Alias Smith and Jones

The buddy movie is a venerable American institution, about two guys, cops, detectives, or outlaws, who may enjoy the company of the other sex but live only for each other.  But it hasn't transferred to television well.  So obsessed are tv producers with promoting heterosexual romance that only a few examples of buddy tv shows can be found.

Alias Smith and Jones (1971-73) was one.

Betting on the popularity of Butch Cassdy and the Sundance Kid the year before, Alias starred Robert Redford lookalike Ben Murphy, who had been making the rounds of tv dramas, usually in roles that required his shirt to come off.  He played Kid Curry, the muscular one.

Round-faced Pete Duel was cast as Hannibal Heyes.  He had starred as Rod Taylor's buddy-boyfriend in The Hell with Heroes (1968), and he was also been making the rounds of tv dramas, as well as doing a few comedies (such as Gidget).

Outlaws trying to go straight, they criss-cross the Old West, getting involved with people's problems along the way.  Thankfully, few of those problems involved old girlfriends or current flames, and many involved rescuing each other from cliffhanging danger.

But they only filmed 18 episodes together.  On December 31, 1971, Pete Duel, who had been depressed and drinking heavily, committed suicide.

Instead of cancelling the program or giving Kid Curry a new buddy to work with, the network immediately hired Roger Davis, previously Vickie's boyfriend on Dark Shadows,  as Hannibal #2.  Gay fans were outraged -- how could they replace a boyfriend so cavalierly?

But the program managed to keep going on through the end of the 1971-72 season and halfway through the 1972-73 before being cancelled.

Tunnel in the Sky

Later in life, Robert Heinlein (1907-1988) was well known as the cranky, conservative, racist, sexist "old man" of science fiction, who wrote weird, turgid, overlong, and heterosexist novels, but between 1948 and 1963, he produced 18 juveniles, about teenage boys involved in interstellar intrigue, with same-sex bonds often intense and intimate, and hardly any heterosexual dating or romance.

Tunnel in the Sky (1955) was my favorite, perhaps because its protagonist, Rod,  never displays the slightest interest in a girl.

The plot: for a high school class in this rip-roaring frontier future. Rod and hundreds of other students are zapped through a space-portal to an alien planet for survival training: "any climate, any terrain.”
They find themselves in a tropical paradise, plagued only by bloodthirsty carnivorous rabbits.

The ten days of the test pass, and then twenty, and thirty, and no time-space portal opens to zap them home. But the castaways don't devolve into Lord of the Flies savagery; they build a no-nonsense libertarian community, Cowperstown, with farming and metallurgy and square dances every weekend. Rod is elected mayor.

Not much of gay interest so far: in fact, the first thing on everyone’s mind is marriage and children.  A former pre-law student even puts out a shingle as a divorce lawyer.

But, oddly, Rod fails to marry, or date, or even flirt. When challenged, he protests that he does indeed like girls, but heterosexual romance would compromise his effectiveness as a political leader.

Such an argument makes little sense, and is based on no real life model; in fact, few men are ever elected to high political office without sporting a wife on their arm. Perhaps Rod comes up with this lame excuse to hide his actual lack of interest in girls.

Early in the survival test, Rod briefly teams up with Jack, a student from another school. They hunt, cook, and seek shelter together, and develop a chummy friendship until Rod discovers that Jack is really Jacqueline, a girl!

It is unclear why she would need to hide her gender, since girls and boys both participate in the test. But the girl pretending to be a boy is a standard plot device.  A male friend finds “him” attractive and has a bout of homophobic panic. Then he discovers that “he” is really a “she,” that is instincts were right all along, thereby “proving” that heterosexual desire is innate and natural, foolproof even when the object is disguised.

Rod, however, does not feel confused or conflicted about his feelings for Jack. When he discovers that Jack is a girl, he is surprised but not relieved, and the two do not subsequently begin a romance. Instead, he has to defend himself from the jeers of his friends, who claim that they are so competent at their heterosexuality that they realized right away that Jack was a girl. 

Eventually the rescue portal opens, but even then, Rod does not return home to a heteronormative future.  Cowperstown is home, and he is staying put.

Heinlein no doubt omitted hetero-romance from his novels because he believed his target audience of teenage boys would not be interested.  But the gay boys who stumbled upon them twenty years later found a strong validation of the legitimacy of "not liking girls."

The Blue Hawk

What gay boy could resist buying Peter Dickinson's The Blue Hawk (1976): the cover displayed a gorgeous young man with olive skin and black curly hair, his muscles visible beneath his a blue robe.

The British edition was almost as good.



















He is Tron, a teenager of humble parentage in a nameless Egypt-like kingdom, who has been raised to become a priest.  In the midst of a turgid plot involving palace intrigues and invasions from without, Tron meets the young King, who is quite obviously taken with him, inviting him to dinner and to go hawking, and asking “where will you sleep tonight?”

Neither the King nor Tron has ever been in a non-coercive relationship, so they grope their way toward love with many hesitations and missteps.  Tron vows to “serve” the King, who obligingly sends him off on a secret mission.  He gets lost, and everyone thinks that he is dead.

When he returns, the King  comes “striding forth with outstretched arms, his whole being seeming to pulse with pleasure in the living instant,” but instead of telling Tron how much he loves him, he hides (barely) behind metaphor: he whispers that losing Tron was like “the emptiness when you lose a favorite hawk, but worse, far worse.”  His master’s pet: close, but not close enough.

When they are back in the palace, the King insists that Tron not leave his side; their arms are linked or his hand is on Tron’s shoulder or he is stroking Tron’s hair even at the most important of council meetings.  But if Tron is merely a favored pet, why does the King constantly seek his advice on complex matters of state?  On a second secret assignment, Tron is wounded, and the King rushes to his side.  But again, neither overtly declares his love:

The King came in.  He looked very tired. . .but the air around around him seemed to tingle with excitement and happiness.  He stretched his arm down in a gesture that would have become a hug of joy in their meeting if Tron had not been wounded; life and warmth seemed to flow from his fingertips.

One can admire and respect a subordinate, but one can only love an equal.  At the end of the novel, he is on his way to ask the King if they can become – not master and servant or king and faithful subject, but something else that Dickinsen does not and perhaps cannot describe, not in 1976, a same-sex love that is exclusive and permanent.