Going to Movies in 1995: DiCaprio Gets Naked and Dies, Pacino Holds Hands and Dies, Devon Sawa Just Dies, and Thomas Dekker Lives

 

For the sake of completeness, I'm viewing the movies I saw in theaters in 1995.  There aren't many: I was thoroughly immersed in West Hollywood's gay culture, where venturing east of Fairfax, north of Sunset, or south of Melrose would result in raised eyebrows and whispered questions.  But if you wanted to see a movie, had to go north to Hollywood for Mann's Chinese Theater, or east on Sunset to the Cinerama Dome. Lane and I ventured out eight times.

January: None

February: Boys on the Side, because it was advertised as a comedy about...um, boys.  Sorry, neither.  It's a depressing drama about three women friends.  One comes out as a lesbian and dies of AIDS (the seroconversion rate among lesbians is miniscule, but I guess gay people in 1990s movies always had to die).  Another goes to prison, but gets out and marries Matthew McConaughey (top photo). The third is Whoopie Goldberg.

March: None

April: Village of the Damned, because Lane was a fan of the original science fiction novel, The Midwich Cuckoos.  Ten women in a small town give birth to alien children with weird psychic powers.  Superman Christopher Reeve plays the town doctor, who is trying to stop their nefarious plans.  Thomas Dekker, the only boy with human tendencies, became a teen idol and adult hunk.

May: Casper, because I grew up with the Harvey comics version.  Sigh -- where to begin?  In the comics, ghosts are not dead people; they are magical beings with regular lifespans.  Casper is a 1960s nonconformist, a hippie in a capitalist world.  And he is not interested in girls.  Here Casper (Devon Sawa) is a dead boy, the plot involves an inheritance, and he gets a girlfriend.  Yuck.

June: None

July: Clueless. Super-entitled rich girl falls for her socially-conscious ex-stepbrother.   En route, she tries to seduce classmate Christian (Justin Walker), but he turns out to be gay.  First clue: he's fashion-conscious.  Second clue: for their movie night, he rents Some Like It Hot and Spartacus;  Kicker: he refuses sex.  Two subplots involve other heterosexual romances.  

August: Jeffrey.  Gay guy who has sworn off sex due to a fear of AIDS changes his mind, due to the intervention of a gaggle of helpful heterosexuals. 

September: To Wong Foo, Thanks For Everything, Julie Newmar.  Three drag queens descend upon a small town and solve everyone's problems.  In the four years since Silence of the Lambs,  Hollywood changed from drag queen as serial killer to drag queen as fairy godmother.  Quite an improvement.

October: None

November: Total Eclipse, because it was about French poets Verlaine and Rimbaud, who were gay, and because it starred Leonardo DiCaprio whom we assumed was gay.  Except here Rimbaud is a bisexual predator who uses the established poet for his prestige, and pushes him into a BDSM relationship (in the movies, tying someone up is always portrayed as the nadir of decadence). And  he dies (of course, Rimbaud really did die at age 37, but here it seems like a punishment for being gay).  But if you want to see DiCaprio's wang, this is your chance: just grab a screenshot and magnify 400%.

December: Heat: A gay-subtext romance between cop Al Pacino and the criminal he's chasing, Robert DeNiro.  They even hold hands.

The Last Straight Kids on Earth

42 days after a zombie  AND giant monster apocalypse destroys his town and probably the world, teenage video-game addict Jack (Nick Wolfhard, left) seems to be coping well.

The monsters and zombies can be easily outrun, there is plenty of food and other supplies to scavenge, and he has his technogeek bud Quint (Garland Whit) for company.  There's only one thing missing:

The Girl.

That's right, only 1 1/2 minutes into The Last Kids on Earth (2019), and Jack is summoning The Girl as the meaning of life, the key to his dreaming, the only thing missing in the apocalypse.

Sigh.  Why is it always the Eternal Feminine?

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, but after watching Twelve Forever and reading Welcome to Wanderland, a series dedicated to finding The Girl seems old fashioned and even offensive. 

The tv series is based on a series of children's books by Max Brallier, who although cute, doesn't appear to have any sexual or gender diversity in his works.

He does admit that "there are gay kids out there" in response to a homophobic comment on his twitter page.  Just none among The Last Kids on Earth.

To be fair, only Jack expresses heterosexual interest.  The other characters could be gay, just closeted.

The Girl is June (Montse Hernandez), all-around athlete, top student, editor of the school newspaper, practically perfect in every way, whom Joe was crushing on before the world ended.  In the first episode, Joe and Quint discover that she has survived the apocalypse by hiding in the school.

What a coincidence?

They also hook up with the school bully Dirk (Charles Demers).  The four "last kids on Earth" (and a friendly cat-monster named Rover) move into a decked-out treehouse with a zombie-proof moat and get down to the business of survival.

According to Netflix, this is a tv series, but there is only one "episode," 67 minutes long, online.  IMDB lists six episodes, perhaps covering the five books in the series, where the kids learn more about their situation, and eventually have to fight to save the world.  There is some stunt casting, including Bruce Campbell from The Evil Dead series and Mark Hamill.

And maybe they'll find someone gay along the way.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and the Blacksmiths with Brawny Arms

One of the poems parodied on Rocky and Bullwinkle was "The Village Smithy," by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1840):

Under a spreading chestnut-tree the village smithy stands.
The smith, a mighty man is he, with large and sinewy hands;
And the muscles of his brawny arms are strong as iron bands.

Actually, it was parodied everywhere, in cartoons and comedy sketches throughout my childhood.   It must have been a recitation assignment for generations of squirming schoolkids, and a hated memory for comedy writers of the 1960s.

If you read the entire poem, you find that the smithy has a wife and kids, but I only ever heard the part about how the village children come around every day to gawk at his muscles.

I could relate.

Although the poem doesn't really have a plot -- the blacksmith flexes his muscles, children gawk, he goes to church -- it was spun into movies in 1897, 1908, 1913, 1922, and 1936.

In the days before factories, the blacksmith had the job of forging tools and other instruments from iron. There were several blacksmith gods, including Vulcan in Graeco-Roman mythology and Ilmarinen in the Finnish Kalevala.

Unfortunately, they rarely worked shirtless -- too many sparks.

But early cinematographer Eadweard Muybridge filmed two naked blacksmiths for his study of Animal Locomotion.

There are still blacksmiths today.  They even have World Championships.  40 blacksmiths from the United States, Canada, Australia, and Britain competed in the 2014 Horseshoeing Contest in Eureka, Nevada.  Trey Green of Lakeside, California was the winner.

Looks like they still have "large and sinewy hands."

See also: James Whitcomb Riley: Even a Dull, Depressing Poet Can Be Gay

Frank Frazetta: The "Good" Muscle Artist

During the 1970s, any comic book about Tarzan, Conan, or any other barbarian hero was likely to show him heavily-muscled, half naked, holding a sword aloft, with a naked woman clinging to his legs. There weren't any gay magazines yet, at least none available for kids in small Midwestern towns, so they became gay teen pornography -- it was easy to ignore the naked woman.

We didn't know who drew the covers, so we just called him the "Good" Muscle Artist.












Turns out that he was a Brooklyn-born bodybuilder tunred cartoonist named Frank Frazetta (1928-2010), who began drawing comics in 1944, at the age 16.  At first he specialized in "funny animal" and semi-naked lady titles, but in 1954 he went to work for Al Capp on the venerable L'il Abner.  

By that point, Abner was married to Daisy Mae, with a son and mostly domestic adventures, but still, they gave Frazetta experience in drawing heavily-muscled men and semi-naked women.  By the 1960s, his covers were re-invigorating the sword and sorcery genre, with Robert E. Howard's Conan and Kull and Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan and John Carter of Mars as musclemen.  Here's a Conan cover with a gorilla instead of a naked lady at his feet.

Although heterosexual fans believed that he was drawing for them, envisioning their dream worlds of having powerful muscles and naked ladies lying at their feet, he was an "equal opportunity ogler," adept at showing the erotic power of everyone and everything.

I've heard that he was bisexual in real life, and that he was homophobic.  Maybe he was both.

During his long partnership with Ralph Bakshi, Frazetta worked on several animated features, as well as album covers and posters for a dozen movies.

Late in life he opened a Frazetta museum in East Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania, to showcase his fine art.

Most devoted to muscular barbarian heroes.

See also: Jim Steranko: Escape Artist Turned Comic Book Illustrator; and Boris Vallejo

The Comic Book Jungle

When I was a kid, in the 1960s, I didn't care much for DC and Marvel comics. Whenever I picked up an issue, it turned out to be the middle of a story that would go on for months, with installments in three or four different titles.

Gold Key Comics were a godsend, with stories that concluded in one issue. They offered Disney's Donald Duck traveling to Tibet or the Amazon, Bugs Bunny and Porky Pig as Indiana Jones-style adventure archaeologists, and even more jungle beefcake than DC and Marvel.  (I also liked Harveys and Archies, but not Charlton).

1. Tarzan.  This was the Edgar Rice Burroughs version, articulate, wealthy, and retired from vine-swinging on a jungle plantation – and, when the television series began in 1966, illustrated by pin-up quality pictures of Ron Ely. Jane was usually absent; instead, Tarzan spends most of his time bonding with various noble Africans and extremely chummy white explorers. The testosterone-laced atmosphere is embued with a surprising degree of tenderness: In “Message in the Snows,” Tarzan and two explorers named George and Alec are captured by giant Autralopitheci. George is wounded. Cradling him lovingly in his arms, Alec cries “Oh, please don’t die! Not now – not yet!”

2. The back-of-the-comic, The Jungle Twins, which spun off into its own title in 1972, introduced the identical cousins, both with amazing physiques and a dislike for clothing. On an extended visit with Uncle Tarzan, they adopt a golden lion and use it to rescue a girl from a savage human sacrifice. She asks suggestively“How can I ever thank you?,” but they skip the kiss. “Don’t thank us! Thank. . .the golden lion.”

3. Korak, Son of Tarzan: not the Boy of the MGM movies, a curly-haired muscleman in leopard-skin Speedos.  He is not interested in girls, though he has a heterosexist back story, and spends a lot of time orchestrating heterosexual romances for others. For instance, in “Valley of the Monsters,” he saves an attractive young urban African named Muhammed Isolo (“graduate of Oxford University”) and helps him “go native,” strip to a loincloth and marry a native girl.

4. His back-of-the-comic feature, Brothers of the Spear, also spun off into its own title in 1972. They are the white Dan-El and the black Natonga, co-rulers of the lost kingdom of Aba-Zulu. They happen to have wives, but their administrative duties and marriages never take front-stage to the joy of stripping down to a loincloth and spending some quality time in the bush. 

5. Turok Son of Stone had the most interesting premise of the lot: two Stone Age Indians, the young Turok and the middle-aged Andar, are trapped in a lost world full of dinosaurs and savages. Both have magnificent physiques, of course, and they spend their stories trying to get home and rescuing each other from monsters, with no girl in sight..

Hours of beefcake and bonding for 12 cents apiece-- well in the early 1970s, 20 cents, then 30, 40, and 50 in quick succession, until the company finally folded in 1982.

"Wet Hot American Summer: Ten Years Later"

It's 1991, ten years since Camp Firewood, and the gang is pushing 30, and with real ages past 50, still pushing credulity.

Victor, shirtless, muscular, and bulgy, but with a ridiculous toupee, works as a sexy bartender with his heterosexual life partner Neil, and still awkwardly talks about getting laid.  Wait...hasn't he...

Coop has written a tell-all autobiography.

McKinley is a stay-at-home husband to workaholic Ben (Adam Scott, replacing Bradley Cooper).  They have an infant daughter.  This was extremely rare and controversial in 1991, but for some reason it is treated nonchalantly by everyone, as if it's 2019.  Go figure.

And the others have done things....

They all arrive at Camp Firewood for a 24-hour reunion in the 8-episode Wet Hot American Summer: Ten Years Later. 

That's right, another 24 hour ludicrous time-dilation tv series, involving drama with the teenage campers,  the snobbish ex-counselors at Camp Tigerclaw, romantic entanglements, a psycho nanny, the talking can of vegetables, the traditional Shakespeare-themed dance that no one has ever mentioned before, a nuclear bomb, and a fistfight between Ronald Reagan and George Bush (did you know that you can see both the Washington Monument and the Capitol from the Oval Office?  Well, you can't.)

Gay couples:  McKinley and Ben, of course, plus several heterosexual life partners.

Beefcake: None.  No water scenes, no stripping down scenes.  But the actors are singularly unattractive anyway, so who cares?

A few of the new cast members are semi-palatable.

1. Adam Scott (top photo) in a suit.

2. Sky Gisondo as Deets, the "new Andy" (the arrogant, self-possessed one).  At least no one does the uvula-licking kissing thing.

3. Mark Feuerstein (left) as Mark.

4. Jai Courtney as actor Garth MacArthur

5.  Joey Bragg as nerd camper Seth

Um, well, that's about it. 

How "I'm Coming Out" Became a Gay Anthem

I'm coming out
I want the world to know
Got to let it show

How can this not be a gay anthem?

You're leaving behind the years of darkness and despair, the big lie that your parents, friends, teachers, and the media have told you, that you do not exist, or if you do, you are a dangerous, deviant sinner.

You exist.  You are not a dangerous, deviant sinner. You have survived.  And now you want the world to know.

There's a new me coming out
And I just had to live, and I want to give
I'm completely positive
That I am coming out!

"I'm Coming Out" was written in 1979 by Bernard Edwards and Nile Rogers of the disco group Chic ("Le Freak").  They were actually straight, but often went to gay clubs, and one night at the GG Barnum Room they saw some drag queens impersonating Diana Ross.  They thought a song about the gay community would be a positive addition to her new album, Diana.

Disco queen Diana Ross was already a legend, with ten albums, a string of hit singles, and starring roles in Mahogany and The Wiz.  But she was also a conservative Christian who thought gay people were all evil and going to hell.

During a 1983 concert, she reportedly complained: "I have seen the evils of homosexuality; AIDS is the result of your sins."  Later she denied making the statement, blaming it on a misquote by a reporter.

But in 1979 she balked at the idea of a song about gay people.  "People will think I'm gay!  Why are you trying to ruin my career"?

So Edwards and Rogers told her it was about the "coming out" tradition of young girls who are ready to enter adult society.  And that's what she believed.

"I'm Coming Out" premiered in September 1980, and quickly moved up the charts to the #5 position on pop charts in the U.S..  Meanwhile, the gay community embraced the song.  What gay person in the 1980s didn't use it as a coming out anthem?

Diana Ross continues to be oblivious, insisting that the song is about "coming out" into society, although she has become more tolerant of her gay fans.  She says "I don't judge."

In 2007, her son Evan Ross landed a role in the movie Life Support as a HIV+ gay man, and was worried that his mother would be upset -- but only because the character smoked.

Wild Things: The Gay Art of Maurice Sendak

Adults like to think of childhood as a blissful Eden, a period of endless joy, unblemished by anxieties over money or sex or death.  But they're wrong.  Childhood is terrifying and painful, crowded with anxieties over money, sex, and death, dismemberment, abandonment, anger, friendship,  and desire.  Author and illustrator Maurice Sendak (1928-2012) inhabited this world better than any other writer.

He was gay, so several of his books can be read as the struggle of a gay child to make sense of the world, and two are about gay couples.

1. Where the Wild Things Are (1963): Max threatens to eat his mother, and while being punished, runs away to the world of the Wild Things.  He stares them down, becomes their king, and decrees that a Wild Rumpus begin. But he gets homesick and goes home. The 2009 movie added some hetero-romance, among the Wild Things, not Max (Max Records).  There have also been stage plays and a ballet.

2. In the Night Kitchen (1970). An amazingly vivid, scary story of Mickey, who sneaks out of his bed to a surreal night kitchen, where three chefs (all of whom look like Oliver Hardy) are making the breakfast "cake."  He helps them, meanwhile wondering about where his body ends and the natural world begins: "I'm in the milk and the milk's in me."

It has been banned in many schools because the toddler is naked -- don't want five-year olds knowing that five-year olds sometimes have a penis.

Sendak's art for adults often contains penises as well, but never to be salacious, to depict vulnerability rather than desirability.

3. We are All in the Dumps with Jack and Guy (1993) is a traditional nursery rhyme with a gay family twist.  Gay partners Jack and Guy find a little boy with "one black eye," a victim of bullying or abuse.  Jack wants to "knock him on the head," continuing the abuse, but Guy suggests that they buy him some bread instead, and "We'll bring him up as other folks do."

4. My Brother's Book (2012). Two brothers are torn apart when a falling star crashes to the earth.  It's a love letter to his partner of fifty years, psychiatrist Eugene Glynn, who died in 2007.  With beautiful watercolors inspired by William Blake.