13 Writers and Artists of the Romantic Era That You Didn't Know Were Gay

When I was studying for my M.A. in English I had to select two adjacent historical eras for my Comprehensive Exams.  The problem is, gay content seems to go up and down, a homophobic wasteland (Medieval, Restoration-Augustan, early Victorian) followed by a period of homoerotic exuberance (Renaissance, Romantic, late Victorian).

For my first period, I chose the Victorian Era (1830-1910), mostly because the professor of my graduate seminar, was gay-- or at least we thought he was.  For my second period, I chose the Romantic Era (1770-1830), because the poets were young and cute, and their lives seemed informed by homosocial and homoerotic bonds.  Later I discovered that several were gay in real life. 

The top 13 gay or gay-subtext literary figures:

1. Hugh Walpole  (1717-1797), who built a pseudo-Medieval castle, Strawberry Hill, to entertain the A-list gays of the early Romantic era.

 2. and 3. The Ladies of Llangollen, Eleanor Charlotte Butler (1739-1829) and Sarah Ponsonby (1755-1831), who eloped, set up housekeeping, and entertained many of the artistic and literary greats of the era.

4. Thomas Chatterton (1752-1770), who forged a series of Medieval poems during his teens, and upset over his lack of recognition, committed suicide.  Many of the other Romantic poets revered him as a beautiful youth martyred by an uncomprehending world. He has only appeared on screen once, in a 1970 German movie, played by Ulrich Faulhaber.

 5. William Blake (1757-1822), who advocated for "free love" and illustrated his poetry with lovingly-detailed, super-muscular male nudes

 6. William Beckford  (1760-1844), who built his own pseudo-Medieval castle, Lansdowne Tower, where he kept his huge art collection. 

7. William Wordsworth (1770-1850) and 8. Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), who roomed together and walked across England together (in the company of William's sister Dorothy).In Pandaemonium (2000), they are played by John Hannah and Linus Roach.

9. George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824), who hung out with attractive men, especially Greeks and Italians, and shared a house in Rome with fellow poet Percy Shelley. I hadn't yet read Byron and Greek Love (1985), but I thought Manfred highly homoerotic.  In Gothic (1986), Byron was played by Gabriel Byrne (seen here holding hands with Shelley, played by Julian Sand).

10. Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), who cohabitated with Byron and wrote Adonais to mourn the death of the beautiful young poet John Keats (check out the beefcake in the Star Trek episode "Who Mourns for Adonais". Besides, his wife, Mary Shelley, wrote Frankenstein.  In Frankenstein Unbound (1990), a scientist goes back in time to meet Shelley (gay performer Michael Hutchence, top photo) and the real Victor Frankenstein (Raul Julia).

11. Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873), who introduced the gay-coded Dandy to England.

12. John Keats (1795-1821), whose love for Charles Armitage Brown overwhelmed his love for Fanny Brawne (which was never consummated), and wrote of pure beauty much more often than the beauty of women.  In Bright Star (2009), which makes the romantic triangle overt, Keats is played by gay actor Ben Whishaw (left), and Brown by Paul Schneider.

13. Gay artist Henry Fuseli.

Frankenstein, vampires, gay subtexts, and beefcake.  It beats boring, 800-page long Victorian novels about who is in love with whom.

Revisiting Brideshead Revisited: Does the groundbreaking portrayal of (temporary) gay love hold up after 40 years? WIth bonus d*cks

January 18th, 1982, a Monday night.  I'm lying on the bed in the attic room my brother and I share, reading a book for my Advanced Spanish class.  Significantly it's Ciro Alegria's El mundo es ancho y ajeno: Broad and Alien is the World.  

Link to NSFW version

I always watch tv while studying.  Tonight the only options are two boring movies, MASH (doctors during the Korean War), and something called Brideshead Revisited on PBS.  It turns out to be an adaption of the Evelyn Waugh novel about 1920s Oxford undergrad Charles Ryder (Jeremy Irons) falling in love with the flamboyant, decadent, teddy bear-toting, alcoholic Sebastian Flyte (Anthony Andrews).

 

They run away to Venice together. They go slumming in Soho, along with Sebastian's sister Julia.  Then Ryder begins a romantic entanglement with Julia, and the outraged Sebastian dumps him and runs off to Morocco. 

 Later Sebastian hooks up with a sleazy German guy named Kurt, and later still he dies.  Ryder can't marry Julia because she's Catholic and he's an atheist, so they just live together.  Later he becomes Catholic.

I'm mesmerized.  In 1982, surrounded by the hetero-horniness of workplace sitcoms, my parents demanding "What girl do you like?", and the preacher at church bellowing about homa-sekshuls, just seeing two men involved in a romance is a revelation.  Sure, no one says "gay," Ryder turns straight, and Sebastian dies, but they walk arm in arm, cuddle, even go nude sunbathing!  And everyone around knows! Even Sebastian's mother.  Even Julia, who tells Ryder that "all our loves are hints and signals," leading us to God.  A same-sex romance leads us to God?  Hear that, Preacher?

40 years have passed.  I've studied a lot of LGBT history and literature, and watched a lot of gay movies, published a lot of books and articles on queering fictional texts, and recently I decided to revisit Brideshead Revisted.

You can't go home again.  Rewatching today,  I strongly dislike Brideshead.  Sebastian is a decadent, flamboyant stereotype who ends up dead.  Ryder may fall in love with him, but then he moves on to Julia.  Evelyn Waugh, like Freud, believed that gayness is a phase -- adolescents, newly potent but forbidden access to the opposite sex, turn to each other.  Their brief period of quasi-romance ends when they move on to "mature" heterosexual love.


In 2008, the BBC aired a new version of Brideshead, with Matthew Goode as Charles Ryder and Ben Whishaw as Sebastian.  This time there's no subtext: Sebastian is gay.  But there's also no romance: Ryder is heterosexual but pretending to be interested in Sebastian to gain access to his vast wealth.

 

It's more honest -- and there's a lot more nudity -- but nothing can match the joy of seeing same-sex romance on screen for the very first time.

See also: Angus De Kirkby: Posh femme boy with long legs, a boyfriend, and a lot of furs. But is he a royal, a model, a fashionista, or just rich?

"Saltburn": Brideshead Revisted for the post-gay generation, with kink and p*nises

 Matt Smith: Who doesn't want to see the p*nis of Doctor Who, Christopher Isherwood, Charles Manson, Superworm, and Prince Philip?

Husbands, Wives, and Lovers: The opening theme of a short-lived sitcom offers an escape from the "job, house, wife, kids" mandate

During the spring of my senior year in high school.  I devised a clever scheme to avoid having to date girls: I would ask out a supermodel-cheerleader, way out of my league.  Then, when she laughed hysterically and hung up, or more graciously had to wash her hair that night, my parents would "console" me by letting me borrow the car anyway.  So on Friday nights I went out with boys, to movies, to get pizza, to Leonard Bernstein's Mass at Augustana College, to the spring musical.

We would get back to my place or his place about 9:00 and turn on the tv set just in time to hear the jazzy, risque theme song to Husbands, Wives, and Lovers ("and luuv-errrrs"), produced by gay-friendly comedian Joan Rivers.

 It was the first time any man and woman on tv had lived together without being married, and hearing about it made us feel grown-up and sophisticated and sort of dirty.  Luuv-eerrrrs....

I just wanted to watch the beefcake-heavy opening credits,  in which five women approach men in the hope of amorous activity, and are rejected. (I don't know the names of any of the characters).

1. Cynthia Harris tries to get the elderly Stephen Pearlman interested, but he's listening to his own heartbeat with a stethoscope.

Stephen Pearlman (1935-1998) appeared on L.A. Law, Seinfeld, and Die Hard with a Vengeance.  He is not related to Michael Pearlman of Charles in Charge, starring Scott Baio (left)

2. The vain Charles Siebert wrests a mirror from Claudette Nevins' hand and uses it to admire himself.

Charles Siebert (1938-2022) appeared on Trapper John MD, Dallas, Matlock, and the Love Boat.  Although he posed for gay magazines early in his career, he was married to a woman for 19 years.

3. Lynne Marie Stewart tries to get  hunky, open-shirted Eddie Barth (left) interested, but he's busy eating a sandwich.

Eddie Barth (1931-2010) appeared in Alice, Magnum PI, Fame, Night Court, and Men in Black: The Series.  

4. Mark Lonow waits in anticipation while Randee Heller strips, but he doesn't like the results, and rejects her.

More after the break

Skeezix of Gasoline Alley: 1930s Gay Icon

When I was a kid, Dad would call me Skeezix when I misbehaved:
"Put down that comic book and clean your room, Skeezix!"

Particularly when my misbehaving had some connection to same-sex desire, like when Bill and I became a "mama and a papa", when I was disappointed at the lack of muscles at A Little Bit O'Heaven., or when I asked for a statue of a naked man for Christmas.

He never used that name on my brother or sister, just me.  I had no idea why.

One day I stumbled upon a book in my Aunt Nora's attic, starring a boy named Skeezix.  Turns out that he was from the long-running comic strip Gasoline Alley (1918-).  Originally about four buddies who hung around in an alley to talk about cars, it took a domestic turn on February 14, 1921, when Walt Wallet found a baby on his doorstep, and named him Skeezix.

The strips were now about a single dad raising a small child -- who aged in real time. Every day in the strip corresponded to a day in real life.

By the late 1930s, when my father was a kid, Skeezix was a teenager, and the undeniable star of the comic strip.  You could buy Skeezix toys, clothes, shoes, ice cream, coloring books, pin-backs, sheet music, and a full line of big little books.

He starred in three radio series and two movies (played by Jimmy Lyndon of Tom Brown's School Days fame, 

The strip was not known for beefcake -- Walt was rather pudgy -- but Skeezix got some shirtless and underwear shots, and displayed a nice physique.

And he had a buddy to bond with, Spud, who accompanied him on the adventures Skeezix in Africa (1934) and Skeezix at the Military Academy (1938).

So my father connected my homoerotic hijinks to the  shirtless, buddy-bonding, arguably gay Skeezix of his childhood.

The gay symbolism didn't last.  Skeezix got a girlfriend, Nina Clock (pronounced Nine-a).

He graduated from high school, served in World War II, and returned to run the gas station.  He married Nina, and had two kids: Chipper and Clovia.

Left: The bisexual Scotty Beckett played Skeezix's brother in Gasoline Alley (1951).

Chipper served in the Vietnam War, and became a physician's assistant as the job was just starting out.  He met his wife through a computer dating service.

Clovia grew up, managed the gas station after Skeezix retired, and married Slim Skinner.  They had two kids: Gretchen and Rover (born in 1978).

Rover grew up, graduated from high school, and married Hoogy Boogle.  They had a son, Boog, in 2004.  As of 2022, he is 18 years old, and has a girlfriend, Polly. 

The first and second generations don't appear much anymore, since Walt Wallet is over 120 years old, and Skeezix over 100, but none of the cartoonists want to mention iconic characters dying.

Six generations of Wallets, Skinners, Boggles, and Bumps, and you'd be hard pressed to find anyone in  who isn't involved in a hetero-romance.  There are no confirmed bachelor uncles or maiden aunts anywhere to provide queer subtexts (except for the outsider characters Rufus and Joel).  Gasoline Alley remains a holdout from the time when gay people were assumed not to exist.

Yet for kids growing up in the 1930s, there was Skeezix.

See also:  Dad buys me a n*ked man for Christmas

Rufus and Joel, the gay couple of Gasoline Alley

Tom Brown's School Days

The Life of Riley: Bullying Boys into Girl Craziness.  

Summertime Car Washes

One of the joys of summer is the car wash fundraiser.  Check your local event calendar, and you'll find one or two per week: a club, class, team, or church group is raising money by washing cars.

The attraction, of course, is that they're washing with their shirts off, allowing you to gawk at their spectacular physiques.

They know it.  They plan on it.  It's the one time in the Straight World where everyone acknowledges the existence of same sex desire.

Well, not really.  Everyone is supposed to pretend that it's all about the cars.

A lot of the car wash fundraisers feature women instead of men, so you have to be careful.  Is it a male team or club?  Is it being advertised by men?  Especially men who wrap the signs around their waists, implying that they are naked.

You also have to worry about the age of the guys.  They are typically in high school or college, but occasionally younger groups host car washes.  No point in gawking at a group of 12 year olds.

If you're lucky, they'll be even older than college age.

I stay away from car washes with both male and female participants.  They invariably try to steer male drivers toward the females, and female drivers toward the male.  If you insist on the "male" group, they act as if they have never heard of anything so outrageous.

More after the break

"Merli": Catalan boy studies philosophy, gets with cougars, displays his backside

In college I took a class in "Modern Philosophy," assuming that the philosophy would be modern.  No, it's 18th century.  All I remember about it is: "Berkeley" is pronounced "Barkeley."  But the teaser to Merli, a Spanish teen drama about a philosophy student, shows a guy gawking at another guy's backside, so I'll give it a try.

Scene 1: Score!  Closeup of the backside of Pol (Carlos Cuevas) as he showers!  We see most of the rest of him, too, as he dresses while getting a plot dump: He and Dad have just moved into an apartment together, he's going to work instead of applying to Uni, and his friend Bruno has just lost his Dad. I thought this was a Spanish series, but I don't understand anything they're saying.

Bruno appears. More plot dump: Pol hooked up with Bruno once, but he's actually straight.  Bruno doesn't really believe him, but what can you do?

Scene 2: Pol runs into Dad and his new girlfriend, and decides that he should get on with his life, too.  He applies to Uni after all, in philosophy.

Scene 3:   First day of class at the amazingly ornate Universitat de Barcelona.  That explains the language: not Spanish, Catalan!    Pol has a meet-cute with Biel (Pere Valribera), who guides him to the wrong class: math, not philosophy.  Finally they find the correct class, Philosophical Issues, with a jaded, world-weary professor (world-weary after just 10 years on the job?  Get back to me after 30 years!).   They also take classes in the History of Culture (all Marxist) and Symbolic Logic (which sounds like gibberish), and meet a Just-Friends Girl.

Scene 4: In the library, they get all-tongue tied over the Girl of Their Dreams, Minerva.  Unfortunately, she already has a Rich Jerk boyfriend, Rai (actor not in the cast list).

Scene 5: Ethics Class with another world-weary philosophy prof.  She makes a bigoted joke to see if the students understand freedom of speech, and brings in a janitor to explain social inequality, and half the class walks out.    

Scene 6: They all hang out after class.  Pol sees Bruno eating Rainbow Flag cake with his new LGBT friends.  Rich Jerk Rai (Pablo Capuz) stops by their table for a few minutes, then accidentally takes Pol's wallet!

Scene 7:  In a palatial mansion, a rich blond lady is giving a blow job to a chunky working-class guy.  Did I accidentally switch channels?  This doesn't seem to be the same series at all.  Someone rings the bell, so she sends working-class guy -- Henry -- to answer the door.  It's Pol, bringing Rich Jerk Rai's wallet.

Mom comes downstairs and flirts with Pol before Rich Jerk Rai appears -- in a swimsuit!

Scene 8:  They go up to Rai's room  -- erm, suite --  to exchange wallets.   Rai invites Pol to take a swim, but he refuses -- he has to work.  But he sticks around long enough to gawk at Rai's backside as he dives into the pool.

Scene 9: Just Friends Girl goes to visit Minerva, who has a flat in the Temple of Augustus. Imagine living in a museum, looking out your window at the crowds on tour.  We are introduced to roommates: Amy, a bubbly American, and Etin, a musician.  Then on to Minerva's room, where she admits that she has a crush on Rich Jerk Rai.   Wait -- I thought they were already dating?  

Scene 10: Rich Jerk Rai's Mom having cupcakes with her friends.  Rai comes in: Mom criticizes him for dropping out of Business to study...ugh...Philosophy.  "Now you have somewhere to vomit your existentialism about being different from everyone else."  So Rai is gay?

Nope: one of the friends excuses herself and goes to the bathroom to get with him with him. (No beefcake.)

Scene 11: Pol at his job. mopping the floor at a parking garage, when a middle-aged woman drives up: she needs help parking.  They do stuff.  Wow, two college boys doing stuff with cougars, one after the other.  I guess the director has a f*tish. 

Scene 12:  Back to class.  World-Weary Prof asks if it's ethical to discriminate against people because they are ugly.   Then she has pastries with her friend and complains that students used to enroll in her classes because she was beautiful; now she's ugly, and attendance has dropped off.  10 to 1 Pol starts dating her before the term is over. We already know that he's into older ladies.

Scene 13:  World Weary Prof meets her daughter, who appears to have Down's Syndrome.  They discuss her chances of becoming Chancellor -- nil.   Meanwhile Pol's Dad discusses moving in with his girlfriend, which makes Pol furiouos.  

Scene 14: The pool at the palatial mansion.  Rich Jerk Rai is pretending to be dead, but Mom isn't falling for his prank.  They argue: "I've spent years tolerating your eccentricities, and the calls from school about your bad attitude and stupidity."  "You should talk!"  And so on, while Henry watches.

Scene 15: Pol and Bruno (David Solans) , his friend from Scene 1, talking over the recent events in Pol's life.  They flirt.  Bruno: "When you hook up with guys and girls, you're bi."  Pol: "It was one time, and there was a girl between us.  I only like girls. Besides, I'm not into labels." I've heard that one before.  It means: I'm into guys, but I don't want to suffer the discrimination that comes from being out as gay.  

He takes off his clothes and runs naked into the ocean (nice rear).  Bruno muses: "I'm going to get you, Pol.  In the end, all roads lead to Bruno."  He strips and runs naked into the ocean, too.  They frolick.   The end.

Beefcake: A lot of backsides, no lady parts (which is a good thing).

Other Sights: A lot of Barcelona.

Gay Characters: Bruno, the possibly bi Pol, and maybe Rai.

Heterosexism: Two cougar bedroom scenes.

Character Dump:  There are about 20 named characters in this episode, impossible to keep track of them all, or to decide which ones are connected. Especially the middle-aged blond women who want to do bedroom stuff with college boys.  The director definitely has a f*tish.

Merli: In the last scene, Pol says that he wants to get a scholarship, graduate, and become "a merli,"  so I assumed that Merli was a Catalan term for a kind of philosopher.  But Google Translate is not familiar with the term.

IMDB lists a tv series called Merli, about an inspiring high school philosophy teacher.  It has a Pol, but otherwise the characters are all different. This must be a sequel or a remake or something.  So they named a tv series after a character who doesn't appear and is only mentioned once? 

Plot Arc:  No paranormal, no secret society, no mystery of any sort.  What is this series about, Pol's  LGBTQ identity?

My Grade: C- for the plot, A for the beefcake.

See also: Off Campus: Hannah must choose between a hocky star with a nice backside and a bad boy with tats. Plus a gay bestie and fratboy c*cks

"After the Hunt": Pretentious philosophy professors have problems, with some penises and Will Price

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

The Red Band Society: Buddy-Bonding Teens in a Barcelona Hospital

Freddie from ICarly Finally Shows Us His Chest

Remember Freddie, the nerdish video engineer on Nickelodeon's ICarly (2007-12)?  It had some rather homophobic scenes, including a queer-coded Big Bad, but at least Carly and Sam had a gay subtext relationship, big brother Stuart was obviously bisexual, and Freddie was cute.

Then actor Nathan Kress started to bulk up.

Fans waited patiently for some shirtless shots, if not on the show, then on Instagram, Facebook, Myspace, Snapchat...anywhere?  On the beach?  Demonstrating your workout?  Taking a selfie?

Nothing.  Nathan never even wore a sleeveless shirt.

Did he think muscles were incongruous with Freddie's nerd image?  Or as a fundamentalist Christian, was he worried about his body sparking lustful thoughts in teenage fans?

Who knows?  Physique aficionados eventually gave up on him, and moved on to guys who weren't so stingy with muscle displays.

Well, it's been six years since ICarly ended,  and Nathan is 26 years old, still buffed, still fundamentalist, only now with a beard, wife, and kid (I mean an actual beard).

He's done guest shots on other Nickelodeon shows, some voice work, some directing, and some acting.  His major projects include disaster (Into the Storm), horror (Tell Me How I Die), something about teen dancers (Breaking Brooklyn),  and a web comedy about an Apocalypse that didn't happen (Alive in Denver).

His new show, RadioActive Dads, will premiere on July 24th.

He's still shy about displaying his physique, but there are two shirtless shots amid the hundreds on his Instagram site.  Both taken at the same time.

Here he seems to be saying, "Ok, fine, here I am with my shirt off.  Happy?"













Not really.  I mean, you're hot and all, but was it worth all the secrecy? What's the big deal? Everybody has a chest.

See also:

Nathan Kress, Freddie from ICarly, grown up. Is he still homophobic? Is he still shy about showing his d*ck?

ICarly

"The Carol Burnett Show": Some 1970s beefcake and gay subtexts amid the boring dinosaur songs.

Variety shows, combining comedy sketches and songs,  are out of style now -- only Saturday Night Live survives -- but in the 1960s and 1970s, they were all the rage.  At least among the adults.  In 1970, they could watch twelve hours of variety per week, with hosts Leslie Uggams, Dean Martin, Carol Burnett, Red Skelton, Glen Campbell (left),  Jim Nabors (who was gay but not ouht), Tom Jones, Jimmy Durante, Jackie Gleason, and Andy Williams.

Kids and teenagers hated variety. Passionately. They were always on opposite something good.  If your parents forced you to watch The Jim Nabors Hour, you had to miss That Girl. If you were forced to watch The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour, you had to miss The Mod Squad.

And the shows were horrible.  Slow songs from dinosaur times!  Comedy sketches about characters popular on radio a thousand years ago!  Bathetic closing numbers involving sad clowns or cleaning ladies!

I usually managed to get out of watching variety shows by claiming homework, or when my brother and I got our own tv set, watching something else -- anything else.  But for some reason I saw a lot of The Carol Burnett Show (1967-78).  Carol, who got her start in the Broadway musical Once Upon a Mattress, played a charwoman, a ditzy secretary, Queen Elizabeth, and Vickie Lawrence's sister.  She and her comedy troupe parodied soap operas ("As the Stomach Turned") and classic movies ("Went with the Wind").  

I had no idea what they were parodying.

Famous guest stars like Rock Hudson, Tony Randall (left),  Sid Caesar, and Robert Goulet played parodies of themselves or sang.  I remember Tony singing "Have some Madeira, M'Dear," about a creep trying to get a girl drunk so he can take advantage of her.  

That was comedy in the 1970s.

There were only three reasons to watch:

I liked three things about the show:

1.  Co-host Lyle Waggoner, a former male model who appeared n*dee in Playgirl.  He played the leading-men and hunks in comedy sketches.  Unfortunately, because they were comedy, he never appeared n*de or even shirtless on the show.

More after the break

12 Forgotten Beefcake Boys of the 1980s

When I was living in West Hollywood during the 1980s, we didn't go to movies much, due to the rampant homophobia. Nearly every movie featured a discussion of how much the main characters hated gay people.  In Teen Wolf, Michael J. Fox protests that he's not a "f__."  In American Werewolf in London, David Naughton calls Prince Charles "a f__"  In Breakfast Club, Judd Nelson writes a warning on his school locker: "Keep out, f___"

But in spite of the homophobia, there was a lot of beefcake.  Men took off their shirts regularly, in frat houses, swimming pools, locker rooms, on wilderness treks.  Some famous, others obscure.  Here are 10 forgotten beefcake boys, actors who surprised us by displaying impressive physiques in one or two movies, and and then vanished.

Or at least never took off their clothes again.

1. Anthony Edwards stripped down to his rather impressive underwear by customs agents in Gotcha (1985).  He went on to teen s*x comedies and eight seasons of ER, but never showed his impressive equipment on screen again.

2. Dan Shor talking to his dad n*de in Strange Behavior (1981).   The backside that "sealed his popularity" in West Hollywood never appeared again, but we got a nice view of his front in Tron (1982).

3, Ilan Mitchell-Smith buddy-bonding in a cut-off t-shirt and blue shorts in underwear in Weird Science (1985).  He retired from acting and became a history professor. Also starring a semi-n*de Michael Anthony Hall and a bare-backside Bill Paxton.

4. Tim Curry lookalike Kevin van Hentenryck runs down the street n*de in Basket Cases (1982).  It's a long shot in the dark, but you can definitely see the bouncing.  There are two more Basket Case movies, but no more Kevin c*cks.

5. Don Michael Paul (left) took his shirt off in  The Brotherhood of Justice (1986) and Aloha Summer (1988) before settling down to a fully-clothed career in writing and directing.  He specialized in horror movies.

6. Nick Corri was  killed while n*ked in Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) and went Full Monty in a locker room in Wildcats (1986).  He changed his name to Jsu Garcia and became a spiritual teacher.

More after the break

Easter Island: Phallic Statues and Penis Festivals

If you thought Mongolia was remote for Westerners, try Easter Island (aka Rapa Nui).  From New York, you fly to Miami, then to Panama City, and finally to Santiago, Chile (about 24 hours).  From there, only one airline flies to the town of Hanga Roa on Rapa Nui, once a day (about 6 hours).

It's a tiny island, about 15 miles long and 8 miles wide, alone in the Pacific Ocean, probably settled from the Marquesas Islands, 2000 miles away.

Once the early Polynesians got there, they became very interested in the penis.

1. Most Rapa Nui men incorporated the word Ure, "Penis," into their names, but in the 19th century Christian missionaries put an end to the practice.

2. The Moai, "Easter Island Heads," are actually complete torsos, over 800 of them, 20-30 feet high, weighing over 80 tons, sculpted and installed over a period of 300 years (1200-1500 AD).  They took so much time and energy that the islanders had little time left for other pursuits, and so many trees were felled to facilitate transport that the island is now almost entirely treeless.

The noses of the figures have often been interpreted as phallic symbols.  Indeed, some scholars interpret the Moai themselves as giant phallic symbols, representing the sexual potency of the Rapa Nui men. There's a legend still common on the island that a penis served as the model.

3. Rongo Rongo, the Easter Island script, appears on dozens of tablets and ceremonial objects.  By the time the Europeans arrived, no islander remembered how to read it, and it remains untranslated.  But at least one of the glyphs is called "Tangata Ure Huki" "Man with Erect Penis"

4. The Tapati Fesival, held every year during the first two weeks of February, is a celebration of the island's history, culture, and penises.  There are parades, dances, athletic contests like haka pei (sliding down a mountainside on a tree trunk), and a race called the Tau'a Rapa Nui: men wearing only skimpy loincloths race through town carrying bunches of phallic-symbol bananas.

Male Nudity in Italian Class

The only good thing about Hell-fer-Sartain, Texas, where I taught at a horrible state college after getting my M.A., was the free tuition for faculty.  There wasn't a lot at that I wanted to take, but they did offer Italian.

It didn't start out well:
Roger e un ragazzo americano. Maria e una ragazza italiana. Roger e Maria sono amici. . .

Roger is an American boy visiting Italy. He goes to a café and tries to pick up a local girl. In the first lesson we learned “What is your name?”, "Your country is beautiful," and "How old are you."

Roger learns the time so he won’t be late for the cinema, learns the names of food so he can order in the restaurant, gets an overview of national history as they tour the museums.  In Chapter 10, we learn the Italian word for "kiss" (bacio).

Why do even language-learning dialogues have to be about  boys and girls gazing at each other?  

I never thought of Italy as a "good place."  The only fiction I read about Italian men  in love was The Little World of Don Camillo, and movies set in Italy seemed to involve mostly horny heterosexuals: Roman Holiday (1953), La Dolce Vita (1960),  Island of Love (1963).  Pasolini was gay in real life, but his moves were entirely heterosexist.  I had never seen Ernesto (1979).

But one weekend I drove two hours into Houston, to the Wilde-and-Stein Bookstore, and bought Ganymede in the Renaissance, about how Renaissance artists used the myth of Ganymede, a mortal boy swept up by Zeus to become his catamite.

And I discovered a whole gay world in Renaissance Italy, artists, writers, statesmen.

1. Leonardo Da Vinci. He gets a girlfriend in modern straightwashing biopics, but he was gay.

2. Michelangelo.  He gets straightwashed a lot, too. 

3. Donatello, who sculpted the famously effeminate David, a counterpart to Michelangelo's more macho version.

4. Benvenuto Cellini.  His Autobiography was on the list of recommended readings in my class in Renaissance History in college.  I didn't read it, and the professor never said a word.

5. Caravaggio, played by Dexter Fletcher and Nigel Terry in the 1986 movie.

6. Aretino, who wrote Il Marescalco, about a gay man forced to marry a woman, but fortunately she turns out to be a man.

7. Ariosto.  I bought his Orlando Furioso in a Ballantine Adult Fantasy edition, but it was about winning The Girl.

8. Matteo Bandello, who wrote 12 Novelle, one about a gay man.

9. The painter Giovanni Antonio Bazzi, nicknamed "Il Sodoma"



See also:  "Da Vinci's Demons": An absurdly heterosexual Da Vinci, a bi guy who only likes ladies, two monstrous gay predators

Pasolini's "Arabian Nights": The less well-known tales told with pe* nises and homophobia

"Caravaggio's Shadow": As time goes by, the gay Baroque painter becomes more and more straight. With n*de Italian men