Nicholas Cortland: Model/Actor/Gay Icon of the 1970s

Here's how I found a forgotten gay icon of my past.

1.  On February 15, 1972, the spring of sixth grade, I saw the "Wild Weekend" episode of Mod Squad, about three hippies working as undercover cops.  Pete (Michael Cole) gets kidnapped, tied up, and presented as a party gift to his ex-girlfriend.

The other guests seem to like Pete, too; he's aggressively groped and manhandled, especially by the hunky prettyboy Doug.  But later Doug helps Pete escape.  Surely they liked each other, I thought!

2. A few years later, I saw the cult horror classic Frogs (1972) on Chuck Acri's Creature Feature. I thought the character of Kenneth Martindale was cute but creepy.  I was more interested in the homoromantic buddy bonding between Pickett and Clint (Sam Elliott, Adam Roarke).

 3. Recently I was reminded of the "Wild Weekend" episode, and hunky prettyboy Doug, so I looked him up in the IMDB.  Nicholas Cortland.  He lived from 1940 to 1988.  My AIDS radar went off.

His screen credits were nondescript: 2 soap operas, 7 guest spots on tv series, and 5 movies, the first in 1965, the last in 1985, nothing I had seen except for the Mod Squad episode and Frogs.  Two gay subtext vehicles -- he must be gay!

4. I found two obituaries, in The Los Angeles Times and The New York Times.  Sure enough, he was gay, and died of AIDS.  He was survived by his "long time companion," Peter R. Kruzan.

In 1976, Nicholas performed the lead in three productions of the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco:  Edward Albee's Tiny Alice, Michael McClure's General Gorgeous, and Tennessee Williams' This is (an Entertainment), the latter written especially for him.  Two gay playwrights.

5. I checked Google Images for pictures, and found lots of beefcake shots, but they all seem to be of Nicky Cortland, a contemporary porn star.

6. Time to check my archive of nude photography.  Jackpot!  Nicholas Cortland appeared shirtless or fully nude in After Dark (March 1972), Playgirl (November 1973), and the gay magazine In Touch (Spring 1976).  Now there was a face, and a physique, to go with my long-ago memory of the guy who liked Pete.

Hundreds of gay actors, writers, directors, and other performers were lost to AIDS during the 1980s. You may think of Nicholas Cortland as a lesser light, not as famous as Rock Hudson, Liberace, or Brad Davis.

But none of them were visible in a small town in the Midwest on a cold winter day in 1972, when the word "gay" had not yet been spoken, and the possibility of men loving men not yet dreamed of, except in hints and signals.

Spring 1980: Malcolm Boyd, the Fighting Priest Who Can Talk to Kids

Malcolm Boyd and Mark Thompson

When Fred the Ministerial Student and I visited Des Moines in the spring of 1980, we went to Drake University to hear an Episcopalian priest named Malcolm Boyd speak on social justice.  Thomas, the priest with three boyfriends, knew him, so the next day we all had lunch (no, Malcolm wasn't one of the boyfriends).

 All I knew about Malcolm was his book, Are You Running with Me, Jesus? (1965), a series of brief prayers about contemporary concerns, such as political injustice, racial inequality, sexual freedom, and gay people:

This is a gay bar, Jesus....Quite a few of the men here belong to the church as well as this bar. If they knew how, a number of them would ask you to be with them in both places.  Some of them wouldn't, but won't you be with them, too, Jesus?

Still, I was shocked to discover that Malcolm Boyd was gay himself -- and out, the first openly gay cleric in any mainstream religious body in the world.  He came out in a newspaper interview in 1977, and in 1978 he wrote Take Off the Masks, suggesting that Christianity should not only be tolerant, but gay-positive.




Born in 1923, Malcolm began his career as a movie producer, but felt the call to the clergy and graduated from seminary in 1954.  During the 1960s, he was famous his work in the Civil Rights movement, and for his hip religious poetry at the Hungry I nightclub in San Francisco.  He was the inspiration for the Doonesbury character Rev. Scott Sloane, "the fighting priest who can talk to kids."

In 1982 he moved to Los Angeles to become the priest at St.-Augustine-by-the-Sea Episcopal Church in Santa Monica.   He has written over 30 books, including Gay Priest: An Inner Journey (1987).

Mark Thompson, his partner of over 30 years, has written many books on gay spirituality, including The Fire in the Moonlight: Stories from the Radical Faeries, about the group that Sparky T. Rabbit helped to found.  They believe that gay people have a unique spiritual role as gatekeepers to the other world.

A Touch of Pink: Whiny Gay Guy, Free-Spirit Bisexual, and Cougar Mom

In A Touch of Pink (2004), Pakistani-Canadian Alim (Jimi Mistry) is living in London, with some kind of behind-the-scenes job in the movies.  He is morose, depressed, and quirky, always having conversations with his imaginary friend, Cary Grant.  But he still manages to land a partner, bisexual free-spirit economist Giles (Kris Holden-Ried).

There are free-spirit economists?

Then Alim's bitter, fault-finding Mom arrives from Canada for a visit.

You know what that means: hid all the gay books and beefcake photos, move the Economist to the guest bedroom, and pretend that you're engaged to his sister.  You've only seen that a few dozen times before.

But you haven't seen what happens next.

  The Economist flirts openly with Mom, calling her "beautiful," and taking her out for a romantic day of sightseeing and dancing cheek-to-cheek.  At this point, I assumed that the Economics would end up dumping Alim for his mother.  But that's not the direction the movie takes.

Roiling with jealousy over his the Economist's romantic interest in his mother, Alim decides to come out in stupidest way possible -- by showing Mom his photo.

Wait -- that's supposed to put the kibosh on her romantic interest?

All hell breaks loose. Mom returns to Canada, and the Economist is so upset over the loss of his cougar girlfriend that he breaks up with Alim and starts dating an Olympic Gold Medalist.

Right, whenever you break up with a guy, Olympic Gold Medalists are always waiting to zoom in.

But not to worry, Mom switches from homophobe to gay-rights activist overnight, and finds a new beau, a poetic janitor.  

The Economist and Alim reconcile. Deciding that he doesn't need an imaginary friend anymore, Alim dismisses Cary Grant.  Cue the fade-out kiss.

There were a few interesting bits:

1. Cary Grant behaves exactly like what you would expect: "Hide everything!"
2. Alim's cousin is gay but intends to marry anyway to "keep up appearances.
3. The bizarre  love triangle
4. Mom's conflicting attitudes toward the West.  She grew up watching old Cary Grant movies,  discovered that the real London was nothing like that, and now hates all things Western.  But not really.

But that's not enough to overcome the tired, contrived ending,  or the whiny, unpleasant character of Alim.

By the way, the title is a parody of That Touch of Mink (1962), a Cary Grant-Doris Day romantic comedy that no one except movie buffs has ever heard of

. 

The Go-Between: Desire is Always Dangerous

"The past is a foreign country.  They do things differently there."

This is the beginning of the 1953 novel The Go Between, by gay novelist L. P. Hartley, which was adapted into a  film by Harold Pinter.  It's about the long-ago year of 1900, where the conventions and traumas of everyday life seemed utterly alien by 1953, and even moreso today.

1. Same-sex desire and behavior are literally unthinkable, not recognized even among the people who experience them.
2. Sexual experience is bizarre, unsettling, and dangerous. One night of passion can lead to insanity or death.
3. Class boundaries are obvious, rigid, and inflexible.

In this alien world,  middle-class Leo (child star Dominic Guard, who would later play in Picnic at Hanging Rock) goes to visit his upper-class school chum Marcus (Robert Gibson) for the holidays.  There he meets the farmer Ted Burgess (bisexual actor Alan Bates).

Leo has never met someone of the lower class before: rough, sweaty, savage, leering, hinting at erotic potential.  He seems Ted shirtless and feels the first stirrings of desire.

In a parallel story of transcending class boundaries, sophisticated Marcus is in love with the rough, uncultured Leo, but Leo is oblivious to the fact, and mostly ignores his school chum.

Ted is involved in an illicit, forbidden romance with Marcus' older sister, Marian (Julie Christie), on whom Leo also has a crush.  Leo finds himself in the awkward role of go-between, delivering messages between two people that he desires.  He is so naive that at first he doesn't understand why they are meeting, or why their meetings are forbidden.

When he does understand that their relationship is sexual, Leo becomes morally outraged, jealous, depressed, scandalized.  He tries to end his service, but the lovers coolly manipulate him to continue.

The film, like the novel, is rather depressing.   Ted commits suicide. Marcus dies in World War I.  Marian marries someone of her station and has children and grandchildren, but to the end of her life pines for her dead lover.  Leo is gay, but so traumatized by the events of 1900 that as the years and decades pass, he is unable to establish any intimate relationship at all.

Desire is always forbidden, dangerous, and destructive, but a life without desire is no life at all.