Avatar: The Last Airbender: Sokka Loves Zuko

If you have a free hour or two, check deviantart.com or fanfiction.net for  "Aang Sokka" or "Sokka Zuko."  You'll get millions of fan fiction romances, homoromantic or homoerotic pictures, and endless arguments over which anime boy is in love with which.

Avatar: The Last Airbender was a Nickelodeon animated tv series (2005-2008) that followed the conventions of anime.  Set in a medieval, vaguely Japanese fantasy world, it featured teenage martial artists with mystical powers struggling against the evil Fire Lord and his minions.

The main characters were:

1. Aang (Noah Ringer in the 2010 movie),  the last Airbender, a martial artist with mystical powers.
2. Katara (Nicola Peltz), a female Waterbender.
2. Sokka (Jackson Rathbone, top photo), the older brother of Katara, who doesn't have any bending powers.
4. Zuko (Dev Patel, left), a Firebender, the exiled prince of the Fire Kingdom who eventually becomes their ally.

The gay subtexts are blatant, obvious, and, according to most fans, deliberate, a reflection of the same-sex romances commonplace in "real" Japanese anime.  Sokka and Zuko are really into each other (sorry, I meant Sokka and Aang, or Aang and Zuko, or Sokka and one of the minor characters, or Zuko and.....)

It was an enormous success, spawning video games, comic books, action figures, toys, books, a feature film, and a large fan base that writes stories, draws pictures, and dresses up for cosplay. In 2012, Nickelodeon premiered a sequel series, The Legend of Korra, featuring Aang's son.

David Manners: Dracula's Boyfriend

Dracula (1931) begins with a scene in which the Count (Bela Lugosi) shows  real estate broker Renfield (Dwight Frye) to a bedroom in his castle, leers at him, fondles his chest, and then looks suggestively at the bed.  It's a surprisingly homoerotic scene in a movie otherwise given over to heterosexual exploits (Dracula doesn't even follow through on his sexual assault; he sends a clutch of female vampires to finish the job).

There was at least one gay actor in the movie, David Manners, but he played a role without gay subtexts, Harker, the love interest to Dracula's main victim Mina.

Born in 1901, the wealthy, aristocratic David Manners began his career as a swimsuit model.  He starred in 39 movies from 1929 to 1936, including tearjerkers, romantic comedies, and horror, but only two, that I know of, had strong gay subtexts:

1. The war movie Journey's End (1930), directed by famous gay director James Whale. Two soldiers in World War I, Raleigh (David Manners) and Osborne (Ian Maclaren) (above) are sent on a dangerous mission behind German lines.   They fall in love during the arduous journey. Raleigh is killed, and Osborne is overcome with grief.

2. The Truth About Youth (1931): Richard Carewe (Conway Teale) and his young ward, The Imp (David Manners) are both in love with the same woman.

Manners left Hollywood in 1936 for the stage.  During his long career, he was also a cowboy, a movie producer, and a painter.  After his partner of thirty years, Bill Mercer, died in 1978, he embarked upon a second (or third or fourth?) career as a novelist.


 He died in 1998.

Girl Meets World: Teencom with Actual, Real Gay Characters

I didn't think we really needed a Disney Channel sequel to Boy Meets World (1993-2000), the TGIF sitcom about a high schooler (Ben Savage), his girlfriend Topanga (Danielle Fischel), and his boyfriend Shawn (Rider Strong).  It was great, loaded down with gay subtexts that the actors seemed fully aware of.  But what contemporary kid has ever heard of it?

Then I saw the picture of the boy on the elephant.

I can't think of anything to say about it.

He's 14-year old Teo Halm, who has just signed on to play the older brother.  He doesn't have many acting credits, but checking out his tweets and instagrams makes me rather certain that his character will be gay-vague.

The teencom, to premiere in January 2014, makes Corey a middle-school history teacher, and Topanga the owner of a restaurant specializing in pudding. Shawn may be stopping by occasionally.

 The central characters are Corey and Topanga's 12-year old daughter Riley (Rowan Blanchard) and her bff Sabrina (Maya Fox).  Girl-power lesbian subtext, anyone?

Riley has two brothers, Elliott (Teo Halm) and Louis (August Maturo), an obnoxious cousin (Leon Sparks), and a crush (Peyton Meyer, left).

Peyton's tweets and instagrams (top photo, for instnace) also suggest that his character might be gay-vague.

Or not.  Apparently this series will be a teencom first, featuring an actual, real, live gay character.  Wearing a Sign and everything.

No word on whether he or she is a regular, recurring, or one-shot.

But, in a few months, barring a last minute decision to close the closet door, the Disney Channel will breaking the silence.

Update: At the last minute, Disney decided to scrap the Teo Halm character, and the gay potential with him.

Fun Size: Nickelodeon Sex Comedy with Gay Characters

American movies and tv programs aimed at a juvenile audience are aggressively heterosexist, screaming hysterically in every episode "Heterosexual desire is universal!" and "Gay people absolutely do not exist!"  Nickelodeon's Fun Size (2012) got away with gay characters only because they were minor, adult, and female, and did not detract from the furious heterosexual machinations of the teens.

Oh, and because the movie got a PG-13 rating: Parents Strongly Cautioned!  Children under age 13 could be traumatized by discovering that gay people exist!

It's a Halloween-themed movie ("Fun Size" refers to the miniature candy bars people pass out to trick-or-treaters).

Wren (Victoria Justice of Victorious) has been invited to a big, cool Halloween party thrown by Aaron (Thomas McDonnell, left), the hunk she is crushing on.

But on the way, her younger brother Albert gets lost in a sea of trick-or-treaters, and she has to find him.  She enlists her best friend April (Jane Levy) and two nerds, Roosevelt (Thomas Mann) and Peng (Osric Chau, left), who have crushes on them.  Guess who hooks up?

Meanwhile Albert gets involved with Fuzzy (Thomas Middleditch), who is plotting to toilet-paper his ex-girlfriend's house in revenge after she breaks up with him to date the jerk Jorgen (Johnny Knoxville).  Not to worry, Fuzzy finds a new girl.

In fact, the only one who doesn't hook up is little Albert.  Which is surprising, since in contemporary juvenile media, 8-year olds are usually portrayed as just as hetero-horny as teens.

There's a lackluster gay subtext between Roosevelt and Peng, and some beefcake, such as Josh Pence (left) as Wren's mother's twink boyfriend.

You also get to see Fuzzy naked.

And the gay characters: Roosevelt's two Moms, an oddball lesbian couple who will allow him to borrow the family car only if he can ask in Ancient Greek (he misses the word for "seat belt").

Not enough to detract from the unyielding heterosexism of this Nickelodeon sex comedy.