys and gods are burying something or someone.  Death must come even in Arcadia.

I wonder what death Hofman was mourning in these paintings, what dark desolation was drawing him away from his celestial thoughts?  Was same-sex desire so disturbing for him?  And, if so, why did he continue to paint homoerotic images for his friend Karasek's salons?

Nude Norse Gods

I went to a Swedish Lutheran college, where we were proud of our Viking heritage.  Our team was the Vikings, our radio station was WVIK.  There was a quote from the Icelandic Hamaval over the circulation desk in the library.  The courses in Norse Mythology was well populated.

Ancient Greek and Roman myths seemed somehow decadent: wandering around the bucolic Mediterranean half-naked, eating grapes and having erotic encounters.  The last story is about Venus and Cupid.  But the North was harsh, with frost giants and battle-hammers, and it ended with Ragnarok, the Apocalypse of the gods.

But Greek and Roman myths had a benefit: nudity.  The gods were portrayed naked, with hard, thick chests and abs and even penises on display.  You had to did deep to find a Norse god with his shirt off.

Ok, it was cold in the north, but still...

Thor was the most popular of the Norse gods among the college students, due to his appearance in comic books and fantasy illustrations.  Here Boris Vallejo shows him fighting some very buffed giants.

But Freyr or Frey seems to have been the most popular among the real Vikings.  He was the god of fertility and prosperity.

Some phallic images of Freyr have survived.

Some phallic images have survived, and modern Neo-pagans have produced many more.

My favorite myth is of Baldur the Beautiful, so beautiful that all the gods were in love with him.  His mother went around to ask every animal, plant, and natural object to agree not to hurt him, so the gods played a game of throwing things at him, to see them bounce off harmlessly.  But Mom forgot to ask mistletoe.

The evil Loki convinced the blind god Hodur, here portrayed as a muscular Classical beauty, to throw a sprig of mistletoe at Baldur, thus killing him.

For punishment, Loki was chained beneath a giant serpent that sprayed venom onto him forever.

We don't see a lot of myths about Odin, the leader of the gods, but here he, plus archaic gods Villi and Ve, are creating the world.

See also: Loki.

Why the Devil Has No Penis

When I was a kid at Denkmann Elementary School in Rock Island, my friend Greg, the vampire boy who gave me my first kiss, had a small oil painting on his bedroom wall: a muscular guy plunging headlong from a sky of thundering, blue-black clouds.  Naked, his backside bare, looking angry, not terrified, as he veers toward the dark mass of land below.

I found it disturbing, and also fascinating.  Who was this guy, why was he falling, and why was he so nonchalant about it?

Later, after Greg moved away, I surmised that the painting depicted Lucifer, the greatest of angels in Christian myth, who began a war to dethrone God, and as punishment was cast down to Hell, where he became the Devil.

 John Milton's Paradise Lost presents Lucifer as a tragic figure, striving against oppression even when he can't win.  Others see him as a queer figure, subverting the hetero-normativity of Adam and Eve in the Garden.



I've never found that particular painting -- it must have been an original -- but Lucifer appears in a lot of artwork.  His muscles are drawn in loving detail, every curve and bulge in place.

All but the penis.  He has none (except maybe Jason Lewis, who played Lucifer in the 2007 movie).

Notice the wisp of fabric hiding the Morning Star's manhood Lucifer in the Bower of Adam and Eve (1805), by Stephen Rigaud.

Or Pietro Calvi's muscular, winged statue (1883), with a rock outcropping covering his privates.

William Blake's 1808 depiction is androgynous and sexless, and so are most modern versions, like Michael Creese's Lucifer (2013, below).

Check out Willy Pogany's Faust.

Painters and sculptors who have no qualms about frontal nudity in their depictions of Biblical heroes, epic heroes, Greek gods, famous people, and the guy next door suddenly get skittish when they portray Lucifer, and obscure or erase his sexiest part.

How can we explain the absence of Lucifer's penis?

My suggestions:

1. Because Lucifer is "beautiful," a full set of male sex organs would make him too stunning to bear.

2. His fall from heaven has "unmanned him," left him without male power and potency.

3. Or it moved his penis around to his backside, where it remained ever after as his tail (as we see in this Hot Stuff the Little Devil comic book, it responds readily to the closeness of a romantic partner).

See also: Why Hot Stuff Wears a Diaper.