The Blue Hawk

What gay boy could resist buying Peter Dickinson's The Blue Hawk (1976): the cover displayed a gorgeous young man with olive skin and black curly hair, his muscles visible beneath his a blue robe.

The British edition was almost as good.



















He is Tron, a teenager of humble parentage in a nameless Egypt-like kingdom, who has been raised to become a priest.  In the midst of a turgid plot involving palace intrigues and invasions from without, Tron meets the young King, who is quite obviously taken with him, inviting him to dinner and to go hawking, and asking “where will you sleep tonight?”

Neither the King nor Tron has ever been in a non-coercive relationship, so they grope their way toward love with many hesitations and missteps.  Tron vows to “serve” the King, who obligingly sends him off on a secret mission.  He gets lost, and everyone thinks that he is dead.

When he returns, the King  comes “striding forth with outstretched arms, his whole being seeming to pulse with pleasure in the living instant,” but instead of telling Tron how much he loves him, he hides (barely) behind metaphor: he whispers that losing Tron was like “the emptiness when you lose a favorite hawk, but worse, far worse.”  His master’s pet: close, but not close enough.

When they are back in the palace, the King insists that Tron not leave his side; their arms are linked or his hand is on Tron’s shoulder or he is stroking Tron’s hair even at the most important of council meetings.  But if Tron is merely a favored pet, why does the King constantly seek his advice on complex matters of state?  On a second secret assignment, Tron is wounded, and the King rushes to his side.  But again, neither overtly declares his love:

The King came in.  He looked very tired. . .but the air around around him seemed to tingle with excitement and happiness.  He stretched his arm down in a gesture that would have become a hug of joy in their meeting if Tron had not been wounded; life and warmth seemed to flow from his fingertips.

One can admire and respect a subordinate, but one can only love an equal.  At the end of the novel, he is on his way to ask the King if they can become – not master and servant or king and faithful subject, but something else that Dickinsen does not and perhaps cannot describe, not in 1976, a same-sex love that is exclusive and permanent.

Animal House

Today the anarchic campus comedy Animal House (1978) seems impossibly homophobic: there are discussions of "closet cases"; characters call each other "fruit" (for wearing a beanie), "homo" (for refusing to sexually assault an unconscious girl), and "faggot" (for falling down).  Apparently they find nothing more disgusting than a gay person.

We shouldn’t be surprised. Two of the writers, Douglas Kenney and Chris Miller, came directly from the staff of National Lampoon, a magazine well known for its homophobic humor, and four actors were solicited from Saturday Night Live, the most homophobic program on television during the period (only John Belushi agreed).

What joy could gay teenagers in the 1970s possibly find in watching homophobes seduce every woman in sight?  

1. There is a TON of beefcake.  The Delta House fratboys are toga-clad, toned, taunt, and tanned almost constantly.  Boon (Peter Riegert) has a stunning shirtless scene.  The rival frat, including Kevin Bacon, have an underwear-clad hazing ritual that is not to be missed.

2. Both Peter Riegert and Tom Hulce, who played Pinto, are reputedly gay.

3. In spite of the endless scenes of bedding and gazing at girls, Animal House is about buddy-bonding.  Two of the fratboys, nerdish Hoover (James Widdoes), and leather-clad anarchic D-Day (Bruce McGill), never display heterosexual interest at all.  The others treat the quest for heterosexual sex as a game, something to talk about later, during their important lives with their friends.  Only Boon has a girlfriend, Katy (Karen Allen), who is constantly reprimanding him for ignoring her in favor of his male friends.

In the grammar of the teen anarchy film, same-sex relationships must end when the rowdy frat boys graduate and accede to their heterosexual destiny, marrying and fathering children. Here, however, the concluding “where are they now” series of freeze shots mostly  skips heterosexual performance – in favor of discussions of their careers: Hoover is a district attorney, Bluto a senator, Flounder a sensitivity trainer, and Otter a gynecologist, transferring his interest in the female form from the personal to the professional, out of the bedroom and into the clinic. In the end heterosexual “destiny” fails to claim them.

Star Man's Son

Andre Norton lived for almost 100 years (1912-2005), and published over 100 science fiction novels, many with gay content.  I stumbled upon her Star Man's Son (1952) in 1978, during my freshman year in college:

 A new edition came out that made the post-Apocalyptic youth (named Fors) look like Arnold Schwarzeneggar, and his telepathic mutant lynx as big as a tiger.  The 1952 and 1968 editions, with a different name, make him smaller but still buffed, and the cat a kitten.

Three hundred years after a nuclear holocaust destroyed civilization, the young hard-bodied Fors of the barbaric Eyrie tribe is exploring one of the dead cities. He observes a man from a strange tribe, with an appearance that is new and obviously pleasing: “His wide-shouldered, muscular bronze body was bare to the waist and at least five shades darker than the most deeply tanned of the Eyrie men.”

Arskane is singing, and his song “affected Fors queerly, sending an odd shiver up his backbone.”

The stranger is attacked by Beast Things (mutated rats), captured and dragged off, and although they have never met or spoken, Fors endures two days of hardship and incredible danger to rescue him. 

 He drags the unconscious and injured Arskane up from a pit lined with poisoned spikes (“his big body was flaccid,” Norton helpfully tells us), carries him to an abandoned building, and spends four days nursing him back to health. 

 Eventually, when Arskane is feeling better and his big body is no longer flaccid, Fors suggests that they return to his home in the Eyrie, for the time being anyway. Arskane jumps at the idea of the two of them staying together, but suggests that Fors’ suspicious tribal elders might have trouble accepting a dark-skinned stranger. They might have more luck among his tribe, the Dark People.

The journey is arduous, with many opportunities for one of the pair to be captured and the other to conduct a gallant rescue, and so many instances of touching, holding, and pulling each other close that I stopped counting. Arskane begins by calling Fors his “comrade,” then “friend,” and finally “brother.” When they arrive at the Dark People’s camp and meet with the chief, Arskane pleads the case that Fors should remain:

Arskane: [Fors] has saved my life in the City of the Beast Things, and I have named him brother.

Chief: He is not of our breed.

Arskane: He is my brother!

The chief finally relents, but Fors is surprised and not entirely pleased by Arskane’s ardor. He hadn’t planned on marrying Arskane!   Instead, he returns to the Eyrie to work on an alliance between the tribes.

Arskane accepts the rejection stoically, but with some deep unspoken hurt: he walks away “without looking back.”

In 1978, I was outraged by the ending.  When men and women meet in science fiction, they stick around.  Why do men meet men, then say goodbye and walk away?  Why do so many authors insist on telling us that same-sex relations are trivial, transitory, unrelated to the permanent social structures of kin and community?

Time Tunnel

Time Tunnel lasted for only a season (1966-67), but it was an obsession; I bought (or rather, asked for) every merchandising tie-in available, a coloring book, Gold Key comics, a Viewmaster, a board game.

When the government threatens to shut down the costly Time Tunnel project for lack of verifiable results, impetuous scientist Tony (former teen idol James Darren, dark and intense in a green turtleneck sweater) decides to become a human guinea pig.  He runs through the tunnel, and is transported through time and space to the Titanic hours before it hit the iceberg.  Coworker Doug (Robert Colbert, tall and broad-shouldered in a dumb-looking business suit) decides to follow, for no logical reason except that he can’t imagine living without Tony.

In each episode, Doug and Tony are transported to moments of tremendous danger (Jericho just before the walls fell, Krakatoa just before it exploded, Pearl Harbor just before the attack).  Fortunately, they are experts in many forms of self-defense and fluent in dozens of ancient languages.  Their co-workers can only watch in horror, and sometimes repair the tunnel sufficiently to send them on a new jump to a moment of tremendous danger.  “At least they’re together,” fellow scientist Lee Meriwether muses.

Doug and Tony are constantly landing on top of each other, being tied together by villains, and otherwise forced into intimate physical contact, as if the Time Tunnel is playing matchmaker.  But perhaps it has no need: neither of the scientists ever refers to a wife or girlfriend back home, and only rarely do they flirt with any of the women they meet on their travels.  Instead, they grab wrists, touch shoulders, wrap arms around waists, exactly like romantic partners in peril.  Nearly every episode has one of them captured and imprisoned or strung up somewhere, so that the other can embark on a daring rescue and say teary-eyed, “Doug [or Tony], I thought you were. . . .”

Tied spread-eagle side by side in “Pirates of Deadman’s Island” (February 1967), they seem to be holding hands; Tony’s hand is actually poised slightly above Doug’s, but this is discernable only with a modern freeze frame.  In the last episode of the series, “Town of Terror” (April 1967), Tony is startled by gunfire and jumps against Doug, pressing both hands flat against his chest, a gesture that I have seen elsewhere only in women seeking comfort in the mighty arms of men.  They are being presented quite overtly as lovers.

I cannot imagine that anyone could be oblivious to the romance between Doug and Tony,  even in the dark ages of 1966; certainly not the producer, Irwin Allen, whose 1970’s science fiction series often resist heteronormativity , and least of all the actors themselves. Robert Colbert, who has guested on forty years of tv programs, from Hawaiian Eye to Frasier, is best known as James Garner’s foppish (i.e., gay) brother on Maverick.

James Darren spent his twenties playing outcasts, loners, victims of prejudice, a jazz musician in love with Gene Krupa (Sal Mineo), and a  race car driver so smitten with a male acquaintance that he marries his sister (in The Lively Set, 1964), while hitting the pop charts with remarkably bitter songs about romantic betrayals: “Goodbye Cruel World” (1961), “Hail to the Conquering Hero” (1962), “Pin a Medal on Joey” (1963).  After Time Tunnel, he took no more outcast or loner roles.  Perhaps playing someone who found love cheered him up.

By the way, in 2006 there was an execrable tv movie version that heterosexualized the characters.