Jul 5, 2024

Joseph and the Amazing Gay Dreamcoat

I'm not a big fan of musicals, but Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat (1972) is one of my favorites, for three reasons

Reason #1: The utter absence of a hetero-romantic plot, almost unheard-of in musical theater.

It's a Mod version of the picaresque adventures of Joseph (from the Bible), favorite of his father, given a Coat of Many Colors.

His brothers, jealous, set out to kill him, but have a change of heart and sell him to slave traders instead.  He ends up in Egypt -- depicted as a glittery Las Vegas -- as a slave to sleazy merchant Potiphar.









Potiphar's wife tries unsuccessfully to seduce him -- "I don't believe in free love," he yells in 1960s slang.  Or maybe he doesn't particularly care for girls.  

Falsely accused of attempted rape, Joseph is thrown in prison, where he begins interpreting other prisoners' weird dreams, thus drawing the attention of the Pharaoh (an Elvis-like pop star).   Pharaoh makes Joseph his right-hand man. The brothers arrive, and Joseph toys with them a bit before reconciling.

Reason #2:  Pharaoh likes Joseph -- a lot.  Big gay subtext.













Reason #3: Joseph spends most of the play with the Dream Coat off.  And nearly everything else off.  The Pharaoh usually gets an opportunity to flex.

There have been innumerable revivals, in Britain and the U.S., with Joseph played by James Royce Edwards, Paul Jones, David James-Carroll, Bill Hutton, Mike Holoway, David Cassidy, his brother Patrick Cassidy, Jason Donovan, Lee Mead, and Keith Jacks (top photo).  Former teen idol Donny Osmond starred in the 1999 movie version.








But that's not all.  Joseph is a favorite of high school and college theater departments; apparently there have been 20,000 productions since 1972. So you have a good chance of seeing Stars of Tomorrow performing Joseph and the Pharaoh at a little theater near you.




Jul 3, 2024

Joseph Cali: Nude model before Stonewall, John Travolta's disco buddy, soap opera hunk, Adonis Male

  


In 1968, a year before Stonewall, 18-year old Joseph Cali was playing chess and cruising in Washington Square Park in Manhattan when he was approached by George Haimsohn, author of Stories of the Homosexual Life, The Gay Psychedelic Sex Book, The Gay Coloring Book, A Summer on Fire Island, and the book and libretto for the musical Dames at Sea, which was currently playing off-Broadway.

Haimsohn was also a photographer, working under the name Plato, and invited Joe to model. 

His first full frontal photo appears in a 1968 issue of Go Guys.  The text says that Joe is a "fast shooting star on the physique horizon....well equipped to handle himself in any tight spot." Tell me more, tell me more, did he get very far?
  

The photo set and magazine work paid for Joe's tuition at Siena College, where he led anti-war protests, starred in the play Drunkard, and worked as a stage manager for The Gingham Dog










 
He moved to Los Angeles in 1973, and continued to pose for the Model of the Month Club and Photozique, while making the rounds of auditions.


Joe's big break came in 1977, when he was cast as Joey, best buddy of John Travolta's Tony in the disco drama Saturday Night Fever

More Brooklyn-disco roles followed, including Flatbush, a tv series about a gang called the Fungos.  Joe starred as Presto opposite Adrian Zmed as Socks.  It only lasted for six episodes.


He got 19 episodes of Today's FBI in 1981-82 as Nick, the "Ethnic" member of the team according to Wikipedia.  I'm not sure what his ethnicity was.

More Joseph Cali after the break. 


"Muscle & Fitness": Searching for the Kelvin cover, with Weatherford's butt and Lesner's dick

  




In Righteous Gemstones Episode 2.5, the flashback to 1993, four-year old Kelvin has a cover of Muscle & Fitness on the wall of his room.  


Not this one featuring Steve Weatherford, top photo, who shows his butt on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends

I never heard of him before, but apparently he's famous. 






You can only see it for a second before Judy turns off the light. Notice that it's positioned very low, at Kelvin's height.  

Being a research fan, I looked through the entire Muscle & Fitness cover gallery to find the issue chosen by the set dresser.  Notice that it shows a man with very short hair, arms akimbo.







I worked at Muscle & Fitness in the 1990s.  Joe Weider was extremely homophobic, worried about gay men reading our magazine, so almost every cover featured a man and a woman together.  A number featured just women.  The only male-only covers during my four years at Muscle and Fitness featured a celebrity, usually Arnold Schwarzenegger, but sometimes Lou Ferrigno or a sports figure.










There were a few non-celebrity male covers later, like this one from October 1997, too late for the 1993 flashback, and not the right cover anyway.













More after the break

Jul 2, 2024

Eight Halifax hunks, bulging Bluenoses, and naked New Brunswickers

  


Link to the nude photos

I don't remember the last time I posted on a Canadian tv series, but there were a lot of naked guys from Nova Scotia and Newfoundland left over that have been sitting in my "to post" file for ages.  

We'll start with a  New Brunswicker from St. Johns,   





Ginger violinist from Antigonish, on the Celtic coast of Nova Scotia









Antigonish selfie











Celtic church 







A statue of footballer Cristiano Ronaldo that fans have been rubbing "for luck."  It's in Portugal, so why am I posting it in a collection of photos from Canada?

Um...have you seen the bulge?



More after the break

Jul 1, 2024

Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunter




I wanted to do a profile of Jeremy Renner, the one-time roommate of Kristoffer Winter, who may or may not have dated my friend Infinite Chazz in West Hollywood.  But there are problems: no nude photos except for a j/o video, very little beefcake, and he's extremely homophobic. 

Addressing the rumors that he's bisexual because he was living with a man and a woman, he cursed "they're not f*** true!"  Same thing when he dumped both to move in with Kristoffer Winters, who may or may not have dated my friend Infinite Chazz in West Hollywood: "Believe whatever you f*king want!"

By the way, his favorite movie is the deeply homophobic Braveheart, which he's seen 35 times.  


So I'll review Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters instead.  It is inspired by, Remember Hansel and Gretel, the Grimm fairy tale about a father who tries to kill his children by abandoning them in the woods, whereupon they stumble upon a candy house, and a witch who wants to eat them, but they turn the tables and burn her alive?

A very pleasant bedtime story for toddlers.

In Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters (2013), the siblings grow up into a pair of wisecracking, martial-arts-using witch slayers (Jeremy Renner, Gemma Arterton), who travel all over 17th century Germany with their arsenal of gigantic phallic-symbol guns.





While investigating a mass child-disappearance in Augsburg, they run uncover a plot to bring hundreds of witches together for a Blood Moon Ritual.  They also find the answer to the secret of their past: why did their parents abandon them in the woods?

On the way, Hansel gets a girlfriend, but he also gets a nice gay subtext with the fanboy Ben (Thomas Mann), touching him repeatedly on the chest, riding with Ben's arms around his waist, and finally inviting him to join the witch-hunting team.

There are frontal and rear photos of Thomas Mann on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends.



Meanwhile, Gretel expresses no heterosexual interest, although she does get an unexpected ally in a gigantic troll (Derek Mears), who also joins the team.  In the last scene, they're fighting a "sand witch" in the vast desert of 17th century Germany.

This is a very bloody movie; a scene involving the mass-execution of dozens of witches is particularly disturbing.  And I didn't like the anachronistic dialogue ("Awesome!") and technology: they have machine guns, phonograph records, tasers, and hyperdermic syringes.  But the people are attractive (at least, all of the good people are attractive), and there's plenty of gay subtexts.  

My Grade: C  

Fred with Tires: The Iconic West Hollywood Photograph

This is one of the iconic photos of West Hollywood.  Nearly everyone I knew had a print in their living room or bedroom.  It was a fixture in our homes, like the family photos that heterosexuals keep on their mantles:

A buffed young man carrying tires through an auto shop, his male-model face and expensive hairstyle contrasting with his working-class surroundings, a sweaty, macho, implicitly heterosexual grease monkey emerging from his closet, transformed into an object of homoerotic desire.

He represented all of small-town joys that we left behind in the Straight World, and the much greater joys we found with our friends and lovers in our new home.

I didn't know where it came from until yesterday: it's "Fred with Tires" by fashion photographer Herb Ritts (1952-2002).



He grew up in a wealthy household in Los Angeles (his next door neighbor was Steve McQueen), and attended Bard College.  His photography career began in 1978, when he and buddy Richard Gere had car trouble on a road trip, and he began photographing the future star in front of their jalopy -- not shirtless but sultry, bulging, a canny evocation of working class machismo combined with pretty boy sensitivity.

The next year, a photo of John Voight made it to Newsweek.

Pleased with the critical reaction, Ritts began photographing other celebrities, such as Brooke Shields and Olivia Newton-John.  He specialized in female supermodels like Naomi Campbell and Cindy Crawford.  He published a number of books on fashion photography, and became a renowned expert in the field.

He was also a well-known commercial photographer, with work for Levis, Revlon, Brut, Chanel, Maybelline.




Although he was gay, out since college, in a committed relationship with partner Erik Hyman, his artistic emphasis was always on the feminine.  There are only a few male celebrities in his archive, and those few are rarely shirtless, displaying a sensuality but not overt eroticism.  This color photo of Justin Timberlake is an exception.













So how did we get "Fred, with Tires"?  In 1984, Herb hired a UCLA undergrad named Fred for a raincoat ad in the Italian magazine Per Lui.

 He hated the raincoats, so he had Fred pose in jeans instead.  The editor hated the photos -- too sultry, too erotic, too gay -- but ran them anyway.  And the last, taken when Fred was tired, sweaty, and little annoyed, anxious to finish up and go home -- perfectly captured the West Hollywood moment.

The original hangs in the Getty Museum, and prints became fixtures in our apartments, emblematic of home.


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