The 24 Months of Jon-Erik Hexum

In the early 1980s, we were holding out for a hero.  As the song goes,

He's gotta be sure, and it's gotta be soon,
And he's gotta be bigger than life.


We got Jon-Erik Hexum.  But he was a gift to the world for only 24 months.

Born in New Jersey to Norwegian parents, Jon-Erik hit the L.A. scene days after he graduated from Michigan State in 1980.  He had a number of failed auditions, mostly because casting agents didn't know what to do with him.  He couldn't be a New Sensitive Man: he was massive, with a swoon-inducing hairy chest, massive shoulders, and biceps like baseballs.  But his dark blue eyes, pretty face, and well-groomed hair disqualified him from roles as man-mountains who fight off enemy armies with their fists.

In the fall of 1982, they cast him in the science fiction series Voyagers!: he and his young ward (Meeno Peluce) traveled through time, making sure that historical events turned out right.

It was put on Sunday nights opposite 60 Minutes, which the oldsters liked, and just before Chips: obviously aimed at an audience of kids, especially gay boys, who couldn't forget the sight of Jon-Erik in a brown vest and a white shirt unbuttoned to his navel.

Voyagers! wrapped up after 20 episodes, and Jon-Erik spent the next year being courted as the Next Big Thing.

He starred with super-famous Joan Collins in a tv-movie, The Making of a Male Model (1983).

He played a Prince on an episode of Hotel (1984).

He co-starred with Gary Busey in the football drama The Bear (1984).

There were rumors of destructive behavior, fast cars, all-night clubbing, orgies, drugs.  Maybe they were just rumors.  Or maybe Jon-Erik was becoming too famous, too fast.



He was often seen dancing in gay clubs, so maybe he was gay in real life.  Or maybe he just liked the adoration of both male and female fans.

Later in 1984 he landed the starring role in Cover-Up, a tv series about a male model and a female photographer who go undercover in exotic locations to solve crimes. He filmed six episodes.

While filming the seventh, on October 12th, 1984, he was playing Russian roulette with a gun loaded with blanks. Or maybe he was just joking around.  Apparently he didn't know that at close range, blanks can kill.

Cover-Up tried to slog on without him, but after 22 episodes it was cancelled.

The world tried to slog on without him, too.

The Last Boy on Earth: Kamandi and his buddy Ben

In 1972, Marvel began to publish two comic book series about gay-vague teenage boys: Werewolf by Night, about a teenage werewolf, and Kamandi, about the last human boy on Earth.

An attempt to capitalize on the popularity of The Planet of the Apes franchise (1968, 1970, 1971, 1972), it is set an a post-Apocalyptic world where sentient animals rule (everything from apes to rats), and humans are extinct.

Except for Kamandi, the last of the human survivors bunkered in Command-D (thus his name), who is raised by his elderly grandfather and emerges into chaos, hunted for sport, imprisoned in a zoo, experimented on by scientists who want to know how a human could be sentient.

Though described as "a boy" and "a tyke," Kamadi is drawn as an extremely muscular teenage with long blond hippie-hair, naked except for tight cut-off jeans.

He is captured a lot, muscles taught and struggling.  Or he fights with high kicks that display his bulging pecs and 8-pack abs almost as well.

Just as the werewolf, Jack Russell, had a middle-aged boyfriend, Kamandi soon meets other humans (he's the last boy on Earth, not the last man). He is rescued by Ben Boxer, leader of an underground human-resistance movement, and his colleagues, Steve and Renzi, who are not shy about physical displays of affection.

For the next 30 issues, Ben and Kamandi fight together, rescue each other, search the ruined cities for each other.  Kamandi occasionally meets girls, momentary dalliances that mean nothing.  And there is no question for Ben: he has eyes only for the blond muscle god.

See also: Jim Steranko; and DC Comics Muscle.

Clint Eastwood: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

During the 1970s, Clint Eastwood killed gay villains.
In 1997, he directed the queer-friendly Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. 
He campaigned for John McCain in 2004 and Mitt Romney in 2008.
And he supports gay marriage.

Eastwood starred in the conventional Western series Rawhide (1959-65) before revitalizing the genre with his Italian-American "man with no name" trilogy: A Fistful of Dollars (1964), For a Few Dollars More (1965), and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.  He's a gruff, taciturn outsider who sweeps into a corrupt town, restores order --with lots of casualties -- and then moves on.  He is no man-mountain -- he has the taunt, lean muscles of an outdoorsman, displayed in frequent shirtless, towel, and bathtub shots.  He has more common with kung fu legends like Bruce Lee, except instead of martial arts expertise, he uses a gun.

More unconventional Westerns followed, including a musical, Paint Your Wagon (1969).  And "Dirty Harry" series -- Dirty Harry (1971), Magnum Force (1973), and so on, about a gruff, taciturn cop who restores order by shooting the perp (I haven't seen them, but apparently gay stereotypes abound).

But there was buddy-bonding, too.  In Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974), Eastwood's gruff, taciturn bank robber Thunderfoot hooks up with the irreverent young hunk Lightfoot (Jeff Bridges), who courts him openly and aggressively.  "I don't want your watch!" he exclaims.  "I want your friendship!"

The relationship ends in tragedy, like many other homoerotic buddy movies, such as  Thelma and Louise or Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.  Apparently you can fall in love -- covertly -- but you must be punished.

In Every Which Way But Loose (1978), an entry into the mid-1970s trucker craze, fist-fighting trucker Philo (Eastwood) pursues a dame, along with his two friends, one human (Geoffrey Lewis), one orangutan, channeling BJ and the Bear. 

And so on through dozens of movies, plust production, direction, composition, and politics, becoming an American legend several times over.  Most recently Eastwood directed J. Edgar (2011), a biopic of FBI director  J. Edgar Hoover (played by Leonardo DiCaprio).  Commentators feared that the conservative Eastwood would closet Hoover and Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer), but in fact their romance was central; Eastwood didn't even censor the crossdressing.