Lanigan's Rabbi

 I didn't meet anyone who was Jewish until my junior year in high school, when a rabbi's son named Aaron was in my English class.  He was lean and wiry, with thick black hair and expressive hands, with a preference for lumberjack shirts and a sky-blue yarmulke. He was always surrounded by a crowd of girls who knitted him sweaters and baked him cookies and sighed a lot, but occasionally I managed to push through the crowd to ask him a few questions about kosher laws or Hebrew School or his bar mitzvah, anything I could think of to keep his attention.

At the same time, our English teacher assigned Chaim Potok's My Name is Asher Lev and I read on my own his gay Jewish Romeo-and-Juliet story, The Chosen.

So I must have been very receptive during the spring of 1977, when two tv series with homoerotic Jewish subtexts appeared, Busting Loose and Lanigan's Rabbi.


On Sunday nights, NBC had a recurring series, The NBC Sunday Mystery Movie, with an alternating series of detectives.  My friends and I weren't impressed.  We called McCloud McClod, and Colombo Clod-Dumb-Bo.  But Lanigan's Rabbi became must-see tv, "good beyond hope."

Lanigan (Art Carney, right) was police chief in a small town in California. When he investigated a murder in a synagogue, he had to collaborate with Rabbi Small (Bruce Solomon, left), whose keen mind, trained in Talmudic scholarship, figured out whodunit.  They continued to be thrown into mysteries for three more episodes, with corpses including guest of honor at a Man of the Year celebration, a miserly millionaire, and the guy who accused Lanigan of malpractice.

The stories were by-the-books stuff, not very interesting.
Bruce Solomon, who also played a cop on Mary Hartman, was very attractive, but his shirt never came off.
Art Carney was 58, too old to be of interest.
 And they both had wives.

What was the gay angle?

It was about two men from different worlds finding common ground, mutual admiration, and finally a deeply intimate bond.  Why did the Rabbi keep tagging along on Lanigan's investigations?  Was it the joy of sleuthing?  Or were they in love?

Spring 1977: On the Brink of Busting Loose

In the spring of my junior year in high school, when I was starting to accumulate college catalogs from all over the country -- indeed, all over the world -- and hoping to get away from the oppressive influence of parents, church, and heterosexism -- a new sitcom appeared on Wednesday nights after Good Times called Busting Loose. 

It starred the 20-year old Adam Arkin as Lenny Markowitz, a cute Jewish boy -- just as I was reading My Name is Asher Lev, and watching Lanigan's Rabbi, with their homoerotic Jewish subtexts.  And meeting Aaron, my first Jewish friend, who was gay but didn't know it yet.

Lenny tries to distance himself from his parents by getting his own apartment -- a terrible one.  The wallpaper has ducks on it.

He has a crush on his next door neighbor, Melodee (Barbara Rhoades), who dates for a living -- "I'm a great date!" she explains. But she's actually a paid escort, not a... you know.

  She's always saying things that sound like sex but really aren't: "Can I borrow some ice?  My date threw his back out."

But I was more interested in Lenny's close knit group of childhood buddies (plus a coworker), various personalities and levels of hotness: the nerd Lester (Danny Goldman), the bad boy Vinnie (Greg Antonacci), the hunk Woody (Paul Sylvan), and Allan (Stephen Nations), whom I don't rememer.

There were only 21 episodes, in the spring and fall of 1977.   No gay characters, no nudity.  You had to be there, just at the brink of "busting loose."

Paul Sylvan also embarked on a musical career, and posed naked and steamy for the cover of this album.

Stephen Nathan was in The First Nudie Musical (1978).

And Adam Arkin has had a long career, with many gay-positive projects, such as East of A (2000) and Kids in America (2005).

Fall 1978: My First Gay Novel: Neveryon

During my freshman year at Augustana, shortly after the summer of Grease, I was looking for anything written about gay people.  Readmore Bookworld had nothing, and the "h" section of the card catalog of the Augustana College Library listed only Nothing Like the Sun, by Anthony Burgess, which had no gay characters in it.  Carefully-worded inquiries to my sophisticated, artistic friend Aaron, who took me to The Rocky Horror Picture Show (he was gay, but didn't know it yet) revealed that there had been only four gay writers in the history of the world: Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde, Tennessee Williams -- and Samuel R. Delany.

Today Delany is a veritable queer theorist, churning out solemn, artsy tomes on race, sexuality, identity, and male prostitution that delight the deconstructionists. But in 1979 you had to wade through dense, turgid prose in Triton, Dhalgren, Babel-17, and The Einstein Intersection to find glimmers of characters who were multisexual, multigendered, and incorrigibly decadent.  Where were the gay people?

Apparently Dhalgren has been made into an experimental play.  I have no idea what it's about.

I didn't hold out much hope for the Neveryon series (1975-79).  First, there was a lady hanging around the mighty-thewed barbarian hero, as if he was a Conan the Barbarian clone.  Second, there were quotations from Lacan, Foucault and Derrida.

But it turned out to be a gay love story.

 Gorjik, a “great muscled, affable, quiet giant of a youth,” rises from slavery to a position of power, and then goes out to acquire some slaves of his own.  He buys Small Sarg, a barbarian prince (which means he’s dirty and smells bad), takes him home, and  indicates that they are to have sex. Small Sarg responds “that’s silly. . .that is what boys do,” but he agrees to “do it” anyway, as long as he can remove his slave collar first.  Gorgik happily obliges, since he is into S&M, and wants to wear the slave collar himself.  After their first encounter, they both pretend to be asleep while thinking of coy ways to cuddle: Delany is good at describing sex, but affection between men makes him queasy.

Later in the book, they become professional abolitionists, invading crumbling, decadent castles to liberate slaves. Sometimes Gorgik is captured and tortured, but he rather enjoys it.  They take turns wearing the slave collar and refer to each other intermittently as “master.”  When questioned about this odd arrangement, Gorgik responds: “We are lovers. . .and for one of us the symbolic distinction between slave and master is necessary for desire’s consummation.”

One wishes that, at least by the end of the series, they would settle down to a nice egalitarian partnership, but after a lifetime of subtle hints and heterosexist "fade out kisses," Gorgik and Small Sarg came to me as a Copernican revolution.

Here, for the first time ever on a printed page, I read of men who loved each other, and who were lovers.  The image of Small Sarg beneath Gorgik’s massive arm, staving off sleep, lying perfectly still so Gorgik wouldn’t shift position, remained with me forever.

See also: Michael Moorcock.