Mark Lester after Oliver

Every kid I knew was forced to see Oliver! in 1968.  Our parents had the impression that musicals were somehow educational, and besides, it was Dickens.

Most of the kids I knew disliked it.  After all, it was a musical. About child abuse, domestic violence, and other fun stuff.   I found the heterosexist "true love" plot boring, but I liked the buddy-bonding between the streetwise Artful Dodger (15-year old Jack Wild) and the cherubic innocent Oliver (10-year old Mark Lester, left).

I followed Jack Wild onto 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 cherub 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.

In What the Peeper Saw (1972), also released as Night Hair Child and Diabolica malicia, 14-year old Marcus (Mark) is sexually attracted to his father's new wife (Britt Eklund).  She shares his interest, and they have sex. 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. 

Love Under the Elms (1975) was originally titled La prima volta sull' erba, "the first time on the grass." While visiting Italy, Mark meets a girl, and they have sex a lot. It ends badly, but if you want to see frontal nudity, this is the one.

Not many gay kids saw these movies -- they were all rated R for violence and sex

Mark strips down to a swimsuit or his underwear, or is accosted in the bathtub, in all of his violent/creepy movies, but with all the heterosexual longing going on, there's not much time for homoerotic subtexts. After Oliver!, I found one only in Senza ragione (1973), also known as Redneck. 

Lennox (Mark)  is kidnapped by two crooks, the evil Memphis (Telly Savalas) and the hunky Mosquito (Franco Nero, left).   Lennox bonds with Mosquito and they run away together, and spend the night, with rear nudity and a strong implication of sex between them.  But does Lennox really like the gangster, or is he plotting?  It ends badly.

Mark Lester also starred in some costume dramas that didn't require creepy sexuality.  He retired from acting in 1977, studied osteopathy, and opened an acupuncture clinic in England.  

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.

The Babysitter: Hetero-Annoying Hetero-Romantic Hetero-Horror Comedy

When will I learn to ignore Netflix's recommendations?

I was drawn in to The Babysitter (2017) by a promo of the spectacular Robbie Amell bare-chested.

But it's all hetero-annoying from there.

12-year old hetero-pubescent Cole (Judah Lewis), who for some reason gets a lot of shirtless scenes, too, lives in an obnoxiously heterosexist world where all boys are hetero-belligerant mean-spirited monsters and all girls are hetero-kind, gentle, and supportive.  His only friend is the hetero-Girl Next Door who he will kiss in a lush hetero-romantic Meaning of Life moment later on.

But first he is the victim of old-school bullying by a gang led by the feminine but "I grabbed her pussy" hetero-obnoxious Jeremy (Miles G. Harvey).  His hot hetero-teenage babysitter, Bee (Samara Weaving), rushes to the rescue.

Later that night he wakes up to find that Bee has invited her hetero-friends (including the shirtless Robbie and Andrew Bachelor) over for a party.  At first it's all innocent "spin the bottle" games, with a hetero-titilating girl-on-girl kiss.  But then they turn on the hetero-nerdish guy and stab him to death.

They discover Cole spying, tie him up, and try some lame explanations before coming clean: they're a hetero-Satanic cult that needs the blood of a hetero-innocent for their rituals.

The police arrive, things go wrong, half the hetero-cult is killed and the other half chase hetero-Cole around, trying to kill him (including the shirtless Robbie, who encourages Cole to stand up to his bully as his last act on Earth).

But hetero-Bee rescues hetero-Cole again: she doesn't want him to die, she sort of likes him.

Oh, brother.  Not that old "sex with the babysitter" chestnut!

But instead of sleeping with her, hetero-Cole rushes over to kiss The Girl Next Door and thwart the forces of evil with her help and embrace his hetero-destiny.

In the last scene, Mom and Dad arrive at the scene of the multiple murders.  Hetero-Cole explains that he is too old for a hetero-babysitter.

Holy hetero-annoying, Batman!

Ken Marino, by the way, plays the hot Dad.  Not shirtless.

Jay North's Gay Connection

Dennis the Menace (1959-63), the sitcom adaptation of  Hank Ketcham's comic strip, was before my time and rarely rerun, so I have never seen it.  But I knew Jay North's Dennis, a gangly blond wearing a striped shirt and white overalls with a famously breathless "golly gee" tone (acquired when his director told the eight-year old to "act younger").  For the first generation of Baby Boomers, he became the iconic Dennis the Menace, even though he was no menace -- his character was kind, helpful, sweet-tempered, even "square," an object of ridicule when the Boomers grew into cynical teenagers.

Jay did not enjoy his years on Dennis.  His work schedule was brutal -- not only the show, but guest shots, talk shows, and even an album; he was not allowed to play with the other children on the set, or to get a decent education; his guardians were physically and emotionally abusive. And even after he left the series, he couldn't escape Dennis.  He had trouble making friends among his cynical teenage peers; he couldn't keep up in school; casting directors wouldn't consider him.

The highlight of Jay's acting career was the intensely homoromantic movie Maya (1966) and spin-off tv series (1967-68).  He loved the location shoots in India; he and his costar, Sajid Khan, became lifelong friends. And he was proud of his performance.  But teen idol fame eluded him.

So he tried to distance himself from Dennis by playing mature, adult roles.





The Gay Connection:

In 1969, gay superstar Sal Mineo was directing Fortune and Men's Eyes at the Coronet Theater in Los Angeles, and playing Rocky, who rapes and abuses the naive Smitty (Don Johnson).  When Don Johnson was hired to do The Magic Garden of Stanley Sweetheart (1970), Jay North auditioned to replace him, hooking up with Sal Mineo in the process.  He rehearsed for several weeks, but the play closed before he could perform.

In 1972, Jay played the lead in a touring company of Norman, Is That You?, about Jewish parents (Hans Conreid, Fritzi Burr) who discover that their son is gay.

Back in Hollywood, Jay did some voiceover work and starred in The Teacher (1974), a sleazy entry in the "teen has sex with older woman" genre.  And his acting career was over.

In the 1990s, he became involved with Paul Petersen's A Minor Consideration, dedicated to ameliorating working conditions for child stars.  Today Jay works as a prison guard in Florida, but he often attends conventions, where he is always happy to talk to the many older gay men who had a crush on him in 1966.

There's a gay dating story about Jay North on Tales of West Hollywood.

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

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, while working toward a degree in marine biology.

Weird Science

The 1985 movie Weird Science was terrible, an entry in the "sex with the babysitter" genre that featured nontop assertions that gay people don't exist.  But strangely enough, the spin-off tv series (1994-97) was not terrible.

1. The boys, Gary (John Mallory Asher) and Wyat (Michael Mannaseri) do create a magical computerized babe named Lisa (Vanessa Angel), but she is neither sex partner nor sex object; she acts more as their big sister and mentor.

2. Of the 26 first and second season episodes, only 5 involve dating/romancing girls.  The others are wacky science fiction adventures:










Gary ends up stuck in a time loop, repeating the same events over and over.

Wyatt becomes President of the United States

Clones of Gary and Wyatt take over their lives

3. Lisa never removes any articles of clothing, but Gary and Wyatt and their male peers are often displayed as shirtless, in swimsuits, in the shower, in locker rooms.

4. Gary and Wyatt may be aggressively heterosexual, but older brother Chet (Lee Tergesen, later to display full frontal nudity on Oz) has almost no interest  in girls.

An amazing turn-around from the movie.

The same plot was used in the 2014 Disney Channel movie How to Make a Better Boy.

The Graduate Revisited

This post on The Graduate (1967), starring gay ally Dustin Hoffman, finds lots of gay subtexts in the tale of the alienated young man who has an affair with his girlfriend's bored Establishment mother.

Gay symbolism aside, I didn't enjoy The Graduate.   It was too deadly serious.  Everyone was trying way too hard to be depressed.  And Benjamin Braddock was something of a twit.

Guess what?  It was supposed to be a comedy!

Find me one humorous scene in the gut-wrenching suburban angst!

Find me one joke!

Find me any way at all to read the final scene, when Benjamin and Elaine drive off into oblivion while Paul Simon sings "Hello darkness, my old friend..." as anything but depressing!

But at least we get so see a good deal of Dustin Hoffman's body.  He's naked often, and in at least one scene floating in a pool with a phallic beer can protruding from his crotch.

In 2000, Terry Johnson, a London playwright who specializes in the fictionalized meeting of historical characters (Alfred Einstein, Marilyn Monroe, Salvador Dali, Sigmund Freud), wrote a stage version of the original novel.

It opened in London, and ran for a respectable 380 performances on Broadway, with Jason Biggs as Benjamin Braddock, Alicia Silverstone as Elaine (the girlfriend), and Kathleen Turner as Mrs. Robinson (the older women).

The reviews were horrendous.

A mish-mash of iconic scenes from the movie, with new scenes that don't make any sense, characters stuck in the 1960s but with modern sensibilities, or stuck with 1960s sensibilities in the modern era.

The gay symbolism is gone.  But at least the homophobia of the original novel is gone, too (Benjamin no longer talks about assaulting "queers.")

Elaine is a dolt, Mrs. Robinson veers from skittish virgin to trollope, and Benjamin...well, he's still rather a twit.

I guess the main draw is Benjamin shirtless in bed, played by such hunks as Tom Carmen, Matthew Rhys, Eric Pierce, Jerry Hall, and Brad Burgess.

"La Belle Vie": Boy Meets Girl, Yet Again

Jean Denizot's La Belle Vie (The Good Life) is the winner in the Venice Film Festival's Europa Cinemas Label and is getting reviews like: "a masterpiece!"

Sigh.  Here we go again.

Brothers Sylvain and Pierre (Zacharie Chasseriaud, Jules Pelissier) have on the run with their father Yves (Nicolas Bouchaud) for 11 years, ever since he lost them in a custody battle with their mother.   They spend their time splashing around naked under a waterfall, paddling down the Loire River, and reading Huckleberry Finn.  

But the homoromantic idyll vanishes when 18-year old Pierre disappears after stealing a horse, leaving 16-year old Sylvain alone with his father.

Without his older brother, Sylvain is horribly lonely.  Until he meets Gilda -- "his first girl, his first crush, and the first stop on his way to the good life."

I guess there's no way on Earth that Sylvain could ever have met a boy.

Nope.  According to Hollywood, or in this case, cinema francais, male relationships are irrelevant or destructive.  They may be ok for children, but eventually all men grow up, and gaze longingly at the girls walking in slow motion into their lives.  Hetero-romantic desire is the only road to happiness -- as James Brown tells us,  a man is nothing, nothing at all, without a woman.

I've seen it all before, from The Summer of '42 on down, over and over and over and over.

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.