"You Spin Me Round": The Theme Song of 300 Sunday Afternoons in a Leather Bar

In West Hollywood, gay bars always had a theme song that you would hear over and over, at least once an hour, every time you visited.

 I went to Mugi, the Asian bar in Hollywood, almost every Saturday night, sometimes Wednesday or Friday, too.  That means that I heard "One Night in Bangkok" at least 300 times.

I went to the Faultline, the leather bar on Melrose, near Los Angeles City College, almost every Sunday afternoon for their Beer and Soda Bust.  The traditional schedule was Church 10:30 am, brunch at the French Quarter 12:00, Gym 2:00 pm, and the Faultline by 4:00 pm.  We hung out on the patio unless it was raining, and it never rains in Southern California.

Around 6:00 pm we left, and picked up tangerine chicken on the way home to eat while watching The Simpsons, Married...with Children, Parker Lewis Can't Lose, and Sliders (Jerry O'Connell, sigh).

Sometimes I went on Friday or Saturday nights, too.  So I must have heard their song over 1,000 times.

I never heard it anywhere else. I didn't know the title or the group, and I didn't bother asking.

It seemed to be a Gay Pride anthem:

Open up the closet door, watch out, here I come.

Although some of the lyrics seemed to involve a bar pickup:

You, I don't even know your name, baby.

You, I want to get you alone, baby.

With a chorus:
Round, round, round, round, something something baby, round round round round.

Years later, I heard the song again, at the gym of all places, and it brought me back to those many nights and Sunday afternoons surrounded by shirtless and leather-clad men.  When I got home, I did an internet search.


It's "You Spin Me Round (Like a Record)", by the British band Dead or Alive, released in December 1984, peaked at #4 on the dance charts in January 1985.

Boy, did I get the lyrics wrong!  The "gay pride anthem":

Not: Open up the closet door, watch out, here I come.

But:  Open up your lovin' arms, watch out here I come.

Not: You, I don't even know your name, baby/ You, I want to get you alone, baby

But: If I, I get to know your name, baby / Then I could trace your private number, baby

So you're planning to stalk him?

No specific gay content, although the lead singer of the bad was the fabulously feminine Peter Burns (bottom left), an androgyne in the mold of Boy George, who married a woman and then a man, but divorced him and declared in homophobic contempt that "gay marriage doesn't work.  It's better to marry a woman."

Other members were Mike Percy, Steve Coy, and Tim Lever.

I'm still trying to figure out why an androgynous dance number was the theme song in a leather bar with no androgyny and no dancing.

It doesn't really matter.  Even though I know the lyrics now, I still can hear in my head the gay pride anthem from 300 Sunday afternoons at the Faultline:

Open up the closet door, watch out, here I come.

See also: One Night in Bangkok

Call it Thunder: 40 Years of Fleetwood Mac

Chad Allen: The Dr. Quinn hunk is outed, but still plays heterosexual romantic leads and a gay detective. With his cock and 1990s San Francisco

Hung Harvey: I hook up with the boyfriend of Sabrina the Teenage Witch

Bugs and Porky meet a Drag King: Warner Brothers Comics

When I was a kid, my favorite comic titles were Harvey (gay-vague Casper the Friendly Ghost), Disney (Donald Duck as macho adventurer), and the Gold Key jungle adventures.  If I had allowance money leftover, Little Lulu and Archie comics were ok.

Comics featuring Warner Brothers cartoon characters Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, and Bugs Bunny were low on my list.  Not as low as Charleton Comics, but low.

The art was amateurish, with minimal backgrounds, or just blank space.  This is one of the best covers,depicting Bugs opening a door leading to another planet, where a cowboy-rabbit is racing across the desert on a camel.

And instead of the anarchic outsiders of the cartoons, the characters were stable, stolid suburbanites, with houses and jobs and girlfriends. Porky was a single dad, raising his nephew, Cicero, like a Donald Duck knockoff.

But sometimes Bugs teamed up with Porky Pig or Yosemite Sam for adventure stories.  Maybe they stumbled upon a haunted inn.  Or they answered a job ad for "undersea explorers"  Or a telegram arrived about "trouble at the ranch."  Buddy-bonding, captures, and nick-of-time rescues followed.

A continuing series had Bugs and Porky working as Indiana Jones-style adventurer-archaeologists, investigating the myth of Pegasus or discovering a lost civilization hidden under the ice of Antartica.  With no girlfriends in sight, and no damsels in distress to be won.

Unfortunately, you couldn't find the adventure stories by looking at the covers -- almost all of them displayed one-shot gags.  Who could guess that this cover art, featuring Cicero using a pogo stick to steal a lick of Porky's ice cream, hid a story about the guys finding a mysterious artifact that leads them to lost Atlantis?  

And the clerks at the drug store frowned on looking inside.  You had to just buy the issue and take your chances.

More after the break

10 Gay Movies I Hated

I haven't seen a lot of gay-themed movies since 2005, when I moved to small-town America, but before that, living in West Hollywood, New York, and Fort Lauderdale, I saw practically everything.  Some were good, but a lot were awful: angst-loaded melodramas set in worlds where there is no gay community, every heterosexual is homophobic, lesbians turn straight, and gay men keep falling in love with women.

Here is the list of the biggest offenders, excluding historical artifacts like Cruising and The Boys in the Band, and movies where the gay guy dies (which I never see in the first place).

It's Still the 1950s

1. Get Real (1998). The only gay guy in the world (Ben Silverstone), who plasters his room with pictures of hunky footballers but still worries that his parents will "find out.  He falls for a local jock, who won't acknowledge his presence in public, continues to date girls, and beats him up to prove he is heterosexual.  But there are no other options.

2. Sordid Lives (1999).  In "modern" Texas, a drag queen named Brother Boy (Leslie Jordan) is in a mental hospital, undergoing de-homosexual therapy.  Meanwhile, a gay man (Kirk Geiger) moves from Texas to Los Angeles, where he undergoes 300 years of therapy to accept "who he is," but is still terrified that his theater-crowd friends will "find out."  Are you kidding me?  (Southern Baptist Sissies is in the same vein).

3. Cruel Intentions (1999).  Teenage brother and sister have fun destroying people's lives.  Fruity queen (Joshua Jackson, not even the most homophobic of the Jacksons) helps them blackmail his sex partner, a closeted footballer, who tries to turn hetero by throwing out his Judy Garland cds.  Excuse me?  Who researched this movie?

Gay Men Really Want Women

4. The Object of My Affection (1998).  Straight woman (Jennifer Anniston) and gay man (Paul Rudd) fall in love and begin a relationship.  Um. . .what exactly did they think the word "gay" meant?


5. The Opposite of Sex (1998). Teenage girl (Christina Ricci) shows up at her gay brother's house and seduces his lover (Ivan Sergei), who never once states that he's bisexual.  Apparently all gay men are into women, they just like men better -- until they find The Girl of Their Dreams.

6. Party Monster (2003).  Party boy (Macaulay Culkin) says he's gay, but he falls in love with a girl, who almost convinces him to abandon his "destructive lifestyle."  But it doesn't work, and he becomes a murderer.  Those are your choices: turn straight, or kill people

Gay Men are Really Women

7. The Birdcage (1996).  It may have been ok with La Cage aux Folles in 1978, but in 1996, the sight of one effeminate stereotype (Robin Williams) teaching another effeminate stereotype (Nathan Lane) how to butter his toast "like  a man" was infuriating.

8. Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001). East German boy (John Cameron Mitchell) falls in love with an American GI, and decides to become a woman for him.  Operation is botched, creating a transwoman with an "angry inch," who becomes a punk rocker and falls in love with a homophobic Bible-belt boy.  Same-sex desire doesn't exist; it's all male-female, regardless of the body you inhabit.

Lesbians Switch Teams a Lot

9. Chasing Amy (1997). Hetero man (Ben Affleck) falls in love with a lesbian and begins the task of converting her to heterosexuality.   Isn't that a debunked myth -- lesbians will "turn back" if they meet the right man?  It works, albeit temporarily.

10. Kissing Jessica Stein (2001).  Jessica meets a lesbian. She's astounded, utterly unaware that such things exist.  In Manhattan.  In 2001.  To be fair, she lives in a gay-free Manhattan, where people constantly make heterosexist statements ("Oh, you got flowers!  Who's the guy?").  They begin a relationship, but then Jessica switches back to heterosexual again.

Gay as Arrested Development

11. Chuck and Buck (2000).  The worst gay-themed movie since Cruising.  I'll save it for another post.

See also: 10 Gay Movies I Loved

"Cruising": Homophobic classic about sin, degradation, and dicks in a doomed gay world. With a nude Mr. Big.

The 39 Dumbest Things on TV

Angel Mock Curiel: LGBTQ and Latinx roles culminate in Lil Pappi on "Pose." Not much after except n*de modeling and Denver.

Link to the n*de photos

It's the late 1980s in Manhattan, the era of Reaganomics, Tough on Crime, and the AIDS crisis.  It's cold outside.  Especially if you're poor, a racial minority, and femme, trans, or gay: "the world hates you.  When you die, it breathes a sigh of relief."

All you have is a "house," a family of choice with a "mother" and her children.  And ballroom.

 Pose (2018-21) is set in the ballroom subculture, where African-American and Latinx trans women, drag queens, and occasionally gay men "posed,"modeled, house against house in the quest for realness.  Some brought home gigantic trophies, and became legends. 

Li'l Papi (Angel Bismark Curiel) was living on the streets, surving through drug sales and hustling  (he preferred women, but accepted male clients).  After stumbling upon the ballroom subculture, he was entranced, and petitioned Blanca of House Evangelista to "adopt" him, even though he wasn't gay or trans.  She agreed, with the rule that he stop dealing, and pose occasionally as a muscleman. 

In Season 2, Li'l Papi starts dating Angel (Indya Moore), a s*x worker whose previous plot arc involved an affair with a married man (Evan Peters).  After various arguments and breakup-reconciliations, they get married.  He opens a talent agency specializing in LGBTQ models, with Angel as his top client.  They have a happy ending (sort of), a welcome relief in a show that too often emphasized people being rejected by family, murdered, or dying of AIDS.

 This was Angel's first exposure to trans people.  In an interview with Attitude, he notes that he grew up in a "very cis, very heteronormative, very rough" Afro-Dominican community in Little Liberty, Miami.  He was bullied for being short and artistic, and for having asthma, and escaped into the world of the theater.  At the Miami Arts Charter School, he performed in The Rose Tattoo, A Midsummer Night's Dream and Jesus Hopping the A Train, and upon graduating in 2013, he enrolled at Pace University in New York as a drama major.

He dropped out in 2015 due to inancial problems, was homeless for awhile, survived anyway he could (he doesn't specify, but I imagine that hustling was one of his survival jobs), and finally found a job in a hotel.  But he still auditioned, and in 2016 landed his first on-screen role in America Adrift.  He played a middle-class teenager on Long Island who drifts into heroin addiction and drug dealing.

And loses his clothes.

Davi Santos, who is gay in real life, played his older brother, giving Angel his first close contact with LGBTQ people.  

Next came the short Louie's Brother Peter (2017).  Peter (Andrew McLarty) has Asperger's Syndrome, but that doesn't stop him from helping his brother with the drug deliveries.  Angel plays Zeke, one of their customers.

Andew McLarty is gay in real life.  .

Night Comes On (2018) is a "slow, painful, grim" indie drama about an African-American, lesbian girl nameed Angel, who is released from juvenile detention at age 18 with no money and no place to stay.  She gets a girlfriend, tries to find social connections, and seeks out her father to punish him murdering her mother.  Dad is played by John Earl Jelks, who often plays gay characters

You're pushing up the LGBTQ representation, Angel buddy

Our Angel played a store clerk. 

Monsters and Men (2018) is not about James Whale and the Frankenstein movie - that's Gods and Monsters.  It's about an incident where six police officers corner a black man and "accidentally" kill him during an arrest.

You're pushing up the Black/Latinx representation, too.

When Angel saw the casting call for L'il Pappi, he thought, "That's me!  Those are my experiences!"  He got the part, and since he had so little exposure to trans people, tried to educate himself, hang out with them, ask about their lives -- and he ended up in a relationship with producer/writer Janet Mock, an African-American transwoman -- while she was still married to her husband.  She is the one who suggested expanding Papi's role by giving him a romance with Angel Evangelista. 

Pose turned out to be the high point of Angel's acting career.  He was starring in a popular tv series, but more importantly, he  had found a community.  

More after the break

Luke Blumm: Femme boy survives the Nazis, a cult, and Maine, but not a homophobic Mom. With his twink physique and some co-star c*cks

 

Link to the n*de dudes

Luke David Blumm was born in New York in 2009, and raised in Atlanta in a family of actors.  Dad Matthew Sean Blumm has 36 acting credits on the IMDB, including episodes of queer-friendly shows like Orange is the New Black and Peacemaker. 

Sister Samantha Grace Blumm is best known for Pose, the drama about drag queen/transgender performers in New York during the AIDS crisis. She plays Amanda, daughter of Stan Bowes (Evan Peters, n*de on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends), who begins dating transwoman Angel Evangelista.

Not a bad queer genealogy.

Luke's on-screen acting begins in 2019, in an episode of The Walking Dead. He plays Linus, a kid growing up in brutal survivor colony in an abandoned factory.

 

His first starring role was in The King of Staten Island (2020): Aspiring tattoo artist Pete Davidson befriends long-haired femme boy Luke,  and starts dating his firefighter father (Bill Burr).  Actually, it's just queerbaiting: the guys both get girlfriends. But Luke is definitely being depicted as gay.

Hank Strong appears as a firefighter (n*de on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends).

Next came Son (2021), about a long-haired femme boy who escapes from a violent cult with his mom, only to contract a mysterious illness. Emile Hirsch (right) plays Paul, a sympathetic police officer with a secret agenda.

Left: Luke's plus-one at the Atlanta Jewish Film Festival in 2024 was Emile's rather femme son Valor.

In 2023, Luke was in his first play, Avenue of the Giants.  It was made into a movie, The Optimist, released in 2026: Holocaust survivor Herbert Heller befriends a young girl, with whom "he shares a 60-year old secret." The plot synopses don't say what the secret is, but I don't think it's being gay. The real Herbert Heller was married, with children.  Luke plays the young Herbert.

Left: A random teen bodybuilder.

On Valentine's Day 2026, surrounded by floating hearts, Luke tells us to: "Check out Lola (2024).  It's a movie about love."

Worried that I was going to see a heteronormative quest for the Eternal Feminine, I read two plot synopses.

Lola, an adult performer and cocaine addict, has a little brother (Luke) who wears dresses and makeup.  She supports his interest, but Mom is abusive, throwing about homophobic slurs and s*xually assaulting him.  Lola grabs the boy and moves out, but Mom lures him back home and cuts off his long hair to turn him straight.  He is so upset that he runs out into traffic and is killed.

More after the break

"Crap Happens": Many gay/bi/trans actors, a gay boy, father-son bonding, puppies, a talking duck , and some Deutsch d*cks

 

Link to the n*de photos

After the death of his mother, failed rapper Toni (played by real-life rapper Fatoni, aka Anton Schneider) returns to his backwater Bavaria home town with the charming name Kacken an der Havel, "Pooping on the (River) Havel."  So basically Schitt's Creek.

 He deals with endearing/annoying townsfolk, his mom's much younger boy toy, and Charly, the 13-year old son that he didn't know he had.  While trying to jump-start his rap career.  Hey, Crap Happens.

Right: Anton Schneider.  I don't think he's the same one.

Preliminary research revealed that Charly is played by the nonbinary German actor Sky Arndt, and voiced in the English dub by trans actor Greg Vinciguerra (left, with a post from his tv series  Wolf Pack).

Surely Charly is trans on the show, too.

More LGBTQ representation: The Boy Toy, Johnny Carrera, is played by straight actor Dmitrij Schaad (left), but voiced by JP Karliak, founder and president of Queer Vox, an organization for LGBTQ voice artists.

Vincent Redetzki, who plays school band leader Paule, is gay in real life.

Showrunner Alex Schaad won an Queer Lion Award for Skin Deep (2022), about body swapping and s*xual identity.

That's enough for me. I'll  reviewing Episode 1.3, which is Charly-centric: he experiences "his first heartbreak" and meets his first arch-nemesis.

Scene 1: Fleischer's Towing Service (his Mom's company). Asleep on a day bed, Toni is awakened by his son Charly: he had a nightmare. Can he sleep in Toni's bed?  There's no room, but Charly squeezes in anyway.

The narrator, a talking duckling named Tupac, explains that Charly didn't really have a nightmare.  He just wanted to cuddle with his dad.

Scene 2: Toni is exhausted after getting no sleep, but Charly is energetic, and makes breakfast for him, the duck, and the Boy Toy: Chocolate-ketchup fountain, sausage water coffee, green farfalle, and chocolate scrambled eggs.  Does Charly have a learning disability?   Boy Toy insists that they try it to avoid hurting Charly's feelings, and it turns out to be delicious. 

Boy Toy: "It feels like love in my mouth."  This is completely innocent of double-entendre.

In other news, is it weird to be in love with your cousin?

Boy Toy: It's normal in Mexico.  Toni: It's weird in Germany.

Charlie announces today's plan: Paddleboard limbo (a real sport where you stand on a paddleboat and negotiate a barrier).

Toni: "Sorry, no time.  I have writing to do today." Ms. Muller-Muller has commissioned him to write eight rap songs.

Meanwhile, the evil Mayor Veronica and her son are surveilling them, cooking up mischief.

Scene 3: Toni starts to work on a rap song, but is distracted. Narrator: "He hasn't finished a song in 18 years."

At school, Charly heads for Sascha, his girl cousin. She is played by Sherine Ciara Merai, who is gay in real life, and voiced by Jonna-Lynn Alonso, a bi/pan, genderfluid, femme presenting voice artist. 

Apparently they've considered dating before, and he is reporting on his research.  Genetics: No problem with their offspring.  So Charlie must be cisgender. A trans boy doesn't produce sperm, so...wait, is Sascha a  trans girl?  

 Social attitudes: A problem in Germany, but they can always move to Mexico.

Nope, Sascha breaks up with him.  Narrator: "The first heartbreak of his life."  

More after the break

Mason Cook: The "Speechless" kid grows up, turns bohemian-hipster, builds biceps, and bares it all

  

Link to the n*de photos

You're probably most familiar with Mason Cook as Ray DiMeo, sarcastic younger brother of focus character JJ (Micah Fowler) on Speechless (2015-18).  JJ has cerebral palsy and is nonverbal, "speechless."

Ray gets a lot of gay subtext plotlines, at least in Season 1.  In Season 2, he becomes annoyingly hetero-horny, and eventually gets a serious girlfriend. 

Ray's sudden movement into hetero-horniness was disturbing not only because the gay teases were overturned, but because of the "discovering girls" rhetoric. Mason is over 18 at the time, but his character is 15.  When I was 15, all I ever heard was "You'll discover girls any moment now, and everything you love will become meaningless. You'll join clubs, take classes, choose your college solely in order to see or meet girls. Your buddies will become mere strategists, helping you find, impress, and win girls. You..."

Sorry for the rant, but I really felt betrayed by Ray DiMeo in the second season.  

So you may wonder why I'm posting a profile on Mason Cook

Not because of his gay or gay-subtext performances.

Born in 2000

Guest star in teencoms like Zeke and Luther

Son of the focus charater in the crime drama Legends

Classmate of the focus character on The Middle

 An "eccentric, devout Christian" who has sex with the focus girl, sending her rushing for a "morning after pill," in Plan B.  This was nominated for a GLAAD award because a major character is trans, but Mason is straight.

Not because of his physique.  

The few shirtless photos on Mason's social media suggest that he doesn't spend a lot of time at the gym.

Although he has developed some biceps recently.

More after the break

Iain Armitage: Young Sheldon grows up, hugs guys, celebrates Pride. With n*de Galecki, Fisher, and Simon Rex

Link to the n*de dudes

I didn't like The Big Bang Theory (2007-19), featuring Johnny Galecki as the (relatively) stable center of a group of wacky nerd scientists who can't get any  "big bangs."  The hetero-horniness was incessant, and there were so many homophobic statements -- mostly asserting that all gay men wear dresses and prance  --- that I was more amazed than offended  Wasn't Jim Parsons, who played the neurotic physics savant Sheldon Cooper, gay?  Why didn't he protest?  (Apparently he was closeted until around the fifth season.) 

But I liked Young Sheldon (2017-24), about Sheldon Cooper's childhood, growing up in East Texas in the 1990s with a conservative Baptist Mom, a macho football-coach Dad, a macho muscle-building brother, and...you get the idea.

I grew up in the Nazarene Church, which taught that Baptists were much too liberal.  I could relate.

Plus there were lots of cute guys.  Sheldon's older brother Georgie (Montana Jordan) had musclebuilding plotlines before they switched to a "getting a girl pregnant" story arc.

If you're into chubs (and who isn't?), Dad Lance Barber had it all.

Next door neighbor Billy (Wyatt McClure) was too young to be hot, of course, but he had that puppy-dog cuteness that makes you say "Aww, how adorable!"  I figured that he would eventually come out, but instead the writers decided to give him a crush on Sheldon's sister.

And how about Rex Linn as Tom Peters, the longsuffering principal at Sheldon's high school. Wait, this is Simon Rex (on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends).

There were no gay characters -- with or without Jim Parsons as executive producer, this was still a "family friendly" (non gay) show.  But also no casual homophobia.  Just a few references suggesting homophobia, as when someone asks if Sheldon is...you know, and Dad angrily yells "NO!"

And in Season 5, Sheldon tells his roommate Evan (Motoki Maxten) that he doesn't want to date girls because they are a distraction. 

"So you're into guys?" Evan asks nonchalantly.

"No, they're a distraction, too."

Actually, he turns out to be asexual hetero-romantic, although this is never specified on The Big Bang Theory.

But I'm pretty sure that Iain Armitage (Young Sheldon) is gay.

More after the break

Jamie Mayers: Absurdly hot Short Guy, LARPer, ghost, with a trans mom, a gay dad, a BFA, and a boyfriend. And maybe a d*ck

Link to the n*de photos

We've been watching the American version of Ghosts (2021-26), about a disparate group of ghosts who are trapped between worlds in a bed-and-breakfast in upstate New York.  I'm not happy with the way they approach the Revolutionary War soldier Isaac being gay.  At least in Season 1, he'll say that a man is attractive, and the other ghosts will stare, mystified, as if same-sex desire cannot possibly exist.

But I like the buddy-bonding and the beefcake. 

In Episode 1.7 (2021),  Samantha, who can see ghosts because she was dead for a few minutes, encounters early 20th century newsboy Winky.  He was only 12 years old when he died, but the actor is obviously an adult --- 21 year old Jamie Mayers, now 25, and at 5'3", an outstanding member of the Short Guy Brigade who deserves a profile.

Well, he's also absurdly hot,  and gay in real life.  But mostly because he's 5'3". 

Jamie has several well-stocked social media pages, plus Linkedin and a professional website, so we can piece together a biography:

He was born in Montreal in 1999, and began acting in 2010, with some shorts, commercials, and Lies My Father Taught Me at Theatre Calgary: a Jewish boy's bittersweet memories of 1920s Montreal.

In 2012, Jamie played the son of gay-vague werewolf Ray (Andreas Apergis, left) in an episode of Being Human, about ghost, vampire, and werewolf roommates.

And he voiced the young Connor in the Assassin's Creed III video game.  He returned in 2017 to voice Pharaoh Ptolemey in Assassin's Creed: Origins.

Teencoms followed: the bratty little brother of Live Action Role Playing Gamer Brittany in seven episodes of LARPERS (2014-15)

The gay-vague best friend of a teenage boy whose life is narrated by sportscaster-like beings in Game On (2016-17).

And a drama: Four episodes of This Life (2015-16), about a woman dying of cancer while her teenage sons have soap opera problems.

But his most famous role is in Venus (2017):  Indo-Canadian trans woman Sid (Debargo Sanyal) is just starting to transition, when a teenage boy shows up on her doorstep, a son from a high school girlfriend.  He's fine with having a trans mom, but what about her conservative Indian parents?   She also finds the time to fall in love with Pierre-Yves Cardinal (n*de on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends).

In high school Jamie spent several summers at Stagedoor Manor, a performance camp for youth in Loch Sheldrake, New York, playing:

Otto in Grand Hotel: a dying bookkeeper who wants to spend his last moments in luxury.  He gets a girlfriend. (Played by Daniel Evans, n*de on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends).

Tobias in Sweeney Todd: the mentally challenged assistant to the murderous barber.  Played by Neil Patrick Harris on Broadway.

Jamie graduated from high school in 2017, and spent his gap year in London, where he performed in two plays with the St. George's Players, Avenue Q and Into the Woods.

Life after high school after the break

Why Do Gay Men Like "The Rocky Horror Picture Show"?

"Like" is too weak a term.  To gay men of a certain age, it is the movie.  It is more than a movie, it is salvation.

They don't attend the audience-participation midnight showings, with young oddballs throwing toast and rice, yelling nasty, often homophobic lines at the screen, and cheering when the "Frank the Fag" is killed.  They watch at home, alone, a private communion.

 Gay empowerment was not at all what Richard O'Brien intended when he wrote the script of a science fiction-horror musical comedy pastiche.

 If yo're looking for positive LGBT representation, you must overlook or excuse quite a lot:

Frank N Furter is a villain!  He keeps Brad and Janet prisoner, turns them to stone with his Medusa ray, brutally beats his servants, kills Eddie and then serves him to his guests for dinner.  That's not just villainous, it's psycho-killer!

And what do you make of the song "Superhero", which Brad and Janet sing in the wreckage of Frank's lab at the end of the movie:

Superheroes come to feast, to taste the flesh not yet deceased
And all I know, is still the beast is feeding.

Not exactly uplifting, is it?


No one is gay.  The male characters are all bisexual, capable of sexual relations with men and women both, and the female characters are all heterosexual.

The main sexual awakening isn't same-sex, it's Rocky and Janet.

The "don't dream it, be it" scene in the pool isn't gay, it's a pansexual orgy, while Frank is floating on a life preserver from the Titanic.

That pink triangle on Frank's lab coat was not intended to be a gay symbol.  It just happened to be on the coat they bought for a prop.

So how did gay men of a certain age get around all that?

1. They didn't notice Frank's villainy.  All gay and bi men in the mass media of the era were villains, usually psycho killers.  It was business as usual.  You simply didn't notice.

Instead, you noticed the scenes where Frank becomes a sympathetic character, longing for home:

I see blue skies through the tears in my eyes,
When I realize, I'm going home.

Telling about his first drag dreams:

Whatever happened to Fay Wray, that exquisite, satin-draped frame?
As it clung to her thigh, how I started to cry, 'cause I wanted to be dressed just the same.

2. There was same-sex desire!  Even the gay men in the mass media of the era never expressed same-sex desire.  Gay meant feminine and not interested in women, period.  You never saw a gay man with a boyfriend except Jodie in Soap, who was planning a sex change to "become a woman" for him. (They didn't understand trans people, either.)

Then you go to Rocky Horror, and Frank belts out:

A deltoid, and a tricep, a hot groin and a bicep
Makes me shake, makes me want to take Charles Atlas by the....hand.

3. There were bulges!

You rarely saw men shirtless in movies of the 1970s, and costumers tried their best to remove all hints of a bulge.  But Rocky and Brad are both half-naked most of the time, in extremely bulgeworthy outfits.  Male beauty was celebrated, not erased.

4. There was transformation.

I feel released
Bad times deceased
My confidence has increased
Reality is here

After years and decades of being told, over and over, that you, like every man who had ever lived and who ever would live, longed for women and shuned the touch of men, that same-sex desire did not and could not exist, you heard Frank sing:

Don't dream it, be it.  Don't dream it, be it.  Don't dream it, be it.

You left the theater with tears streaming down your face, transformed, literally saved.

I was lost, but now I'm found.  Was blind, but now I see

See also: "A hot groin and a tricep": Nude photos of Peter Hinwood, the original Rocky Horror. With Ian McShane, Morgan Jackson, and Chord Overstreet.