20 Musclemen who guided me through the Age of Innocence, from Bomba the Jungle Boy to the American Psycho

Link to the n*de photos

This is a nostalgic journey through the musclemen who gave me my first hints that gay people existed, and guided me from junior high through college and to West Hollywood. They provided a joy that transcended aesthetic pleasure, telling gay kids that we belonged.  We were welcome. 

Everyman, I will go with thee and be thy guide.

In your most need I'll be by your side.

1. Johnny Sheffield played Bomba the Jungle Boy on Tarzan Theater every Saturday afternoon when there wasn't a game.  I never actually made it through a whole movie -- they were dreadfully heterosexist.  But there was always time for those gleaming black-and-white muscles, especially when he was tied up.

2. Bruce Lee.  He died in 1973, but his movies were playing constantly on Kung Fu Theater, and everybody's older brother had his beefcake poster on his bedroom wall.

3. Michael Forest played a god of masculine beauty (literally the God Apollo) on an episode of Star Trek which I saw sometime in the 1970s.

4. Denny Miller. Moments of gay promise as a surfer and a jungle man on Gilligan's Island.

5, David Naughton.  The cutest guy of the Disco Era showed us his stuff in American Werewolf in London (1981).  Plus he also gave us a strong gay subtext in spite of the 1980s homophobia.

6. Yukio Mishima.  It wasn't hard to find gay-themed books in the early 1980s.  Just look for "evil" or "hidden" in the title.  So I found Confessions of a Mask, with Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima's obsession with male muscles and death.  

7. Arnold Schwarzenegger.  The 1980s start and end with Arnold, who single-handedly brought bodybuilding into the mainstream and made it respectable.

8.  Sylvester Stallone gave him a little help with his grunting, sweat-soaked Rambo and Rocky.  We saw his stuff  in The Italian Stallion, a recast of his early adult movie.  

9. John Amos.  Gordy the Weatherman on Mary Tyler Moore, a warrior in a Conan rip-off that we all saw, and my gym buddy.

10. Lou Ferrigno, who played a muscular green Hulk against Bill Bixby's David Banner, dropped by often when I was working at Muscle & Fitness.  Did I mention our hookup?

More after the break

11. Bill Cable.  Nothing brings back the sights and sounds of 1980s West Hollywood like Elvira Mistress of the Dark, Pee-Wee's Playhouse, and Bill Cable's Playgirl spreads.

12. Ted Prior.  When the golden boy of the ladies-only Chippendale Dancers starred in the schlock actioner Deadly Prey (1987), we all rented it.

13. That Boy.  That's all you needed to say, but his actual name was Peter Berlin, all muscle, c*cks, and freedom in a sunlit world that gay men in the 1980s had barely imagined.

14. Alan Kayser.  Every Saturday night, before heading out to the bars, we watched Mama's Family, to see the muscular Alan Kayser, Mama's grandson Bubba, and the bulge that entered the room two seconds before the rest of him.

15.  Peter Hinwood, the original muscleman of The Rocky Horror Picture Show.  "Don't dream it, be it" was the motto of gay men of the 1980s generation 

16. Scott Madsen, The Soloflex Guy, sold gym equipment in gay subtext-laden ads, and became a gay icon before he was replaced by a heteronormative spokesperson.

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17. George Perez.  I never heard of him before or after, but he lit up the screen in his underwear in Toy Soldiers (1991)

18. Mark Wahlberg.  Nothing brings back the sights and sounds of 1990s West Hollywood than Marky Mark dropping his pants while singing "Good Vibrations."

19. Johnathan Schaech.  Through the 1990s, as he starred in gay-subtext classics like The Doom Generation and Welcome to Woop -Woop, and posed like this, everyone assumed that Johnathan was gay.  Why would you not? He finally came out as straight in an Advocate interview.

20. Christian Bale  also played gay characters through the 1990s, but showed us his his physique and an innate straightness in American Psycho (2000)

The Age of Innocence was over.