It's a Man's World: A Gay Threesome from the 1960s

 Speaking of Ted Bessell, before That Girl, he starred in It’s a Man’s World (1962-63) as Tom-Tom, a college student obsessed by Beat poetry and jazz, both emblematic of the multisexual bohemian subcultures of the 1950’s.  

Tom-Tom lives on a houseboat with his teenage brother Howie (Michael Burns, right) and boyfriend Wes (Glenn Corbett, above, who by the way was bisexual, and appeared in Physique Pictorial under the name Glenn Robinson).

But the couple is not happy; they are always arguing about chores and money.  One night Tom-Tom can’t take it any more.  He wanders into a waterfront tavern, where newly-arrived country boy Vern (Randy Boone, left) is playing the guitar. 

In perhaps the first gay pick-up in television history, the two exchange suspicious glances and then knowing grins.  The next scene shows them returning to the houseboat to spend the night together, and in the morning Tom-Tom tells Wes that it was not just a bar pick-up – Vern is moving in.  

Wes gets somewhat snippy about this new threat to his dominance, but soon he decides that having a cute farmboy around might be fun, and the episode ends with the trio splashing about in the water, the first gay three-way relationship in television history.

This series was before my time, and I only saw one episode, thanks to an ebay collector.  Unfortunately, according to tvobscurities.com, later episodes backed away from the gay subtext -- really more of a text -- and gave them girlfriends.

See also: That Girl: Will and Grace for the 1960s; and Get Your Beefcake on Route 66

Pat Boone, Gay Icon

It's hard to imagine, but conservative spokesperson Pat Boone was once an icon for gay kids.  In a 1959 version of the Jules Verne classic Journey to the Center of the Earth, one of a series of adaptions of Jules Verne classics which Disney made during the period, Alec (Boone) journeys into the subterranean world with his geologist uncle, Professor Lindenbrook (James Mason), their guide Hans (Peter Ronson), and a love interest for the professor (Arlene Dahl).

While minimizing plausibility (they encounter giant lizards and the ruins of Atlantis), director Henry Levin maximized beefcake. As the explorers descend, Alec doffs his clothes, and the camera forsakes closeups of his prettyboy face to concentrate on his small, firm biceps and lean, tight chest.

Soon Hans doffs his clothes, too; he is blond and beefy, considerably more defined, a veritable Tarzan.

The men spend the rest of the movie falling into pits, fleeing from lizards, almost suffocating in salt pits, and almost drowning in oceans, and consequently rescuing, grabbing, holding, and comforting each other; Alec is especially likely to require rescue, followed by cradling in Hans' strong arms. When they reach a field of giant mushrooms that will replenish their dwindling food supply, they are so delighted that they break out into a dance while the Professor's love interest stands aside, a spectator only.

Hans is not interested in girls, but Alex has a girlfriend back home, whom he marries in the last frames of the movie.  But after two hours of half-naked men grabbing, holding, and comforting each other, we could put up with a fade-out boy-girl kiss.

In real life, Pat Boone is a conservative Christian who frequently makes homophobic statements, although my friend Randall said that he was "straight but open to suggestions back in the 1950s.

See: Dick Sargent's Hookup with Pat Boone

Justin Berfield's Very Special Episode

I hate it when you watch a tv program for countless episodes under the impression that a character is gay, only to find out that he was straight all along -- or, more likely, the producers noticed the gay subtext and retconned the character to "correct" him.

On Malcolm in the Middle (2000-2006), about a dysfunctional family, dimwitted hunk Reese (Justin Berfield) never expressed any interest in girls for five seasons, even though nearly every male teenager in mass media, including his brother Malcolm (Frankie Muniz), is scripted as indefatigably girl-crazy. 

 He was also over-emotional and interested in cooking, two gender-transgressive traits that could easily mark him as gay.  

To make matters worse, the scripts kept dropping unmistakable hints.  

Reese says “Sorry, I’m gay” to dissuade an amorous girl.

He “courts” an attractive male classmate.

He sells "his services” to neighborhood men and then blackmails them in an amazingly blatant parody of male prostitution (he even lounges at poolside in a swimsuit like a kept boy). 

Fans began to speculate that a special “coming out” episode was planned. Then, in the Season 5 finale in May 2004, Reese is distraught over a breakup with a never-before mentioned girlfriend. “You are mistaken!” the producers seemed to squeal. “Reese was straight all along!  There are no gay teenagers!”

Justin Berfield is the subject of gay rumors in real life, too, but he adamantly refuses to make any public statements.

Parenthood: Gay Teen Tease

Parenthood (2010-) is a "warm," "family-friendly" drama centered on the lives of Zeek and Camille Braverman and their four adult children:

1. Adam Braverman (Peter Krause, left), who has a "traditional" job, house, housewife, and 3 kids.
2. Julia Graham (Erika Christiansen), a hotshot lawyer whose husband (Sam Jaegar, below) stays home to raise the kids.
3. Recently divorced Sarah Holt (Lauren Graham), who has two kids (Amber and Drew)
4. Irresponsible bachelor Crosby (the less-than-attractive Dax Shepard), who is helping to raise his baby mama's child (Jabbar Trusell)

Think Modern Family, without the gay characters.  Or any gay references.
Or The Waltons, without the gay subtexts.

And lots and lots of heterosexism, boys meeting girls, boys and girls falling in love, with the elders intoning "This is what life is like for everyone.  Every boy falls for girls, every girl falls for boys.  No one has ever, in the history of the world, not even once, experienced even a glimmering of same-sex desire.

I don't know any gay people who have even bothered to watch, but some heterosexuals have wondered where the gay characters are?  There's a cast of 3,000 (this is only half of the main cast).  It's set in Berkeley, California, right across the Bay from gay mecca San Francisco.  Why aren't some of them gay?  Why doesn't somebody mention gay people?

Two words: Ron Howard, the homophobe who drains gay content from everything he touches.

Sarah's son Drew, played by Miles Keiser, was sweet, sensitive, artistic, and not particularly into girls (at least, in the few scenes he got, having to share the program with 3,000 other people).  Viewers thought he was gay, and expected an eventual coming-out episode.  But apparently it was purely unintentional, and when producers got wind of the fact that the viewers were "getting the wrong idea," they quickly gave Drew a girlfriend.

Of course, just because he's on a homophobic tv program doesn't mean that Miles can't be gay-friendly in his personal life.  After all, he played a gay teen on Private Practice in 2007.   I doubt he's gay in real life -- I have seen approximately 300 photos of him off-screen, and in every one, he has his arms around a girl or woman.  Every one!

African Journey: Jason Blicker's Boyfriend

The six-episode Canadian miniseries African Journey (1989) was broadcast in the U.S. on Wonderworks in 1990.  It stars Jason Blicker as 16-year old hockey star Luke Novak, who travels to Zimbabwe with his engineer father.

He bonds with the teenage Themba (Pedzisai Sithole), who is shy, passive, and rather feminine in mannerisms.  They handle some catastrophes, like a broken village pump (a big problem when there is no water for miles around), a mine collapse, and poachers (resulting in a kidnapping and rescue.  One expects them to collapse teary-eyed into each  other's arms.

But it's all a tease: in the second part of the miniseries (released as African Journey 2), Themba is all but absent, and his sister takes over, getting seriously ill so Jason can ride his dirtbike to the nearest hospital to get medicine, and fall in love with her.

Still, the first three episodes provided a rare Westerner-African homoromantic bond, as well as the remarkable sight of Jason Blicker's muscular torso as he rides his dirtbike with his shirt off (the VHS quality was too poor to transfer, but it's striking).

It's never been released on DVD, but yoou can get used VHS tapes on Amazon.

Jason Blicker, who was nowhere near age 16, starred in the gay-themed movie As Is in 1986 and in a gay-themed episode of the Canadian teen series Hangin' In (1986).  Since 1990 he's had supporting roles in many movies and tv programs, both in Canada and the U.S., but he is a private person, almost anonymous, giving few interviews and revealing little information about his life.

According to his Facebook page, he likes yoga, Russian martial arts, Stonefox Jewelry Originals, and Yoav Deckelbaum Desserts

Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

British radio personality Arthur Dent is having a bad day. First he must lie down in the mud in his bathrobe to keep his house from being bulldozed, and then his friend Ford Prefect pops round to tell him that the Earth is going to be destroyed. Soon. In a few minutes.

 Still in a muddy bathrobe, he allows Ford to teleport them both to a passing Vogon cruiser and escape. The Vogons, who hate stowaways, torture them with bad poetry and then eject them into space. 

 But not to worry: in a staggering improbability, another spaceship happens to be zipping by at that precise moment, and they are rescued in the moment before they suffocate. 

 In another staggering improbability, their rescuers turn out to be Ford’s cousin, a two-headed hipster named Zaphod Beeblebrox, and Trillian, a ditzy blonde with a Ph.D. in astrophysics. In another staggering improbability, Arthur knows Trilian: he had been chatting her up at a party in Islington six months before when  she left with Zaphod. . . .

And so on. Douglas Adam’s anarchic Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy began as a 1977 radio series, then became a 1981 television series (which I saw during the 1980s British invasion that also included The Prisoner, The Tomorrow People, and Monty Python's Flying Circus) and a five-part novel series (1979-92),. It sent Ford and Arthur to a restaurant at the end of the universe, a prehistoric Earth settled by advertising executives, an Earth that is really a giant computer manned by rats, and many more wildly improbable worlds. 

In the radio/tv series and the first two books, the two are inseparable companions. Never in the course of their adventures do they suggest that they might find amenable planets and part company, nor do they ever exhibit a romantic interest in anyone else. 

 In later books, Arthur becomes increasingly insistent about heterosexual practice -- he even goes at it with a girlfriend while floating in midair -- and he grows to despise Ford, parting company with him as often as feasible. But Ford (on television the androgynous, purple-eyed Elf David Dixon, Ariel in BBC’s The Tempest) does not engage in heterosexual practice at all.  

And his attachment to Arthur (Simon Jones), his insistence that they remain together, never seems to diminish. Indeed, he seems to engineer hassles just so Arthur will have to depend upon his intergalactic expertise. And one must wonder how the whole chain of events began in the first place: 

Before the Vogons arrived, Ford spent fifteen years on Earth, researching an entry for The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a sort of hip interplanetary encyclopedia (his entry consisted of two words: “Mostly harmless”) . No doubt he acquired many friends, associates, and lovers. One morning he discovered that the Earth would be destroyed. He then devoted valuable escape time to seeking out Arthur, explaining the situation as best he could, and bringing him along. Why did he choose Arthur? Why not a famous physicist, or another friend, or some girl from Chelmsford? 

 For that matter, why anyone at all? Why not transport himself directly onto the nearby Vogon cruiser, and escape? No explanation is ever given, but for the gay teenagers of the 1980s, a simple one came to mind: Ford is in love with him.