Swinging Bachelor Detectives of the 1960s

The early 1960s was overloaded with tv shows about "swinging bachelors" who dug the ladies but found their deepest emotional bonds with each other: Route 66, Follow the Sun, Bourbon Street Beat, It's a Man's World, Hawaiian Eye, 77 Sunset Strip, Surfside 6.  (Sea Hunt was an exception, about a solo scuba diver.)

They usually had a female friend who worked the switchboard or sang at the local bar and provided opportunities for leering, but few if any plots involved them finding heterosexual romance.

The bachelors were often discovered by gay talent agent Henry Willson, so they were often gay, bisexual, or gay friendly.

77 Sunset Strip (1958-64) paired Efrem Zimbalist Jr. (straight) and Roger Smith (straight) as detectives who lived in Los Angeles. Edd Byrnes (rumored to be gay) played Kookie, a hipster who worked at the nightclub next door, and eventually became a business partner. Jacqueline Beer played Suzanne, their telephone operator.

Bourbon Street Beat (1959-60) paired Richard Long (rumored to be gay) and Van Williams, left (rumored to be gay), detectives who lived in New Orleans.  Cal Duggan (straight) was their business partner.  Arlene Howell played Melody, their secretary.

Hawaiian Eye (1959-63) paired Anthony Eisley (rumored to be gay) and Robert Conrad (straight) as detectives who lived in Hawaii.  Connie Stevens played Cricket, who sang at the Shell Bar.

Surfside 6 (1960-62) paired Van Williams (just before he played The Green Hornet),  with Lee Patterson (gay) as detectives who lived on a houseboat docked at Miami Beach.  Troy Donahue, left (rumored to be gay) played their friend, a wealthy playboy who lived on the yacht next door.  Margarita Sierra played a woman with the odd name "Cha Cha," who sang at a bar with the odd name "Boom Boom Room."

Follow the Sun (1961-62) paired Brett Halsey (rumored to be gay) with Barry Coe, left (straight) as writers who solve crimes in Hawaii. Gary Lockwood (bisexual), who appeared shirtless in The Magic Sword, played their assistant.  Gigi Perreau played their secretary.

What are we to make of this abundance of beefcake and buddy-bonding?

An idolization of the unmarried and unattached heterosexual swinger, after years of 1950s Family Men.
A fear of the feminine: women were portrayed as a pleasant distraction from the important things in life. But inadvertently it gave Boomer kids a glimpse of homodomesticity, men who lived together, loved each other, and didn't need a woman to fulfill them.

Beefcake at the Top of Iowa

I've lived on the Plains for 5 years, which means that I've crossed "The Top of Iowa" about 12 times. It is becoming a place of pleasant memories, but I was my pleasant memories are due to traveling through twice a year, and then going somewhere else.  Are permanent residents .  Are real residents overcome by poverty and ennui?  Or worse, homophobia and Islamophobia?

1. Enter Iowa on the I-35 just south of Albert Lea, Minnesota.

2. Stop at the big red barn rest stop next to the Diamond Jo Casino.    It has a gift shop with tacky "I'm in Iowa!" knicknacks, and an ice cream store upstairs and a lot of sculpted grounds, where you can see some of the cutest guys on Earth.

Northwood, Iowa, population 2,000, features a park on the Shell Rock River, some brew pubs, the Rock-a-Billies Bar, and the Northwood-Kensit Junior-Senior High.

Searching for wrestling or swimming team photos proved fruitless, but I did find a track player.

So far, rather disappointing.

3. Turn onto State Route 3, go east and south to Iowa Falls: an art center displaying local artists, a huge antique store, a restaurant serving old fashioned phosphates, a Chinese restaurant, and more of the cutest guys on Earth.

Oddly, Iowa Falls has a college, Ellsworth Community College, with a wrestling team, but no high school.

For beefcake photos, I had to do a search for a local, then check out his Facebook friends.

Not great.  Craggy, tattooed, scary-looking guys smoking cigars and drinking out of coconuts.

And the memes.  One of the scary guys had memes saying:
 "Kneel for America!"
"When the time comes, I will give my life to defend America from Islam!"
"One nation under God, not Allah!"

I can only imagine his opinion of LGBT people.

Ok, I don't need to imagine with this hottie:
"Male and female.  The end."

Brr.  Let's move on.

4. Go south from Iowa Falls, then east on Highway 20, a long stretch with no rest stops except for The Mill, a windmill-shaped travel store with weird tacky gifts, a Godfather's Pizza, and a Subway.  More cute guys.  Its address is Holland, Iowa, a small town about 5 miles away, but the nearest town is actually Dike.

Dike, Iowa, has no dike, or any large body of water nearby; it was named for the railroad engineer Thomas Dike.  But it does have a high school, a public library, a restaurant called Slice, two churches, and a town motto: "A Slice of Iowa."  It features Watermelon Days in August and a "Razzle Dazzle" festival just after Thanksgiving.

The only photo from Dike that even started to display a physique was this one from a professional photographer, depicting a redheaded cross-country runner.

5. Continue on Highway 20 to Waterloo, then south to Cedar Rapids, 100 miles north of Rock Island, the farthest edge of my world when I was a kid.  From here it's all intimately familiar. 

I guess the cutest guys in the world are just passing through.

10 Forgotten Musclemen of Movie Serials

Between 1936 and 1955, you didn't just go to a movie; you went to a whole evening's entertainment, with cartoons, newsreels, two features, and a serial -- a cliffhanging, 12-15 chapter adventure, Western, or science fiction series designed to fill the seats week after week as audiences wondered "How will the hero get out of this jam?"

Three main studios, Columbia, Republic, and Universal, churned out dozens of serials every year, so they needed lots of action heroes.  Some became famous later, in feature films and on tv, and others faded away quickly, but they all offered buddy-bonding and occasional glimpses of biceps and bulges.  Here are the top 10 musclemen of the movie serials:

1. Buster Crabbe may have died in 1983, but his fame -- and exceptional physique -- live on. He was a beefcake staple for 30 years, playing Tarzan and Tarzan clones (1933), cowboys Red Barry and Billy the Kid, and futuristic space heroes Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon.  Lots of scripts called for him to get his shirt ripped off.

2. Herman Brix competed in the Olympics as Bruce Bennett, then gave Buster Crabbe some competition with the serials The New Adventures of Tarzan (1935) and Tarzan and the Green Goddess (1938).  He also stripped down to play Kioga in Hawk of the Wilderness (1938).

3. Former college athlete Charles Starrett was best known for the Durango Kid series, but he also got torn out of his clothes in The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932), to be tortured and turned into a zombie (left).

4. Gordon Jones (left) died in 1963, so he isn't well known to the Boomer generation, but in his day he was a well known face and physique.  Catch his exposed biceps in an early version of The Green Hornet in the 1941 serial.

5. Kane Richmond played the adult mentor/boyfriend to teenage Frankie Darro in a series of 1930s "Thrill-o-Ramas," plus some Charlie Chan mysteries, Westerns, and beefcake-heavy boxing movies.   His main serial was the superheroic Spy Smasher (1942).  He retired to open a hair salon.

6. The rugged Tom Tyler had a long career in Westerns, but flexed his muscles as two comic superheroes brought to life in movie serials: The Adventures of Captain Marvel (1941) and The Phanton (1943)

7. Gerald Mohr played a pulp detective named The Lone Wolf (1946, 1947) and narrated the first season of The Lone Ranger series on tv (1949-50). 

8. Speaking of The Lone Ranger, before Clayton Moore became identified with the Masked Man (1949-1957), he had a long career in movies and serials, mostly Westerns, naturally.

9. Kirk Alyn never disrobed on camera, but his muscular frame was displayed in a Superman costume in the only serials about the original superhero, Superman (1948) and Atom Man v. Superman (1950).

10. Jock Mahoney played a rather long-in-the-tooth Tarzan in Tarzan Goes to India (1962), but he also starred in some serials, such as Cody of the Pony Express (1950) and Roar of the Iron Horse (1951).