Naked Werewolves

Vampires resonate with gay teens because of their metrosexual sophistication, their unconventional sexual practices, and their "secret," but they tend to be Don Juans, courting women, biting only women. But werewolves are working class to the vampires' elite, they're rugged and macho, and they usually inhabit a male-only world.  Besids, after a night of howling at the moon, they always end up naked.

Gay boys in the 1960s loved the Gothic soap opera Dark Shadows (1966-71), because cute werewolf Chris Jennings (Don Briscoe) was always getting ripped out of his clothes, revealing a firm hairy chest.  David Collins, young heir to the family fortune, had a fairly obvious crush on him.

Thirty years later, a new generation of gay boys got to see the cute, diminuitive Oz (Seth Green) nude in a cage on Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003).













David Naughton played a gay-coded werewolf in American Werewolf in London (1981).

There were gay-coded werewolves in comics during the 1970s.

But the quintessential werewolf hunk appeared on the inaugural season of the Fox network, in a series aptly entitled Werewolf (1987-88).  The physique of college student Eric Cord (John J. York) was on display throughout most of most episodes, the camera zooming in obsessively on his massive chest, biceps, and backside.

The future soap hunk knew that his body was the main draw of the program, and he worked it, obtrusively strutting and flexing like a male model in the middle of a story about fleeing deadly danger.  Even when he hadn't just reverted from werewolf form, his shirt was usually off.  His chest was hairy or smooth, depending on whether he'd shaved recently.

The plots were male-centered, too.  In the first episode, he wolves out and attacks his college roommate. Fleeing from an obsessed bounty hunter, Eric gets involved with the personal problems of the people he meets along the way (usually men), but rarely if ever looks at a girl.

Time Tunnel

Time Tunnel lasted for only a season (1966-67), but it was an obsession; I bought (or rather, asked for) every merchandising tie-in available, a coloring book, Gold Key comics, a Viewmaster, a board game.

When the government threatens to shut down the costly Time Tunnel project for lack of verifiable results, impetuous scientist Tony (former teen idol James Darren, dark and intense in a green turtleneck sweater) decides to become a human guinea pig.  He runs through the tunnel, and is transported through time and space to the Titanic hours before it hit the iceberg.  Coworker Doug (Robert Colbert, tall and broad-shouldered in a dumb-looking business suit) decides to follow, for no logical reason except that he can’t imagine living without Tony.

In each episode, Doug and Tony are transported to moments of tremendous danger (Jericho just before the walls fell, Krakatoa just before it exploded, Pearl Harbor just before the attack).  Fortunately, they are experts in many forms of self-defense and fluent in dozens of ancient languages.  Their co-workers can only watch in horror, and sometimes repair the tunnel sufficiently to send them on a new jump to a moment of tremendous danger.  “At least they’re together,” fellow scientist Lee Meriwether muses.

Doug and Tony are constantly landing on top of each other, being tied together by villains, and otherwise forced into intimate physical contact, as if the Time Tunnel is playing matchmaker.  But perhaps it has no need: neither of the scientists ever refers to a wife or girlfriend back home, and only rarely do they flirt with any of the women they meet on their travels.  Instead, they grab wrists, touch shoulders, wrap arms around waists, exactly like romantic partners in peril.  Nearly every episode has one of them captured and imprisoned or strung up somewhere, so that the other can embark on a daring rescue and say teary-eyed, “Doug [or Tony], I thought you were. . . .”

Tied spread-eagle side by side in “Pirates of Deadman’s Island” (February 1967), they seem to be holding hands; Tony’s hand is actually poised slightly above Doug’s, but this is discernable only with a modern freeze frame.  In the last episode of the series, “Town of Terror” (April 1967), Tony is startled by gunfire and jumps against Doug, pressing both hands flat against his chest, a gesture that I have seen elsewhere only in women seeking comfort in the mighty arms of men.  They are being presented quite overtly as lovers.

I cannot imagine that anyone could be oblivious to the romance between Doug and Tony,  even in the dark ages of 1966; certainly not the producer, Irwin Allen, whose 1970’s science fiction series often resist heteronormativity , and least of all the actors themselves. Robert Colbert, who has guested on forty years of tv programs, from Hawaiian Eye to Frasier, is best known as James Garner’s foppish (i.e., gay) brother on Maverick.

James Darren spent his twenties playing outcasts, loners, victims of prejudice, a jazz musician in love with Gene Krupa (Sal Mineo), and a  race car driver so smitten with a male acquaintance that he marries his sister (in The Lively Set, 1964), while hitting the pop charts with remarkably bitter songs about romantic betrayals: “Goodbye Cruel World” (1961), “Hail to the Conquering Hero” (1962), “Pin a Medal on Joey” (1963).  After Time Tunnel, he took no more outcast or loner roles.  Perhaps playing someone who found love cheered him up.

By the way, in 2006 there was an execrable tv movie version that heterosexualized the characters.

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

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.

Big Wednesday

Big Wednesday (1978)  covers twelve years in the lives of a trio of goldenboy surfers: troubled Matt (Jan-Michael Vincent, fresh from his homoerotic role in Danger Island); blue-eyed, curly-haired innocent Jack (William Katt, who would go on to star in Greatest American Hero); and joking outsider Leroy (Gary Busey).

Beach scenes in most movies involve slow-motion close-ups of bikini-clad women,  with an occasional guy in the distance, but Big Wednesday lingers over shots of glistening male bodies so tight that you can see the veins running across biceps and count the vertebrae on backsides.  Even scenes set far from the beach are populated chiefly by gorgeous muscleboys.





The trio shares a quiet, subdued homoerotic bond from the first moments, when they awaken on the beach in 1962, wrapped in each other’s arms under blankets, then surf “the morning glass” on a single board.  But Leroy goes even farther, eschewing the girl-grabbing that most buddy movies emphasize to “prove” that the protagonists are all heterosexual.  When they invade the Star Burger Café (still shirtless) and flirt with a pretty waitress, Leroy pointedly ignores her, horsing around with Matt instead.  Later, at a party, dozens of (still shirtless) muscleboys locate girls to grab and kiss, with the exception of Leroy – he’s in the kitchen, half naked, being oiled up by some male friends (to facilitate sexual congress, I presume).

When Matt and Jack get girlfriends, they all head down to Acapulco, and Leroy remains a “fifth wheel” who doesn’t even flirt with the local girls.
Years pass, and the water grows cold.  Matt battles the bottle, Jack goes to Vietnam, and Bear (Sam Rockwell), the South of Market leatherman who runs the beach surf shop, becomes a wealthy surfboard magnate.  All of them (except Leroy) abandon the homoerotic paradise of surfing for marriage.  Yet at Bear’s wedding, he proposes a toast:
Jack: What are we drinking to?
Bear: Only to your friends.  To your friends, come hell or high water.

It is an odd toast for an occasion that usually marks the end or severe circumscription of same-sex friendships in favor of heterosexual bondng, and striking when one notes that Bear’s fiancee appears only in that scene.  It is as if he married simply to celebrate his love of his friends, “the most important thing you got.”

The trio concurs.  Heterosexual practice comes and goes; there are flirtations, sexual interludes, marriages, and divorces (except for Leroy, whose romantic interests are never specified).  But their most important, most permanent bonds are with each other.

In 1974, at the end of the movie, they gather for another “Big Wednesday” at the beach, and the camera lingers again (for a full ten minutes) on their bodies glistening and straining under the bright summer sun.

We don’t have to look far for clues about how the possibility of same-sex desire became so overt into this plot-riddled extension of Endless Summer (1966): director John Milius, a surfer in his own right and sometime workout buddy of Arnold Schwartzeneggar, specialized in the bonding of brawny, heavily-muscled buddies in Conan the Barbarian (1982), Red Dawn (1984), and Flight of the Intruder (1991), and here he cast three goldenboys who would play much the same roles throughout their careers.  Jan-Michael Vincent plays troubled, aging muscleboys. Gary Busey has played soldiers, villains, lunatics, rock stars, and heavily-muscled regular guys, pairing with Willie Nelson in Barbarosa (1982), gay-friendly Corey Haim in Silver Bullet (1985), and Fred Williamson in South Beach (1992), but he is almost always a lost soul aching for love.

I Wanna Hold Your Hand

If Bye, Bye, Birdie got it completely wrong, I Wanna Hold Your Hand (1978) got it right.  Set on the evening of the Beatles' American debut on The Ed Sullivan Show on February 9, 1964, it follows the adventures of four girls trying to meet the Fab Four in person -- for various reasons.
1. To convince Paul McCartney to marry her.
2. To get a photo scoop.
3. To protest the Beatles' terrible music.
4. To have a fun evening with friends.

There are also 4 boys, there for various reasons.

1. The cute but nerdy Larry (Marc McClure, Jimmy Olsen in the 1978 Superman movie) lends them his car because he wants to fit it.

2. The sullen bad boy Tony (Bobby DiCicco) hates the Beatles and wants to protest.



3.  Ringo (Eddie Deezen) wants to make a lot of money by stealing a personal item from their hotel room.

4. Peter (Christian Juttner) is a big fan.

This is itself a big improvement, an acknowledgement that the Beatles appealed to both boys and girls.  But there is more.

Peter's interest in the Beatles marks him as gender-transgressive to his peers and parents.  His father especially hates his Beatles mop top -- "It makes you look like a girl," and refuses to let him go to the performance until he gets a haircut.  So he sneaks out, determined to stay true to both his devotion to the Beatles and his "girly" fashion sense.

Christian Juttner, then 14, specialized in male-bonding vehicles.  Unfortunately, his career ended with his adolescence, shortly after The Ghosts of Buxley Hall (1980).

Phyllis Diller and Gay Childhood

Phyllis Diller, who has just died at the age of 95, was a fixture of the 1960s.  Her fright wigs, bizarre makeup, cigarette in a long holder, and raspy "ah-ha-ha" laugh appeared everywhere.

Her two 1960s tv series were flops; no one could stand her schtick for more than a few moments at a time.

But those few moments were priceless.

So she guest-starred on Laugh-In; she appeared in commercials; she did the voice of the Monster's Bride in  Mad Monster Party.

In her act, she pretended to be a "normal" suburban housewife.  Then she turned normalcy on its head. She hated cooking and housework. She was not attracted to her husband, a milquetoast humorously named Fang. He was not attracted to her.

That in itself was enough to make her a role model for gay kids.  She demonstrated that it was ok to be different, to reject the "normal" future of husbands, wives, and suburban houses, to not be attracted to the opposite sex.

One of my earliest memories is a tv commercial that appeared when I was four or five years old. Phyllis shows us a white business shirt ripped in back, and says "If you know my husband Fang, you know it didn't get this way from him flexing his muscles.  Ah-ha-ha!"

But I misunderstood.  I thought Fang did rip the shirt by flexing his muscles.  And I imagined what this muscular Fang might look like.

A promise of beefcake to a four-year old.

The Hunks of Fame

The tv series Fame (1982-87), about a high school for the performing arts, is notable for three things:

1. The cool opening sequence,  in which Debbie Allen brings the wannabe stars back to earth.  I can still quote it verbatim:
You got big dreams?  You want fame?
Well, let me tell you, fame costs.
And here's where you start paying. . .in sweat!

2. The complete heterosexualizing of the cast.  In the 1980 movie, one of the aspiring dancers, singers, and actors was gay (ok, one of the depressed Hollywood gays, who moaned "Never being happy isn't the same thing as being sad).  But in the tv series (as in the 2009 remake starring Paul Iocono), we don't get even that. Gay people do not exist.

3. The hunks.  The male cast members were, every one of them, muscular and gorgeous, and frequently without shirts.

Gene Anthony Ray as sullen dancer Leroy (top photo).

Billy Hufsey as soulful singer Chris, who posed in the gay-coded After Dark.

But my favorite was probably Carlo Imperato, because his muscles were so unexpected. His Danny Amatullo was a wisecracking comedian, for heaven sake.  Who'd expect Jerry Seinfeld or Jay Leno to be built?  But he was:

Here's another, to give you the general idea.














 

Silver Streak

Silver Streak, a 1976 homage to Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes (1938), seems odd for a movie that I found "good beyond hope" as a teenager.  Homely, frizzy-blond Gene Wilder (Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory), plays mild-mannered but randy book editor George Caldwell.  He's traveling from L.A. to Chicago via train for some reason, and since this is the 1970s, where every conversation is about sex, he hooks up with a secretary (Jill Clayburgh), who admits that she can’t type or take shorthand but “gives great phone," while he brags that he edits sex manuals ("I know what goes where, and why").  Back at the cabin, preparing for "phone," George sees her boss, a renowned art professor (do art professors get renowned?) fall past the window, shot to death.

Hilly doesn’t believe that George saw anything, but art dealer Devereau (suave Patrick McGoohan) does; we discover that Devereau has masterminded many murders, and that he intends to kill Hilly as soon as the train reaches Chicago. But before George can help, Devereau’s henchmen toss him off the train.

Framed for the professor’s murder, George wanders through rural Oklahoma with every Sheriff Lobo in a dozen counties chasing him, and to evade arrest, he steals a police car – with car thief Grover Muldoon handcuffed in the back seat. Grover is played by Richard Pryor, star of a few blaxsploitation vehicles and writer for such programs as The Flip Wilson Show and Sanford and Son.

The two experience an immediate, jaw-dropping attraction. They can’t seem to stop grinning at each other like schoolboys in love, in spite of the danger of their situation.

 Their union quickly becomes permanent: after they evade a police barricade and reach the safety of Kansas, Grover has no reason to stick around, yet he helps George steal a second car and drives with him through gorgeously-photographed rural landscapes while Henry Mancini’s romantic theme plays in the background. And their relationship becomes increasing physical: when they reach the train station in Kansas City, Grover grabs George’s hand, then puts his arm around him and pulls him close (ostensible to pull him out of danger); George responds by laying his head on Grover’s shoulder. 

 

They reboard the train together, and when the evil Devereau recaptures George, Grover dons a porter’s disguise and rescues him.

 After a gunfight, they are thrown from the train again, and grab at each other as they fall into a river. 

 Only after George is cleared of the murder charge and joins a cadre of federal agents out to capture Devereau does Grover opt to end their union. The two clasp hands, and then forearms, gazing at each other with an intensity that is painful to watch. George tries to say something chummy: “If you ever need anything. . . .” But Grover knows that they have transcended words. He touches his hand to his heart, and they slowly pull apart.

But he can’t leave, not yet. As George and the federal agents stop the train and exchange gunfire with Devereau and his henchmen, Grover inexplicitly re-appears.

 George knocks him over in the fury of his embrace, and then they reboard the train yet again to rescue the girl.

Finally, when the runaway train has stopped by crashing into Chicago’s Union Station, and George and Hilly -- the girl he spent ten minutes with -- discuss their future together -- Grover realizes that he has no chance with George. This time he permits no long farewell aching with desire: he steals a car and scrams. 

On the lobby card, Gene Wilder stands facing the camera, his arm around Jill Clayburgh. Off to the side, Richard Pryor is staring at them, a patently fake grin on his face. He has been abandoned.

Many gay and gay-friendly artists collaborated to produce this poignant evocation of same-sex love that almost – but not quite – triumphs over frenetic skirt-chasing.  Gay screenwriter Colin Higgins infused Foul Play (1978), Nine to Five (1980), and The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (1982) with a pleasantly low-key ambisexuality. Arthur Hiller directed many of the hunkfests of the 1960’s, such as The Rifleman and Route 66, and made an early attempt to portray gay men in a positive light in Making Love (1982). Richard Pryor was openly bisexual and supported many gay causes.  And Gene Wilder noted that he and Pryor had “an almost sexual relationship. It's like lovers. When we see each other on the set there's a certain nervousness, a little anticipation. . .People call [it] a chemistry, but I call it an energy, like a sexual energy. . .it's almost as if [we're] lovers who have just met.”

Mission: Impossible

On Sunday nights in the 1960s, if we were lucky, we'd get home from church by 9:00 pm, just in time to see a brawny hand strike a match to light a fuse, which sizzled into a fast montage of action scenes set to a jazzy score. Mission: Impossible.

By the way, the hand belonged to series producer Bruce Geller, and the score was by Lalo Schifrin.

When you're starved for beefcake in a cold Midwestern winter, even a hand is evocative.

Before 1969, my brother and I weren't allowed to stay up past 9:00, and by the 1970s it had moved to Saturday nights, when we usually had something else to do (no way to record programs back then), so I have only seen three years of episodes.

Mission: Impossible belonged to the 1960s spy craze, along with Wild Wild West, Get Smart, Hogan's Heroes, and The Man from U.N.C.L.E.  The plots: the Impossible Missions Force (IMF) engaged in Cold War espionage, usually involving wearing disguises to trick a communist leader into signing a peace treaty or prevent a communist general from taking over a "peace loving" country. An occasional Mafia don or master-criminal thrown in.

Not a lot of bonding. In fact, two of the team members, Rollin Hand (Martin Landau) and Cinnamon Carter (Barbara Bain) specialized in seducing opposite-sex targets.  But Barney Collier (Greg Morris), the electronics whiz, and Willie Armitage (Peter Lupus), the weightlifter, rarely expressed any interest in girls.







And Peter Lupus was not shy about displaying his physique.  A frequent model for muscle magazines, he  was a Playgirl centerfold.in 1974.

Donny Osmond Doll

Speaking of toys, my sister had a Donny Osmond doll, which came out in 1976 as a tie in with his tv show, Donny and Marie (1976-79).  There was also his sister Marie, which you could use to do a duet of their theme song, "A Little Bit Country/A Little Bit Rock and Roll," and little brother Jimmy, which wasn't good for much of anything (I don't like Jimmy. He makes homophobic remarks).

I was a teenager, and thought myself too old for dolls, but the Donny figure was nice to look at -- bulging in all the right places.  So one day I checked, and sure enough, the manufacturers had realized that a certain percentage of kids would be interested in undressing the doll, so they eliminated the G.I. Joe problem -- he was almost all naturalistic.  There was even a little bump to ensure that he filled out his pants properly.

Leif Garrett in Love

Speaking of Leif Garrett, did you know that he fell in love in on CHiPs in 1979?

He plays Jimmy Tyler, a burnt-out rock star who is involved in a traffic accident. As he lies in his hospital bed, his manager, Frank Balford (Bill Daily of The Bob Newhart Show), rushes in a panic to his side. They argue: Jimmy accuses Frank of being all business, insufficiently attentive to his needs, and Frank retorts that he should be grateful that someone cares enough to handle the thousands of details necessary to maintain a rock star. They break up. Frank is heartbroken, but won’t admit it. Instead, he falls into the incoherence that we have seen often in actors and writers trying to express something that lies hidden in the depths of their characters.

Frank: When you’ve been with someone as long as I’ve been with him. . .he’s been with me. . . .

Ponch: [Helpfully.] You’ve been together.

Frank: I produced the first song he ever wrote.

Ponch: “Give In.”

Frank: That’s what brought us together. [Bitterly.] It used to mean something to him.

Ponch: Maybe it still does. If you walk away, you’ll never know.

The middle aged, less than dashing Bill Daily seems an odd choice for true love, but Daily was no stranger to gay-vague roles, and Leif’s characters often displayed romantic interest in older, less-than-dashing men.

The implication that they are a romantic couple intensifies when Jimmy, distraught over the break up, pulls his Ferrari to the side of the highway because he is crying too hard too drive; such hysterics seem somewhat odd for terminating a business relationship.

“It’s confusion in my head, trying to work things out,” Jimmy explains to the solicitous Ponch and Jon, his incoherence matching Frank’s. 

 Officer Jon invites him back to his apartment – why not Ponch, who invites stray boys home in every other episode? Maybe Ponch’s dazzling smile and tightly-packed uniform was too potent to combine with an androgyne with big hair and tightly-packed chinos. Even so, when Jon and Jimmy appear chummy in bathrobes the next morning, drinking milk, it is hard not to imagine that they are immersed in a “morning after” glow.

Jimmy soon realizes that he is lost, both personally and professionally, without Frank, but there will have to be some changes made before he is willing to take him back. “I feel things!” he exclaims. “I’m not just a piece of merchandise!” (Surely the original line was “piece of meat.”)

Officers Ponch and Jon, who like many sitcom stars have little else to do but engineer romances, devise a complex scheme to reunite the couple. Jon talks Jimmy into performing at “Skate with the Stars,” a charity roller disco exposition, and Ponch importunes Frank to attend with some of his celebrity friends. Neither realizes that the other will be there. Frank enters as Jimmy is singing “Give In,” the song that brought them together (coincidentally featured:

Give in to all the fire in your heart.

You know I want to enter every part

Of your heart and soul.

Let yourself go, give in.

Though Frank turns abruptly to leave and Ponch has to restrain him, his eyes mist up at the memory of Jimmy entering “every part” of his. . .um. . .heart and soul.  

 After some “what’s he doing here!” posturing, the officers literally shove the two together. Frank promises that he’ll “hire some people” so it won’t be just business anymore; they’ll “spend some time together." They hug – not a tepid Hollywood grab, but a weepy, full-body, head-nuzzling, never-letting-go hug. 

 The camera pans out to freeze-shots of Jon grinning, Ponch leering, and then Jon looking embarrassed when he sees the two still clinched.

 “I think we can let them go,” Jon says.

Only then does the hug break, and the actors shake hands. This seems to be a mistake, an out of character Leif telling Bill Daily “it was a pleasure working with you.” The last image we should see, the image has remained fixed in my mind, is of the two men, certainly lovers, holding each other tightly.

Fonzie Before Happy Days

Lords of Flatbush (1974) was a precursor of next year’s Happy Days, about four Brooklyn greasers (about 30 years old but still in high school) whose same-sex relationships are doomed by the “discovery” of girls. Chico (Perry King) courts a rich girl, and Stanley (Sylvester Stallone, pre-Rocky, never shirtless but filling out his t-shirts beautifully) gets his girlfriend pregnant.

 The other two gang members, Butchie (Henry Winkler) and Wimpy (Paul Mace), seem not particularly interested in girls, in spite of their obligatory smooching sounds and breast-grabbing gestures whenever girls pass. 

 Butchie especially, short, slim, with a desperate, haunted look in his eyes and a curious diminution of a name that protests too much, behaves in a decidedly transgressive fashion.  He likes boys, but the objects of his interest keep rejecting him.

Late one evening, the others decide to look for girls, but Butchie wants to hang out at the deserted soda shop with Eddie (Joe Stern), the dark, curly-haired soda jerk. No one else is present, so Eddie asks if they might “get personal.” Butchie, grinning, says: “as long as you don’t come over here and give me a great big kiss, anything goes.”

This is a curious response; although his grin suggests that he is stating a laughable absurdity, his quickness at considering it, and the accumulation of adjectives (it’s not just a kiss, it’s a great big kiss) suggest that it is close to conscious thought: perhaps Eddie could kiss him. Indeed, he has specifically rejected an evening of girl-chasing to be alone with a man. What does he expect to happen? 

 But then Eddie rejects him, telling him that he is wasting his life by spending all of his time in the soda shop, oblivious to the possibility that Butchie might hang out there because he likes Eddie. Understandably angry, Butchie goes home.

Later, Chico sneaks into Butchie’s room. They sit, one on a chair, the other on the bed. “Do you have anything to tell me?” Butchie asks. They gaze at each other for a long moment. 

 Chico considers telling him something, but then decides against it. What are they leaving unsaid? Somewhat angry, Butchie prods him further: “Because if you don’t have anything to tell me, I guess I could go to sleep.”

Chico stares at him for a moment more, and then angrily jumps up and runs for the door, refusing to tell him, leaving Butchie silent and frustrated, rejected twice on the same evening. Butchie remains silent and frustrated as Chico, still refusing to tell him, weds the rich girl.

Henry Winkler went on to superstardom as Fonzie on Happy Days, a sitcom that also had tons of gay content.

Arlo and Chad: Orange County Gay Couple

Orange County (2002), a comedy starring Colin Hanks as a high school senior torn between buddies at home and and a distant college, features an explicit same-sex romance.

I assumed that buff slacker buddies Arlo (Kyle Howard) and Chad (RJ Knoll) were standard movie buddies with a unstated homoerotic attraction, like Dave and Chainsaw in Summer School -- especially when they were shown trying to pick up girls.  But then they make an announcement:

Chad: Last night we’re at this party, little Arlo here decides to profess his undying love for me. Didn’t I tell you he was a fruitcake?

Arlo: That’s not true, Bro. Here’s what really happened. Chad crashed at my house, right, and I woke up in the night, he was fondling my. . . .

Chad: Dude, I lost my keys. I was looking for ‘em.

Very clear, isn't it: they have had sex, and they are in love. They are sitting in their car in a position of quiet intimacy, at peace with each other. They are delighted that there is no longer any doubt about whether they are lovers. Their friends respond with approving grins, not with surprise, since they were aware that the two were a couple all along.

Oddly, the screenplay was written by Mike White, who also wrote and starred in the execrable Chuck & Buck (2000).

But most fan reviews of Orange County on Amazon.com and the Internet Movie Database seem utterly confused: “What the heck does that scene mean?”; “Weird scene”; “It’s a joke, right?”; “Are they supposed to be gay, or what?”

Why are reviewers baffled?  Because they believe that no fictional characters can be gay unless they are Wearing a Sign.  Arlo and Chad have never explicitly stated "We are gay," so they must be taken as heterosexual. Why would they profess their "undying love" and have sex?  It must be a joke.

Mike Henry's Tarzan

There were several Tarzans in the 1960s -- Denny Miller's blond beach boy, Ron Ely's lanky environmentalist, Johnny Weissmuller flickering on late-night reruns -- but Mike Henry captured the imagination of the Now Generation.  The former football star and tv cowboy donned a loincloth for Paramount only three times -- in Tarzan and the Valley of Gold (1966), Tarzan and the Great River (1967), and Tarzan and the Jungle Boy (1968).  He had signed up to play Tarzan on tv, but he opted out and continued his career fully clothed.

Why was Mike Henry the iconic 1960s Tarzan?

1. He had a hairy chest.  Previous Tarzans had been muscular, of course, but only Mike Henry was a bear.

2. He got out of Africa.  Fighting the Waziri headhunters and elephant poachers was hackneyed. Mike Henry's Tarzan explored the jungles of Mexico, South America and Southeast Asia.

3. He was well-educated and sophisticated, more James Bond than Noble Savage.  Edgar Rice Burroughs' literary Tarzan was fluent in English and French -- it was Johnny Weissmuller who invented the "Me Tarzan" lingo.  Mike Henry returned to sophisticated Tarzan of the novels, taking his clothes off only when the plot required it (during 9/10ths of the movie).

4. He rescued and bonded with kid sidekicks: Ramel in Valley of Gold and Pepe in The Great River (both played by Manuel Padilla Jr.),  and of course the Jungle Boy (played by Steve Bond). They were too young to be his romantic interests, but gay boys who were about that age themselves certainly fantasized about fading into the sunset with Mike Henry's muscular arm around their shoulders. 

Incidentally, Steve Bond, who played the Jungle Boy in 1968, grew up to be a popular Playgirl centerfold:

G.I. Joe and Ken

Introduced in 1964 to get boys used to the idea of fighting in Vietnam when they grew up, G.I. Joe is the bestselling boys' doll of all time (though he is marketed as a "movable fighting man").

He was cute, and since he was movable, you could have fun adventures with him, like have the bad guys force him and a buddy to kiss.















Unfortunately, when you took his clothes off, you got this:

Barbie's "boyfriend" Ken, introduced in 1961, was more fun.  He came wearing a swimsuit, with a natural-looking body that got more buff as time passed:

Unfortunately, no letter to Santa Claus or picture circled in a toy catalog ever produced a Ken doll.  Your sister or the girl down the block certainly had one, but she always wanted to play "Barbie and Ken at the prom."

If you were very lucky, she might let you play "Ken goes to the beach with his 'buddy' Allan while Barbie is out of town."  Note that the term "buddy" is in quotes on the box.

See also: The Big Men of American Tall Tales