Kurt Russell's Secret

We usually went to church on Sunday nights, but for some reason I was home one night in November 1968 to see the last half of the best movie ever made, The Secret of Boyne Castle, on the anthology series Wonderful World of Color.
This was former child star Kurt Russell's only movie as a Disney Adventure Boy (others included Peter McEnery, Tommy Kirk, Tim Considine, and Jeff East) before he moved on to playing oddball outsider Dexter Riley in a series of Disney comedies.

Here Kurt plays Rich, an American exchange student in Dublin who learns that his older brother Tom (bisexual muscleman Glenn Corbett, previously a model for Physique Pictorial and star of Route 66) is not a steel company executive after all, but a spy charged with delivering essential information to Boyne Castle, in the west of Ireland. When Tom is captured by Russian agents, Rich must take over the mission, racing through the quaint villages and lush green hills of Ireland, hoping to elude capture and reach Boyne Castle before the Russians. Fellow student Sean (long-faced, steely-eyed Patrick Dawson) tags along, throwing himself into deadly danger for no logical reason except that he rather likes Rich.

The two are presented as more intimate than mere buddies, framed in tight shots, their faces together in close ups. While they are sleeping on the heather, Rich hears a suspicious noise, and wakes Sean by moving his own body slightly. Although all we see are their faces and necks, to wake someone with such a small gesture means that they must be cuddling together. They rescue each other a dozen times, and are eventually rescued by big brother Tom.

But the most important scene, the scene I have remembered fondly for 40 years:

At an inn, Rich flirts with a waitress.

“You didn’t tell me you had an eye for the ladies!” Sean exclaims, as if he hadn’t anticipated any competition.

Rich responds by asking the waitress if she has any rooms to rent for “for a few hours.” Suspicious, she wants to know why the two boys would need a room for such a short period.

Rich and Sean exchange a knowing grin.

In 1968 I was entranced by that grin. I knew that it was a clue to the secret. If only I could decipher it, I could find my way to that other world, Oz or Living Island or Middle Earth, the world where boys could fall in love and got married.

How might we account for the not-so-subtle homoerotic bantr between the Rich and Sean? Certainly Glenn Corbett might be a gay ally: he began as a model for the Athletic Model Guild, the Advocate Men of its day, and made a career as a buddy-bonding “man’s man. Kurt Russell was never particularly gay-friendly.

Patrick Dawson works mostly in Irish radio, but his limited filmography includes the gay-vague Ginger in The Jigsaw Man (1983). We should look at the director, Robert Butler, who in the 1960’s specialized in dramas with strong male leads, such as Ben Casey, Dr. Kildare, and I Spy, and later directed such hunk-fests as Remington Steele, Moonlighting, and Lois and Clark. Whether he was working with Bruce Willis, Dean Cane, Pierce Brosnan, or Kurt Russell, Butler neither minimized nor hid their physicality, allowing and even directing them to be open as objects of desire, both to male viewers and to each other.

There are nude photos of Kurt Russell on Tales of West Hollywood

See also: Kurt Russell

An Angst-Ridden, Gay Hanna-Barbara Cartoon

Picture from Deviantart.com

In 1958, former MGM animation directors William Hanna and Joseph Barbera  (probably not a gay couple) teamed up to explore the uncharted world of television cartoons.

Their first creation was Huckleberry Hound, a laconic blue dog named after Huckleberry Finn, who got into countless jams trying to fit into the human world.

Many other characters followed, in a bewildering variety of tv shows airing in prime time and on Saturday morning, until by the 1960s Hanna-Barbara was synonymous with television animation. 

Although they experimented with many genres, including sitcom (The Flintstones), superhero (Space Ghost), and mystery, their most recognizable brand was anthropomorphic animals, alone (Wally Gator, Magilla Gorilla, Snagglepuss) or in domestic partnerships (Yogi Bear and Boo Boo, Quick Draw McGraw and Baba Louie, Pixie and Dixie), in an exclusively human world, fighting against the constraints of their human caretakers.

Kids could relate.  We were constantly trying to be more, experience more, and constantly running against adult constrictions: "No, you're too young to do that."

Gay kids could especially relate.  The heterosexual longing that we see in the Warner Brothers cartoons was nearly entirely absent.  There are no wives (Doggie Daddy is a single parent), few girlfriends, few female characters of any sort.  Instead, two males live together, an early glimpse of the gay subtexts that would eventually allow us to realize that "it's not raining upstairs."

I actually couldn't recount the plot of any particular cartoon. I just remember the distinctive Hanna-Barbera running style:  legs spinning like airplane propellers, arms straight out in front of you, passing the same background scene over and over.

But it wasn't about the cartoons, it was about the characters.  They appeared in mountains of toys, games, clothing, furniture, foodstuffs, and who knows what else?  They became iconic images of childhood, familiar faces that guided us into the future, and now inform our memories of the past.

Yogi Bear seems to be balancing a box of his cereal on his bicep.  Not really suggesting that he is particularly strong.










Many pastiches, fan creations, and tv shows have revisted the characters.  But the DC Comics miniseries Exit, Stage Left: The Snagglepuss Chronicles, by Mark Russell and Mike Feehan, is by far the most complex.

Snagglepuss was a pink mountain lion with a flair for the theatrical, modeled after Bert Lahr. with three catchphrases: "Heavens to Murgatroyd!", "Exit, stage left!", and the intensifier "even.":  "It's raining.  Pouring, even."

In The Snagglepuss Chronicles, he's a Southern gentleman, a playwright reminiscent of Tennessee Williams, a Broadway celebrity who hob-nobs with Lilian Hellman.  Don't believe the cover, which shows him rakishly peering over sunglasses while cuddling against a lady's shoulder, like a hetero-horny lady's man.  He's gay.

He has a wife, but only as a beard, since he must keep his gay identity hidden in the harshly repressive world of the 1950s.

Early episodes involve his testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee, and friendship with an aspiring writer named Augie Doggie, while he supervises a play about his early life.  Then Huckleberry Hound drops in for a permanent visit.

Huck has just lost his wife, children, and career after a private detective revealed that he is gay.

Snagglepuss takes him to the Stonewall Inn, where Gay Liberation will be born in a few years.  "It's the only place like it in New York,  Maybe the world."

That's ridiculous.  There were many gay bars in New York, and in most big cities.

Quick Draw McGraw, the police officer assigned to keep Stonewall under surveillance, gets a kickback for reporting that there are no "deviants." He turns out to be gay himself, and begins dating Huck.  But when the bar is raided anyway, he betrays his boyfriend to save his career.  Huck soon commits suicide.

A few years later, Huck's son, Huckleberry Hound Junior, comes to town in search of the truth about his famous father.  Snagglepuss invites him, along with Quick Draw and other familiar Hanna-Barbara faces, to join the cast of a new animated tv series.

That's right.  They become the cast of The Huckleberry Hound Show.

The storytelling is competent, if a bit contrived, and I like the world where animals and humans co-exist.

But it's way too angst-ridden and depressing for my tastes.  I like my comics funny.

And what, precisely, is the point of usinng Hanna-Barbera characters to tell this story?  It would work just as well without them.

See also: Yogi Bear and Boo-Boo

Spring 1973: My Date Must Be a Boy

When I was growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, heterosexual desire was assumed a constant, a universal of human experience.  Same-sex desire was not only never mentioned, it could not be mentioned.

It not only didn't exist, it could not be conceived of.

It wasn't just a certainty that no boy on Earth had ever longed for the touch of another boy, not once in the history of the world.

We were unable to even imagine the possibility.

Boys who obviously longed for boys?

They were looking for a buddy or a role model.

Boys who obviously didn't care for girls?

They were shy, or immature, or hadn't found the right girl yet.

Boys who were derided as "fairies" and "fags"?

Their interest in art and ballet, their inability to catch a ball, obviously represented deficient masculinity, but they desired girls as heartily as every other boy.

Desire for the same sex was simply beyond the boundaries of our imagination.

It was easier to conceive of hobbits.









But there were hints, mysteries to mull over, to contemplate like zen koans, to puzzle out like cryptograms.

Men on tv or in movies who cared for each other, fought for each other, and walked side by side into the future.

Men who didn't marry, who lived alone or with other men.

Men who hugged.

Who smiled at me, or touched me on the shoulder.

The sight of a muscular frame that filled me with inexplicable joy.

Small subtle signs.

Through the looking glass.
Take the red pill.
With a bit of a mind flip, you're into the time slip.
It's not raining upstairs.







Sometime in junior high, I read an one-page story in an Archie comic book.  Big Ethel's friends criticize her for being indiscriminate, accuse her of accepting dates with anyone, anytime, anywhere.

On the contrary, Ethel says, she has very exacting standards.
1. Her date must be a boy.
2. He must be breathing.
3. He must be a slow runner (so she can catch him as he's fleeing in terror).

It was just a throwaway joke with the punch line of "slow runner."  But I was mesmerized.  There was something -- a logical fallacy -- a paradox -- a hint.

Slowly it dawned on me: Ethel has a rule about dating only boys.

Such a rule is necessary only if there are other groups of people whom she could date.

Does she only date teenage boys, and not adult men?
Or only date boys, and not girls?

Could a girl date a girl?
Could a boy date a boy?

It's not raining upstairs.

Don Grady/Robbie Douglas

When I was a kid in the 1960s, a trio of teenage legs signified my bedtime on Thursday nights.  Mom and Dad refused all pleas to stay up longer and investigate, though later, in our basement room, my brother and I heard teenage voices and sitcom laughter.  In November 1966, I was finally old enough.

I found My Three Sons (1960-72), a sitcom about two men who were married: Steve Douglas (Fred MacMurray), who read the newspaper on a reclining chair, and Uncle Charlie (William Demarest), who puttered around with sack lunches and vacuum cleaners.

Their three sons: college boy Robbie (Don Grady), sleepy teenager Chip (Stanley Livingston), and little kid Ernie (Barrie Livingston).  I later discovered that another son, Mike (Disney regular Tim Considine) had been written out.

All of the boys were cute, but I liked Robbie best.

He was not a jock yet trim and energetic, innocent and even naïve yet self-assured; his dark-eyed dreamy expression, shy half-smile, and endless supply of cool varsity sweaters made him seem distant but attainable, a perfect fantasy boyfriend.

And most importantly, he liked boys, not girls!  I watched week after week, as Robbie fell for a cute bullfighter, an Italian exchange student, a hunky college boy named Kerwin, even a gay pal (played by Sal Mineo).  Sometimes he pretended to like girls, too; but it was all an act, to get something he wanted (like a passing grade in chemistry).  When he grew up, he would certainly marry a boy, like his Dad.

One day in 3rd grade, my boyfriend Bill and I were sorting through his older sister's record collection, and we were amazed to find two Canterbury singles by Robbie Douglas, Don Grady.  "Impressions with Syvonne" had Robbie shirtless, displaying warm tanned arms and shoulders, smiling his shy yet knowing smile, but it was too scratched to play.

"Children of St. Monica" was hard to hear, but one line stood out: two children, no doubt boys,  hiding in a church, holding hands among the candles.

An evocation of same-sex romance!

Bill's older brother obligingly took us to the Record Barn every couple of weeks, but we found no more Robbie Douglas records until one day I saw The Yellow Balloon (1969), the cover displaying a hard-muscled young man sullen on a beach.

To my surprise, one of the performers, “Luke R. Yoo,” turned out to be Don Grady in a wig and dark glasses, Robbie Douglas leading a secret life!

Most of the lyrics were heterosexist, but “A Good Man to Have Around the House,” hinted at hidden knowledge.  Robbie argues that he should move in with someone -- I assumed a boy -- because he could help out with the chores: take out the trash, and so on. Then he adds with a lascivious laugh, “I know how to do some things your father just can’t do.”

What things could a boyfriend do that a father couldn't?  In a couple of years, I would know what he meant, but I didn't then.  It had something to do with the boys holding hands among the candles.

The gay-vague Robbie didn't last.  He fell in love with a girl, Katie (Tina Cole),  and married her, and became a nuclear family dad before vanishing from the show. But the image of Robbie Douglas remained with me, the promise of hidden knowledge, of boys holding hands, of men married to each other.

I saw Don Grady many years later, during the late 1980s, in the crowd at a gay sports event in Los Angeles, shirtless, toned and handsome. He saw me looking and smiled shyly. You see heterosexual celebrities at gay events all the time, but still, I was afraid to go over and talk to him.

It was enough to know that he had been a friend all along.

Don Grady died on June 28, 2012.

Top Coming Out Stories: Louie the Lilac to "Getting Some Cocks"

During the 1980s and 1990s, every time you met a new person, you exchanged coming out stories.

It doesn't happen anymore.  No one offers, and if you ask, the under-30 crowd says "What? Oh, I've always known that gay people exist.  My parents had gay friends over all the time."

But in the 1980s and 1990s, we all grew up in a world where gay people were never mentioned, heterosexual desire assumed universal..  It was interesting to hear how someone gradually pieced together clues, measured evidence, and concluded that "it is not raining upstairs."

It was a bonding experience.  It gave us a sense of camaraderie.

So here, preserved from the dark, quiet days, are the most interesting of the five hundred or so coming-out stories I've been told (Part 1):

Age 5: The Homosexuals

One day I was playing in the family room, and my father walked through with one of his friends.  I heard him say: "...and we need to do something about the problem of homosexuals...."  I didn't know what a "homosexual" was, but I knew that it had something to do with me.

Age 6: Louie the Lilac

I was watching the old Batman tv show, the episode where Milton Berle played Louie the Lilac, a villain who dressed in a lavender suit.  I thought it was the most beautiful thing in the world.  I asked my older brother, "Can I get a suit like that for Christmas?"  He laughed and said "Only if you're a lilac!"  Ever since then,  I associated the word "lilac" with being gay.

Age 8: The Babysitter

When I was little, I had a male babysitter, a teenage boy from the neighborhood, and I liked to sit on his lap.  I liked the warmth, the closeness -- and the feel of his basket!  One night I overheard him talking to his friend: "Yeah, the kid's very affectionate.  If I didn't know better, I'd think he had homosexual tendencies."

So "homosexual tendencies" meant "you like to sit on guys' laps."

Age 12: The Porn Magazines

When I was around 12 years old, my friends and I were walking through a wooded area near my house, when we saw some porn magazines that someone left lying on the ground.  We started leafing through them, the other guys gushing over the naked ladies, you know, when I saw an article called "Inside a Gay Bar."  I didn't know what "gay" meant, but I returned later to tear out the article and take it home.  It was about me!

Age 13: The Sleepover

I was spending the night with my best friend, sleeping in the same bed, and in the middle of the night I woke up to him...well, fondling me.

"Hey, what are you doing?" I whispered, shocked.

"It's ok," he said.  "All the guys do it.  It doesn't mean you're queer if you think about girls."

So I tried to think about girls, but I kept imagining guys.  That meant I was queer....

Age 13: The Alternative Prom

One day my mother, who taught high school English, came home and started complaining to my father: "You'll never guess what those idiots on the school board are up to now -- an alternative prom!  I can't believe they would pander to the deviants like that!"

I had never heard of gay people before, so I asked "What's a deviant?"

Mom said "You don't need to know.  It has nothing to do with you."

But I persisted, and finally she said, "A deviant is a pervert, a man who wants to go to the prom with another man."

Age 20: Getting Some "Cocks"

In the service I was stationed down in New Orleans, and when we had leave,  one of the guys in my barracks said "Let's go down to Bourbon Street and get us some cocks!"

I didn't realize that there were guys in the world who liked guys, so I said "Cool!  Let's go!"

Turns out that "cock" is Cajun slang for "girls," sort of like "chicks."

But the "damage" was done.  I knew that gay people were out there somewhere.  I just had to find them.

See also: Two Men Hugging.

Captain Kangaroo's Treasure House

Gay kids struggle to learn the rules of this new world they've been cast into.  They find hints and signals wherever they can.

They latch onto any evidence that there is more to life than the boy-meets-girl stories the adults are alway droning on about.

Any hand on shoulder, any shared smile, any pair of men living together can suggest that there is more.

In the early morning in the 1960s, Mom often parked us in front of the kid's program Captain Kangaroo (1955-1984).  Bob Keeshan, who played the Captain, was actually in his 30s, but he had shaggy white hair and a white moustache, like a grandfather.  Every morning he invited kids into his Treasure House for an hour of "fun."








His program predated the frenetic energy of Zooboomafoo and the sly pop-culture winks of Sesame Street: it was slow, sometimes glacial, and decidedly old-fashioned.

There was some 1960s countercultural subversion: Mr. Moose tricked the Captain into being pummelled by pingpong balls, and Bunny Rabbit, who didn't speak, managed to nevertheless trick him out of carrots.   But mostly the "fun" involved petting baby sheep, listening to stories about circuses, and watching a man in a bear suit dance.  I grew bored with it quickly.

Except for one detail: the Captain lived with a man.

Mr. Green Jeans (Hugh "Lumpy" Brannum) was a lean stringbean in farmer's overalls whose physique contrasted with the Captain's portly frame. Mostly involved with farming and displaying cute animals, a precursor to the nature show hosts of the 1990s, his personality, stoic, taciturn, and sometimes demanding, reminded me of a father, while the Captain's genial nurturing reminded me of a mother.






Like a father, Green Jeans was responsible for the outdoor chores, such as mowing the lawn, so he only came into the Treasure House occasionally, to show off his latest animal acquisition or mechanical apparatus.  Neither he nor the Captain ever mentioned a lady friend.

When the cameras dimmed, did they cook dinner together?  Sleep together?  Call each other "honey" and hug and kiss?

I didn't extrapolate that far.  All that mattered was that they were together, a couple.

Like Yogi Bear, they offered a hint that the world didn't consist entirely of men and women marching side by side into the future.  Sometimes men walked with men and women with women.