Michael Gray and Captain Marvel

Michael Gray didn't get a big teen idol treatment, maybe because he didn't sing, so there was nothing for his fans to do but wait for Saturday morning, when his live-action tv show Shazam (1974-77) came on after Land of the Lost.  It was about a teenager named Billy Batson who traveled around with an older mentor (Lee Tremayne), looking for people in trouble.  When he found some, he would say "Shazam!" and turn into the muscular superhero Captain Marvel (so all bad guys had to do was gag him, and he'd be helpless).

Wait -- a middle-aged man and a teenage boy traveling and living together?  Sounds like a homodomestic pair to me.

It was a slight, wish-fulfillment plot, similar to The Powers of Matthew Star  a few years later.  My friends and I found it too childish to watch regularly.  But to make matters worse, after a season, Shazam got all mixed up with the adventures of a miniskirted female superhero, the Mighty Isis, so you could never be sure if you would see beefcake or cheesecake.

But at least Michael Gray was cute, in an androgynous teen idol way, and his alter ego, Captain Marvel, (Jackson Bostwick, John Davey) had muscles in all the right places.













Shazam marked the beginning and the end of Michael Gray's fame, but he's doing well in his second career as a florist.

Animal House

Today the anarchic campus comedy Animal House (1978) seems impossibly homophobic: there are discussions of "closet cases"; characters call each other "fruit" (for wearing a beanie), "homo" (for refusing to sexually assault an unconscious girl), and "faggot" (for falling down).  Apparently they find nothing more disgusting than a gay person.

We shouldn’t be surprised. Two of the writers, Douglas Kenney and Chris Miller, came directly from the staff of National Lampoon, a magazine well known for its homophobic humor, and four actors were solicited from Saturday Night Live, the most homophobic program on television during the period (only John Belushi agreed).

What joy could gay teenagers in the 1970s possibly find in watching homophobes seduce every woman in sight?  

1. There is a TON of beefcake.  The Delta House fratboys are toga-clad, toned, taunt, and tanned almost constantly.  Boon (Peter Riegert) has a stunning shirtless scene.  The rival frat, including Kevin Bacon, have an underwear-clad hazing ritual that is not to be missed.

2. Both Peter Riegert and Tom Hulce, who played Pinto, are reputedly gay.

3. In spite of the endless scenes of bedding and gazing at girls, Animal House is about buddy-bonding.  Two of the fratboys, nerdish Hoover (James Widdoes), and leather-clad anarchic D-Day (Bruce McGill), never display heterosexual interest at all.  The others treat the quest for heterosexual sex as a game, something to talk about later, during their important lives with their friends.  Only Boon has a girlfriend, Katy (Karen Allen), who is constantly reprimanding him for ignoring her in favor of his male friends.

In the grammar of the teen anarchy film, same-sex relationships must end when the rowdy frat boys graduate and accede to their heterosexual destiny, marrying and fathering children. Here, however, the concluding “where are they now” series of freeze shots mostly  skips heterosexual performance – in favor of discussions of their careers: Hoover is a district attorney, Bluto a senator, Flounder a sensitivity trainer, and Otter a gynecologist, transferring his interest in the female form from the personal to the professional, out of the bedroom and into the clinic. In the end heterosexual “destiny” fails to claim them.

Star Man's Son

Andre Norton lived for almost 100 years (1912-2005), and published over 100 science fiction novels, many with gay content.  I stumbled upon her Star Man's Son (1952) in 1978, during my freshman year in college:

 A new edition came out that made the post-Apocalyptic youth (named Fors) look like Arnold Schwarzeneggar, and his telepathic mutant lynx as big as a tiger.  The 1952 and 1968 editions, with a different name, make him smaller but still buffed, and the cat a kitten.

Three hundred years after a nuclear holocaust destroyed civilization, the young hard-bodied Fors of the barbaric Eyrie tribe is exploring one of the dead cities. He observes a man from a strange tribe, with an appearance that is new and obviously pleasing: “His wide-shouldered, muscular bronze body was bare to the waist and at least five shades darker than the most deeply tanned of the Eyrie men.”

Arskane is singing, and his song “affected Fors queerly, sending an odd shiver up his backbone.”

The stranger is attacked by Beast Things (mutated rats), captured and dragged off, and although they have never met or spoken, Fors endures two days of hardship and incredible danger to rescue him. 

 He drags the unconscious and injured Arskane up from a pit lined with poisoned spikes (“his big body was flaccid,” Norton helpfully tells us), carries him to an abandoned building, and spends four days nursing him back to health. 

 Eventually, when Arskane is feeling better and his big body is no longer flaccid, Fors suggests that they return to his home in the Eyrie, for the time being anyway. Arskane jumps at the idea of the two of them staying together, but suggests that Fors’ suspicious tribal elders might have trouble accepting a dark-skinned stranger. They might have more luck among his tribe, the Dark People.

The journey is arduous, with many opportunities for one of the pair to be captured and the other to conduct a gallant rescue, and so many instances of touching, holding, and pulling each other close that I stopped counting. Arskane begins by calling Fors his “comrade,” then “friend,” and finally “brother.” When they arrive at the Dark People’s camp and meet with the chief, Arskane pleads the case that Fors should remain:

Arskane: [Fors] has saved my life in the City of the Beast Things, and I have named him brother.

Chief: He is not of our breed.

Arskane: He is my brother!

The chief finally relents, but Fors is surprised and not entirely pleased by Arskane’s ardor. He hadn’t planned on marrying Arskane!   Instead, he returns to the Eyrie to work on an alliance between the tribes.

Arskane accepts the rejection stoically, but with some deep unspoken hurt: he walks away “without looking back.”

In 1978, I was outraged by the ending.  When men and women meet in science fiction, they stick around.  Why do men meet men, then say goodbye and walk away?  Why do so many authors insist on telling us that same-sex relations are trivial, transitory, unrelated to the permanent social structures of kin and community?