Cody Simpson and His Gay Crew

When I was little, I thought of Australia as a "good place," where same-sex desire was open and accepted.  Visiting Australia in the summer of 1986 (just before moving to Japan with Alan) didn't change my mind.  But I might have to change it after hearing about Cody Simpson.

Born in 1997, Cody Simpson began to record songs on youtube, and was discovered in 2009.  He has four albums to date.  The most recent, Surfer's Paradise (2013), includes the following songs:

"Pretty Brown Eyes": a girl with brown eyes.
"La Dee Dee": a girl he likes.
"No Ceiling": no ceiling on our love.
"Sinking In": falling in love
"Summertime of Our Lives": being young and in love
"Imma Be Cool": he can't find a girl who gets him.
"If You Left Him for Me": the girl he likes, likes another boy
"Love": "love, love, love, love, love."

You get the idea: not a lot about social issues or friendship, lots of "girl! girl! girl!"

He has one acting credit, playing one of the "ambassadors for peace" along with other surfers and models in Isolated (2013), along with Chris Galya and BooBoo Stewart.

Many musicians are gay-friendly in real life, even when their music is heterosexist, but in January 2012, Cody and best friend  and occasional collaborator Jake Thrupp (left) appeared in a UStream discussion with fans, and dropped the "g" bomb:

Jake: Do we have to say their names when we respond?
Cody: All that gay stuff, like 'No, I'm not gay like Campbell [Carsley].
Jake: Look at their twitter [names]

Cody took down the UStream and apologized to fans for "calling them gay."  Big insult. no doubt.

Campbell Carsley (left) is another of Cody's friends and occasional collaborators, who also throws "gays" around at random to mean inept, inane, or uncool. He has apparently invented a dance called the "Are you gay?" shuffle.

Other friends and occasional collaborators include Josh Winnington and Oliver Crane.

Sorry, I can't tell them apart.  They're all blond, buffed Aussie teenagers who think "gay" is something bad.

For gay-positive Australian performers, check out Xavier Samuel and Ryan Kwanten.

Beerfest: Gay-Positive Guys Behaving Badly

The first thing you notice about Beerfest (2006) is the lack of emphasis on female breasts.  The DVD cover zeroes in on the breasts of a fraulein serving beer, but in the movie itself, the frauleins are tastefully dressed, and manage to serve the beer without the camera going wild.  In fact, there's minimal girl-ogling, no hetero-romantic plotline, and no fade-out kiss.

The second thing you notice is the lack of homophobic panic and gay slurs, very unusual for a "guys behaving badly" movie.  In fact, one of the protagonists is gay but not a swishy stereotype.

It's about two brothers, Jan and Todd Wolfhouse (Paul Soter and Eric Stolhanske) who must defend their grandfather's honor by winning an underground drinking competition.  They bring their friends, competitive eater Landfill (Kevin Heffernan), scientist Fink (Steve Lemme), and gay prostitute Barry (Jay Chandrasekhar).  Each uses his special talents to defeat the evil German team.  There's also a stolen beer recipe, a spy, an identical twin brother, and a great-grandma who was a prostitute.

Not a great movie, but the lack of homophobia and non-stereotyped gay character are both refreshing.

The main cast belongs to the Broken Lizard Comedy Troupe, formed when they were students at Colgate University.  Their Super Troopers (2001) also lacks homophobia, and has a bisexual character who isn't evil: the cop Ramathorn (Jay Chandrasekhar), who makes a date with a male-female couple, and approaches them both with equal gusto.

Kevin Heffernan bragged that his  nude scenes (including this frontal) got him named Bear of the Month by a gay magazine.  Steve Lemme complained that he hasn't won any gay awards, though he is quite muscular and  often semi-nude.

I don't think any are gay in real life, but they certainly sound like gay allies.

However, Club Dread (2004) contains a homophobic slur, and Slammin' Salmon (2009) contains a panicked reaction to an implication of gayness.

Why do they alternate gay-positive and homophobic?

Conan the Barbarian

Robert E. Howard created Conan, the barbarian hero who wanders an antediluvian sword-and-sorcery world,  in a series of stories for the pulp Weird Tales beginning in 1932.  Though not terribly muscular, according to the taste of the age, Conan was aggressively heterosexual.  Other barbarian heroes in 1930s pulps traveled alone or with same-sex sidekicks and disdained women as unwelcome harbingers of civilization.  But Conan rescued women, fell in love with them, and usually intended to marry them before they were killed by sorcerers or turned out to be witches.  He had no room for a sidekick; those men he did manage to befriend invariably betrayed him before the story ended.

The stories fell out of favor for a generation or two, but they were rediscovered during the Swinging Sixties.  In 1966, heroic fantasy writers L. Sprague DeCamp and Lin Carter put them in chronological order, added additional materials, and published the series.  Other authors added their own tales to the mythos, specializing in endings in which Conan ravishes the naked lady after rescuing her (the original stories kept Conan chaste).

The covers, often by Frank Frazetta,  showed a nicely muscled Conan, but it was hard to find one that didn't also show a naked lady.

Marvel began the comic book series in 1970, with both adaptions and original stories. In 1974, the magazine-size Savage Sword of Conan printed more "adult" material (that is, you see breasts).

I bought the comic books whenever the covers DIDN'T show a naked lady lying on the ground, clutching Conan's leg (couldn't they stand up?).  So about one issue in six.

The stories inside had not a hint of bonding; women exist to be rescued and then either betray Conan or fall in love with him, and men exist to torture him.

But at least there was plenty of beefcake.

Meatballs: Bill Murray mentors a gay kid at summer camp

I never liked Bill Murray. When he first appeared on Saturday Night Live in 1977, I was still somewhat homophobic, and I found his flamboyantly feminine manner and Castro Clone outfits disquieting.  Though I was out by 1979, my initial disquiet remained, so when my brother recommended Meatballs (1979), I said "No way!"  But then he made a cryptic comment: "It's the kind of move you'll like."

Bill Murray played hetero-horny summer camp counselor Tripper Harrison, who leads the boys in his care on panty raids at girl’s camp across the lake, and meanwhile romances female counselor Roxanne (Kate Lynch). Heterosexual desire is assumed the goal of every journey and the motivation for every action; an Internet Movie Database reviewer writes that it is about: “teens and young adults living their summer with no concerns other than guys hooking up with girls and girls hooking up with guys.” Even in his pep talk to the track team, Tripper presumes that the only reason boys participate in sports is to get girls:

Even if we win, if we win, hah!. . .It just wouldn't matter because all the really good looking girls would still go out with the guys from Mohawk [the rival camp] because they've got all the money! It just doesn't matter if we win or if we lose. It just doesn’t matter!

Director Ivan Reitman got his start with the sleaze-fests Foxy Ladies (1971) and Cannibal Girls (1973), and went on to produce Kindergarten Cop (1990) and Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot (1992), films that manage to defuse the erotic potential of man-mountains Arnold Schwartzenegger and Sylvester Stallone by making them comedy dupes. Could we expect even a moment of love to intrude into Meatballs?

But then there was Rudy.

Chris Makepeace, a fifteen-year old Montreal native with dark blue eyes, pale soft skin, and oddly red lips, plays the shy and feminine Rudy, who falls in love with the boisterous Tripper. In an early scene, Rudy notes that Tripper jogs past his cabin every morning, so he conspires to jog himself and arrange an “accidental” meeting. Though oblivious to the romantic signals -- or pretending to be to avoid having to tell the boy "sorry, not interested" -- Tripper accepts Rudy’s friendship with panache, and even adopts him as a special project, coaching him to become star of the camp track team.

 Oddly, Tripper never tries to force heterosexual desire upon Rudy, never asks what girl he would care to sleep with or invites him on a panty raid. Perhaps on some level, everyone concerned with the film knew that it would do violence to the character of Rudy to make him abandon his sweetly romantic attraction to Tripper and fixate on some girl.

Chris Makepeace went on to play many other characters informed by same sex desire; he fell in love with high school bully Adam Baldwin in My Bodyguard (1980), sleaze-teen Lance Kerwin in The Mysterious Stranger (1982), and a young Tom Hanks in Mazes and Monsters (1982), before settling down to the more heteronormative Captive Hearts (1987) and Aloha Summer (1988).

 More recently, in Synapse (1996), he played a man who gets his brain transplanted into a woman’s body, allowing him both gender-bending and nudity. To the best of my knowledge, he has never married.