**Link to the n*de photos**

Fall 1977. Thursday night meant staying downstairs with the family to watch The Waltons (ugh!) or going up to the room I shared with my brother to watch the ABC lineup of hip sitcoms on our small black-and-white tv: Welcome Back Kotter, What's Happening!, Barney Miller, Carter Country. But if my brother wasn't around, I changed over to CBS before Barney Miller to watch the opening sequence of James at 15

James (17-year old Lance Kerwin) jumps out of bed, checks for acne, does overhead presses (shirtless), swims across the pool (displaying his bare shoulders) -- practices the flute, goes skateboarding, photographs some iconic sights of Boston, walks in the rain, walks through a crowd -- and walks through the locker room (in his swimsuit). Teenagers had never seen so much teen idol beefcake.

I didn't actually watch the show because it was almost entirely about girls: James dates a girl who is "easy," a girl who belongs to a cult, who's taller than him, who plays basketball for a rival team; "becomes a man" with a Swedish exchange student (whereupon the series becomes James at 16), has a disease scare. But just seeing James in a swimsuit was a queer code.

Lance had already been a busy child star, with roles in Emergency, Police Story, Cannon, Gunsmoke, Wonder Woman, and lots of others. Even as a child, he specialized in contemporary angst drama, like:

The Loneliest Runner (child abuse)

The Death of Richie (drug overdose)

Four episodes of the Roman Catholic "contemporary issues" series Insight (on alcoholism, stalking, unemployment, and hydrophobia).

Five After School Specials (on bullying, stepparents twice, being short, and being poor).

The guy staring at Lance's chest in "The Amazing Cosmic Awareness of Duffy Moon" is Ike Eisenmann, who would go on to a future of jaw-dropping physiques.

But it was James at 15, with its controversial decision to make a teenage boy active with girls, that made Lance the Golden Boy of the 1970s. He had one memorable foray into horror, a gay-subtext buddy-bond with David Soul in the tv-version of Stephen King's Salem's Lot (1979).

But otherwise it was a lot of angst with his shirt off: buddy-bonding with alcoholic high schooler Scott Baio in The Boy Who Drank Too Much (1980)

Dealing with his parents' divorce (in Children of Divorce, 1980)

Accidentally shooting Wil Wheaton in "The Shooting" (1982)

Being threatened by his murderous Dad in A Murder in the Family (1983).

Eric Stolz played another threatened brother (n*de photos on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends)

More after the break

Mark Twain's The Mysterious Stranger is a depressing, solipsistic tale in which a young man discovers that he is the creator of this horrible world -- and why didn't he create a nicer one? "in a little while you will be alone in shoreless space, to wander its limitless solitudes without friend or comrade forever—for you will remain a thought, the only existent thought. Dream other dreams, and better!" This from the author of "Tom Sawyer"?

The 1982 tv movie is quite different: a Missouri farmboy dreams himself back to the Middle Ages, where he helps print the first Bible, gets a girlfriend, and deals with a mischievous spirit who creates a printers' strike. As an English major, I was not impressed

Moving away from angst, or not, in 1985 Lance starred in "The Snow Queen" on Fairy Tale Theater. It's based on the Hans Christian Anderson story, which should be all you need to know.

Spoiler alert: The Snow Queen kisses you, and then you freeze to death.

And that was about all we saw of Lance Kerwin, although he continued to work through the 1980s and into the 1990s, with guest spots on Trapper John MD, Finder of Lost Loves, Simon & Simon, Murder She Wrote, and The New Adam-12. He also performed in some of those tv star athletic competitions that were popular at the time.

No n*de photos, but I posted some guys who are close on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends

Suffering from alcohol and drug problems, Lance retired from acting in the 1990s and moved to Hawaii, where he married, had a lot of kids, and became a Pentecostal preacher and the head of U-Turn for Christ. That didn't end his problems, though: he and his wife were sentenced to 300 hours of community service for falsifying documents about retail properties and food stamps.

He died on January 24, 2023.

Straight, and doubtless homophobic, but for a few years in the late 1970s and early 1980s, strutting about in a swimsuit provided enough gay promise.