Let's Hear it for the Boy

In the early 1980s, I listened mostly to classical music.  I was too old for teen idols,  and adult music was dreadful, all about hetero-romance, hetero-sex, or large breasts.  Especially when MTV began playing music videos to illustrate the songs.

For instance, let's look at the charts for the spring of 1984, when I was working on my master's degree:

Phil Collins, "Against All Odds": a girl left him, and now he's depressed.
Lionel Richie, "Hello": a girl left him, and now he's depressed.
Ultravox, "Dancing with Tears in My Eyes": a girl left him, and now he's depressed.
Julio Inglesias, "To All the Girls I've Loved Before."
Nik Kershaw, "Dancing Girls."  'Nuff said.

But there were exceptions.  A dozen songs of the early 1980s could be appropriated, read as gay-positive regardless of what the performers intended.  Especially "Let's Hear it for the Boy," by Deniece Williams


The lyrics are standard pop hetero-romance, about the female singer's boyfriend, who is not rich, a fancy dresser, or a good singer, but nevertheless provides hetero-romance.  In the music video, however, she praises a variety of boys, starting with with a tap dancing little kid (Aaron Lohr, later photo), who of course is not her boyfriend.

Here's another recent photo of Aaron, in a stage version of  The Full Monty.

The scene shifts to a teenager who plays the piano and dances, badly, then to more teenage boys and adult men, playing chess, playing football, dancing with her, dancing with each other.  Some are athletic, some aren't, some are shirtless, some aren't, but all of them are beautiful due to their exuberance, their energy, and their fun-loving joie de vivre. Who has time to even think about muscles?

 Finally there are thirty men and one woman on stage.  The song has become a paeon to the entire male sex.

And that's not all.  It's the background music in the intensely romantic montage in Footloose (1984) where city boy Ren (Kevin Bacon) teaches redneck Willard (Chris Penn) to dance, and they end up posing, running, frolicking, hugging.

With the absence of a female focus character, it becomes a paeon to men loving men.

See also: Ocho Rios: Tracking Down a Jamaican Bodybuilder.

Is Every Movie About Men and Women Kissing?

An April morning.  The last week of class, with the dreary, boring summer coming up.  The highlights will be a colonoscopy and a trip crosscountry to visit relatives.  I don't know which I'm looking forward to the most.

I've already checked Netflix, Hulu, and Disney for something "new and notable," and come up empty.  Now it's time to check the bottom of the barrel Amazon Prime for something that isn't terrible: no plots featuring detectives with dead wives or teenage boys trying to win the girls of their dreams, no trailers featuring men and women falling in love.

1. Deadly Promises: "At Castle Park High, both Dylan and Travis have a crush on Megan.  Of course they do.  Dylan is played by Julian Crouser, a Denver-based actor with only six credits on IMDB, including Beautiful Boy and The Sinister Tale of Scoopy Burger.  I'd watch those.

2. Only the Animals: A French movie about men and women kissing and men glaring at each other.

3. Adam and Evil: "A group of sexy high school graduates" go somewhere remote to be stalked by a psycho-killer.  There is an Adam in the cast (Sean Arnfinson). The trailer shows boy-girl couples all the way down.   

4. Tyfelstei: An Alpine Horror Tale: "After a serious accident, Michael Dorn wakes up in a village in the Swiss Alps."  Where he meets a girl.  Never, ever, under any circumstances, does a boy ever meet a boy.

5. These Streets We Haunt:  Marcus, "a corporate artist who's lost his zeal for life, rents out his spare room to...."   Let me guess: a hot guy who restores his joie de vivre.  Nope, a girl.

Strangely, the actor playing Marcus is at the bottom of the cast list on IMDB. Top billing: Sam Brooks as Pedro, whose IMDB photo gallery has some pictures of a boy and some of a girl.  Maybe they transitioned.  

6. Shangri-La:  No connection to Lost Horizon, the 1937 movie with Ronald Coleman discovering the mythical Tibetan kingdom. Here "Shangri-La" is the last human refuge in a postapocalyptic world.  The trailer shows shooting, fighting, arguing, trudging through snow...and a man and a woman kissing...and tied-up girls in bikinis.  Ugh!

7. Seven Stages to Achieve Eternal Happiness.  An "offbeat comedy" from New Zealand about a man and a woman kissing, hugging, lying on the floor, kissing again, and then fighting off a weird cult.  One of the IMDB reviewers trashes anyone who doesn't love, love, love this movie: they "are no doubt boring and devoid of any real joy in life."  Right, people who don't like exactly the same things you like are doomed to a life of eternal misery.  Sounds like the Birdy-philes who were so insistent that the movie Birdy contained the meaning of life.

8. Iberion:  "Joe is a loser who is in love with a woman who doesn't even know his name."  How do you love someone that you have never actually met?'  

I'm having a hard time finding beefcake images for actors in any of these movies: they're all obscure, with no social media presence, or they have the exact name as 30,000 other people.  So here's a random hunk.

9. Honeymoon.  I'm not even trying.

10. Ragnarok: Sigurd, his kids, and a colleague set out to discover the mystery of Ragnarok, the future battle that will destroy heaven and earth.  The colleague is...a woman.  Did you dare to hope that he'd invite a cute guy along?

11. Kopy Kings: The hilarious misadvetures of employees at a copy store in Austria.  Do copy stores still exist?  Do hard copies of documents still exist?  The only pieces of paper I see these days are in junk mail. But there are no men and women kissing each other in the trailer, so maybe it's not terrible.

12. Retreat: "Kate and Martin (Cilian Murphy) escape from personal tragedies to an Island Retreat. Their attempts to recover are shattered when a Man is washed ashore."  Doesn't anyone learn about common and proper nouns in school?  By the way, the Man (Jamie Bell, left) is a threat.  It's kind, nurturing, compassionate women and glaring men all the way down.

13. Straight Edge Kegger:  "After his straight edge friends go too far," a young man goes to a party where a psycho killer awaits.  And he meets....a girl.  Wait -- I thought "straight edge" meant someone who always follows conventional norms, never breaks the rules.  How could a "straight edge" person go too far?

14. Maiden Woods: A town full of "Decent, hard-working people."  I'd like to see those towns full of indecent lazy people.  Then bad things start to happen (or as the blurb says, "transpire"), and former child star Lukas Haas kisses a girl.

15. Is It Just Me?  A comedy about a gay man (Nicholas Downs) looking for love online, and in the ads in the gay news magazine Frontiers.  I used to read that in L.A. in the 1980s, but I haven't seen a copy for years.  Does it still exist?  The trailer mostly shows him hanging out with his female bestie -- interesting that even in a movie about gay men, you need to portray men interacting with women.

16. Flashback.  Charlie, "a female lawyer who believes in nothing but herself," takes a cab into the past to "The French Revolution, the Glorious Thirties, and the First World War," where she meets famous women: Marie Curie, Jean D'Arc, Gisele Halimi. I've never heard the 1930s described as "Glorious" before: in the U.S. they're always about bread lines, Hoovertowns, and "Brother, can you spare a dime?"  The trailer shows Charlie getting naked and taking pratfalls, but not falling in love with her cabbie (Issa Doumbia, left).

17. All the Old Knives: "two CIA agents and ex-lovers (Chris Pine and Thandiwe Newton)" broke up so they could get back together in this movie.  The gender of Thandiwe isn't obvious from their name, but 90% of the trailer consists of a man and a woman kissing, having sex, cuddling in bed, kissing, arguing, gazing at each other across a crowded room, and kissing.

18. Goodbye, Seventies.  "The Golden Age of Gay Porn."  The trailer features footage of Watergate, homophobic cops, and the Everard Baths fire, a lot of half-naked men, and a lot of women, for some reason.

19. Wrath of Man: "A mysterious new cash truck security guard surprises his coworkers during a heist with his precision skills."  What's a cash truck security guard?  What are precision skills?  The trailer shows him shooting a lot of people, in prison, in heists, and in an office, and talking to a woman but not kissing her.

20. Horizon Line; "A couple that broke up so they can get back together again  (Alexander Dreymon and....you guessed it.  A woman) boards a routine flight to their friend's island wedding, but the pilot suffers a fatal heart attack, leaving them with no idea how to fly the plane."  The trailer shows them kissing and having sex, then boarding the plane. So when did they break up so they could get back together?  And why would they even get on a plane where the pilot looks like he fought in World War I?

Conclusion: Every movie is about men and women kissing, except when it is specifically aimed at a gay audience, and then it's about men and women talking.