Sean Flynn: Was the Son of the Legendary Actor Gay?

Born in 1941, Sean Flynn was the son of infamous bisexual superstar Errol Flynn (and uncle of his namesake Sean Flynn, star of the Nickelodeon teencom Zoey 101).

Handsome, muscular, and the son of a superstar, he was naturally pushed into acting, and in 1962 appeared in the swashbuckling Son of Captain Blood, a sequel to his father's Captain Blood (1935).  

Some other actioners followed, with Sean playing Zorro (Duel at the Rio Grande, 1963), a man-mountain of Colonial India (Temple of the White Elephant, 1964), and a James Bond-style secret agent (Mission to Venice, 1964).  But there were lots of better movies with similar characters, and audiences stayed away.

Besides, Sean didn't care for acting.  He wanted to be a real-life adventurer, like Richard Halliburton and Michael Rockefeller.   He moved to Africa to become a hunter and game warden. Then he became a photojournalist, covering the Vietnam War and the 1967 Egypt-Israeli War for Paris-Match.  

In April 1970, while traveling near the Cambodian border, he and colleague Dana Stone (left) disappeared.

His mother spent years searching for him, and eventually found evidence that the two were captured by the Khmer Rouge or Viet Cong, imprisoned for a few months, and then executed.

A tragic end to a fascinating life.

Of course, you're wondering: was he gay or bisexual?










Sean's friend Perry Deane Young (left, the one with the bulge) doesn't say anything about Sean's same-sex interests in his memoir of their Vietnam experiences (published in 1975).  But then, one wouldn't expect him to.

However, it is compelling to note that Sean spent his life surrounded by attractive men.

See also: The Disappearance of Michael Rockefeller; The Disappearance of Richard Halliburton.

J. Allen St. John: The Beefcake and Phallic Images of Tarzan

In spite of his aristocratic name, J. Allen St. John was born in Chicago in 1872, when it was still a small town, and lived there throughout his life, except for studying in New York and Paris.


But his imagination went far afield beginning in 1916, when he was offered the cover and interior illustrations for Edgar Rice Burroughs' Beasts of Tarzan

An opportunity to draw muscular, half-naked men?  He had found his dream job!










One that lasted for the next thirty years, through dozens of Tarzan books, plus some of the Venus and Mars series.

St. John's extremely-muscular, mostly-naked men and blatant phallic imagery also enlivened the covers of Weird Tales, The Blue Book, and Amazing Stories.

He influenced a generation of beefcake science fiction and fantasy artists, such as Frank Franzetta.










He only wrote one novel of his own, The Face in the Pool: A Faerie Tale (1905).  It's a standard Medieval "boy meets girl" fantasy: "He came to the tower where the Princess Astrella's golden head at the window served as a gleaming beacon to those who would rescue here."

So her head revolves, or what?

Better stick to illustrations.











St. John always tried to get his male figures as naked as possible, negotiating as many phallic images as possible.  Is this a giant snake or a penis come to life?

But not his female figures.  Here the titular Cave Girl, fully clothed, rescues her semi-naked boyfriend from a semi-naked Neanderthal.

St. John was hired to do the cover art for Weird Tales, but fired after a few issues when he refused to provide enough female t. and a. to titilate the straight male audience.  Who wanted to look at naked men?

This is a cover of Mystic Magazine, November 1953, probably to illustrate the article "The Secret Kingdom: Secret Rules of Earth and the Coming Armageddon!"  Armageddon is presaged by a naked redhead with a scythe, his penis cleverly hidden by Father Time's head.

But that didn't stop him from including THREE phallic images












St. John was married to a woman named Ellen from 1904 to his death in 1957, but his interest in the male physique and the penis is obvious.  I'd be surprised if he wasn't gay.

South Pacific: A High School Music

I don't care much for musicals, but I've had a soft spot for South Pacific (1949), the Rogers and Hammerstein musical adaption of James A. Michener's Tales of the South Pacific (1948), ever since I saw it performed live 8 times in high school.

I was in the orchestra pit, so I had no choice.  But anything that required my male classmates to parade around with their shirts off was fine with me, even if they were singing the heterosexist "There's Nothing like a Dame."










Over the years I've seen four more live versions, at my nephew's high school, Augustana College, a community theater in Ohio, and a gay synagogue in West Hollywood.  But until recently, I never saw the 1958 movie with Ray Walston (later on My Favorite Martian), Jack Mullaney (later on It's About Time), and Ken Clark (the bodybuilder with something extra). (Gay icon Robert Goulet starred in the original.)

Most musical comedies have two hetero-romantic plots, one romantic and the other humorous.  In South Pacific, the romantic plot is handled by Lt. Joe Cable (in this case, Anderson Davis in a 2008 Baltimore production).  A soldier stationed on a small island in the Pacific during World War II, he falls in love with the native girl Liat, but his family's prejudices keep them from marrying.  Then he dies on a secret mission.

Here's another Jim (Matthew Morrison, who plays Will Schuester on Glee) from the 2008 Broadway revival.

The humorous plot is handled by Nellie Forbush, one of musical theater's big-voiced, gutsy broads, who falls in love with Emile, a fey, sophisticated, gay-coded plantation owner -- they perform a gender-bending number in drag -- but rejects him because he has mixed-race children.  He goes on the secret mission, too, but returns alive just in time for Nellie to overcome her prejudice and marry him.

The prejudice theme, plus the gender-bending romance between the gay-coded guy and girl, provides adequate gay symbolism.  But you hardly need any, with all the muscles to look at.

Who are the Guys in Sweat Pants on My Twitter Feed?

This showed up in my Twitter feed, a welcome change of pace from the outrage over the lunatic in the White House.

"Thanks for the great weekend, boys," the tweet said, signed Dante Colle.

And at the bottom, the watermark "Guys in Sweatpants."

I was intrigued.  Who were these guys?  A baseball team?  A boy band?  An youtube celebrity and his entourage?  And why weren't any of them actually wearing sweat pants?

It proved to be in a bizarre photo format, which wouldn't load in any of my photo programs, so I converted it to a .jpg, but it was still invisible until I copied it onto another file and converted it again.

Which only added to the mystery.  So I started checking out the twitter accounts.

The one on the far left, with the horse shoe tattoo, is Dante Colle, "GQ in the streets, hippie in the sheets.  Pura Vida," with 3,000 followers on twitter.  Lots of shirtless, semi-nude, and NSFW gay sex scenes on his social media feeds.

Kaden Dean, the femme guy with the ears standing next to Dante in the back row, is a 22-year old college student from Texas.  He has a Hebrew phrase tattooed on his chest.  He retweets a photo of himself aroused, sent by Logan Cross with the phrase "Look at this new meat my booty gonna eat."

Logan Cross, the short guy in the front with the weird hair and the chest, is from  Utah, with 58K followers on Twitter.  He likes pizza, pug dogs, Miley Ray Cyrus, his hairstyle, and sex with Kaden Dean.

Leo Luckett, the blond guy with the big red tattoo, second from the left, is  from San Diego.  He likes Harry Potter, peanut butter, and Daddies.   He tweets: "Who wants to top?  I wanna bottom."

Clark Parker,  hiding in the background, second from the right, was born on September 6, 1990, is into skateboarding and sex, and belongs to Slytherin House at Hogwarts.  He's Austin Wilde's sock buddy and favorite bottom.

Austin Wilde, the bald one holding the camera, has 90,000 followers on Twitter.  He lives in San Diego, where he regularly tops men on camera.  It helps if you like dogs and are a good cook.  He won the "Best Body" trophy at the Gay Porn Awards in 2017.








Charles King, on the far right, has excellent abs, representation from Ted Faye, and 1,300 followers on Twitter.  He tweets "I can't remember the last time I paid for underwear," and admits that he's never had sex with Hugh Jackman.

Yeah, it didn't take long to figure out that they were the cast of a porno, and guysinsweatpants.com is a website devoted to "Real. Gay. Sex."  134 models, countless scenes, and an invitation to become a model (the application is quite lengthy, though, so I didn't fill it out).

But it's nice to know that there is still professional porn being made in this age where everybody and his brother has a nude selfie floating around the internet, and it's a class act.

Yes, I have some nude photos on Tales of West Hollywood.