Mark Lester: Jack Wild's boyfriend moves on to sleazy hetero cringe, buddy-bonds with Michael Jackson, shows his backside on the grass

It seems that every kid is forced to see Oliver! (1968)   Their parents think that the musical is somehow educational because it's roughly based on Oliver Twist.

I saw it on DVD a few years ago, after two doses of the live musical, in high school and in L.A.  Not my favorite: all about child abuse, domestic violence, and other fun stuff, with a heterosexist "true love" plot.  

But I liked the gay-subtext buddy-bonding between the streetwise Artful Dodger (15-year old Jack Wild) and the cherubic innocent Oliver (10-year old Mark Lester).

 

I knew Jack Wild from H. R. Pufnstuf, but I heard nothing more about Mark Lester for many years. During the early 2000s, I was writing an article on demonic children in the movies, and I found that the cherubic Mark Lester spent his pubescence playing violent or creepy, or both.  His characters seemed uncomfortable with their bodies, ravaged by uncontrollable desires, and obsessively heterosexual.

In Eyewitness (1970), also released as Sudden Terror, 12-year old Ziggy (Mark) witnesses a murder on the Mediterranean island of Malta,  and is pursued by the killer.  He goes on the lam, along with his girlfriend.

In Melody (1971), 10-year old Daniel (Mark) falls in love with a girl and decides to marry her. The adults disapprove of a 10-year old getting married, but it's the heart of the counterculture, and "true love" is always right.

Jack Wild plays his gay-subtext budd.

In What the Peeper Saw (1972), also released as Night Hair Child and Diabolica malicia, 14-year old Marcus (Mark) isattracted to his father's new wife (Britt Eklund).  She shares his interest, and they start a relationship. They conspire to kill Dad so they can be together. But is she really conspiring to kill Marcus? 

In Who Slew Auntie Roo (1972), 14-year old Christopher (Mark)  tries to rescue his sister from the demented Mrs. Forrest (Shelley Winters), who is holding her prisoner in the attic. 

More after the break

"Country Comfort": Is seeing Ricardo Hurtado, Eddie Cibrian, and Eric Balfour worth the pain?

 

Ricardo Hurtado, best known for starring in Nickelodeon's School of Rock, has a perfect combination of face and physique.  I would definitely be asking him out -- if we were both single and he didn't include Bible verses on his Instagram.  Quoting the Bible doesn't necessarily mean that he hates gay people, but I'm not risking it.    

He hasn't had many tv or movie roles recently, so if I want to see him perform as an adult, it will have to be GlichTechs, Malibu Rescue: The Next Wave, or Country Comfort.

We'll start off with Country Comfort, which must mean something like "cold comfort." (something that is supposed to encourage you, but actually makes you feel worse).

Link to NSFW version.

Scene 1:  A rainy night in a small town.  We pan past a church (see, we're religious) to a middle class house.  

There's a knock on the door.  Tuck (Ricardo!) answers: it's Bailey (Katherine McPhee), a young woman with black hair wearing a black cowboy hat.  He gawks at her gorgeousness and says "Looks like they sent the right woman to do the job."  Did he call for a prostitute?

Bailey thinks she has been mistaken for a prostitute, and starts to bolt, but Tuck explains that he thought she was from the nanny agency. (He makes gross sexual come-ons to all of his nannies?  And why does he need a nanny at age 21?)

No, she's not a nanny.  Her truck broke down, her phone died, and she wants to use theirs.  But Tuck is so horny for her that he trots out his siblings for introductions: two little girls, 12-year old Dylan, and Brody (Jamie Martin Mann, left).  Wait -- he's 17 (20 now), and way too old for a nanny.  

While all three of the boys gaze at Bailey with unbrindled lust, Tuck explain that their mom died two years ago, and they've gone through 10 nannies since (do  they get tired of the sleazy come-ons and quit?)   

But Baily likes their sleazy come-ons: "You think I'm hot?  You have no idea how much that means to me!"  Two of those boys are jail bait, lady. 

Finally Dad, a middle-aged cowboy, arrives, accompanied by his blond bimbette child-hating girlfriend Summer.   (wait -- if they didn't need a babysitter while Dad was out, why do they need a nanny?  To, like, restore their joie de vivre, like Fran Fine and Charles in Charge?).  He's Beau (Eddie Cibrian, who played lots of lifeguards and teen hunks back in the day).

Beau asks: "Why are you so early for your nanny interview?" (Wait -- he's just getting back from a date, so it must be after 10 pm.  Why did they schedule an interview in the middle of the night?  Oh, right, the sex...)

Then: "If you're not the new nanny, what are you doing here?" Baily explains:

Scene 2:  Flashback to earlier that evening.  Bailey and her boyfriend Boone (Eric Balfour) are singing at a honky tonk, with a record producer listening.  We hear her entire song: "Dream baby got me dreaming sweet dreams the whole day long."  Ugh!  That's terrible!. And are they supposed to stare at each other instead of the audience through the whole song?

The record producer hates it, naturally. So Boone replaces Bailey with a boobalicious bimbette (yeah, that will fix those atrocious lyrics), and Bailey angrily breaks up with him.  Since they live together, she has no place to stay (um...a friend's house?  A hotel?  Let her stay there until she finds a place?).  She starts driving aimlessly.  Then her truck conks out right outside the home of a family that needs a nanny.  Well, it worked for Fran Fine.

Boone is played by Eric Balfour (left), who played many hunkoids back in the day.

Scene 3: Dad offers to call Bailey an Uber (to take her where?  She's driving aimlessly, remember?).  At that moment there's a tornado alarm, so everyone rushes to the basement.   Beau jokes about the last nine nannies being buried there (whoa, creepy! If I was Baily, I'd take my chances with the tornado.)  But Bailey is too overwhelmed by the love and togetherness of this family to be scared.  

Hey, there are musical instruments in the basement.  Could the family be...coincidence of coincidence -- country-western singers?   

Yep -- they join her for an impromptu song: "When Will I Be Loved."  The kids know all the words to a song that last charted in 1975?

One of the girls -- Cassidy -- gets upset because her mom was a singer, and this is bringing up old memories.  Beau tells her to get over herself.  Great parenting, Beau -- why not let the girl be sad?

Now Tuck is upset -- since their Mom died they haven't been allowed to touch their instruments.  Why not?  This family gets more and more screwed up.  Fortunately, Bailey has come to the rescue. 

Scene 4: Cassidy runs out into the storm.  Bailey follows her into the barn and apologizes for the "singin'" (of course it's singin', not singing).  I fast-forward through their heart-to heart, which no doubt solves the psychological trauma that no therapist has been able to handle.  And no doubt Mom will never be mentioned again.

Scene 5: Morning.  I fast-forward through this scene, too.  Obviously Bailey will agree to become the nanny, get the Partridge Family band back together, and start dating Beau.  And the ex-boyfriend will be around in some capacity.

Beefcake: Probably.

Gay Characters: Are you kidding?

Teens Out of a 1980s Sex Comedy: 2

Creepy Lines: 7

Absurd Coincidences: Too many to count.

Bible Verse that Ricardo Quotes; Hebrews 11:12: "No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful.  Later on, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it."

Is seeing Ricardo Hurtado worth the pain of Country Comfort?: Heck, no.

There are some frontal and rear photos of Eric Balfour and a bulge shot of Eddie Cibrian on Righteous Gemstones Beefcake and Boyfriends

In Every Man's Life There's a Summer of 42

During the 1980s, as the gay movement gained ground, film producers tried every way they could think of to assure heterosexual audiences that they had nothing to worry about, that gay people did not exist.  One of their most annoying attempts was a spate of movies involving young boys having sex with older women.  It was not a statutory rape, however; it was presented with flowers and hearts and swelling music, and a voiceover of their adult selves crowing "I learned about life, and love, and being a man!!!!  It was most beautiful, most fulfilling experience of my life!!!!!"

What did the older women want with the young boys, anyway, when there were lots of men their own age around, and their dalliance with the jailbait was patently illegal?  The adult voiceover usually explained: the boys were so incredibly attractive that every woman on Earth wanted them. The one they slept with just happened to make her offer first.

The annoying trend probably began with The Summer of '42 (1971), which stars Gary Grimes as 15-year old Hermie, whose hotness causes an older woman to cheat on her husband (away in the War).  He never saw her again, but that night made him a man.  The tagline even universalizes the young boy-older woman trope: "In every man's life there is a summer of '42."

Jay North played a teenager who beds The Teacher (1974).




But the genre took off in the the early 80s, with countless "bedding the teacher/tutor/friend's older sister/miscellaneous older lady" movies: Private Lessons (1981) with Eric Brown (of Mama's Family),  My Tutor (1983), with Matt Lattanzi; Class (1983), with Andrew McCarthy; A Night in Heaven (1983), with Christopher Atkins; Gotcha! (1985), with Anthony Edwards. In Weird Science  (1985), the boys (Anthony Michael Hall, Ilan Michael Smith) build an older woman robot of their own.

Why did I find these movies so annoying?

1. The promise of beefcake made them a must-see.  But the boys usually had a woman with them to ruin the swimsuit, shower, and underwear shots, and anyway they were overwhelmed by the endless breast shots of the "older woman."



2. So exuberantly hetero-horny were the boys that there was no room for men.  Sometimes men were completely missing; the cast consisted entirely of the boy and some babes.  Sometimes the boy had a best friend, but only as a sounding board, to strategize with and brag to; emotional intimacy was completely absent.


3. These movies loudly proclaimed that they represented all of male experience, that every boy who had ever lived or who ever would live longed to have sex with older women.  But they didn't just ignore gay male experience, they lovingly, emphatically, with elaborate detail, declared that no gay men exist.

Dustin Hoffman: The Gay Graduate

Gay subtexts usually require longing looks, physical contact, or at least a same-sex friendship, but in The Graduate (1967), there is none.  The plot centers on Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman), a recent college graduate, and we do see a lot of him: he is naked more often than clothed, and his hard-muscled physique would not look out of place on a Chippendales calendar.  But there is no one to notice.

Benjamin lives in a world of suburban castles with wide lawns and pools, organization-man husbands, and drunk wives, the logical culmination of the heterosexist myth, a glimpse into his future, a glimpse into the future we were all told that we should long for.

He spends most of the movie trapped, staring mutely from behind fish tanks, wet-suit visors, wide shots angled to suggest enclosed space, and Mrs. Robinson's legs shaped into a triangular dragnet.  There is no escape from his Stepford world, not even among the hippies.  When he goes to Berkeley, he finds no shaggy-haired, tie-died counterculture, just straights with textbooks.  Roger Ebert says that he is "utterly unaware of his generation."

He is a rebel without a cause, made vaguely nauseous by materialism and loveless marriages -- and by his heterosexual destiny.  He has no interest in girls until he is seduced by Mrs. Robinson.  There are no pictures of girls on his bedroom wall; he mentions no girls at school.  It seems unlikely that a handsome track team champ with a magnificent physique would be deprived of hetero-romance, if he desired it, so one must conclude that he doesn't.

The adults seem to notice, and obsessively try to prod him into heterosexual practice, always suggesting that he "call a girl."  When Mrs. Robinson first approaches him, he rushes horrified down the stairs, where Mr. Robinson sits him down and has a heart-to-heart: "You should be having fun with girls!"  Benjamin protests that he is not interested in girls.

Later Mrs. Robinson tries again.  When displaying her body doesn't work, she tries to insult him into bed, accusing him of being a "virgin" and "inadequate," not man enough, that is, gay.  Now he "wants" to be a lady-killer; he slams the door and comes toward her.  They begin an affair.

Eventually Ben finds a girl, actually the only adult his own age in the entire suburb, Elaine, spontaneous and free, the polar opposite of the cold, calculating, constrained adults.  No matter that she is the daughter of his fling Mrs. Robinson, or planning to marry a Stepford beau in a cold, square church in the suburbs.  Ben calls her name over and over until she acquieses.  "It's too late!" Mrs. Robinson snarls.  "Not for me!" Elaine responds.

She and Ben will not forget that they majored in art or married for love.  They will be deliriously happy and gloriously fulfilled.  They fight off oldsters who are literally snarling with rage, flee the church, and jump on a bus.  Fade out to freedom.  They have escaped the suburban nuclear family, husband, wife, kids, organization-man job, and house made of ticky-tacky -- the entire heterosexual trajectory -- through heterosexual love.

Then something remarkable happens.  Instead of congratulating each other on having discovered the meaning of life, Benjamin and Elaine sit somberly, staring out into space, exactly the way Benjamin looked in the first scene when his airplane began its descent into suburban doom.  Paul Simon reprises the theme: "Through restless streets I walk alone."  Why is Benjamin still restless, still alone?

Because the bus is taking them right back to the suburbs, where they'll buy a house, and Benjamin will sell plastics, and Elaine will sign up for charity drives, and in twenty years he'll be a workaholic, and she'll be an alcoholic.  "The one" inevitably becomes Mrs. Robinson.  Heterosexual love provides no escape.  They are trapped.

See also: The Graduate Revisited

Mason Gamble: "Dennis the Menace" turned quiet, shy outsider.

In the science fiction thriller Gattaca (1997), young Vincent (Mason Gamble) is "different," "inferior" in a society of genetically engineered supermen.  He excels anyway, besting his brother Anton (Chad Christ) at a swimming contest and longing to participate in an elite space-exploration program that's open only to the genetically superior.

Obvious gay symbolism -- the "inferior" outsider who longs to be a real boy.  Plus bonding: when Vincent grows into an adult (Ethan Hawke), he "borrows" the DNA of crippled athlete Jerome (Jude Law), and rather overtly falls in love with him.





Throughout his career, Mason Gamble has played outsiders who challenge heterosexist strictures.  At age six-and-a-half, he beat out 20,000 hopefuls for the role of Dennis the Menace in the feature film (1993), which, challenges the myth of the heterosexual nuclear family, the tight triad of Dad-Mom-Kids that is presumably all you need and will ever need, until the Kids grow up, marry, and form Dad-Mom-Kids triads of their own.

In the myth of the heterosexual family, other friends are irrelevant, other relatives unwelcome intrusions, and strangers malicious (as we see in the MGM Tarzan series).  But even more than in the comic strip and television versions, Dennis seeks out emotional connection outside, with Joey, with Margaret, and with Mr. Wilson.  Not romantic bonds, certainly, but nevertheless bonds which, according to the myth, do not and cannot exist.

In Rushmore (1998), Mason plays Dirk, a shy, quiet outsider who is drawn to the eccentric high schooler Max (Jason Schwartzman).  Max is aggressively heterosexual, dating two older teachers (in a modern update of the 1980s "sex with the babysitter" genre), but Dirk is not.  They quarrel, plot acts of revenge against each other, and finally reconcile.

A Gentleman's Game (2002) is about a teenage golf caddy (Mason) who discovers a dark sexual secret (not that dark secret) involving his best friend, and meanwhile tries to hide his interest in golf pro Foster Pearce (Gary Sinise).

Now tall, slim, and square-jawed, Mason still acts occasionally, when he can find time from his new career in marine biology

Making a Man of Mimi: Gay Jungle Boys

For every Sabu, Jonny Quest, Alix, or Maya that pairs a "savage" subaltern with a "civilized" white boy or Sabaka that pairs Indians with each other, there are a dozen Mowglis: adaptions of the 1894 Rudyard Kipling classic about a boy raised in the Indian bush who abandons his same-sex chums in search of heterosexual destiny.  During the 1990s, they appeared over and over again, forcing upon gay children and teenagers the heterosexist myth that their story, like all stories, must end with a boy-girl kiss.

The Jungle Book (1994) begins with the infant Mowgli fully involved in a heterosexual romance with the infant Kitty, who gives him a bracelet as a symbol of their troth.  After a period of anarchic buddy-bonding in the jungle, the now-teenage Mowgli (28-year old Brandon Scott Lee) is “restored” to heterosexuality through an encounter with his lost love (19-year old Lena Headley).  She is now dating the slimy, effete, and ultimately murderous Captain Boone (Cary Elwes), so most of the movie consists of a romantic triangle rather than junble adventure.

In Jungle Boy (1996), Krishna (Asif Mohammed Seth) seems closer to Tarzan than Mowgli. Muscular rather than underfed and cute, he swings on vines through the Indian jungles and interacts with a sort of drag-queen guardian angel named Deva (“God” in Hindi).  True to form, he encounters Anna (18-year old Lea Moreno Young), niece of a visiting anthropologist, as she lounges around on her terrace in a San Diego Athletic Department t-shirt.  She feeds him ice cream, dresses him, and teaches him English before being kidnapped by the evil Sultan.  After two or three rescues, Krishna decides to return to his job as Guardian of the Jungle (and a promised sequel) , but not before a kiss.  And the music swells: he is a man.

Fred Savage, who narrates The Jungle Book – Mowgli’s Story (1998), tells us that this is the story of “how a boy became a man-cub, and how that man-cub became a man.”  Mowgli (Brando Baker) becomes a man by, first, investigating an abandoned house, like Tarzan did in Edgar Rice Burroughs’ original story.  He stares at a sepia-tinted picture of a girl, and the music swells.  Later, he encounters some Indian children playing.  He kicks their soccer ball across the field, and the boys run off, but the girl remains, smiling at him.  He smiles back. And the music swells again.  He is a man.

In Jungle 2 Jungle (1997), as in its precursor, Un indien dans la ville (1994), wildboy Mimi (13-year old Sam Huntington) travels from Amazonia to New York dressed only in a loincloth (the Brasilia Gap does not sell t-shirts, evidently).  His long blond hair, pretty face, and soft body only barely beginning to tighten certainly code him as feminine, as does his gender-bending name, but he transforms into heterosexual adolescence upon meeting Karen (14-year old LeeLee Sobieski):

Karen’s Dad: You’re putting the moves on my twelve-year old daughter!
Karen: That’s not true!  I was putting the moves on him!

Leonard Maltin calls it “love of the puppy variety,” but there is an extended kiss (while the music swells), a shot of the two asleep in a hammock, a tearful goodbye when Mimi returns to Amazonia, and then, when the whole cast decides to join him, a a joyous reunion, while everyone else stands around grinning (and the music swells again).  Clearly it is heterosexual congress  that made a man of Mimi.