Hollywood: Henry Willson, Scotty Bowers, Rock Hudson: The Gang's All Here

During the glory days of studio-driven Hollywood, Jack (David Corenswet), a World War II vet with a wife and a baby on the way, wants to become an actor (no, a movie star). He hasn't been discovered yet (go figure), so he takes a job at  Ernie West's garage where the rich-and-famous fork over $200 ($2000 in today's money) to have sex with the attendants (have you read Scotty Bowers' book?).

Jack's main client turns out to be Avis Amberg (Patti LuPone), whose husband owns Ace Studios, and can get Jack work ("You take care of Mama, and Mama takes care of you.").

He won't do male clients, so he enlists Archie (Jeremy Pope), who aspires to be the first black gay screenwriter working in mainstream cinema. Archie's first client is the young, nervous Roy Fitzgerald (Jake Picking), who is destined to become movie great Rock Hudson. They start dating.

Meanwhile, Raymond (Darrin Kriss), a half-Filipino aspiring director, has had no luck getting his movie with an Asian star greenlighted, so studio exec Dick Samuels (Joe Mantello), who is gay, suggests that he work on Archie's movie.  Raymond hires his girlfriend Camille, who is black, for the female lead.

Jack tries out for the male lead. But Roy (now named Rock Hudson) has an edge: sleazy agent Henry Willson, who has the dirt on everyone and can blackmail them into casting his stable of gay-for-pay beefcake actors.

Plus Rock (left) slept with Dick Samuels.  But Jack is sleeping with Avis....

This all sounds very sleazy, an examination of the sexual exploitation of attractive men through the lens of the me-too era. But it's not.  The sex-for-screen tests exchanges are portrayed as perfectly legitimate and beneficial -- millions of people have acting talent, but how many are both hot and willing to put out?

The main problem of this system is prejudice. Jack, Archie, Raymond and their allies, all amazingly non-racist and gay-friendly for 1948 (and for 2020), are up against a system embedded with racism and homophobia.  But they're going to change all of that!  They're getting on the bus, throwing the first rock at Stonewall, and making movies about interracial and gay romance.

Ok, that didn't happen.

The sets are gorgeous, the background music spot-on, and you see fictionalized versions of Rock Hudson, Scotty Bowers, Henry Willson, Anna May Wong, Vivian Leight, Tallulah Bankhead, George Cukor, Noel Coward, Cole Porter, and Eleanor Roosevelt.   But...

Ok, that didn't happen.

Beefcake: Lots.

Gay Characters: Lots

My grade: B.

"Love, American Style": I Will Defend Your Right to Shine

Love, American Style (1969-74)  aired when I was in grade  school and junior high, late on Friday nights, when my parents were already in bed and I was watching tv with my sleepover friends or my brother, loggy and yawning, eating enormous dishes of ice cream, feeling very grown-up and somewhat mischievous. 

It was an anthology, with three humorous stories every week, all somehow related to "finding love" (all heterosexual love, of course, but who knew that anything else existed?). 

Some of the episodes were actually dramas rather than comedies ("Love and the Ledge").  Some were paranormal or science fiction  ("Love and the Vampire".  Some were only tangentially related to romance.

Sex was hinted at ("Love and the Coed Dorm"),but no one actually did the deed.  This was at heart a conservative show, aimed at an audience that was home on Friday nights -- old people and kids, both confused and disturbed by this new world of sexual freedom, longing for the old days of "true love's first kiss."

No beefcake -- at least, none that I remember.  An occasional cute guy, like teen idol Kurt Russell or Ronnie Howard of The Andy Griffith Show, but mostly oldsters. like Charles Nelson Reilly (from Lidsville) and Paul Lynde (from Bewitched).

Wait -- both of those actors were gay.

Stuart Margolin (top photo) starred in risque interstitial gag pieces,  chasing secretaries around desks or trying to glimpse a bit of cleavage.

But there was some buddy-bonding, guys working together to acquire something of value or evade an enemy, with the "finding love" tacked on at the end so the story would fit the premise. One stands out in my mind:

The guy is afraid of girls, so he asks his buddy to hide in the closet and offer advice during the date. To explain why he is going into the closet so often, he brings out items that he wants to show the girl: a bowling ball, a tennis racket, skiis -- until the apartment is full of junk.  The girl expected sex, not an episode of Hoarders, so she gets up to leave.  Then the guy kisses her,and they get engaged.

Get it: he keeps going into the closet to meet a man.  And he keeps coming out of the closet with masculine-coded sporting equipment, to show the girl that he's really interested in...well, that's about as far as they could go on prime time television in the cold winter of 1972.

I'm only thinking of the gay symbolism now, of course.  When I was in grade school and junior high, what mattered was feeling warm and safe but also dangerous, glimpsing a world built for someone else, an outsider who somehow belonged.

On a star spangled night, my love,
You can rest you head on my shoulder.
And by the dawn's early light, my love,
I will defend your right to shine.

"The Hollow": Adam is Gay

Last year I reviewed the first season of The Hollow, the Netflix animated series about three kids working their way through the various worlds of a giant video game.

1. Strong leader Adam (Adrian Petriw)
2. Cut-up Kai (Connor Parnall)
3. Sensitive, intuitive Mira (Ashleigh Ball)

 I liked the animation, and the complex plotlines, and found a gay subtext between Kai and Adam.  I didn't like how Kai kept crushing on every girl in sight.

Season 2 just dropped. In the first episode, they all awaken back home. Or what they think is back home.

While Mira and her brother have breakfast, two men are discussing changing around their work schedues to go on vacation....wait...she has two Dads!  Not just in the background, like on Ducktales, but talking, addressing her as their daughter, hugging. 

No way to de-gay them as friends, roommates, or brothers.  Let the Million Mom screeching begin.

But that's not all.

Adam has a giant rainbow flag on his bedroom wall!  Not a little one.  Not just in a blink-and-you-miss it shot.  It's obviously hanging there throughout the entire scene.

Adam is gay!

He says the word in the second episode, explaining to Kai that he's not interested in Mira. Then Mira apologizes for trying to kiss him last season -- she wouldn't have, except for the amnesia they were all suffering from.

So  Mira knew, but Kai didn't.  They were together in the video game world for weeks, maybe months, and it never came up?

I'm not happy that the writers waited until Season 2 to out Adam, and it doesn't seem to be referenced again, except maybe in a bickering subtext with new character Reeve.  (Fans suspect that they're ex-boyfriends.) 

But those are minor quibbles.

There's a gay kid in The Hollow!

In other news, actor Connor Parnell, who plays Kai, is 26 years old, a graduate of the Canadian College of Performing Arts, and gay.  Or does everyone already know that? 





See: The Hollow

Tommy Kirk

In the 1960s, the room my brother and I shared was cluttered with the likeness of Tommy Kirk, on coloring books, comic books, Little Golden Books, games, and toys.  A former Mousketeer, Kirk was packaged as “the all-American boy” and “the epitome of young masculinity”  in such Disney products as The Hardy Boys (1956-57) with Tim Considine,  as Old Yeller (1957) and Swiss Family Robinson (1960), with James MacArthur and Kevin Corcorran.  Plus several movies with Fred MacMurray as his beset-upon dad or favorite professor.

 But he entered his twenties, it became apparent that he lacked the tongue-lagging heterosexual horniness necessary for masculinity in the Cold War Era.  Although his intense brown eyes and respectable physique were by no means repellant, he was bookish and shy, an “oddball” (that is, gay).

In The Monkey’s Uncle (1965), his last gasp for the Disney Studios, the 24-year old Kirk plays Merlin Jones, a “scrambled egghead” studying science at Midvale College, oblivious to the heterosexist world of girls and sports around him.   To demonstrate that he is nevertheless straight, director Robert Stevenson cast beach movie babe Annette Funicello as his girlfriend.

Annette spends the opening credits singing, accompanied by the Beach Boys, a hard look of defiance on her face as she dares us to disbelieve that “I’m in love with the Monkey’s Uncle and I wish I was the monkeys aunt!”  Otherwise we would never know: they behave precisely as best friends, not as persons in love.
  
Midvale College is oddly deficient in collegiate beefcake; standing in for football jocks are hefty, slack-jawed Norman (“Woo-Woo” Grabowski) and balding, befuddled Leon (Leon Tyler).  One wonders why a college set omits any trace of hunky extras; perhaps it is for the same reason that Merlin’s best friend is a chimp:  human men might bring homoerotic desire too close to the surface.

Merlin does bat his eyes flirtatiously at girls, but even that gesture seems transgressive, flamboyantly feminine.  Instead, the various plot strands of the movie continuously return to the question of kinship: how does one form intimate, permanent associations in the absence of heterosexual desire?

He finds two answers:

1. He adopts a chimpanzee.  A judge rules that he cannot become the chimp’s father; he must settle for an avuncular relationship, becoming a literal monkey’s uncle.

2. He joins a fraternity.  The "jock" Leon becomes his test case in a human-flight experiment and promptly crashes, forcing Merlin to grab him, cradle him in his arms, and whisper “Are you ok?”

At a pivotal moment, Leon begins to return his interest, expressing a shy, tentative, hand-on-shoulder affection: “All the brains I ever knew were snobs, but not you. You’re just like a regular stupid fellow. That’s why I like you.”  He adds coyly “Let’s go back to the [fraternity] house,” rather an odd suggestion, since it’s the middle of the day.  What precisely does he expect that he and Merlin will do there?  But Merlin flashes a knowing smile, and we recall that this is the last of Leon’s film roles; though only about thirty years old, he will never work again.  Did the adroitness of his hand-on-shoulder affection cause Disney to abandon him?

About halfway through the film, all of Merlin’s plans have failed, and dark-eyed from despair he wails to the chimp, “[Do] you know what it’s like when the whole world is against you?  Everyone on campus hates me.  I’m being expelled from Midvale. . .kicked out. . . disgraced. . . .”  Years later, I learned why Tommy Kirk left Disney so abruptly: Walt discovered that he was gay and summarily fired him.  Although he was asked to return to finish The Monkey's Uncle, he was being expelled, kicked out, disgraced, and most likely everyone at the studio did hate him (except for Annette Funicello, who continued to support him).  That was the penalty in 1965 for taking the next step beyond fraternity, for falling in love (something similar apparently happened to Peter McEnery).

After some beach movies and teen horror like Village of the Giants (1965), Tommy was abandoned into a ghetto of drug abuse and late-1960s sleaze movies like Mars Needs Women and It's a Bikini World.  Eventually he pulled himself together and started a carpet-cleaning business.