Peter Parros: Hookups with the Hunk of "Knightrider"

I never saw Knight Rider (1982-1986), with 1980s hunk David Hasselhoff as a secret agent with a magic talking car. I had other things to do on Friday nights, and besides, the premise made me uncomfortable:
The title is a pun on "night riders," the Ku Klux Klan.
Michael Knight works for the Foundation for Law and Government, which sounds right-wing reactionary.
And the car, KITT, is voiced by William Daniels, who played a disgusting homophobe on St. Elsewhere.

But I did like Peter Parros, who played Michael's sidekick in Season 4. A scene where they are tied up side-by-side in muscle shirts got saved to a VHS tape, and made the rounds of West Hollywood parties, along with frequent stories of hookups.  (But usually in a three-way with David Hasselhoff, which made the veracity of the stories suspect.)

Is there anything else you need to know about him?

How about: Knight Rider was his first starring role.  He moved on to play a variety of soap opera hunks, on One Life to Live, The Young and the Restless, and As the World Turns.

In The Haves and the Have Nots (2013-), a soap opera with a primarily African-American cast, Peter plays David Harrington (nice soap opera name!), who is supportive of his gay son in spite of his wife's homophobia.

Peter has never made any public coming-out statements, but I know several guys in West Hollywood who claim to have seen his beneath -the-belt attributes  (in a word, spectacular).

Watching Monty Python's Flying Circus

When PBS came to Rock Island, it brought us a full-fledged British invasion. Sitcoms (Father Dear Father, Good Neighbors), science fiction (The Prisoner, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy), costume drama (Upstairs Downstairs) -- and since they were on PBS, they were all educational, approved even by teachers who derided all other tv as "mindless trash."

Monty Python's Flying Circus was the most bizarre of the lot.  Ostensibly a comedy-sketch show with a regular troupe of performers, like Saturday Night Live, it had sketches that bled into other sketches, or stopped halfway through, weird semi-animated characters commenting on the action, visual puns, in-jokes, moments of sudden chaos.  In Britain, there were antecedents in The Goon Show  and This Was the Week That Was, but in America we had never seen anything like it.


And we loved it.  We repeated catch phrases over and over (I still use "Nudge nudge, wink wink!").

We discussed the inner significance of sketches with the zeal of literature scholars.

We sang "The Lumberjack Song.": "I like to put on lady's clothes and hang around in bars.."

We went to the movies, Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975) and Monty Python's Life of Brian (1979).

In retrospect, we didn't like Monty Python very often.  Many sketches were incomprehensible, too bizarre, too busy savaging British programming conventions that we had never heard of.  And why are men in drag portraying elderly women with Yorkshire accents by definition hilarious?


But some of the sketches were -- and still are --anarchic gems.

Dead Parrot ("This is an ex-parrot!")

Hungarian Translation ("My hovercraft is full of eels.")

Nudge Nudge Wink Wink ("Is your wife...into photographs?")

Spam ("No one expects the Spanish Inquisition!")


There was a fair amount of nudity, many more exposed chests and abs than you would ever see on American tv.  Eric Idle (left) was particularly likely to be displayed in the altogether.

And  there were few swishy stereotyped gay characters, After Graham Chapman came out to the other troupe members in 1967, they were careful to avoid overt stereotyping of gay men, although their distaste for drag queens is often apparent.

In fact, a number of sketches skewered homophobia, as when one character suspects that another is a "poof," and casually shoots him.  Or a "Prejudice Game," in which anti-gay prejudice is placed on equal footing with racial and religious prejudice.

See also: Saturday Night Live.

The Goldenboy in the Attic: Jeb Stuart Adams

There are lots of threatened gay-vague kids in movies and tv, but not many are threatened by their own parents.  Flowers in the Attic (1987) is an exception.  It was based on a 1979 novel by Virginia Andrews, about four children who go to live with their grandmother because their mother doesn't like them.  But Grandma doesn't like them either; she locks them in the attic for several years, and finally tries to poison them.  The eldest two, Chris and Cathy, develop an incestuous romance.

The movie omits the incest, thus omitting any hint of heterosexual interest, transforming Chris (Jeb Stuart Adams) into a gay-vague teenager.  Grandma (Louise Fletcher) struts around with a Bible, accusing Chris and the other kids of "sin," which of course adds to the gay symbolism.

The incest angle, murderous relatives, and some nasty plot elements made the film controversial, but it didn't help Jeb's career.

Blond goldenboy Jeb Stuart Adam looked like he sprang up from the Appalachia of the Dukes of Hazzard, but he was actually the son of gay actor Nick Adams and his wife, Carol Nugent, and he grew up among the Hollywood glitterati.

His angelic smile and a smooth, firm but not muscular chest, making him perfect for roles as threatened kids: threatened by drug dealers on Quincy ME (1982),  a bad father in His Mistress (1984), and a hippie cult on Airwolf (1985).


He also had significant supporting roles in The Goonies and Once Bitten, plus a 7-episode story arc (1977-78) on Baa Baa Black Sheep, about World War II fighter pilots led by Pappy Boyington (Robert Conrad).

After Flowers in the Attic, Jeb was threatened a few more times, in They Live (1988), Dragnet (1990), and Sworn to Vengeance (1993), but you can't play threatened kids forever. He retired from acting and moved into production design and stuntwork.

Today Jeb has a successful real estate business in Ventura, California, specializing in the million-plus market.

Suddenly Susan: Biceps, Brooke Shields, and Pete the Gay Mail Boy

In the fall of 1997, you had four main tv choices on Monday nights: America's Funniest Home Videos, the hundredth series starring Bill Cosby, the uber-religious Seventh Heaven, and Suddenly Susan (1996-2000).  Guess which won?

It was one of many workplace sitcoms about Young Female Journalists with Big Ideas who butt heads with stick-in-the-mud magazine or newspaper editors, in this case Susan (Brooke Shields, best known for Blue Lagoon nearly twenty years before) and Jack (Judd Nelson, the homophobic bigot best known for Breakfast Club nearly twenty years before).


Suddenly single after a long engagement, Susan is assigned to write a column about what it's like to be...um...single in contemporary San Francisco.  But she, naturally, wants to do more.  And, of course, she and Jack have a "You're so arrogant!" Sam-and-Diane romance going on.

Her main coworkers included:

1. Photographer Luis (Nestor Carbonell, top photo), a Latino hunk ("Today is the day I work on my biceps.")
2. Sardonic restaurant critic Vickie (gay-positive comedian Kathy Griffin, right)
3. Susan's arch-nemesis, tough-as-nails reporter Maddy (Andrea Bendewald).
4. Pete (Billy Stevenson), the mail boy.






5. Hip music reporter Todd (David Strickland).

Two things made Suddenly Susan memorable (excluding Nestor Carbonell's biceps).

1. On March 22, 1999, David Strickland committed suicide.  Instead of replacing him without comment, the producers decided to incorporate his death into the series.

When Todd fails to report for work and doesn't respond to his pager, his coworkers spend the day searching for him and worrying.  Finally they congregate in his apartment.  The episode ends with the telephone ringing.  Everyone looks around, afraid to answer, knowing what news is coming.  It gave me goosebumps. Very effective.




2. Pete the Mail Boy.  Although he appeared in only 15 of the 93 episodes, he was still memorable as just about the only gay character on television who wasn't portrayed as a swishy stereotype.  In fact, he was dimwitted and rather a nerd.

When he married his boyfriend, the equally nerdish Hank (Fred Stoller, left), he talked the homophobic Jack into participating -- quite a memorable accomplishment for the 1990s.

See also: Just Shoot Me