The Top 10 Hunks of "Stranger Things," Season 3, Plus Some of the Plot

The tv series Stranger Things, now in its third season, is an homage to 1980s Goonies movies, with monster-fighting kids in stereotypic small-town Indiana. I watched some of the first season, but couldn't figure out what was going on -- it was a mishmash of psychic powers, alternate worlds, missing children, and parents with histrionic backstories.

So I am starting Season 3, Episode 1 fresh,  mostly looking for gay characters and beefcake, but also trying, once again, to figure out the painfully interrelated characters and endless back stories in this monsterized Peyton Place.

Prelude: A top-secret underground lab in the old Soviet Union, where scientists are trying to break on through to the other side.  When they finally manage to blast a crack in the wall, something slithery and horrible comes out and kills them, then goes back in.  The experiment was a failure.  "You have one year!" Colonel Klink growls.

1. In stereotypic small-town Indiana, Sheriff Hopper (David Harbour, top photo) is annoyed about his daughter and another girl kissing.

A lesbian couple!  Score! When they pull back, I find that they're not lesbians after all, but it's still cool that they're so gender-atypical.  The more masculine one is the girl, El (Millie Bobby Brown), and the more feminine one is:

2. Mike (Finn Wolfhard).

Great name, although he looks less like a Wolf Hard than anyone I can imagine.

Sheriff Harper doesn't want his masculine daughter having sex with a feminine boy, or anyone, for that matter, so he asks advice of Joyce (Wynona Ryder), his old girlfriend, who runs a local drug store that has fallen on bad times since the opening of the mall.

Joyce suggests a heart-to-heart talk; but when the Sheriff tries the talk, the teens laugh at him, so he drags Mike out to his truck and threatens to kill him.

3. Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin) is at the new mall with his girlfriend Max and another feminine boy, Will (who looks like Mike's brother but isn't).  Finally Mike and El show up, apologizing for being late -- the sex took longer than they expected.

They are sneaked into the movie Day of the Dead by:

4. Steve (Joe Keery), the ex-boyfriend of Nancy (Mike's older sister), who works at a horrible ice cream place in the mall.

Afterwards Steve tries to pick up every female customer in sight, but usually fails.  His coworker Robin is keeping a tally (spoiler alert: Robin turns out to be a lesbian.)

By the way, Nancy (Steve's ex, Mike's older sister) is now dating:

5. Jonathan (Charlie Heaton), the older  brother of the androgynous Will, who was waiting at the mall with Lucas and Max.

Both Jonathan and Will, by the way, are sons of Joyce, the ex-girlfriend of Sheriff Hopper who works at the drugstore downtown.

Jonathan sneaks Nancy (Mike's older sister) out of the bedroom, and she goes to work at a horrible job bringing hamburgers to the local newspaper staff and having them make fun of her ideas.

Turns out that Mom Joyce is aware of Jonathan's sexploits, and fully approves.  His heterosexuality established, she turns her attention to:

6. Will (Noah Schnapp). the androgynous boy who looks like Mike's brother but isn't.  "You'll meet a girl someday, yada yada yada."

 "I'm not gonna fall in love!" he exclaims.  So he's either asexual/ aromantic, or he means "with a girl," and he's gay.

Spoiler alert: later on, during a fight, Mike exclaims that Will doesn't like girls, and he gets all upset.  But he doesn't express any interest in boys or girls this season.  Maybe the writers are ok with lesbians but skittish about gay men.

After Joyce's "what girl do you like?" interrogation, Will meets up with his friends (El, Mike, Max, and Lucas), where they use El's magical powers to arrange a welcome-home surprise party for:






7. Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo), who has been away at summer camp. He got a girlfriend there, so instead of doing something fun, he insists that they all trek to a mountaintop to install a makeshift radio tower, so he can call her via short wave (what, no telephones in Utah?)

There's no answer.  They hang out all afternoon, abandoning him one by one, until he's all alone.  Then finally he gets a message -- but it's in Russian!

Call back to the first scene.  He's getting transmissions from the Soviet lab where they had "one year" to break through to wherever the slithery thing is from.

8. That night, Joyce, having rejected Sheriff Hopper's dinner invitation, is eating microwaved lasagna and peas and watching Cheers.  All of a sudden Sean Astin is sitting next to her, laughing at Cheers and asking whether  Sam and Diane (the "will they or won't they" couple) will ever get together.  Apparently this is a metaphor for Joyce, who has been rejecting Sheriff Hopper for quite some time.  But I have no idea what Sean Astin was doing there.

9. Billy Hargrove (Dacre Montgomery), the older brother of Max (one of Mike's friends, the girl who is dating Caleb) works as a lifeguard, where lots of middle-aged women are lusting after him.

He tries to pick up Karen Wheeler, the mother of Nancy and Mike.  Initially she resists, probably due to his horrible 1980s double-entendre talk: "I could give you a...private lesson...I know some...moves...the breast stroke...."  But then she agrees. That night she gets dolled up, and leaves her husband and youngest child asleep on the couch to head out for her hookup.

On the way to the hookup, Billy hits something slithery that drags him into an old abandoned iron mill.  Call back to the Russian blasting experiment?

That's all for this episode, but see how nicely everyone is interconnected?

10. To get to 10, I had to go to Episode 2, where Grigori (Andrey Ivchenko) shows up, a Russian agent assigned to beat up Sheriff Hopper and otherwise cause mischief.

I don't think I'll be watching.

My grade: B for the gender-atypical and queer characters, D for the plot.

Netflix's "Tales of the City": Not Your Grandfather's San Francisco

I thoroughy dislike the Tales of the City series of maudlin angst-ridden melodramatic novels, so watching the Netflix tv series wasn't near the top of my list.  But when I found out that the series was set in 2019, I was curious.  Mary Ann Singleton was in her mid-twenties when she moved to San Francisco in 1976, and got an apartment in the building of "feisty old broad" Anna Madrigal.  43 years later, Mary Ann would be in her 60s, and Anna Madrigal over 100.  How would they handle that?

So I sat down to watch two episodes.

They retconned all of the characters' ages and streamlined the melodramatic plot complications. Now Mary Ann (Laura Linney) moved to San Francisco in the 1990s, met Anna Madrigal and gay man Michael rather than a cast of thousands, married Brian, adopted a daughter, Shawna, and vanished in 1999 to pursue a career in tv journalism.  20 years later, she and her horrible estranged husband return for Anna's 90th birthday party.  Things have changed.

In the San Francisco of the 1970s (or I guess the 1990s), you were gay or straight, mostly straight.  Anna is a transwoman, but it was a deep secret, a big reveal far into the series.  Now San Francisco is a glittering, rainbow-flashing collage of nonchalant gender fluidity and pansexual queerness that make cisgender masculine-presenting gay men like Michael seem quaintly old-fashioned. 

And the old-guard residents of Barbary Lane are mostly there to provide advice and problems for the new generation.

The San Francisco of the novels was as white as a 1950s sitcom.  Now black people exist.   And East Asian, South Asian, Hispanic.  Actually, all of the new generation except Shawna are nonwhite post-racial "um...I guess my ancestors came from...IDK who cares?"

1. Shawna (Ellen Page), now 25 and working as a bartender in an eclectic queer bar, is so traumatized by her mother's disappearance that she can't commit to a relationship, but doesn't mind going out to the back alley for hookups with various gender-fluid people (Ida Best, her laid-back drag queen boss doesn't mind her leaving in mid-shift).  Eventually she starts dating the polyamorous couple Eli (Benjamin Thys) and Inka (Samantha Soule)

2. Wren (Michelle Buteau) is the neighbor/bff of Shawna's dad, Brian (Paul Gross, left, photo from when he was part of the new generation).

Paul is having trouble getting over Mary Ann (after 20 years?).  He has a Tinder full of women who are Mary Ann lookalikes, but he never swipes any of them, so Wren takes matters into her own hands.

3. Ben (Charlie Barnett of Russian Doll) is dating the much older Michael (Murray Bartlett), who no one ever calls Mouse.  He has to deal with the implications that he is a "boy toy," as well as the fact that Michael doesn't understand twentiesh culture.

Michael, meanwhile, finds in Ben a constant reminder of his own mortality.

I've dated a lot of guys 20-30 years younger than me, and never once did I get upset over the fact that they would probably outlive me.

4. Jake (nonbinary actor Garcia) has just transitioned, which bothers his partner Margot (May Hong) because now everyone mistakes them for a heterosexual couple, and what's the point of being queer if no one knows that you're queer? 

Margot also misses being in a lesbian relationship, while Jake, exploring an interest in guys, begins dating Flaco (Juan Castano).

5. Twins Ani (Ashley Park) and Raven (Christopher Larkin, left) are Instagram performance artists who change their identities regularly.

There are many other members of the new generation, some of whom are masculine-presenting, so beefcake is not a problem.  lots of bare chests and bare butts.  The sex scenes are mostly same-sex.

And the things I hate about the novels are mostly absent: no convoluted interconnections, no existential angst, no gloom-and-doom. At least in the new generation.  The old guard has secrets to be revealed.

Still, I'm not sure I find the new generation engaging enough to want to know more about their lives.  Maybe if there are more bare chests and butts.

My grade: B.

See also: Tales of the City, Gay San Francisco, Who Cares?

"Pose": Let Your Body Move to the Music

I was around in 1987, but almost nothing in Pose (2018-) is familiar.  In retrospect, I was enjoying a lot of privilege: white, middle-class, conventionally masculine, HIV negative, able to escape from the homophobia of the mainstream Reagan-Jerry Falwell society. I visited my parents twice a year.

Meanwhile, many LGBT people were racial minorities, drag queens or transwomen, sick, poor, eking out a living through sex work and petty theft, rejected by their birth families, rejected even by other LGBT people. They had nothing but each other.

So they lived together in "houses" under the care of a "mother," and when the lights went down, they vogued.

Look around, everywhere you turn is heartache
It's everywhere that you go 
You try everything you can to escape
The pain of life that you know
I know a place where you can get away
It's called a dance floor, and here's what it's for, so
Come on, vogue

They compete in gigantic drag contests with judges and scores, their acts involving not lip-synching but "posing," often not in dresses but in the Park Avenue drag of the rich and powerful, critiquing the culture of excess and exclusion that would eventually lead to the Orange Goblin being elected president.

Real house members act as series consultants and take small roles, so the series has an air of authenticity. The nostalgic 1980s soundtrack helps: "Heartbeat," "In My House," "On the Radio," "I Wanna Dance with Somebody," "It's Raining Men," all of those old songs that we heard constantly at the bars but have since forgotten.

Feuds between houses occupy a substantial part of the plot, but there are also stories  about conflicts with the outside world.

1. Damon Richards of the House of Evangelista (Ryan Jamal Swain) is neither drag queen or transwoman, just a rather feminine gay man who aspires to become a dancer.  He begins dating fellow Evangelista Ricky (Dyllón Burnside),

2. Angel Evangelista (Indya Moore) begins dating Stan (Evan Peters): white, married, middle-class, employed by the Trump organization (which was sleazy even back in 1987)

The cast consists mosly of transgender actresses, so one doesn't expect a lot of beefcake. But there are a few conventionally masculine physiques:

1.Dyllón Burnside

2.Evan Peters

3. Angel Bismarck Curiel as drug-dealing house member Lil Papi.

4. Johnny Sibilly, Costas, the lover of ball m.c. Pray Tell (Billy Porter), who is dying of AIDS.

5. James Van Der Beek as Matt Bromley, Stan's completely odious boss.

6. Matthew Carter as "Walkman Wally).

But aren't muscles themselves a type of drag, a costume we wear to hide who we really are?

My grade: A+.

The Top 10 Hunks of "The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina," Season 2

I'm not liking the second season of The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, about the adventures of half-witch Sabrina as she straddles the witch and mortal worlds.  The coherent plotline about Sabrina resisting her initiation into the Church of Night has been muddled, the previously strict separation of the two worlds transgressed over and over again. Episodes are mostly about "look what weird rituals the witches have," equivalents of mortal Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter, and Valentine's Day. 

Plus it somehow turned heterosexist.  Cousin Ambrose (Chance Perdomo) is "pansexual," but he dropped his boyfriend for a girl, making him for all intents and purposes straight.  The witch rituals involving only heterosexual pairings.  The school dance at Baxter High shows only male-female couples.   There's a transman, Theo (formerly Susie),but he doesn't date anyone.

And the cast list is so woman-oriented  that it's hard to find any beefcake.  You have to skulk around the margins to find anyone other than the guys introduced last season (Cousin Ambrose, his ex-boyfriend Luke, Sabrina's boyfriends Harvey and Nick).

The Academy of Unseen Arts

1. Tyler Cotton as Melvin, a meek, shy warlock who loses his virginity during Lupercania, the Satanic Valentine's Day.  I don't buy it.  Witches are so into the "sins of the flesh" that he'd never make  it through a week at the Academy without being cherry-picked.  Of course, we're also led to believe that Aunt Hilda, who is over 100 years old, has never been cherry-picked either.

2. Adam DiMarco as Dario, a member of the Judas Society, anti-witch faction of the  Church of Night.  Apparently there's a lot of sexism among witches:  The High Priest must be a man; the Top Boy must be a boy; Dorian's Gray Room, the warlock hangout, is off limits to women.

3. Jeddidiah Goodacre as Dorian Gray himself, the guy with the painting in the attic, who runs the warlock-only nightclub.   After the first mention, however, the sexism is quietly dropped, and Dorian's Gray Room becomes a standard hangout, like Pop's Choklit Shop in Riverdale.

4.Liam Hall (left) as Marcus Pierce, a warlock killed by witch hunters.

5. Luke Cook (top photo) as Lucifer himself.  When he actually appears as El Diablo, he wears tons of prosethics, growls and grunts,and speaks in a ridiculous British-villain accent.

















The Witch Hunters


6. Spencer Treat Clarke as Jerathmiel. There's a mouthful.  You know that those Hebrew names mean something, right?  -El endings are "of God."  He belongs tothe Order of the Innocents, a witch-hunting club.

Why are there witch hunters? Couldn't the witches just turn them into frogs or something?

7. Graeme McComb as Gideon, another witch hunter.  He doesn't really push my buttons,but after watching Sabrina, Prudence, Dorcas, Agatha, Miss Wardwell, Hilda, and Zelda getting it on, I'll take whatever I can get.










Baxter High

8. Remember Miss Wardwell, the "lonely old spinster" whom Madame Satan has been possessing?  Turns out she wasn't so lonely after all; her boyfriend was just overseas doing charity work. Adam (Alexis Denisoff) returns, and Miss Wardwell/Madam Satan is horrified at the thought of hooking up with such a goody-goody, until she discovers that he gives foot rubs and cooks.

9. This is actually cheating, since the character of Billy (Ty Wood), appeared in Season 1 as a bully who harasses Susie for her gender-transgressive traits, and gets his comeuppance when a spell makes him kiss a guy (how humiliating! For all its inclusivity,this show has a homophobic edge). When Susie transitions into Theo, Billy is all smiles and apologies. Apparently he just doesn't like girls.

10. Peter Bundic as Carl Tapper, his sidekick, who according to Aunt Hilda is "in lust with him." Nothing comes of it, though.  What could -- they're both guys.

See also: The Top 10 Hunks of "The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina."

Champions: Gay Kid with Two Dads

TV series that failed after only 10 episodes used to fade into oblivion.  Now they are picked up by streaming services, Amazon Prime, Vudu, and Netflix.  But streaming services also have self-contained 10-episode series, designed to tell a story and end.  See if you can figure out which one Champions is.

We open in a run-down Brooklyn gym, where two guys, a hunk and a dork, are arguing over whether to get a dog.  A gay couple?  Nope, just heterosexual life partners -- gym owner Vince (Anders Holm, below) and his layabout brother Matthew (Andy Favreau, left). Think Alan and Charlie of Two and a Half Men.

  Suddenly a gunman bursts in, threatening to kill Vince for sleeping with his wife. Matthew convinces him that Vince has such a horible life that death would be a blessing.  This is the stuff of comedy?

Is it just me, or are the pair named wrong?  The hunk should be named Vince, and the dork Matthew. And shouldn't the one with the muscular physique be the gym owner?  Did the actors get their casting calls switched?

Also, why is it the dork who has sex with a hundred women per day, beginning in high school, where he got his girlfriend Priya (Mindy Kaling) pregnant?

Speak of the devil.  Cut to the ritzy Manhattan Academy of the Performing Arts, where 15-year old Michael (transgender actress Josie Totah) is being told that there's a problem with his application (whose bright idea was it to name the two stars Michael and Matthew?).  The Dean of Admissions, who admitted him and offered to let him stay in his house, has been arrested in a "Jared from Subway type sting," so Michael (the kid) has nowhere to live.

Wait -- Michael (the kid) was being groomed by a pedophile?  This is the stuff of comedy?

The solution is clear: Michael (the kid) can live with Dad Vince (the dork) and Uncle Matthew (the hunk), who didn't know that he existed before today.

Michael s the only kind of gay kid one ever sees on tv, an uber-swishy, facial product-wearing, show tune-obsessed swish.  He reminds me of Justin from Ugly Betty, except that Justin took five years to come out, and Michael's gayness is a done deal, not ever questioned.  In this world, homophobia does not exist.

But racism does: Vince has a type, preferring to date Indian women, although he's eclectic in his choice of bedroom partners. Anti-Indian and other racial prejudice is frequently evoked.

Michael proceeds to rehabilitate his two Dads. He encourages Vince to cut back on his womanizing, Matthew to study for his GED, and the duo to reconcile with their estranged mother.  He helps out at the gym, too, revising its web page and giving gym bookkeeper Dana (Ginger Gonzaga) advice on her love life. 

Not that Michael (the kid) lacks problems:  he's painfully naive about everything but musical theater, he struggles to embrace his Indian heritage and to accept the fact that he's no longer the most talented performer in his school.

I watched one of the two "someone tries to take Michael away" episodes:  Rich Uncle Ro (Hasan Minhaj) breezes into town, courts Michael with trips to Paris and tickets to Broadway musicals, and petitions to take over as the boy's guardian.  Vince and Matthew (the dork  -- no, wait, Vince is the dork, Matthew the hunk) discover that he doesn't care about Michael (the kid) at all; he just wants his urine for drug tests.

In the other episode I watched, Vince (the dad) finds a sexy poster of Matt Bomer in Michael's room, and decides that it's time for "the talk."  But he knows nothing about gay sex, so he conducts research, and prepares a 4-hour long lecture beginning with the need for a Hepatitis B vaccine, which mortifies Matthew -- um, I mean Michael (the kid).

And what does this mean: "If you have any questions about this (rubbing his chest), let me know."

Um...fondling the chest is not Second Base for gay men.

The characters are likeable, and the conundrums, if not original, are pleasant.  The caste is diverse, with many Indian actors showcased.

I would prefer more beefcake in a show set in a gym (even the personal trainers are rather less than muscular).  And there are occasional cringeworthy moments of sexualization that give the whole show a bad taste.

Granted, Archie and his pals and gals over at Riverdale are Michael's age and jumping into bed with each other every five minutes, but Michael looks much younger, and characterizes himself as "a kid" and "a little boy."  He's not even ready for his first kiss.  But Vince and Matthew (the hunk) suspect that Uncle Ro has a sexual intent with him, and Matthew (the hunk) points out that Matt Bomer looks like Vince (the dad), implying daddy-incest issues.

It's not a raunch-fest, like Two and a Half Men, but still, we could do without jokes like that.

In the last episode, Michael brings a dreamy boy (Kevin Quinn) home for dinner.  Vince takes that opportunity to announce that he has taken a job managing a baseball team in Louisiana (really?), leading to an abandonment-argument and fist fight with Matthew (the hunk), thus ruining Michael's first date.

Not to worry, Vince decides not to go.  Zoom out with the three riffing.

I'll give it a B

Answer: Champions was cancelled by NBC, and failed to find a home elsewhere.  Josie Totah has begun transitioning, so will probably not be accepting any more male roles.  So this is all you're going to get of  Michael, Matthew, and Vince.

Which one is which, again?

Are the Pantos Gay?

Before researching my post on Father, Dear Father, I had never heard of a pantomime or panto, in spite of my years of study of English literature and hours of watching British tv. Apparently everyone raised in Britain has fond memories of Christmas pantomimes, but never writes about them or mentions them on tv, almost if as if they're too personal to share with the rest of the world.

The pantomime is a type of musical comedy performed during the Christmas season, using well-known stories.   Next winter, for instance, you will be able to attend the pantos of Cinderella, Jack and the Beanstalk, Peter Pan, Puss in Boots, Aladdin, Dick Whittington, Treasure Island, and Robin Hood (prices range from $12 to $30 U.S.)

It's important for the basic plot to be familiar, since it will be skewed, augmented with satiric bits, slapstick, references to current events, and ad-lib scenes.  The audience, mostly children, will interact with the cast, boo the villain, ask questions, shout "It's behind you!", and even argue: "Oh, no it isn't!" "Oh, yes it is!."

There are five standard characters, plus a chorus and various comedic players:
1. The Principal Boy, traditionally played by a girl in drag, but now more often a tv star, such as Ray Quinn of The X Factor as Aladdin (top photo), or a boy band hunk.

That explains why, when I saw Peter Pan back in the 1960s, Peter was played by Mary Martin.  And why the audience had to shout "I believe in fairies" to save Tinker Belle's life.  Panto roots.  But it doesn't explain the creepy dog in the nanny cap, or why people who aren't sick need to take "medicine."

2. The Dame, usually the Main Boy's mother, traditionally played by a man in drag.



3. The Comic Lead, the Main Boy's zany friend or servant, often played by another celebrity, such as Robin Askwith, or wrestler Nick Aldis as the Genie in Aladdin (left).

4. The Love Interest, an attractive woman with whom the Principal Boy will find love. If the original story lacks hetero-romance, not to worry, one will be added.  For instance, in the Wizard of Oz panto, Dorothy falls in love with Elvis.

5. The Villain, male, female, or a drag performer.

Questions immediately arise: why the drag?  What does it mean to watch a woman in male drag fall in love with a woman?  Does it ameliorate the heterosexism of the boy-and-girl plotline?  Are the pantos gay?

Maybe not.  Maybe the drag serves to accentuate rather than challenge gender norms.

Although there have been pantos for adult gay audiences, such as Peta Pan (a lesbian version of Peter Pan), Get Aladdin, and Snow White and the Seven Poofs, two gay writers who grew up with the pantos felt that they weren't "for us."

And attempts to incorporate gay characters or situations into the traditional panto have met with hysterical hand-wringing of the "It's for kids!!!!" sort.

If you still haven't met your beefcake quota after seeing a panto, check out the Boxing Day Dips, hundreds of people -- mostly cute guys -- dashing into the ocean nude, or at least wearing as little as the censors will allow.

See also: 15 Reasons to Skip Christmas.

Peter Pan

I'm fine with drag now, but in 1966, I was freaked out by Mary Martin's portrayal of Peter Pan, a monstrous conflation of male/female and child/adult (Peter is traditionally played by an older woman, in the tradition of the British Christmas pantomime).

Three years later, in 1969, my uncle took me to the theatrical re-release of the Disney version (1953), with 15-year old Bobby Driscoll voicing Peter Pan. Although I was older, I was still freaked out by the dog wearing the nanny cap and the Lost Boys in bear, wolf, and skunk costumes, monstrous conflations of the human and the animal.

And the heterosexism, nearly as intense as in the Disney live action adventures like Light in the Forest with James MacArthur.

There's a story about Bobby Driscoll's date with Joe Dallesandro on Tales of West Hollywood.






Peter is subjected to the amorous flirtations of Tinker Bell and the mermaids, all of whom try to kill his current gal pal, Wendy. He goes beyond flirting with Princess Tiger Lily, whose kisses make him redden and tremble with erotic ecstasy.  Meanwhile, the Indian men explain how they "became red": they're all reddened with erotic ecstasy after being kissed by Indian women.

Captain Hook, one of Disney's standard gay-vague sophisticated villains, dislikes women and has an arguably erotic interest in Peter Pan.  He stays in Neverland year after year, in spite of the advice and near-mutiny of his crew, with only one goal: to "get" the boy.

Homoerotic desire is evil, unwholesome, and destructive.  Heterosexual desire inflames you.  A monstrous perversion of the original novels and plays by J. M. Barrie (who was gay in real life), where Peter Pan inhabits a homoerotic Eden, free from the constraint of "growing up" into heterosexual marriage.


But it gets worse.

In Hook (1991), Robin Williams plays a Peter Pan who grew up, forgot his identity, graduated from law school, and married Wendy's granddaughter.  When his children are kidnapped by Captain Hook (Dustin Hoffman), Tinkerbell (Julia Roberts) appears to restore his memory and his powers so he can rescue them.  She accomplishes this task by reminding Peter of the hetero-erotic Eden he abandoned:
"You know that place between sleep and awake?  The place where you still remember dreaming? That's where I'll always love you."

In Peter Pan (2003), Peter (13-year old Jeremy Sumpter, top photo and left) is dressed in wisps of leaves that lay bare unexpected bits of his body, like a prepubescent strip tease, as he struts about, emblematic of heterosexual eroticism.

He doesn't just flirt -- he desires Wendy, and the stories she tells, which all end with a kiss. He wrests her from her parents ("Sorry, we both can't have her), and their prepubscent passion ignites into a power that can defeat Captain Hook (who, by the way, is no longer gay-vague)

Let's not even mention the depressing Death of Peter Pan (1988),  about the "impossible love" of J.M. Barrie's adopted son Michael and his schoolmate Rupert Buxton.

See also: Jeremy Sumpter: A Normal Kid

Mae West: Gay Diva of the 1930s

She appeared in ten movies between 1933 and 1943 -- a rather small body of work (during the same period, Mickey Rooney appeared in over fifty).  And two others during the 1970s.  Yet she is instantly recognizable today, and her lines are still being quoted:

"It's not the men in your life, it's the life in your men."

"Goodness had nothing to do with it."

"Why don't you come up and see me sometime?"

Like 1970s sitcoms, comedy movies of the 1930s were about people not having sex.  The Hays Code forbade any implication of sex, premartial, marital, or extramarital, so you could only talk about it through code, hints, and innuendos.  Mae West was an expert on innuendo -- her body language and intonation could make the most innocent line sound like it wasn't.

Maybe that's why she became an icon for gay men of the pre-Stonewall era.  Faced with police-state repression, where discovery would be catastrophic, they learned to communicate with body language, gestures, code-words.  That's the origin of the term "gay."

She was also a favorite model for drag queens of the era.  In fact, she claimed that she invented drag.

Mae West had a number of close friends who were LGBT, such as bisexual Cary Grant, and wrote the first play to openly mention gay people. It was closed down by the police during a run-through in Connecticut in 1927, but copies are available.  Her attitude was rather progressive for the era: she believed that gay men were feminine souls trapped in male bodies, and thus doomed to sad, empty lives.  But they weren't innate criminals plotting the overthrow of civilization.

Unfortunately, her attitude stayed the same as seasons changed, and by the 1970s it was old-fashioned and homophobic.

In her last film appearance, Sextet (1978), Mae West is presented as an ongoing sex symbol.  There's nothing wrong with the elderly having active libidos, but seeing the 85-year old actress surrounded by fawning musclemen and married to 34-year old Timothy Dalton is rather ludicrous.

Still, we get to see the musclemen.

See also: Madonna.