The Banned Beefcake Photo of Michael Burns

You may not realize it, but every word and image on Blogger is carefully analyzed by an army of censors to make sure there are no penises.  Bloody, decapitated heads and eviscerated corpses are fine,but God forbid anyone find out that men have dangling parts.

This photo doesn't show one,but it still got me banned from Blogger Advertisements, because he's obviously covering it with a towel.

It happens to be one of the iconic beefcake photos of the 1960s, with handsome, muscular 22-year old Michael Burns hiding his penis behind that towel in That Cold Day in the Park (1969): Michael's character is an innocent, possibly mute,  somewhat addled Boy taken in by the middle-aged, repressed Frances (Sandy Dennis).  She provides food, shelter, nice clothes, whatever he needs, and he provides a coy eroticism.

When Frances' flirtation becomes too aggressive, the Boy leaves, returns to his hippie commune, and we discover that the innocent-addled bit was all an act. He often defrauds the establishment that way, acquiring free food and favors in return for displaying his body and feigning a willingness to have sex.






The Boy represented the desire and dread with which the adults approached the youth counterculture, but he also served as a metaphor for the game gay male teens must play: pretend to be interested in women, let them desire you, but pull back at the last moment. Always remember that your real desires, your real emotions, your real life lies elsewhere.

Born in 1947, Michael Burns was a very busy child actor, with starring roles as an orphan kid on Wagon Train (1960-65) and the kid brother on the overtly homoerotic It's a Man's World (1962-63), plus guest spots on about 30 Westerns, dramas, and comedies.

But other than That Cold Day in the Park, he was most famous for a 1967 episode of Dragnet, in which the deadpan detectives investigate a houseful of hippies who are using the "new drug menace, LSD," and going crazy.  Michael plays Blueboy, who has half of his face painted blue and screeches in paranoia before dying. Again, the desire and dread of the youth counterculture.

Michael retired from acting in 1977 to pursue an academic career.  He became a professor of history at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts, a specialist on the Dreyfuss Affair of 1890s France.

Dick York: Bewitching Beefcake

I imagine that most gay male and heterosexual female Baby  Boomers have been desperate to see Dick York with his shirt off ever since their diaper days, when they saw him eye-bulge as Darren Stephens, mortal married to the witch Samantha (Elizabeth Montgomery) on the gay-symbolism-heavy "my secret" sitcom Bewitched (1964-69)  

Good luck.  As a stick-in-the-mud advertising executive in the Mad Men sixties, Darren usually wore a business suit, slept in pajamas, and was never shown in the shower or at the beach.  Dick was suffering from a debilitating back injury that prohibited most stunts and action scenes; finally the writers had to find reasons to keep Darren in bed for entire episodes.

Prior to Bewitched, Dick starred in various Westerns, thrillers, and dramas.  I haven't seen any of them except for Inherit the Wind (1960), but they probably didn't include significant beefcake.

But you can find everything on youtube.  A  compilation clip called Dick York: the Sexiest Man Alive seems to be displaying clips from Dick's very early work, playing high schoolers in "educational films" such as "How Popular Are You?" (1951).  They were used in classrooms for promoting conformity and compulsory heterosexuality.

In Bewitched, Darren was the "straight" man, in more ways than  one.  Not only the eye-bulging, slow-burning spectator to the mayhem, but aggressively heterosexual, faithful to Samantha but tempted by slithery witches, wood nymphs, sirens, and human women every five seconds.

But the compiler finds some gay-subtext images.  Dick and another boy check out each other's equipment in the shower (top photo), and he demonstrates that he is popular by walking off arm in arm with the school hunk.

There are also a few pics, very small, of an older Dick York at poolside, courtesy of Democratic Underground.  Not a bad physique.  Too bad Darren didn't get zapped out of his clothes from time to time.

Parker Lewis Can't Lose

The 1980s was the era of the teen operator, the teenager who works behind the scenes, enraging tyrannical assistant principals and college deans.  He starred in virtually every TGIF sitcom, from Family Ties to Growing Pains; he used his stealth to save the day in Toy Soldiers; he ruled the school in Ferris Bueller's Day Off.

Parker Lewis Can't Lose (1990-93) was a late entry in the teen operator canon, a Ferris Bueller clone that aired on Fox on Sunday nights.

Parker (Corin Nemec, left) ruled the school with flashy costumes and surreal antics, along with his bud, the uber-cool Mikey Randall (Billy Jayne, previously Billy Jacoby, below), and their  nerdish protege Jerry Steiner (Troy W. Slaten).

They had several allies, including inarticulate man-mountain Kube (Abraham Benrubi) and Nick Comstock (Paul Johannson), manager of their diner hangout.

And several nemeses, including the cartoon-villain principal Grace Musso (Melanie Chartoff), who was obsessed with men with "big hands," and her vampiric crony, Lemmer (Taj Johnson), who could appear and disappear at will.

There was a lot of heterosexism; about half of the episodes involve somebody trying to get with a heterosexual crush.

But Parker and Mikey made a cute couple, with Jerry as their surrogate son, and later Kube found a soulmate in the obese Coach Kohler (John Pinette), in spite of their respective hetero-crushes.

In the third season, hunky bricklayer Brad Penny (Harold Pruett) became interested in Parker, and tried to win his "friendship."  When Parker rejected him, he got revenge by stealing Jerry, who dropped  out of school to join him in the career of bricklaying.

After Parker Lewis, Corin Nemec had a stable career, mostly playing sleazoids: two serial killers, an Adolph Hitler lookalike, and "himself" (in the webseries Star-Ving with buddy David Faustino).

He was the associate producer of the evangelical Christian film Hidden Secrets (2006), and starred as an ex-gay guy who can't accept God's forgiveness for his sinful past.  Yuck.

Billy Jayne had some acting and directing credits, but he's better known now as a commercial producer.

Troy Slaten is now an attorney.

See also: David Faustino: Bud Bundy is star-ving, humiliated, butt-nekkid, and a gay ally

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.