Kalevipoeg: Gay Epic Hero of Estonia

When I was visiting Estonia in the summer of 1998, I couldn't go anywhere without hearing about Kalevipoeg.  There were a dozen public statues of him, a naked, muscular god carrying small people.

There was a Kalevipoeg Sculpture Park in Tallinn.

There was a Kalevipoeg Museum near Kaapa, which became a full Theme Park in 2007.

There was a chain of Kalev Chocolate Shops.

Teenagers were filming adaptions of his adventures for  school projects.

Kalevipoeg Imprisoned, Enn Poldroos

Museums were crowded with sculptures, murals, and paintings, often emphasizing the god's superheroic endowment.

Kalevipoeg at the Gates of Hell, Kristjan Raud

Or muscular backside.

Bookstores were teeming with books that praise Kalevipoeg as "James Bond and Chuck Norris put together."

So who is this guy?

He's the son of the god Kalev in The Kalevipoeg,  the Estonian national epic, culled from ancient myths by Friedrich Kreutzwald and published in 1853.

The youngest of  Kalev's children, but the biggest, strongest, and most resourceful, Kalevipoeg has many adventures.  He:
1. Swims to Finland to rescue his mother from an evil wizard
2. Gets a cursed sword from the Finish god Ilmarin.
3. Wins the throne of Estonia in a stone-throwing contest.

Kalevipoeg, Amandus Adamson

From then on, his companion is Alevipoeg, with whom he:
4. Fights a water demon and a sorcerer.
5. Travels to Porgu (Hell) twice.
6. Seeks out the edge of the world.
7. Fights an apocalyptic battle with the demon Sarvik and his army.

When Alevipoeg is killed, Kalevipoeg is so grief-stricken that he gives up his kingdom and becomes a hermit.  When he dies, he goes to Heaven, but is deemed so valuable that he is tied to the gates of Porgu to keep the world safe.

Kreutzwald was inspired by the Finnish Kalevala, also compiled from ancient myths, and set to verse by Elias Lönnrot in 1849.

But there's a big difference: the Kalevala is all about the quest after the Eternal Feminine, the gods Ilmarin, Väinämöinen, and Lemminkäinen searching for wives.

Kalevipoeg, Drisil Woan

But except for one short maiden-seduction early on (which, admittedly, gets a lot of attention), Kalevipoeg is oblivious to women.  When he rescues three maidens from Porgu, he busily tries to find them husbands, never attempting to seduce them himself.

He is all about masculine buddy-bonding, first with his brothers, and then with Alevipoeg.


A gay epic hero?

Kalevipoeg Mural, Tallinn

In addition to the many literary and artistic adaptations of The Kalevipoeg, there's been a ballet featuring the Kalevipoeg Suite, by Eugen Kapp, and a stage play, a "Cool Epic" starring Tanel Saar, that has toured Europe and the U.S.

See also: Kristjan Raud: Mesmerized by Male Beauty and Yuri and I Cruise in Estonia.

August Strindberg: Nude Statues and Dream Visions

Growing up in Rock Island, where most people were of Scandinavian ancestry, I heard constantly about Vikings, runestones, Peer Gynt, Knut Hamsun, Hans Christian Anderson, lukefisk, the Elder Edda, and especially August Strindberg (1849-1912), the Swedish playwright who explored subconscious drives and secret desires.

You'd expect a lot of same-sex interest among those secret desires, but mostly there are heterosexual longings and battles of the sexes.
The Father (1887): a father-daughter relationship goes wrong.
The Dance of Death (1900): a heterosexual marriage gone wrong.
The Ghost Sonata (1907): A young student discovers that the girl he likes is not what she seems.

His most famous play, Miss Julie (1888), is a standard rich-poor romance with a psychosexual twist, as the wealthy Julie and the footman Jean vie for power.  It has been filmed a number of times, and there are various stage productions, including a black/white version, Mies Julie, and a gay version set in 1905 South Carolina, Miss Julie(n).

A Dream Play (1901) strays from the formula. It's about the surrealistic journey of Agnes, daughter of the Hindu god Indra, who comes to Earth to see what men are like.  She runs into lots of them, of various sizes and shapes, with various ambitions, desires, traumas, and cruelties. Most fall in love with her, but some might be gay.

By the way, Strindberg is the only writer I know of who is immortalized in two different nude statues, both in Stockholm.  The massive, muscular "Titan" by Carl Eldh in Tengerlunden Park.

And this more realistic version, in a group with two other equally nude writers, Gustaf Frödingshöjd and Ernst Josephson, in Stadhusparken (City Hall Park).

There are also about a dozen non-nude statues of Strindberg scattered around town.

Fall 1979: A Roland for an Oliver: Gay Medieval Lovers

The old expression "A Roland for an Oliver" means that you're equally matched (for instance, these brothers can both bench press exactly 320 pounds each).

It's derived from the Medieval gay lovers that I first read about in The Young Folks' Shelf of Books during my early childhood.

I heard about them again in college, when my French Literature class was assigned a modern version of the 12th century Song of Roland, the national epic of France.









During the siege of Viana, Emperor Charlemagne agreed to let the outcome rest on single combat between two champions.  He sent his nephew, the bold, heavily-muscled Roland, the Prince Valiant of France.  Count Gerard of Viana sent his grandson, the handsome, quick-witted Oliver (or Olivier).  Their talents were complementary; they were perfectly matched.

As they fought, an angel appeared, separated them, and bade them become friends (the same thing happened to Simon and Milo a few generations later).

They spent the rest of their lives together, fighting side by side, and their love, with its divine mandate, was acclaimed in every corner of Charlemagne's Empire.

Then the Saracens began wending their way through Basque country,  If they entered France through the pass at Roncevaux, they would take all of Europe.  Charlemagne and his troops tried to stop them.  In the heat of battle, Oliver was killed, and the distraught Roland cried:

So many days and years gone by
We lived together.
Since thou art dead, to live is pain.

Then he died as well.

I didn't bother to point out the homoromance to my French professor, who no doubt would have insisted that Roland, like Aschenbach in Death in Venice,  wasn't Wearing a Sign.  He was betrothed to Oliver's sister, after all, and in the Italian epic Orlando Furioso, he falls in love with a woman (and flies to the moon).

The 1978 movie version of La Chanson de Roland gives Roland (Klaus Kinski) an overwhelming hetero-passion.  Oliver (Pierre Clementi, left) looks on with an unacknowledged, unrequited love.

How Do We Know that Paul Robeson was Gay?

When I was in college in the late 1970s, Paul Robeson (1898-1977) was one of my heroes.  I loved his booming, soul-rending "Old Man River" in Showboat:

I get weary, and sick of trying
Tired of living, and scared of dying
But ol' man river, he just keeps rolling along.

And his hysterical megalomaniac in Emperor Jones.


He was one of the few African-Americans who managed to break into mainstream theater and film, but during the Cold War his radical political views caused him to be blacklisted -- he called America a "fascist state," and spoke favorably about the Soviet Union.  He had to live in exile in London, and his movies and songs were censored for many years.

How cool is that?

His physique was almost as impressive as his voice, so directors had him rip off his shirt whenever possible.  In the 1920s he became the first African-American to pose nude, for photographer Nickolas Muray.

When sculptor Antonio Salemme saw a performance of The Emperor Jones, he asked Robeson to model for him, and produced several busts, as well as the nude, arms-raised "Negro Spiritual."


I always assumed that he was gay because...well, I assumed that everybody was gay.  Besides, he was friends with many of the gay figures of the Harlem Renaissance, and Paris between the Wars, and many of his film and theatrical roles involved gay subtexts.

I got my proof in 1987, when an article the Advocate mentioned that he was "recently discovered to have been gay."

In August 2014, a new biography of Paul Robeson came out, written by none other than distinguished gay scholar Martin Duberman.

Great!  I thought.  Now I'm going to hear all about Robeson's male lovers, maybe a long-term romance with Antonio Salemme or director Sergei Eisenstein, maybe cruising for hunky sailors in Paris with Jean Genet or visiting Paul Bowles in Morocco to troll for rent boys.

But Duberman found no evidence of Robeson's male lovers, not a hint of cruising for hunky sailors or trolling for rent boys. Not that Robeson had a problem with gay people; he was "wholly accepting," according to his gay friends.  But he never expressed any same-sex desire.  As a young man in Harlem, he was often approached, even offered money, but he wasn't interested.

 Instead, Duberman found a long list of women.  A very, very long list.  Robeson had a robust sexual appetite. Robust, but exclusively heterosexual.

So where did the "Robeson is gay" come from?

Author Marc Blitzstein tracked it down to a story told by gay liberation pioneer Jim Kepner.  One day in 1947, the young Kepner made a delivery to Robeson's apartment in Manhattan.  Robeson answered the door in a "lavender dressing gown," invited him in for tea, and made some cruisy eye contact as they chatted.

In 1987, Kepner told the story to Stuart Timmons, who then wrote "Robeson was recently discovered to have been gay" for his Advocate article.

That's it.  One anecdote, 40 years old, where nothing actually happened.

Robeson still might have been gay or bisexual, with super-secret liaisons, or desires that were never fulfilled.  But his very busy heterosexual sex life and his openness to friendships with gay people lead me to doubt it.

Well, at least he was an ally.

Bhutan: Land of the Penis

This post has been moved to Boomer's Small Town Beefcake

A Beefcake Tour of the Louvre

This post has been moved to Small Town Beefcake

A Beefcake Tour of Amsterdam

This post has been moved to Boomer's Small Town Beefcake

Laocoon and His Sons: Beefcake Through the Ages

Laocoön was a priest who angered Apollo or Poseidon during the Trojan War, and as punishment the god sent sea serpents to kill him and his two sons.  Variations of his story, with different plots, were recorded by Sophocles, Virgil, Apollodorus, and other ancient authors, and inspired one of the most famous of all ancient sculptures, Laocoön and His Sons, now in the Vatican Museum.

After Michelangelo's David, this is probably the most famous beefcake sculpture in the world.  Interesting that one must enjoy male bodies only when they are in agonizing pain.

Similar to the boxers and wrestlers that we are "permitted" to ogle today.








The story of Laocoön has inspired many artists to try their hand at depicting bulging, straining muscles, regardless of the reason that giant snake tentacles are biting and straining at them.

Alessandro Allori (1535-1607), a painter of the Italian Renaissance, copies the pose of the ancient sculpture, but fills in the blanks a bit.

El Greco (1541-1614), one of the greats of the Spanish Golden Age, separates the sons from the father so we can see their muscles better, and has their pale forms struggling against the ruined Spanish countryside.

The older son, on the left, is Antiphas, and the younger, to the right, is Thymbraeus.  The stories make them twins, but artists usually think that it's more poignant to make one ateenager and the otehr a child.

Roy Lichtenstein (1923-1997), the pop artist of the Andy Warhol school, gives us a stylized version in which the three bodies blend in to the troubled, multicolored background of the 1980s.

Contemporary painter Richard Wallace's version is grotesque, with three men who look more like brothers, and one penis visible.

See also: Japanese Tentacle Porn

The Top 10 Beefcake Sights of Brno

This post has moved to Small Town Beefcake

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.

See also: The Beefcake Festival of the Andes.

The Big Men of American Tall Tales

In the mid-1980s, Shelly Duvall (fresh from playing Olive Oyl in the Popeye movie) hosted a Showtime series of Tall Tales & Legends, featuring live-action versions of Big Men (and Women) from American folklore: Pecos Bill (Steve Guttenberg), Johnny Appleseed (Martin Short), John Henry (Danny Glover), Davy Crockett (Mac Davis), Annie Oakley (Jamie Lee Curtis).

It was dreadful.  It brought back terrible memories of childhood, when those "colorful figures from our nation's past" were pounded into my brain through incessant classroom assignments and Wonderful World of Disney episodes.

Pecos Bill rode a mountain lion instead of a horse, used a snake for a lasso, and ate dynamite for a snack.

Davy Crockett was once swallowed by a bear, so he turned it inside out and escaped.

Paul Bunyan carved out the Grand Canyon by dragging his axe in the dirt.

Mike Fink (left) was half horse, half alligator, and half snapping turtle.

Who cared?  I much preferred Tarzan, Batman and Robin, and the Man from U.N.C.L.E.  For that matter, Li'l Abner and Alley Oop from the comics page.

For that matter, Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge.

And some of the tales weren't even very tall:

Casey Jones ran a railroad engine fast.

John Henry...well, he drilled a million holes in rocks, and then died.

Johnny Appleseed...um, well, he walked around planting trees.

But, on the bright side, they weren't given many heterosexual exploits.

Pecos Bill had a girlfriend, and I just discovered that Paul Bunyan had one, but she doesn't appear in any stories that I recall.

The other Big Men were portrayed without Big Women.

And there was a a lot of beefcake.  Big Men were by definition as muscular as Superman.

You could ask your parents for a Davy Crockett action figure, and then strip him out of his clothes.

John Henry was portrayed as a hard-iron bodybuilder, as in this 8-foot tall statue in Talcott, West Virginia.

 And Paul Bunyan?  Just think about the possibilities.  If he is 30 feet tall, then he must have a three-foot long....

See also: G.I. Joe and Ken; Roadside Beefcake

Serge Lifar: Gay Masculine Beauty during the Jazz Age

During the 1920s, the go-to guy for masculine beauty was a Russian ballet dancer named Serge or Sergei Lifar.

Born in Kiev, Russia in 1905, Lifar went to Paris in 1923 and joined the Ballet Russes as Sergei Diaghilev's newest protege-lover.  In 1925, he became lead dancer, to the consternation of previous protege-lovers who were no longer getting the best roles.

Ballet was big during the Jazz Age, maybe because it was the only art form that allowed audiences to see masculine biceps and bulges, and Diaghilev showed off Lifar's every chance he got.  In La Chatte (1927), Lifar entered the stage riding in a "chariot" formed entirely of men.

That didn't sit well with the other members of the ballet company.

In 1929, Diaghilev died, and Lifar moved on to become the director of the Paris Opera Company, where he staged and danced in his own creations, including a renovation of The Afternoon of a Faun in 1935, and Icare (1935), his masterpiece, about the Greek boy who flew too close to the sun.

But Lifar was famous far beyond the world of ballet.  He was photographed in newspapers and magazines. He was painted and sculpted.  He was on a stamp in the Ukraine.

He cavorted with artists, writers, and film stars, many involved in the gay culture of Paris Between the Wars, like Salvador Dali, Paul Valery, Jean Cocteau, Gertrude Stein, and Paul Robeson.

In 1944, during World War II, Lifar's collaboration with the Nazis got him "banned for life" from the Paris Opera.  He claimed that he was working as a secret agent (he returned in 1947).

And don't forget the "duel" he fought in 1958 with equally flamboyant ballet producer George de Cuevas.

Lifar was not openly gay, but his many liaisons with men were well known in the ballet world.  He also sought out the attention of wealthy women who served as his benefactors.

He died in 1986.

See also: The Chilean Bad Boy

10 Gay Things You Should Know About Cornwall

 This post has been moved to Small Town Beefcake

The Wonderful Adventures of Nils: A Boy and His Goose

Remember Leda in Greek mythology and the Yeats poem, who had a thing for swans?

14-year old Nils Holgersson had a thing for geese.

The star of The Wonderful Adventures of Nils (1906) and The Further Adventures of Nils (1907) by gay Swedish novelist Selma Lagerlof, Nils is a bad boy who torments animals, until he shrinks down to their size.  He and a domestic goose named Morton join a pack of wild geese and fly off to Lapland.

The other geese, especially cranky matriarch Akka, disapprove of the two outsiders, but Nils and Akka prove to be valuable allies during the dangerous and difficult journey.

Finally Nils matures enough to return to human form.  He is now a man, but he no longer understands the language of the geese, and he must abandon his friends (picture by Taya Strizhakova).

There's a lot of gay symbolism in the "queer" boy trying to fit in.

The books were envisioned as school texts: Nils visits every province of Sweden, and hears about their geography and economic output.  But kids -- and adults -- loved them.  They are still best-sellers in Sweden.

Nils has been immortalized in a dozen statues, on a postage stamp, and on the back of the 20 krona bill.  There have been five film versions of his adventures, in Russian, Swedish, Japanese, and German.

The 2011 German tv version starring Justus Kammerer unfortunately gives Nils a heterosexist reason for wanting to become a "real boy" again: he's got a girlfriend back home.

Otherwise Nils is wonderfully free of the girl-craziness that besets most other adolescents in children's literature.

Dag Hammarskjold: Gay Isolation at the United Nations

Augustana College, my alma mater, was founded by Swedish Lutherans, and most of the students were still Swedish Lutherans, so there was an obsession with all things Scandinavian.

So everyone read Markings (1963), by Dag Hammarskjold, the Swedish economist, diplomat, and finally Secretary General of the United Nations from 1953 to his death in a plane crash in 1961.

Discovered and published after his death, Markings contains no references to Hammarskjold's illustrious career; instead, it talks about his spiritual journey, his search for God, his loneliness and isolation and existential dread.  His desperate search for a love that he never found.

Why was this famous public figure, surrounded by people all the time, so overcome by loneliness?   I noted that he never married, and there were a few glimpses of masculine beauty in the brief poems and phrases.

When he told me that he had many friends, could easily make new ones, it struck hard like a blow which had been very carefully aimed. A question had become meaningless.

Narcissus leant over the spring, enthralled by the only man in whose eyes he had ever dared -- or been given the chance -- to forget himself.

In the Stone Age night
A church spire, erect on the plain
Like a phallus.

I had no doubt that he was gay.

 There were a few biographies in the Augustana library: Dag Hammarskjold: Soldier of Peace (1961), Hammarskjold: A Pictorial Biography (1962), and Dag Hammarskjold: Strictly Personal (1969).  None of them mentioned him being gay, of course.

Even the most recent biography, Hammarskjold: A Life (2013), by Roger Lipsey, argues that he may have experienced same-sex desire, but he certainly never engaged in any of that yucky sex stuff.  Besides, it was a trivial thing, utterly irrelevant to the qualities that made him great.

But Noble Lives (2005), by Marc E. Vargo, argues that 1. Yes, he was in fact gay; and 2. It was not trivial; it played an important role in his career.

In 2011, the Dag Hammarskjold Plaza in New York featured Borders, an exhibition of 26 life-sized androgynous statues by Icelandic artist Steinunn Thórarinsdóttir.

Though representing "cultural diversity," the statues do not interact, as they do in the Norwegian Penis Park; they are sitting, standing, facing each other but not touching, isolated and lonely.  Like Hammarskjold himself.  (They are currently on display at Chicago's Park District).