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.

And what's up with the car washers who leave their shirts on?  I understand that when you're out in the sun for hours, you can get burnt, but that's what sunscreen is for.

You're not allowed to just stand and watch the workers. That would make the real reason for the car wash fundraisers too obvious.

But nobody says you can't bring your car in to be washed several times.

See also: The Nude Car Wash; A Week of Beefcake and Bulges on the Plains

The Top 10 Problems of Summer

For teachers and college professors, summer lasts for about 3 1/2 months, begins when you turn in the final grades in May, and ends when you stand in front of that first class in August.

I hate it.  3 1/2 long, hot, boring, miserable months of nothing.

But I've survived it before.  Here are my solutions to the top 10 problems of summer.

1. There's nothing to do during the daytime.

I envy those people with office jobs that stay the same all year round, so they can keep their same structure and routine through the summer.  I have no appointments, no obligations, nothing to do, no one to see.

At least when I was a kid, there were summer enrichment classes, summer camps, Vacation Bible School, and the weekly visit of the bookmobile, but as an adult, it's sitting around the house for three months waiting for fall classes to begin.

Solution: Pursue a new hobby, like BDSM or hooking on Grinder.



2. There's nothing to do in the evening.

TV is all reruns, and the theater, opera, and ballet seasons are over.

Solution: Host a M4M party.  Advertise on Craigslist, and invite 20 gay and bi-curious guys over.  Nudity optional; prizes for the biggest and smallest endowments.

3. There is no nighttime.

The sun doesn't go down until 9:00 pm.  Then it's an eerie twilight until 10:00 pm.

It should be dark before dinner.  Eating dinner in broad daylight is just creepy. I especially hated it when I was a kid, and my parents sent me to bed while the sun was blazing.

Solution: spend 6 pm -10 pm in a bathhouse, where it's always dark.

4. You gain weight.

When classes are in session, you walk from your car to the parking lot, from your office to class, to the student union, to the library, to various committee meetings, plus pacing around while teaching, so you cover 5 or more miles a day easily on top of your daily run.  In the summer, your daily run is all the cardio you get, 3 miles.

But you're within arm's reach of snacks all day, so you take in more than 5 miles worth of calories.  Between May and August, you could gain 20 pounds.

Solution: Spend more time at the gym, particularly if it's a gay gym where you can do more than work out.









5. You're forced to "enjoy the outdoors."

Come on, "the outdoors" is what you go through to get places.  What is there to "enjoy" there?  It's like enjoying a train station, or standing in line for a movie.  

Yet your friends get upset when you "waste" a day indoors, and drag you off for swimming, boating, canoeing, or just wandering about.

Solution: when you are forced to "enjoy the outdoors," insist that everyone take their shirts off.  Concentrate on the muscles, and it will soon be over.

More after the break.

6. You're even forced to eat outside.

I challenge you to find anyone who actually enjoys eating on hard wooden benches, with the wind blowing napkins and paper plates around, and leaves and twigs and bugs falling all over the food.  We put our dining rooms inside the house for a reason.

Yet summertime is a mess of barbecues, picnics, festivals, and baseball games with food being chomped done on outside, and your friends even want to serve you dinner on the back yard patio.

Solution: Again, shirts off.

7. It's ungodly hot outside.

In the winter you can bundle up, but there's nothing you can do about getting drenched with sweat after walking half a block,

Solution: I had this problem all the time in Los Angeles and Florida.  Hot weather means clothes off, so there lots of opportunities for guy-watching.

8. It's ungodly cold inside.

After getting drenched with sweat, you walk into a building in a tank top and shorts, and face an Artic wind -- air conditioners are blasting away, and it's 60 degrees!

Solution:  Carry a warm sweater with you, and every time you walk into a building, put it on and pretend that it's December.  This will help alleviate your summer depression, too.

9. There are no good holidays.

Fall has Halloween and Thanksgiving, winter has Christmas and Valentine's Day, spring has Easter and St. Patrick's Day.

What does summer have?  In the U.S., Independence Day, the 4th of July, a holiday of jingoistic patriotism, noisy fireworks, and eating outside.

Solution: there are Gay Pride Festivals in hundreds of cities, mostly in June, some in July and August.  Go to as many as you can.

10. There's no escape.

If you don't like cold winters, for some crazy reason, you can fly south to balmy Los Angeles, Fort Lauderdale, or Phoenix.

But there's no place in North America that's cold during the summertime -- even Fairbanks, Alaska can hit 80 degrees.  You'd have to summer in Australia.

Solution: Only 88 more days until fall.

See also: Playing Outside; 34 Reasons to Like Summer

The Answer to the Naked Man's Question

Garrett, Indiana, Summer 1970

The summer after fourth grade, when I am nine years old, lasts for months and months, hundreds of days, all bright green and dazzling.  A week in Indiana, visiting my parents' family.  A week camping in Minnesota and Canada.  Nazarene summer camp.  Swimming lessons at Longview Park Pool.

 The bookmobile every Tuesday.  The Denkmann School Carnival.  Malts at Country Style.  Sleepovers with Bill and Joel.

Gold Key comic books at Schneider's Drug Store.


Dark Shadows.  H.R. Pufnstuf.  Tarzan Theater.

David Cassidy.  Bobby Sherman.  Robbie Douglas.

 All on a golden afternoon, probably a Saturday, in my Grandma Davis's farmhouse on the south side of Garrett.  It's a big house, all white frame, the big rooms done up with flowered wall paper and thick drapes.

My brother and I are all alone.  I don't remember why.  Maybe Mom and Dad have gone off somewhere, on an expedition of their own, leaving Grandma Davis to babysit for the afternoon.

We have just come in from something or other -- puttering around in the apple orchard, exploring the old barn where Grandpa used to milk cows, or the attic where Grandma keeps hundreds of back issues of magazines, neatly bundled -- Look, Life, Better Homes and Gardens, Grit.  We kick off our shoes at the door.  Kenny heads toward the kitchen and the stairway leading up to our room.

I stop in front of the tv set, a big piece of furniture, wood-brown, with curved pillars on the sides, with a candy dish and a picture of my Cousin Phil on top.

At our house it's almost always on, whether anyone is watchng or not, a stable, comforting background noise.  But Grandma Davis keeps it off unless someone wants to watch a specific program.  It seems unnatural, wrong somehow.


I reach down and turn it on.

Kenny turns and asks "What's on?"

I shrug. "I don't know.  Maybe Tarzan Theater."  On Saturday afternoons in Rock Island, when there isn't a game on, you can see old Tarzan and Bomba the Jungle Boy movies.

The black and white screen flickers, and then pops on.  A game.


I turn it to the next channel.  Some people talking.

"Find some cartoons," Kenny suggests.

There are only three channels.  I turn to the third.

A naked man.

In my memory he's naked, although he was probably wearing a leotard.  Shirtless, though, with taut hard pecs and very thick hard biceps.

You never saw even shirtless men on tv in those days, except in Tarzan movies, so I stand dumbstruck, frozen in place, realizing that I will remember this moment forever.

"What's this?" Kenny asks.

The naked man twirls and high-steps, bulging his bare calves, across a bare stage to a young blond woman.  Then, dancing a sort of tap dance, he asks "Who....are...youuuuuu?
She starts a tap dance of her own, dances in front of him, and says "I....don't...know. Who...are...youuuuu?"

He stops dancing and glowers at her, his eyes dark, and replies.  "I am the Magic Mushroom."

At that moment, Grandma appears at the window leading to the kitchen.  "There's nothing for kids on," she says. "Turn the tv off."

"Wait...I..."  I begin.   But Kenny obligingly turns it off.  .

"Now who wants to help me bake a pie for dinner tonight?"

All in a golden afternoon.

The naked man, dancing, darting, twirling across the stage, haunts my dreams, asking  "Who...are...youuuuu?" a hundred times.  I answer in a hundred ways:

I am a boy..

I am a Davis.

I am a Nazarene.

I am a fourth grader.

I am a brother.

I am a friend.

But no answer is satisfactory.

A few years later, I realize that the scene was adapted from Alice in Wonderland.  Except it's a hookah-smoking caterpillar who asks "Who are you."  The mushroom is not a speaking character.

So where did the naked man come from?

Over the years, I've read The Annotated Alice, Aspects of Alice, The Dream Child, and a dozen other books of criticism and analysis.  I've investigated dozens of Alice movies, stage plays, and ballets in search of the one with that scene.

There was a 1966 tv movie with Alice in a hippie wonderland, but no ballet scene.

And Alice in Acidland 1969 is a softcore porn with Alice taking LSD and engaging in lesbian sex before losing her mind.  I doubt that there's a ballet scene in that, either.

I've even tried to google the phrase "I am the Magic Mushroom."  No luck.

It remains a mystery.

Still she haunts me, phantomwise,

Alice moving under skies

Never seen by waking eyes.

The dark dancing naked man still haunts me, but at least now I know the answer to the perennial question:

"Who...are...youuuuuu?"

A version with nude photos is on Tales of West Hollywood.

Physique-Watching at the County Fair

I've been to three county fairs in the last month.  Not that I'm complaining -- they're a major source of summertime beefcake, as well as a fascinating glimpse into a different world.

Fairs originated in the Middle Ages, when most people engaged in sustenance farming, and brought their excess into town to trade for items they might need.

By the 19th century, most people were buying from professional merchants, and fairs became a place to see the latest agricultural equipment and techniques, and compete over the best produce and livestock.

There were state fairs beginning in the 1830s, and county fairs in the 1870s (international expositions of industry and commerce were called worlds' fairs in the 1880s).

Eventually there were carnival-type rides and games, musical acts, races, and other activities, and fairs became a place for fun rather than business.

Nazarenes weren't allowed to go to fairs -- places of sin and corruption -- and of course in gay neighborhoods you wouldn't be caught dead at the heteronormative nuclear-family gun-toting beer-swilling redneck fest -- so I didn't go to any until I moved to the straight world in 2005.



They are, indeed, full of nuclear families and gun-toting, beer-swilling rednecks, but don't let that dissuade you.  The opportunities for physique watching are endless.

1. Those nuclear family dads are often built, and wearing muscle shirts (it's always a hot day, and fairgrounds offer no shade).

2. The beer-swilling rednecks are often hot, too, in a seedy, rough-trade way.

3. Fair employees and volunteers, always buffed young men.  They don't take their shirts off often, but you can see some tight shirts and tighter jeans.

4. Groups of teenagers and college boys.  They don't take their shirts off, either, but they often wear those shirts with no sides, so you can get a side-glimpse of their chests.












5. Hang around the livestock exhibits to see farmboys who have won awards for their sheep, goats, cows, pigs, and horses (this is how everybody displays their goats, with face against crotch.  I don't know why).

Can you imagine what it's like to live on a farm, taking care of animals every day, taking a bus 5 miles into town to go to high school?  For city folk, it's a completely alien world.

But nowadays have smartphones and wi-fi, so they're as connected to the wide world as the rest of us.












 6. Don't forget that there are other gay guys in the straight world, who come to the county fair for physique watching.

See also: Summertime Beefcake at the County Fair

Depression-Era Sheriff Eugene Biscailuz: Secretly a Fruitfly?

The UCLA Digital Archives contains about 50 pictures captioned "Boys from financially disadvantaged backgrounds participate in a free summer camp in Griffith Park."

The camp, organized by Sheriff Eugene Biscailuz, hosted over a thousand boys during the summer of 1937, in groups of 100, 10 days at a time.

They were apparently in their teens.  Photos show them boxing, swimming, fencing, and reading.  There were also apparently religious programs.












There was already a Griffith Park Boys' Camp, started in 1924 and still running.  I can't tell if Sheriff Biscailuz co-opted it or started one of his own.

But it doesn't look like he continued it past the summer of 1937.  It was a one-time thing, a surcease for the underprivileged youth of L.A. County, and an opportunity for us to look at the biceps and abs of our grandfathers' generation.

Why only once?

Maybe we can find a clue in the life of Sheriff Biscailuz.  Eugene Biscailuz (1883-1969), a L.A. native who graduated from St. Vincent College (now Loyola Marymount), got a law degree from USC, and worked for the L.A. police department from 1907 to 1958.  Of Basque ancestry, he spoke Basque, Spanish, and Latin.

According to a L.A. Times article, "He was a courtly and colorful cowboy who sat astride a silver-saddled palomino at parades and rodeos."

How festive!

At the age of 19, he married Willette Harrison, whose father was an administrator at San Quentin.  Way to increase your career prospects!

She was also interested in the rough-and-tumble world of police work.  Although not allowed to join the force due to the sexist mores of the day, she often helped Biscailuz with his cases.

 In 1923, they went to Honduras to extradite notorious murderer, Clara Phillips, "The Tiger Lady."

Willette died in 1950.  They had no children.


Although a proponent of "law and order," Biscailuz belonged to the secretive Lofty and Exalted Order of Uplifters.  Founded in 1913 by Harry Marsten Haldeman (the grandfather of Bob Haldeman of the Watergate scandal) and L. Frank Baum (author of the Wizard of Oz books), it originally met in the Blue Room of the Los Angeles Athletic Club for drinking and carousing.

Another of their hijinks were the risque musicals, written by Baum and set to music by  Louis Gottschalk, with names like The Uplift of Lucifer; or, Raising Hell: An Allegorical Squazosh and The Orpheus Road Show: A Paraphrastic Compendium of Mirth.  Most

During Prohibition they moved to the isolated Rustic Canyon, where they could drink and carouse in private.  They met until 1947.

Other members included celebrities like Clark Gable, Harold Lloyd, Daryl F. Zanuck,  and Walt Disney.

The gentlemen's clubs of the early twentieth century were sites of homosocial camaraderie and probably not a little homoerotic buddy-bonding.

Biscailuz has other gay connections.  He knew gay actors Ramon Novarro and William Haines.  Hard-boiled novelist James Elroy talks about a "lean, mean fruitfly" who plays golf with Sheriff Biscailuz.

So why just one year helping underprivileged boys?  Could it have drawn too much suspicion that Sheriff Biscailuz was a secretly "fruitfly?"

Summertime Beefcake at the County Fair

If you wanted to insult a Nazarene, you accused them of being "worldly," engaging in behavior that wasn't sinful, but veered a little too close to the behaviors of "the wicked old world."

For example, women were merely required to avoid wearing men's clothing or jewelry, to keep their hair long, and to dress "modestly."  After that, they were on their own.  So a skirt that came above your knees?  Not a sin, but sure to get you glares and whispers of "worldly!"

It was a sin to go to the theater, but what if the theater came to you?  If you went to an amateur drama production at the high school, you weren't technically backsliding, but your Sunday school teacher would certainly admonish you for being worldly!

The Nazarene Manual had a long list of "entertainments" that were forbidden by God: carnivals, circuses, festivals, theaters, moving picture shows, dance recitals, vaudeville shows.  But it didn't mention fairs.  An oversight, certainly, but one that made fairs worldly instead of sinful.

So I never went as a child, and of course when you live in a gay neighborhood, the thought of going to a county or state fair never crosses your mind.

I didn't start going to them until I met Troy, who was a fan.

Ok, they're very crowded, with redneck stuff like farm exhibits and tractor pulls.

Glittering, gaudy rides and games of skill hawked by scary people with cigarettes and big baskets.

Crazy food like deep fried Twinkies.

And the people who eat deep fried Twinkies every day.

Heterosexuals as far as the eye can see.

There's something fascinating about heterosexuals in the wild, certain that there are no gay people for a hundred miles around.

Married heterosexuals wander around with their kids in tow.  But unmarried heterosexuals come in single-sex packs, hanging all over each other, grabbing each other's butts, engaging in all sorts of homoerotic hijinks.

Not to mention the ample beefcake, muscular men with their shirts off and their jeans packed.

If their shirts aren't off, ask.  They may be persuaded to strip for a photo.

See also: Celtic Festivals; Physique-Watching at the County Fair

Boys Hugging in Tuxedo, North Carolina

Tuxedo, North Carolina is in the far southwest of the state, where it borders South Carolina.  It has nothing to do with the formal costume; it was named after Tuxedo, New York (which did give its name to the formal costume).

I doubt that anyone actually wears a Tuxedo there.  It's so rustic that you can't even tell that you're in a town.  There are no amenities but a Baptist Church and a restaurant called Mike's Chuckwagon.  The nearest grocery store is 8 miles away. The nearest drug store is 10.

But Tuxedo does have one unique feature: summer camps.  Parents from all over North Carolina, and indeed all over the Southeast, have been sending their kids to Tuxedo every summer since the 1920s.  Within a five mile radius there are two camps for boys, two for girls, and three for both.


Camp Mondamin, founded in1922 by "Chief" Andrew Bell, teaches 200 boys aged 6 to 17 "self esteem and community."  It offers activities never heard of in the Nazarene camps of my youth, like performing arts, rock climbing, and kayaking.

Camp Wayfarer, for 60 boys and girls, is a "close knit family" for kids in 1st through 10th grade, based on nondenominational Bible study.  It offers the usual sports plus some sort of canoe battle.  Not ACA-accredited.

Blue Star Camp is a co-ed  Jewish "sleepaway camp" for over 600 kids aged 6 to 16.  It offers a "living Judaism" program with a service learning component.

Camp Tekoa is a Methodist camp for boys and girls.

The most interesting of the camps is Falling Creek, founded in 1969 by a Christian businessman who wanted to steer boys away from the path of long hair, rock music, tv, drugs, sex, and rebellion. He wanted to introduce "traditional values," such as those espoused in Psalm 133:1: "How good it is for brothers to dwell together in unity."

In many ways Falling Creek is like the Nazarene camps I grew up with: college boys as counselors, daily church services, special musical numbers, a lot of sports.  Of course, there are activities we could never have imagined, everything from blacksmithing to lacrosse, plus "warrior ball," a jacked-up form of dodgeball; and rules that we could have never imagined ("campers  may not post anything negative about the camp on social media").

The website still features prominently an article in Time magazine from 2007 that praises the camp as "a trip to boy heaven."  Sounds like a gay boy's dream.

And the promotional materials show lots of boys hugging.

Of course, it expects the boys hugging to be heterosexual bros.  I'm quite sure that the directors at all of these camps would be horrified at the suggestion that any of the campers might gay.

But a hug is a hug.  When you are erased, told over and over again that you do not exist, you find meaning anywhere you can.

Camp Charlevoix, the Best Growing Up Experience Ever

The first summer camps opened during the 19th century, with the theory that city life was bad for kids-- they needed several weeks of "fresh air" and "exercise."  One of the biggest, Camp Charlevoix, opened on the shore of Lake Charlevoix in northern Michigan in 1927 with the purpose of "building character" in boys aged 8 to 16.

During the 1950s and 1960s, thousands of boys from 23 states and a dozen countries spent their summers at Camp Charlevoix.  It became a model of what summer camps look like: sleeping in cabins; learning "Indian lore"; lots of outdoor activities, from archery to water skiing; and those cute young adult counselors.

The camp finally closed in 1984.

The Camp Charlevoix website has hundreds of pictures of the golden age of the camp, giving us a glimpse into the memories of the men who spent their formative years there (all photos copyright by their respective owners).

I'd like that counselor teaching me to swim.

A water-skiing class.

Cafeteria workers.

A weightlifting class.

Counselors looking a little embarrassed in their Indian gear.