Tom and Huck

In Tom and Huck (1995), an idiosyncratic take on Mark Twain's classic Tom Sawyer, the standard elements are retained: Tom paints the fence, gets engaged to Becky Thatcher (with a tight-close up kiss), has a fake funeral, gets lost in the cave.  But as the title suggests, the relationship between Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn is emphasized.

Tom is played by fourteen-year old Jonathan Taylor Thomas, whose short stature and baby face could easily mark him as prepubescent, especially given his previous cute-boy roles.  Huck, in contrast, is played by Brad Renfro (left), thirteen years old but already a head taller and considerably more mature looking than Thomas, and already saddled with a reputation for being bad, wild, and irascable.

Brad Renfro’s Huck is a creature of the wild, as unpredictable and enigmatic as forest sprite.  He appears without warning, lodged in a tree or lying on a river bank to comment on the action of the fools with the dispassionate interest of a Puck.

In one scene he appears unexpectedly before Tom, naked, his body coated with mud.  He explains – it is a form of camoflauge – but still we are shocked at the sight of an elemental spirit. Indeed, his wilderness home is no hut or cabin, but an earthen pit, the sort of place one might visit at night to conjure hobgoblins.

Huck has no need or desire for human relationships. When Tom says softly “I thought we was friends,” Huck retorts “You thought wrong. I ain’t got no friends.”

But Tom desires him with a intensity beyond friendship, beyond even erotic longing.  Though he knocks around with acts of minor mischief, conning his schoolmates and torturing his cousin, he yearns to be naked and muddy, to need no one, to be free.

Yet he also yearns for a connection with Huck: he seeks out the sprite, invites him places, gazes at him with glassy-eyed wonder, sometimes dares to put touch his shoulder or put an arm around his waist.  This version omits the traditional homoromantic idyll on the island, since, in a terrible paradox, if Tom ever succeeds in establishing a connection with Huck, it will destroy the very “no-strings” freedom that he finds so attractive.





Huck is mistaken, of course: he does need human relationships, and Tom is indeed his friend.  In the cave with Injun Joe, he risks his life to save him – not Becky, who has long since escaped, but Tom alone: “When a friend’s in trouble, you can’t run away.”

With an elemental human connection (and, coincidentally, a fortune), Huck accepts the Widow Douglas’s offer to civilize him.  He puts on pants and enrolls in school and church.    Now Tom feels betrayed.  He decides to stay in the pit and replace Huck as woodland sprite, proclaiming “Somebody’s got to carry on!”  But Huck convinces him that one can be both uninhibited and civilized, and the two walk off together to plan their minor acts of mischief. The outsider has become a schoolboy through the evocation of friendship, with Becky Thatcher long since forgotten.

Joey Lawrence: from Blossom to Bodybuilder

Joey Lawrence was a child star of the 1980s, appearing in kid-friendly movies (Little Shots, Summer Rental), sitcoms (Silver Spoons, Gimme a Break), and after school specials.  At the age of 14, he landed role as Joey Russo, brother of the unconventional Mayim Bialik in Blossom (1991-1995).

Gay boys  were more interested in Joey and Blossom's older brother, Tony (Michael Stoyanov), or in their hunky Dad (Ted Wass), or in Blossom's hunky boyfriend (David Lascher), and lesbians watched for the buddy-bond between Blossom and her best friend, Six (Jenna Von Oy).  Joey was mostly left on the sidelines, observing the action, uttering an occasional "Whoa!" to denote surprise, all but ignored by teen magazines.  Then, in a 1992 episode, Joey's shirt was "accidentally" ripped off, revealing a tan, slightly hairy, muscular chest that for some reason the teenager had kept hidden.   The studio audience gasped in amazement. Suddenly Joey -- and the producers realized that his chest was a bigger audience-draw than the catchphrase "Whoa!" 

He initiated a teen idol career, filming music videos while shirtless.  He appeared shirtless on the cover of his first album, Joey Lawrence, in 1993 (but not the more serious Soulmates in 1997).

After Blossom, his tv and movie appearances usually required his shirt to be off a lot.  He became more and more buffed as the 1990s progressed.  

Many of his movies involved buddy-bonding, most notably in the boys alone drama Jumping Ship (2001) with his brothers Matthew  and Andrew.  It appeared on the Disney Channel and then vanished, never to be released on DVD.  He also played a gay character in Confessions of a Sociopathic Social Climber (2005).

Today Joey -- now Joseph -- mostly draws the crowds with his singing, dancing, and acting talent.  Not that he ignores the power of his physique; in June 2012 he stripped with the Chippendales for a special 3-week engagement. Unfortunately, it was heterosexist, for "women only."

Otherwise Joseph is a staunch gay ally. 

Jughead's Girlfriends

Today Archie comics is unique in children's media in featuring an open, out gay teenage character, but during the 1980s and 1990s, it made an attempt to heterosexualize its most famous "woman-hater," Jughead Jones.

In a story prophetically entitled “Genesis. . .the Beginning” (Jughead Digest  36, 1985),  Jughead is up late one night when a beam of light flashes out of his TV set and renders him unconscious.  The next morning he has received a facelift, and there is an odd masculine symbol affixed to his beanie.  “I feel reborn. . .” he exclaims.  “I have strange tingling sensations. . .It’s like I have an inner power.  I have a desire to talk to. . .to touch. . .my gosh! A girl!”


Reggie doesn’t believe that his friend has suddenly been converted to heterosexuality: “That boy is one sickie!”  But Archie comes to his aid: “This is going to make him more normal!  He’s always been an oddball!”

Further stories during the late 1980s and early 1990s indicated that the publisher John Goldwater expected the readers to buy the explanation that Jughead had always liked girls, but was inhibited by lack of self-confidence, that his real self was a “self-confident, girl-loving, prowling wolf."

In a letter to the readers reprinted incessantly during the period, he noted slyly that Jughead had “changed” (but failed to give any details), and invited readers to comment on which version they liked better.

The consensus was overwhelming: readers liked the old Jughead, needed someone to stand apart from the boy and girl-crazed antics of his peers and demonstrate that heterosexual desire was not necessarily an universal of human experience.


Nevertheless, the girl-loving Jughead remained.  During the last 20 years, Jughead has been involved in  passionate affairs, tempestuous love-hate relationships, and casual dates with amateur psychologist Trula Twyst, health food nut Googie, jazz fan Debbie, and long-time admirer Big Ethel.

Paradoxically, the girl-hating Jughead is still around, often in the same issue; in Jughead 130 (2000), Jughead is in love with Trula Twyst in one story, but in another he saves an attractive female movie star from drowning and refuses a kiss as a reward.  For several years, his capsule biography on the Archie comics webpage referred both to his girlfriends and to his “rather abnormal dislike of girls."

Archie and Jughead

Though there are lots of hints and signals about same-sex desire in Archie Comics, Archie himself is ludicrously girl-crazy. He is failing French until Veronica helps him “study” by seductively reciting French words  – and then he gets an “A.”  He is an expert artist, but only when he paints girls.  Advised to chose a future career, he selects fashion photography because then he can be surrounded by girls all day.

Archie’s girl craziness rarely receives any criticism from parents or peers, and when someone does complain that he's "too" girl-crazy, he retorts that chasing girls is the only thing worth doing in life.  In “The Andrews Family Tree” (Archie Digest 108) , teenage brain Dilton discovers that all of Archie’s ancestors just missed brilliant scientific discoveries because of their girl-craziness  – they didn’t notice the apple falling because they were busy flirting, for instance. “I feel sorry for your ancestors,” Dilton says, “They were a bunch of losers.”  Archie responds  “And I feel sorry for poor Dilton!  He can’t tell us winners from the losers!”

It seems odd that this acme of girl-craziness has a best friend who "hates" girls. Or at least "hated," from the 1940s through the 1980s, until the character was retconned.  Jughead actually liked girls as friends, but he did not want to date. kiss, or cuddle them.  He was not attracted to women.

Archie and the gang generally accepted this "quirk," but on those rare instances where Jughead seemed to be interested in a girl, they were beside themselves with joy.  In “There’s This Girl, See” (Archie Annual Digest 74) Jughead says that he needs money because “There’s this girl,” and his friends joyfully hug each other and take a collection to finance his date.  When it turns out that the girl merely owes him money, which he needs for a date with a boy, his friends spend a spread panel banging their heads together and kicking themselves in frustration.

Jughead’s most passionate relationship was with his “best pal” Archie, a fact recognized as natural and inevitable by almost all of the other characters. In Archie Double Digest 9, Jughead is so closely attached to Archie that he even tags along on his date with Veronica.  She banishes him, but the softhearted Mr. Lodge intervenes and reunites them

In Archie Andrews Where Are You Digest 66, Archie is dumped by a girl, and his father cheers him up not by introducing him to another girl, but by sending him out on the town with Jughead.

In “Best Friends” (Archie Andrews, Where Are You? 43), Jughead invites Archie to a dance, explaining that “you know I don’t go with girls.” Archie agrees, but at the last minute Jughead receives an invitation to a pizza cook-off that he would rather attend, and gives the tickets to Betty.

When Betty presents herself as a substitute date, Archie is nonplussed.  “[Jughead] stood me up!” he exclaims, treating the snub exactly as if he were expecting a romantic date.  There is no hint that anyone perceives the event as “buddies hanging out”; if we knew nothing about the characters but this single story, we would certainly conclude that Archie considers both Jughead and Betty appropriate romantic partners.

Jughead was also frequently paired with Betty or Veronica, or both,  as a competitor for Archie’s affection. When all three successively try to lure Archie to fates unknown, he balks.  “How much can a man take!” he exclaims.  “Is it my fault I’m so desirable?”  Although this is a satirical story that ended with all of them characters rejecting Archie, the implication is clearly that Jughead, like the girls, has a romantic interest in Archie.

Gradually becoming aware of the existence of gay people, Archie Comics tried -- not always successfully -- to heterosexualize the character of Jughead during the 1990s.  But not to worry, in 2011 they made up for it by introducing a "real" gay character.

Most recently, Jughead has been retconned as asexual, adding to the sexual diversity of Riverdale High.