Enrico Natali: Accidental Beefcake

Enrico Natali was born in Utica, New York in 1933, and moved to New York in 1954.  His photographs of people on the New York Subway were published in 1960.  During the next decade, he traveled to several cities in the U.S. to photograph real people engaging in their daily activities, producing moments frozen in time.  His most acclaimed, Detroit 1968, was recently republished.

His world depicts the heterosexual male gaze, with women outnumbering the men, and the men mostly in couples.  There is no one obviously gay, except maybe this short-short and bulge number.

But male beauty leaks through anyway, as if it is impossible to keep it hidden, regardless of what the artist intends or hopes for.

It's accidental beefcake.

And who's to say which of the pairs living their lives in the dark days of 1968 didn't care for each other like that?


In the 1970s Natali gave up photography to concentrate on Zen Buddhist meditation. In 1990s he and his wife moved to the Matilija Canyon, in Ojai, California, where they opened a Zen meditation center (the Blue Heron Zen Center

His oldest son Vincenzo Natali is a writer and director known for horror movies and tv series such as  Cube and Darknet.  His Splice is about a genetically-modified being who changes gender.

In 2000, his youngest son Andrei suggested that they go on a photography tour together.   Andrei died in an auto accident in 2005, but Enrico continued the project, and in 2015, presented Just Looking: Photographs of the American Landscape.

Devon Sawa

I wasn't happy when Casper (1995) made the Harvey Comics character into a real ghost -- a dead boy -- rather than a magical being, and then eliminated the gay subtext by giving him a girlfriend.   So, by implication, I wasn't happy with the star, 16-year old Devon Sawa.













But I forgave him when he starred in a string of homoromantic buddy-bonding movies (most required extensive shirtless and underwear shots and skinny-dipping scenes for teenage fans to gaze at):

1. Night of the Twisters (1996), based on the novel by Ivy Ruckman.  Nebraska teens Dan (Devon) and Arthur (Amos Crawley) try to find their families during a spate of tornados.  Unfortunately, there's a fade-out-kiss conclusion.

2. The Boys Club (1997).   Ontario teens Eric (Devon),  his boyfriend Kyle (Dominic Zamprogna), and their friend Brad (Stuart Stone), who seem too old for a clubhouse, are terrorized by an escaped con (Chris Penn).

3. Wild America (1997).  Three "brothers" (Devon, Jonathan Taylor Thomas, Scott Bairstow) head out into the wilderness to make a movie.

Meanwhile Devon was getting the full teen-idol treatment, with dozens of photo shoots in teen idol magazines and interviewers asking such probing questions as "What kind of girls do you like?"

His teen idol career lasted for only a few years.  Then he was relegated to sleazy horror films like Idle Hands  (1999), Final Destination (1999), and Devil's Den (2006), or sleazy teen sex comedies like Slackers (2002).

More recently Devon has re-invented himself as an action hero, the heavily-muscled, heavily-tattooed assassin Owen in Nikita (2010-2013), or the unscrupulous cop-turned-detective Nico in Somewhere Between (2017). 

Mostly the kind, sympathetic women and rough, aggressive men bit.  Not a lot of buddy bonding.

There's a sausage sighting story on Tales of West Hollywood

The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina

Sabrina the Teenage Witch first appeared in the anthology series Archie's Madhouse in 1962, as a glamorous although rather malevolent witch perhaps inspired by the movie Bell, Book, and Candle (1958). 

During the last fifty years, she has appeared occasionally in the Archie universe as a student at Riverdale High, generally in stories where she tries to use her magic to help one of the gang, with disastrous consequences.  But magic doesn't fit in well with the usual naturalistic Riverdale, so Sabrina appears most often in completely separate stories, living in an unnamed town (later called Greendale) with her own supporting cast: her aunts Hilda and Zelda, an older cousin Ambrose, and her doofus boyfriend Harvey.  Her cat Salem is sometimes just a cat, sometimes a familiar with magical powers of his own.

Sabrina has had four comic book series:

1. From 1971 to 1983, in conjuction with the tv cartoon Sabrina and the Groovy Ghoulies (a pack of Universal Studios monsters)

2. From 1997 to 1999, in conjunction with the TGIF tv series starring Melissa Joan Hart (who appeared on several covers).

3. From 2003 to 2009, in conjunction with a new animated series.

4. Her most recent comic book series, The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (2014-), is set in the 1960s, with witches as Satan-worshipping cannibals.  But you're also born a witch; there are strict rules about witch-mortal "miscegenation" to "protect the blood line."

So is being a witch a religion or an ethnicity?

Heterosexual romances abound, but there are no gay characters -- although Cousin Ambrose comes across as a bit fey, and head witch Aleister Crowley is criticized for breaking the Satanic Bible's rule against men lying with men.

Nor is there any beefcake.  There are nude females everywhere in boob-heavy detail, but no men with their shirts off, ever.  Not even Harvey, who in this rendition is a football-captain-mega-hunk rather than a nebbish.

So I don't hold out a lot of hope for the Chilling Adventures tv series premiering in 2018.  It will be set in modern times, a cognate to Riverdale.

Ross Lynch (top photo) has signed on to play Harvey.  He always looks good naked, but will he be allowed to fumble with a button on the show?

Chance Perdomo, who will be playing Cousin Ambrose, looks like Diana Ross.  One article says that he'll be making his character pansexual, so he'll be like the gay best buddy of the female lead stereotype.  But Ambrose is "under house arrest," forbidden from leaving Sabrina's house, so he won't be doing much dating.

Other beefcake possibilities include Richard Coyle as Father Blackwood, who I assume is the head of Sabrina's coven.

And maybe some of the boys at the school.


See also: Riverdale

Gay Fan Art 1: Max Goof

Go to deviantart.com or one of the x-rated yaoi sites and do a keyword search for "Max Goof slash."

You'll find dozens of fan-produced pictures of the Disney character kissing a guy, hanging out in his underwear with his boyfriend, or having explicit s*x with him.

His boyfriends include the portly P.J., 1980s-lingo-spouting slacker dude Bobby Zimeruski, and one of the 101 Dalmatians.

There are also pictures of Max having s*x with women, but they are far outnumbered by the homoerotic pictures.

Apparently fans enjoy envisioning Max Goof as gay.

Ironically, the character appeared during the 1980s conservative retrenchment, when the cartoon characters of previous generations came under scrutiny.  Quasi-romantic bonds, gender ambiguity, any hint of a potential gay subtext had to be erased.  Sometimes they were transformed into children, but more often they were explicitly heterosexualized, given husbands, wives, and children.

So, in the tv series Goof Troop (1992-1996), Goofy, the gay-vague sidekick of Mickey Mouse in many Disney comic books, became a widower raising his 11-year old son, Max.   Most of the episodes involved Max's embarrassment over his less-than-cool Dad.

The characters spun off into two movies with similar "embarrassed Max" plotlines.

A Goofy Movie (1995) has a teenage Max torn between going to a concert with the girl he likes, and going on a father-son fishing trip with Goofy.

In An Extremely Goofy Movie (2000), Max heads off to college, hoping to be rid of his less-than-cool Dad once and for all, only to discover that Goofy has enrolled along with him.

Both father and son have hetero-romantic plotlines.

In the Disney Channel series House of Mouse (2001-2003), Max works as a valet at Mickey Mouse's nightclub.

It's not a very long pedigree, nor are there any major gay subtexts, but it still resonated with fans.

Maybe it's because Max is voiced by Jason Marsden, long-time gay ally and all-around hunk.

(All pictures borrowed from the artists on deviantart.com.)