Bobby Darin: Dream Lover of the 1950s

Bobby Darin (1936-1973) grew up in East Harlem, New York.  His first foray into the music business was as a songwriter, paired with future radio great Don Kirshner.  But he hit the big time in 1958 with "Splish Splash" (I Was Taking a Bath), a humorous take on the teen dance crazes of the era.

Splish, splash, I was taking a bath
On about a Saturday night

Bing, bang
I saw the whole gang
Dancin' on my living room rug.
Flip flop
They was doin' the bop
All the teens had the dancin' bug.

He illustrated the song with a nude, censored photo of himself in the shower, a rarity in 1958.

More songs, humorous, romantic, and just weird, appeared, six albums in 1960 alone.  Perhaps the weirdest is "Mack the Knife," about a murderer:

Now on the sidewalk, sunny morning,
Lies a body just oozin' life,
And someone's sneakin' 'round the corner
Could that someone be Mack the Knife?

Well, at least it's not heterosexist.

In the 1960s Bobby moved into moved into jazz, country-western, and folk, became a dramatic actor, and ran a successful music publishing company.

In 1960 he married Sandra Dee, the star of Gidget (1959), a gay icon and role model to young lesbians of the era, here being wooed by James Darin (no relation) and some other beach hunks.

The couple divorced in 1967, leaving a son, Dodd.

Bobby was married again, briefly, in 1973.

He was politically liberal, and heavily involved in the campaign to elect Robert F. Kennedy as president.

There's not much evidence of Bobby being gay in real life.  The 2004 biopic Beyond the Sea, starring Kevin Spacey, contains a few gay jokes:

Sandra tells Bobby that if he thinks acting is so easy, he should try kissing Troy Donahue (who was rumored to be gay).  Bobby smiles, as if he's considering it.

But that may be a take on Kevin Spacey himself.

On the other hand, most of Bobby's songs drop pronouns, and could apply equally to male and female lovers:

You're the reason I'm living
You're the breath that I take
You're the stars in my heaven
You're the sun when I wake.

The nude photo is on Tales of West Hollywood.

See also: Ricky Nelson

How Do We Know that Paul Robeson was Gay?

When I was in college in the late 1970s, Paul Robeson (1898-1977) was one of my heroes.  I loved his booming, soul-rending "Old Man River" in Showboat:

I get weary, and sick of trying
Tired of living, and scared of dying
But ol' man river, he just keeps rolling along.

And his hysterical megalomaniac in Emperor Jones.


He was one of the few African-Americans who managed to break into mainstream theater and film, but during the Cold War his radical political views caused him to be blacklisted -- he called America a "fascist state," and spoke favorably about the Soviet Union.  He had to live in exile in London, and his movies and songs were censored for many years.

How cool is that?

His physique was almost as impressive as his voice, so directors had him rip off his shirt whenever possible.  In the 1920s he became the first African-American to pose nude, for photographer Nickolas Muray.

When sculptor Antonio Salemme saw a performance of The Emperor Jones, he asked Robeson to model for him, and produced several busts, as well as the nude, arms-raised "Negro Spiritual."


I always assumed that he was gay because...well, I assumed that everybody was gay.  Besides, he was friends with many of the gay figures of the Harlem Renaissance, and Paris between the Wars, and many of his film and theatrical roles involved gay subtexts.

I got my proof in 1987, when an article the Advocate mentioned that he was "recently discovered to have been gay."

In August 2014, a new biography of Paul Robeson came out, written by none other than distinguished gay scholar Martin Duberman.

Great!  I thought.  Now I'm going to hear all about Robeson's male lovers, maybe a long-term romance with Antonio Salemme or director Sergei Eisenstein, maybe cruising for hunky sailors in Paris with Jean Genet or visiting Paul Bowles in Morocco to troll for rent boys.

But Duberman found no evidence of Robeson's male lovers, not a hint of cruising for hunky sailors or trolling for rent boys. Not that Robeson had a problem with gay people; he was "wholly accepting," according to his gay friends.  But he never expressed any same-sex desire.  As a young man in Harlem, he was often approached, even offered money, but he wasn't interested.

 Instead, Duberman found a long list of women.  A very, very long list.  Robeson had a robust sexual appetite. Robust, but exclusively heterosexual.

So where did the "Robeson is gay" come from?

Author Marc Blitzstein tracked it down to a story told by gay liberation pioneer Jim Kepner.  One day in 1947, the young Kepner made a delivery to Robeson's apartment in Manhattan.  Robeson answered the door in a "lavender dressing gown," invited him in for tea, and made some cruisy eye contact as they chatted.

In 1987, Kepner told the story to Stuart Timmons, who then wrote "Robeson was recently discovered to have been gay" for his Advocate article.

That's it.  One anecdote, 40 years old, where nothing actually happened.

Robeson still might have been gay or bisexual, with super-secret liaisons, or desires that were never fulfilled.  But his very busy heterosexual sex life and his openness to friendships with gay people lead me to doubt it.

Well, at least he was an ally.

Flannery O'Connor's Lesbian Girlfriend

I had to laugh when I was watching the recent adaption of Tales of the City, and a young Anna Madrigal cons her way into a job at the famous City Lights bookstore in San Francisco by claiming to be a fan of Flannery O'Connor.

As if anybody in real life would ever be a fan of Flannery O'Connor.  Or ever read a word of her stories, unless they were forced by some horrible literature professor.

I was forced to read two of her stories in college:

"A Good Man is Hard to Find": a family on vacation is murdered, one at a time. Including the children.  Grandma is the last to go.  Why would anyone willing read about something so horrible?  Why would anyone write about it.

"Good Country People": a depressed philosophy major thinks that a traveling salesman is interested in her, but she's fat!  No chance!  He really just wants to steal her prosthetic leg.

O'Connor wrote lots of other stories, plus two novels that were hedged together from stories, all in the Southern Gothic vein of grotesque, people hugging corpses and lauding the mentally disabled as prophets.

A devout Catholic, she really hated intellectuals: all that book learning keeps you from the mystery of faith. She also hated atheism and religions other than Catholicism.  She lived her life in Milledgeville, Georgia, never married, attended Mass daily, and died of lupus in 1964, at the age of 39.

Sounds like the life of most of her isolated, miserable characters.

Wait -- never married?

And she had a lesbian buddy!

We were not aware of the relationship until the day after Christmas1998, when 75-year old  Betty Hester shot herself.  Next to her bed was a copy of the Flannery O'Connor fan newsletter splattered with her blood.

Fan newsletter?  It must have three subscribers.

Research by her friend, Flannery O'Connor scholar Sally Fitzgerald (wow, what a horrible academic specialization) revealed a correspondence beginning in 1955, when a timid 32-year old "office girl" from Atlanta, a lesbian who had been dishonorably discharged from the army,  wrote to her favorite author.  Flannery, surprised to get actual fan mail rather than suicide notes, wrote back.

They began a correspondence of hundreds of letters.  Some were published in a collection of Flannery's works, but with a pseudonymn, as if revealing Betty's identity would be too personal.  They are mostly about philosophy and religion: Flannery begs Betty to convert to Catholicism, the only true faith.

Betty agrees to convert, but there might be a problem: she's a lesbian.  Flannery states that she "doesn't care in the slightest," nor will it make the slightest difference in her relationship to the Church.  She only starts to get annoyed when Betty decides to leave the Church in 1961.  The  two continued to correspond, but more cooly, up until Flannery's death.

So, was Flannery a lesbian, too?  Or did she not care because lesbians were only mildly salacious compared to the human monsters she was accustomed to writing about?

Her biographer insists that Flannery couldn't have been a lesbian because she dated a man, once, in the early 1950s.  Proof positive!

Next Betty got a crush on Iris Murdoch, another philosophical Catholic writer whose biographer insists "couldn't have been a lesbian."  But Flannery remained her first, and truest love.

 You're probably wondering about the top photo.

Flannery's novel Wise Blood is about the preacher in the Church of Truth without Christ, which doesn't believe in God, heaven, hell, or sin, so you are free to do whatever damn thing you want.  Enoch Emery, a teenage follower, leaves the church when he starts worshipping a new Jesus, actually the shrunken corpse of a South American Indian in a museum.

In the 1979 movie version, Enoch Emery was played by Dan Shor.  Two years later, Dan starred in the horror movie Strange Behavior, which features a lengthy conversation buck nekkid, his bare butt displayed to a generation that had almost never seen male nudity on a screen.

I wish I had written this post on Dan Shor rather than Flannery O'Connor.  Lesbian or hot, I hate her works with the white hot intensity of a thousand suns.  I even hate the plot synopses of her works.

Astronauts and Cave Men: It's About Time

In November 1966 I turned six, a "big boy," with a later bedtime and the freedom to watch "good tv", shows about cute boys: The Monkees, Lost in Space, Tarzan, Get Smart, Hogan's Heroes, Run Buddy Run, Time Tunnel, Flipper .  On Sunday night we had church, but with a new baby in the house we often stayed home, and I could watch It's About Time (1966-67), a "trapped far from home" sitcom from Sherwood Schwartz, creator of the hugely successful Gilligan's Island.

It was about two astronauts who got zapped into prehistory, where cave men spoke in "ug-ug" broken English and fought dinosaurs.  They move in with a cave family played by comedy legends Imogene Coca and Joe E. Ross.

Mac (Frank Aletter, right) was a sitcom pro, already the star of Bringing Up Buddy and The Cara Williams Show.  He would go on to play Professor Hayden on Danger Island, with Jan-Michael Vincent.

Hector (Jack Mullaney, left) was best known for his role in the beefcake-heavy musical South Pacific (1958), with Ken Clark as the voluminous Stewpot.  Mullaney never married and was reputedly gay.

Mac and Hector wore their astronaut costumes most of the time, but sometimes they wore animal skins that revealed tight, firm chests and shoulders.  The cave people also wore animal skins, and in spite of their fright wigs, many muscular bodies were visible in the background.

Here's another picture from South Pacific.  

There was significant bonding: the two astronauts bickered like a married couple, hugged, fell into each other's arms, and lived together, even when they returned to the twentieth century.

They gazed with tongue-lolling horniness at the cave family's daughter, but such minor concessions to heterosexism could be ignored.

And there was a "dreamy boy" for us to gaze at: Pat Cardi, who had just finished work on the dark comedy Let's Kill Uncle, played the cave family's fourteen year old son, Breen.  He wore a fright wing, but his animal skin was almost as revealing as the tight pants on Flipper.  

Unfortunately, It's About Time aired on Sunday nights, opposite the last halves of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea and Walt Disney, so most of the intended kid audience was already occupied.

After 18 episodes, low ratings prompted a complete reversal of the premise: the astronauts return to 1960s America, bringing a cave family with them. It didn't help.  So in spite of the ecstatic tv ads and a full run of tie-in toys, games, coloring books, lunch boxes, and the like, It's About Time sank seven episodes later, and was lost to history.  Except for 60 year olds who can still recite the theme song:

It's about time,
It's about space,
About strange people in the strangest place.
It's about time,
It's about flight,
Traveling faster than the speed of light

Alice Through the Looking Glass

Lewis Carroll's books, Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass, are supposed to be nonsense.  Characters appear and disappear at random.  There is no plot, just a series of incidents.  There is no goal.  Things happen, and Alice wakes up.

There are three ways that you can adapt these books for movies or tv.

1. You can stay true to the original books, and have Alice faced with a random series of events that make no sense.
2. You can play on what would happen if Alice returned to England and insisted that she had actually been to Wonderland:  a grim story of a girl undergoing Victorian cures for insanity.
3. You can make Wonderland a real fantasy or science fiction universe, with internal consistency and logical plot developments (good luck!)

The 2016 Alice Through the Looking Glass did #3, with a little of #1 and #2.  The result varies tremendously in tone, and has about as much to do with the original book as The Lord of the Rings has to do with professional baseball.

Alice (whose last name is Kingsleigh, not Liddell), is grown-up, and who is played by 27-year old Mia Wasikowska, is a sea captain, with a domestic problem: her ex-suitor Hamish (Leo Bill) has bought her father's company (um..Alice's father was a college professor), and will throw her mother out unless she gives up her adventuring life and goes to work as a clerk in his firm.  When she refuses, her mother has her committed to an insane asylum under the evil Dr. Addison Bennett (Andrew Scott).

Got all that?  As turgid as a George Elliot novel.

Then Alice goes through the looking glass, gets involved briefly with some nonsense shenanigans involving chess pieces and Humpty Dumpty, then plummets into Wonderland (now called Underland), where she is given the task of curing the life-threatening depression of the Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp).

He's depressed over his family being killed a jabberwock attack when he was a boy, so the White Queen (Mirana of Marmoreal) talks her into going back in time to try to prevent their deaths.

To do so, Alice has to steal something from the chronoscope from the God of Time (Sacha Baron Cohen).

Unfortunately, the exiled Red Queen (Iracebeth of Crims) is dating the God of Time.

She also gets involved with the feud between the White and Red Queens back when King Oleron (Richard Armitage) ruled Underland, and they were just princesses.

Got all that?

I don't.

But at least there's no hetero-romantic plotline.  The Mad Hatter does not express any romantic interest in Alice, or anyone else.  I expected Alice to fall for James Harcourt (Ed Speleers, top photo), the only Victorian who isn't shocked by her eccentricities, but she doesn't.