Bobby Diamond: Horse's costar, non-DIckensian Pip, Dunky Gillis, gymnast, flower child, and the Mighty Mightor

Link to the n*de dudes

Dig this vintage commercial from the 1950s.  Bobby is trying to chop wood, but he's too weak, causing him to lose the respect of his friend, dad, and horse.  Then his other dad calls them to lunch.  

They burst with excitement: they're having Borden's Cottage Cheese!!!!The cooking-and-cleaning dad plops on "any kind of fruit."  Yuck!The friend pours syrup on an enormous pile of the gunk.  Yuck again!

Bobby makes a cottage cheese-and-jelly sandwich.  Triple yuck!  

But shoveling the vile stuff into his face gives Bobby the energy to chop that wood and earn his gay dads' love.

And he takes his shirt off, causing conniption fits among the gay boys of the era.

During the 1950s, television characters commonly sold the product during the story ("Let's take a break for some Maxwell House Coffee -- It's so incredibly delicious!"), so this commercial was probably shown during Fury (1955-60), a modern-day Western: The orphaned Joey (Bobby Diamond) is adopted by Jim (Peter Graves), a rancher with a horse named Fury.  His friend might be Packy (Roger Mobley), and the dad who does the cooking Pete (William Fawcett).

Born in 1943, Bobby was discovered by a talent scout and put to work in 1952, with uncredited roles in The Silver Whip, The Lady Wants Mink, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Half a Hero, and many other movies,, plus one tv show, Father Knows Best. 

In 1955, he was cast as the lead in Fury, and achieved the greatest stardom of his career. 

Though Bobby was an adolescent during the course of the series, he was generally excused from expressing heterosexual interest (he gets a crush on a girl in one episode).  The producers did give him a series of best friends to get into scrapes with: after Packy, Pee Wee (Jimmy Baird), and then Buzz (Stuffy Singer), but they didn't express any heterosexual interest, either.  The episode "Pee Wee Grows Up" would today mean getting a girlfriend, but in 1956 it meant signing up for a bodybuilding course.

After Fury, Bobby was offered My Three Sons, which became a mega-hit, but instead he decided to play to his strengths, and become the adopted son of newlywed Nannette Fabray on Westinghouse Playhouse.  It lasted for only 25 episodes. (He did score three My Three Sons guest spots)

During the Swinging Sixties, the Westerns of yesteryear seemed old-fashioned and obsolete, and the former cowboy star had trouble finding roles, in spite of his willingness to take off his shirt.

And, reputedly, his pants, as this art photo from around 1965 suggests.  (On RG Beefcake and Boyfriends)

More after the break

Orphans of the Sky: Gay Hints in a Curmudgeon's Science Fiction Universe

When I was growing up, I loved the juvenile science fiction novels of Robert Heinlein (1907-1988): originally published during the 1950s Cold War, they featured boys bonding in a rip-roaring cowboy future.  Plus the Ballentine paperbacks often featured beefcake.

His adult novels were unreadable, loaded down with disgusting s*x scenes, right-wing politics, and curmudgeonly grumbles about the state of the world. But in junior high and high school, I found a universe of gay hints.

My favorites, in order:

#10: Starman Jones (1953).  A muscular farmboyta longs to go to the stars.  Unfortunately, he gets a girlfriend.

#9: Stranger in a Strange Land (1961): A boy raised by Martians founds a hippie cult.  When he learns to kiss, he offers to demonstrate on his male mentor, who refuses.  But I learned that boys can kiss.

#8: Citizen of the Galaxy (1956): A rich kid is sold into slavery, but forms a buddy-bond with the guy who buys him.

#7: Time for the Stars (1956): Telepathic twins.  One stays home, goes into business, gets married, has children, the whole heterosexist trajectory.  The other goes into space for masculine adventures at near-light speed, so he stays a teenager forever.  The symbolism is obvious.

#6: Have Space Suit-Will Travel (1958): Heinlein wasn't good at envisioning social changes in his future societies.  The title is a parody of the tv series Have Gun -- Will Travel (1957-63), and the boy wins a used spacesuit in a tv jingle-writing contest.  He and a girl are captured by aliens. This edition makes her look much older, but she's only 11, and there's no hetero-romance.

#5: Starship Troopers (1959).  Rico trains to be a soldier in the war against the evil Communists -- um,  I mean aliens.  No hetero-romance.  The 1997 movie starred Casper Van Dien (top photo), Patrick Muldoon (left), and Neil Patrick Harris, and gave them girlfriends.

More after the break

David Seville and the Chipmunks: The gay icons of my childhood turned live-action and straight

When Wiliam Saroyan's play The Time of Your Life (1939) was first performed, Willie the Pinball Player was played by his 20-year old nephew, Ross Bagsadarian.

But while the elder Saroyan specialized in wistful melancholy, Ross was famous for whimsy.  For the songs that I heard when I was a kid, with secret messages about something big and important that I wouldn't understand until I was grown up:

When I was six or seven years old, two teenage boys on a church bus singing "Come On-a My House" (1951):
Come on-a my house, my house
I'm gonna give a you peach and a pear and I love your hair
Come on-a my house, my house
I'm gonna give a you everything

What did they mean?  What was one boy offering the other?

And a warm summer night when I was four or five.  I was already in bed, though it was still light out, and I gazed out the window at a teenager walking down the street by himself.  He was singing about "a bird on his head," which turned out to be a David Seville song from 1958:

Wicked, wicked, cruel, cruel world, what have you done to me?
I deserve to be in someone's arms.

Someone's arms, not a girl's arms!

When my friend Bill's older brother Mike  babysat us, he sometimes played his guitar and sang. One night he taught us the words to "Witch Doctor" (1958).  He sang:

I told the witch doctor I was in love with you.

And Bill and I, facing each other, giggling, sang the chorus:
Ooo eee, ooo ah ah, ting tang walla walla bing bang

It was one of the best nights of my life.

In 1958 Ross recorded "The Chipmunk Song", which spun off into an animated sitcom, The Alvin Show (1961-62, and syndicated through the 1970s).  Ross's alter ego, David Seville, became the beset-upon manager of the singing group The Chipmunks.
1. Alvin, the troublemaker, Dennis the Menace in a red baseball cap.
2. Simon,  the intellectual
3. Theodore, the glutton




More after the break

Ken Clark: "South Pacific" Stewpot, Sword and Sandal Baddie, Bodybuilder on My Sausage Sighting List

I've seen live performances of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical South Pacific (1948), about American sailors in love with South Pacific islanders during World War II, but never the 1958 movie. Until now.

Colonialist, imerialist, and highly heteronormative plotlines.  I already knew that.

But I didn't know that beefcake abounds -- and sausages.  Wait until the minor character Stewpot leads the sailors in a paeon to heteronormativity, "There's Nothing Like a Dame."

There ain't a thing that's wrong with any man here

That can't be cured by putting him near

A girly, womanly, female, feminine dame

Was I really seeing what I thought I was seeing?

Fast forward to Stewpot's only other scene, a weightlifting contest.  Darn, he's wearing grapes.

But when you see him in jeans, his beneath-the belt gifts are obvious.  Maybe he was even cast for them.  Henry Slate played a skinny, fully-clothed Sttewpot on Broadway, but for the movie, director Joshua Logan wanted to reflect the 1950s muscle craze, so he cast 31-year old bulging bodybuilder Ken Clark. 

I checked some of Ken Clark's other works, to see if more sausages were evident.

He was born in Neffs, Ohio, a tiny town near the West Virginia border, in 1927.  After high school he enlisted in the Navy, and then worked jobs as a coal miner, construction worker, and model while trying to break into acting.  

The modeling included some of those nearly-n*de photos published in "fitness" magazines like Physique Pictorial.  We have a backside, but I couldn't find any frontsides.

His acting career begins in 1955, with a string of two-fisted man's man roles: The Proud Ones, The Last Wagon, the True Story of Jesse James.

South Pacific did not propel Ken into stardom, in spite of his physique and sausage.  The guest spots continued: A cop in Suspicion, an FBI agent in The Shaggy Dog, a cop on Alfred Hitchcock Presents (left).  But at least he got a chance to showcase his talent.  And stuff.

He starred in Attack of the Giant Leeches (1959) as a Florida game warden who teams up with a local physician (Walter Kelley).  They take off their shirts, fight giant leeches, and win the Girls.  

More after the break

The Mickey Mouse Club: Which Mousketeer was the cutest? Which was gay?

When Annette Funicello died on April 8, 2013, the world mourned one of the iconic figures of the Boomer generation.  She was the first crush for many heterosexual boys and gay girls who watched her every week on The Mickey Mouse Club, and later in comedies co-starring Tommy Kirk and Frankie Avalon (left).

The Mickey Mouse Club (1955-59) was the first children's television program that starred real children, "the Mouseketeers."  They wore wore mouse ear-shaped caps and white sweaters emblazoned with their first names, and performed song-and-dance numbers interspliced with Disney cartoons, amateur talent contests, and dramatic serials.

In the early 1980s, the original series was broadcast on the Disney Channel.  My sister watched every day after school, and I saw a few episodes.  Girls outnumbered boys three to one, but if you could find them, the boys were exceptionally cute.  And in the 1950s, singing and dancing were widely labeled "sissy" pursuits, so they were all gay coded.  Turns out that only two were actually gay.

1. Bobby Burgess (born 1941), who was very tall, well-scrubbed, and always smiling. Straight. 

He went on to dance on The Lawrence Welk Show.

2. The short, sandy-haired Lonnie Burr (born 1943) was the intellectual of the group (his website commemorates Annette Funicello's death with the Latin phrase "ave atque vale"). Straight.

He was a poet and playwright as well as an actor.

3. Tommy Cole (born 1941) was hired primarily for his singing ability, though had a handsome face and the hunkiest physique among the Mousketeers (left). Straight.

After MMC, he had a stint in the air force and then became a makeup artist.

4. Cubby O'Brien (born 1946), the kid of the show, became a professional drummer. Straight.

More after the break

Mr. Muscles

We all know that superhero comics were just an excuse to gawk at bodybuilders  in tight underwear, but the Mr. Muscles title was rather blatant.

It was created for the low-budget Charlton Comics company by none other than Jerry Siegel, co-creator of Superman.  The first issue, in 1956, was numbered #22 (talk about wishful thinking).

Former wrestler Brett Carson, the "world's most perfect man," was a blond Aryan demi-god in white shorts and a lavender vest, perfect not only in body but in soul:  "A healthy physique breeds a healthy mind," he exclaims.















The school system in the 1950s would agree.  Kids were being forced to do push-ups and sit-ups every morning before class, in the belief that exercise bred morality.

This was the "age of the chest," with bodybuilders like Steve Reeves and Dan Draper taking center stage.

And Bob Mizer's Physique Pictorial barely bothering to hide the real reason subscribers were checking out those muscular physiques.

More after the break

The First Bad Kid: Barry Gordon gets nuttin' for Christmas in 1955, plays gay-subtext teens, nebbishes, nerds, lawyers, and the Quik Bunny

In December 1954, three-year old Barry Gordon made the scene with Art Mooney's "I'm Getting Nuttin' for Christmas (because I've been nuttin' but bad)":

I broke my bat on Johnny's head;
I hid a frog in sister's bed;
I spilled some ink on Mommy's rug;
Bought some gum with a penny slug;
Somebody snitched on me.

Far more mischievous than Dennis the Menace or Peck's Bad Boy of the 1920s, he was a humorous precursor to the threatened or threatening kids whom the adults would fear through the 1960s. Audiences were amazed; the record sold a million copies, and hit #6 on the Billboard pop chart, beating out "Autumn Leaves" and "Love is a Many Splendored Thing."

But you couldn't have a kid miss out on Christmas forever, so they made him record "I Like Christmas" in 1955.  

During the 1950s and 1960s, Barry (who recorded many other songs, with  "Rock Around Mother Goose" and "I Can't Whistle" gradually giving way to "True Love Can Never Die," "Sealed with a Kiss," and "The Girl I Left Behind."  In the days of acid rock and Yellow Submarine, none of them charted.

He made some movies,  including Hands of a Stranger, Pressure Point (with Peter Falk and Sidney Poitier), The Spirit is Willing, and Out of It, in which a high school brain (Barry) buddy-bonds with a jock (John Voight).

Barry was nominated for a Tony for his performance in the Broadway play A Thousand Clowns (adapted for film in 1965), as a gay-vague teenager crushed when his free-spirit guardian (Jason Robards) caves to the establishment.

Barry also made the rounds of tv guest spots: Leave It to Beaver, Davis the Menace, Make Room for Daddy, Jack Benny, and Love American Style (in the 1969 episode "Love and the High School Flop-Out").  Why is he sitting with his hands like that?

He had bad luck with starring roles:

The New Dick Van Dyke Show (1971-74) pushed Dick into a "backstage at a tv studio" premise that his former co-star Mary Tyler Moore was already doing, in one of the most popular tv series of all time.  You can imagine what happened to the lifeless imitation. Dick's muscular son Barry as his announcer failed to incite much audience interest.

Our Barry played a writer on Dick's soap opera as the third season eked by. 

More after the break

Why was Bomba the Jungle Boy always tied up?

Johnny Sheffield (1931-2010) spent the first 24 years of his life being filmed in a loincloth cut to the thigh, first as "Boy," son of Tarzan Johnny Weissmuller in 8 movies (1939-1947), and then as the teenage Bomba the Jungle Boy in 12 movies (1949-1955).  After all that, it proved impossible to find a fully-clothed role, so Johnny went to UCLA, got his degree in business, and had a successful second career in real estate.

The Bomba movies were on tv constantly during my childhood, usually on Saturday afternoons when there was no game,  and now they're all available on DVD. 

I noticed something interesting: in all of the Tarzan movies featuring the adolescent Boy, and in all but one of the Bomba movies, Johnny gets tied up. 

Was director Ford Beebe interested in tie-up games?

Or is it a matter of maximizing beefcake?

Of course, Bomba was tied up a lot in the original book series.

And the original Boy was no stranger to tied-up peril.

But the constant close-ups of the young adult Sheffield straining at his bonds were quite impressive to gay kids growing up in a world where same-sex desire could never be named or even thought of.

Was that the point?

Johnny begins to get an impressive physique in the last 3 Tarzan movies, Tarzan and the Amazons (1945), And he Leopard Woman (1946), And the Amazons (1947).  Unfortunately, they are terrible.  Maureen O'Sullivan refused to do them, so Jane was recast with Brenda Joyce.  

The Bomba movies are even worse: endlessly recycled stock footage of African animals, and an endlessly recycled plot about Bomba falling in love with a visiting colonial administrator's daughter while fighting poachers or insurrectionists.  

How can you get audiences to fork over money to see such stuff?

Easy: show some pecs and biceps, and maybe a loincloth-bulge now and then.

So you add a few scenes of Johnny asleep, or else unconscious after falling out of a tree.  The camera zooms in for a close up of his face, shoulders, chest, stomach, and loincloth.  Then it starts over again.  Before we're done, we've been staring at Johnny's body for five minutes.  

But sleeping/unconscious shots show the muscles at rest.  Audiences want big, bulging, flexing muscles.  Fight scenes with bad guys or wild animals cause bulges, and sometimes the loincloth rides up to reveal the underwear beneath, but there's too much moving around for a serious gawk at Johnny's body.

Idea: why not have Boy/Bomba tied up, threatened by poachers or about to be sacrificed by an evil cult or something? That way he can strain against the bonds, flexing his muscles, but he's not moving.  The camera can zoom in, and audiences can stare as he struggles for five minutes.

See also: Shayne Topp: Nickelodeon teen, Barry's buddy, bodybuilder, sketch comedian who pretends to be gay and have a massive d*ck. We'll see.

Denny Miller: Gilligan's Island, Tarzan, Quark, frontal stuff, and moments of gay promise

Tarzan's Boy

Bomba the Jungle Boy.

Andy's Gang: Beefcake and Bonding on 1950s Children's TV

The earliest generation of Boomer kids have fond memories of tv programs that, at least to modern sensibilities, seem outlandish and bizarre.  You Can't Do That On Television in the 1980s can't even begin to compete with the weirdness of Kukla, Fran, and Ollie, Pinkie Lane, or Howdy Doody.  

But the weirdest of all was Andy's Gang (1955-60), hosted by long-time Western sidekick Andy Devine (previously a radio and tv series hosted by Ed McConnell, and called Smilin' Ed's Gang)

1. A scary kid with blond page boy curls and one eye perpetually closed announced "I'm Buster Brown...I live in a shoe.  Here's my dog Tige...he lives in there,too."  Whereupon the studio audience went wild with laughter (actually, it was the same clip of a hysterical kid, over and over again).

2. The anarchic Froggy the Gremlin kept popping in to skewer human pretensions and stir things up.  Cue the same clip of a studio audience going into hysterics.

3. A cat named Midnight could talk. But she said only one word: "Nice," and it sounded more like a meow.  Cue the hysterical laughter.

But gay kids in the audience were waiting for the "Story Time" segment about Gunga, an Indian boy (surprisingly buff college student Nino Marcel).  He was supposed to be Indian, but he looked sort of like Jay North on the similarly-Indian themed Maya, or an older version of  Jonny Quest.  I'll bet he had blond hair under that turban.

Although they lived in India, Gunga and his boyfriend, Rama (a surprisingly buff Vito Scotti) got into Bomba the Jungle Boy-style adventures with animal poachers, lost cities, and savage cannibal tribes.

But unlike Bomba, they had no interest in girls, at least not in the episodes I watched. Rama was the one who usually needed rescuing.

They were amazingly physical in their interactions, always hugging, clinging together, touching arms and shoulders.

Afterwards, Andy would end the program by underscoring the buddy-bonding:  "We're pals, and pals stick together!"  Then, to keep Christian fundamentalists happy, "Remember, Sunday school or church tomorrow!"  (No Hindus in the audience, apparently.)

Nino Marcel also played his Gunga Ram character, but with a different premise, in the feature film Sabaka (1954): he is a young elephant trainer who vows revenge against the evil cult that killed his family. His costar was none other than the famous Boris Karloff.

You can watch the full movie here.

See also: Burr Tillstrom, the gay puppeteer behind Kukla, Fran, and Ollie.

Nancy: Lesbian Panic in a 1950s Comic Book

The cheesecake comic strip Fritzi Ritz premiered in 1922, with gags involving the aspiring model and her series of boyfriends, notably the nerdish Phil Fumble.  And a lot of sex jokes.

In 1933, Fritzie took in her orphaned niece, Nancy, a mischievous and rather melodramatic child.  Soon Nancy became the star -- the titular character in 1938 -- and acquired a series of friends and antagonists, including poor boy Sluggo.  Fritzie became mostly-absent parental figure.

Nancy has remained in print ever since. In contemporary strips, written by Guy Gilchrist, Fritzie is in her 50s and works as a music reviewer.

Nancy appeared in several issues of Dell Four Color and Dell Giants, and got her own title in 1957 (numbered #146 for some reason).

When John Stanley retired from the Little Lulu comic book,, he went to work on Nancy, writing all of the stories in issues #162  through #173, and then the renamed Nancy and Sluggo through #185 (1961).

Stanley specialized in the terrors and anxieties of childhood, and in Nancy's world  he goes unbrindled. The result is disturbing, sometimes painful to read.

Fritzie is at best neglectful, and sometimes downright abusive.

Nancy is jealous, spiteful, vindictive, petty, and vain.

Sluggo lives alone in an abandoned house and often goes hungry, unless Nancy agrees to feed him.

They are not friends, like Lulu and Tubby; they are dating, adding dark humor to their interactions as Stanley hints about just how physical they have become.

Neither has other friends, just antagonists and enemies who ridicule, criticize, manipulate, and harass them.

Sluggo has an adult nemesis who literally intends to kill him.

And the weird physical manipulations that, in Little Lulu, happened in stories, here happen in real interactions with the yoyos, who will transform you permanently unless you trick them into letting you go.

Perhaps the most disturbing element of the yoyos are the adults who fall into their trap, and spend their entire lives transformed, until, in old age, Nancy rescues them.

To top it off, there's Oona Goosepimple, who looks like Wednesday Addams from the Addams Family comics, an orphan (that's three of the regular cast).  She lives in a spooky old house with her usually absent grandmother.  Other relatives usually appear, as threats.

One uncle is a giant, lying asleep in the basement.  If he ever awakens, his movements will bring down the house.  So Grandma keeps him drugged.

Nancy dislikes the "creepy" Oona, and rejects all of her overtures of friendship -- but finds herself drawn unwillingly to the house anyway.

She is invited to a party, but arrives to discover that she is the only guest.

Oona pushes Nancy to eat cookies, play games, and spend the night.

Nancy tries to refuse, but can't help herself.

A weird compulsion to spend the night with a creepy girl, or eat the forbidden fruit.

During the 1950s, gay men and lesbians were portrayed as expert seducers, pulling innocents unwillingly into their "deviance."

Just another of the horrors of Nancy's world.

See also: Little Lulu

Ricky Nelson

Ricky Nelson was the first teen idol produced by television.  He was born in 1940 to show biz parents, band leader Ozzie Nelson and singer Harriet, who played "themselves" on The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet on radio.  Both Ricky and his brother David began playing themselves in 1952, after the switch to television.

His plotlines were standard Boomer-kid stuff -- paper routes, bullies, homework --until the night of April 10, 1957, when Ricky performed the Fats Domino classic "I'm Walkin'."

Teenagers -- never big fans of the program before -- went wild.  Envisioning a whole new market, Ozzie had Ricky sing every week after that.  At first he used the pretense of a "talent contest" or "school dance," but then he gave up, put a guitar in Ricky's hands, and let him perform to audiences of rapturous teens.




Ricky stayed on The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet until it finally ended in 1962, but his parts became increasingly smaller as his performing career took off.  Between 1957 and 1962, he hit the Top 40 charts 30 times, more than any other performer except Elvis and Pat Boone. In the interest of maintaining closeness with his brother, he also performed in "The Flying Nelsons," a trapeze act, as the flier to David's catcher.

Many performers in the 1950s were androgynous or slightly gender-transgressive -- singing itself was coded as a "sissy" activity -- but Ricky was the first teen idol to promote a gender-transgressive image, as soft, shy, introspected, and somewhat dark, as if he had a secret pain.  Though he was attracted to women and married multiple times, his primary relationships -- his most fulfilling, intimate relationships -- were with same-sex friends.  My friend Drake claimed to have dated him.

At the same time, he was rather homophobic.

Teen magazines didn't do a lot of beefcake shots in those days, but that didn't matter.  Ricky looked good in chinos, and he could fill out a cowboy outfit.

Ricky tried to rename himself "Rick," but it didn't work -- fans called him Ricky through his life.  He was busy through the 1960s and 1970s, writing new songs, experimenting with new genres. "Garden Party" (1972), about Hollywood hypocrisy, became a hit for a new generation.

He died tragically in an airplane crash in 1985.