Six Linus Van Pelts, from Eric Shea in "A Charlie Brown Christmas" to Alex Saxon in "A Charlie Brown Christmas, the Musical"

A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965) is the first of the animated specials based on Charles Schultz' Peanuts, and arguably the only one that holds up for adults.  I first saw it when I was so young that when Lucy says that she wants "real estate" for Christmas, I had no idea what she was talking about.

Linus has always been my favorite Peanuts character: witty, intellectual (an aspiring theologian), and a good friend to Charlie Brown.  If it weren't for their frequent heterosexual romances, I would identify them as a gay-subtext couple.  

And no other voice artist comes closer to capturing his inner beauty than  Christopher Shea.

Christopher  (1958-2010) voiced the wise-beyond-his-years Linus in  A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965),  It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown (1966), and three other Peanuts specials.  He starred in the Western Shane (1966), a short-lived tv version of the iconic movie, playing the "Come back, Shane!" Joey Starrett, and did a lot of guest spots.  Kids of the 1960s probably saw him in  The Invaders, Green Acres, The Odd Couple, and Here Come the Bride.

Here he buddy-bonds with Kevin Tate in Firecreek (1968).

I always thought that he played Tim Matheson's little brother in Yours, Mine, and Ours (1968), but that was his brother Erik.

His last credited role is A Little Game (1971), about a teenager (Mark Gruner) who plots to kill his stepfather.

He's hard to research because of another Christopher Shea, who appeared in more recent tv series like Will and Grace and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, but I found his obituary: He moved to Humbolt County, in northern California, where he died in 2010, leaving a wife and two daughters.

Eric Shea, born in 1960, did the usual tv guest spots: Batman, Here Come the Brides, Gunsmoke, The Flying Nun, Room 222 -- but he snared some more substantial movie roles, such as Lucille Ball's son  in the big-family comedy Yours, Mine, and Ours (1968) (top photo, the one in the pajamas.  The other one is Tim Matheson).

More after the break

Arnold Schwarzenegger: Nude photos of Trench, Mr. Freeze, The Terminator, Conan, and an Austrian fitness model

Link to the nude photos

Arnold needs no last name.  He almost single-handedly took bodybuilding out the realm of  Muscle Beach physical culturists and Italian sword-and-sandal movies and created the genre of Man-Mountains. His superlative physique and distinctive Austrian growl have been parodied innumerable times, on Saturday Night Live, on Seinfeld, on Tiny Toon Adventures).    It's hard to leave a room temporarily without being tempted to use his signature line from The Terminator, "I'll be back," or Terminator 2, "Come with me if you want to live."

Already a Mr. Universe and nearly a Mr. Olympia, the 21 year old Mr. Schwarzenegger moved to the United States in 1968 with his best friend Franco Columbu, to become an actor.  He posed for a lot of fitness magazines, including the gay-coded Tomorrow's Man.  In the 1970s he was the subject of more conventional semi-nude paintings by Jamie Wyeth.  In the 1980s, photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe.

I had a friend in the 1980s whose bathroom featured what looked very much like a nude photo of Arnold, clipped from a fitness magazine.  It's not the black and white flexing photo that's available everywhere; this one was in color, and showed Arnold standing on a hillside.

His first starring role was in Hercules in New York (1969), which nobody saw.  His accent was so bad that his lines were dubbed.

He starred in Stay Hungry (1976), about a young man, drawn into the world of bodybuilding, and in The Jayne Mansfield Story (1980), asMansfield's muscular husband, Mickey Hargitay.

More Arnold after the break

The Fabulous Bridges Boys

Lloyd Bridges (1913-1998),  known to the first generation of Boomers as the hunky, often-shirtless star of Sea Hunt (1958-61), and to the second as Izzy Mandelbaum, the octogenarian personal trainer on Seinfeld, had four children.  Garrett died as an infant, and Cindy has been in only a few projects, but Boomer and Beau have had successful show biz careers of their own.

Born in 1949, Jeff was a favorite of gay Boomers, with a huge number of buddy-bonding movies.
1. With small-town high schooler Timothy Bottoms in  The Last Picture Show (1971) 
2. With boxer Stacey Keach in  Fat City (1972).
3. With racer Gary Busey in The Last American Hero (1973)
4. With bank robber Clint Eastwood in Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1973)
5.With bodybuilder Arnold Schwarzenegger in Stay Hungry (1976)

He was also known for on-screen nudity, displaying his wares in Tron (1982) and Starman (1984)

Jeff specializes in quirky small-town types who listen to country-western music and drink beer in honky tonks.  I haven't seen any of his recent movies, except for The Fabulous Baker Boys (1989), where he buddy-bonded with his brother, and The Big Lebowski (1998), which is about bowling.

I hear that Crazy Heart (2009), about a washed-up country-western singer, has a gay character.

Jeff's older brother Beau, born in 1941, wasn't quite as popular among Boomers, although he began acting as a child, and had a starring role on Ensign O'Toole while still in his teens.

I first saw him as one of the muscular teenagers who grows into a giant (and in the process sheds his clothes) in the anti-hippie sci-fi movie Village of the Giants (1965) (with Tommy Kirk and Johnny Crawford as the "square" teens who save the day).

In 1967 he starred in The Incident, about two thugs (Martin Sheen, Tony Musanti) who terrorize the passengers on a subway car.  It's notable for having one of the first gay characters in the movies.

He specialized in serious dramas, often playing quirky small-town types, sometimes in gay-positive productions, such as Sordid Lives (2000).  Occasional gay characters, most recently in The Masters of Sex (2011-2013), about sex researchers Masters and Johnson.

Several of his children are actors.  Jordan, born in 1973, is best known for Drive Me Crazy (1999).

See also: The Fabulous Bottoms Boys.

The Last Picture Show: Small Town Melodrama with Nudity and Gay Subtexts

I saw The Last Picture Show (1971) when I was trapped in Texas, and found it immeasurably depressing, in spite of the infinite number of gay subtexts.

It's about depressed young people in a dismal, windswept Texas town in the 1950s.  They try to find meaning in their sad little lives through tawdry affairs with people they hate and going to the movies, but they can't perform during the affairs, the movie theater is closing, and they're all leaving or dying.

Sad-eyed high school seniors Sonny (Timothy Bottoms) and Duane (Jeff Bridges) are obviously into each other, no matter how much they try to triangulate their romance with girlfriends whom they can't perform for and affairs with older women whom they hate.  They split up when Sonny goes off to die in the Korean War.

Sonny has an affair with the depressed middle-aged Ruth Popper (Cloris Leachman).  Why is she depressed?  Other than being trapped in a horrible small town, I mean. Because her husband, Coach Popper (Bill Thurman), is unable to...well, you know, and likes to smack his student athletes on the butt.  Gay, right?  You couldn't state it openly in 1971, but it's implied.

For that matter, an awful lot of the men in town are unwilling or unable to...well, you know.  It's as if the quiet desperation of their lives has resulted in impotence.  And a lot of gay subtexts.

Rich boy Bobby (Gary Brockette) invites them all to his house for a skinny-dipping party (he has a famous frontal nude scene that got the movie banned as obscene in several places).  He wants a girlfriend, but not if she's a virgin.  He doesn't want to have to worry about any of that icky sex stuff.

They take the young street sweeper Billy (Sam Bottoms) to a prostitute to lose his virginity, but it doesn't work out, probably because he's not into girls.  He is into Duane, however.  At the end of the movie, he's killed as he sweeps the streets, thus convincing Duane to return to the girlfriend he hates.  Is it because the only two eligible guys in town are gone?

Several of the performers, including Timothy Bottoms, Cloris Leachman, and Cybil Shepherd (Jacey, who dates both Sonny and Duane), have become strong gay allies. Jeff Bridges went on to play in several gay-subtext dramas.

See also: The Fabulous Bottoms Boys.

Village of the Giants

Tommy Kirk's first movie after he was outed and fired by Disney was Village of the Giants (1965), which I saw at a kiddie matinee on my first date in October 1968.

A small town full of rednecks and inept police officers, the sort frequently overrun by giant ants or Commie body snatchers during the 1950s, gets a different sort of invasion: six hippies who play loud music and smart off to authority figures.  Oddly, though the group is of mixed sexes, none of them seem to be heterosexually involved, and no one displays more than a passing interest in the ogling of the other sex: it’s boys on one side, girls on the other.










Meanwhile, nice teenager Mike (Tommy Kirk) spends about ten minutes demonstrating that he is heterosexual by kissing up a girl, but then he descends to the basement nightworld of her pint-sized brother Genius (Ronnie Howard, future star of Happy Days).  Genius has invented a concoction called “goo,” which transforms dogs, birds, and people into giants.

After ridiculing the nice teens at a local hotspot, the hippies steal the goo, figuring that they can use it to create more mischief.  They eat it and shoot up to thirty feet tall, in the process shredding their clothes.

Director Bert I. Gordon previously accentuated the beefcake in several B-movies, including The Amazing Colossal Man (1957) and The Boy and the Pirates (1960), and his camera lingers lovingly on the thick arms and sculpted torsos of the boys, including a young Beau Bridges.

And a very sexy Tim Rooney (Mickey Rooney’s son), while all but ignoring the girls.

The giant hippies conclude that the Revolution has come, the Establishment has been defeated, and youth are in charge of this brave new world.  They don Roman-style togas that enhance the boys’ musculature, and celebrate by dancing semi-nude  in slow motion in the town square.








So far, in spite of the beefcake, we have a heterosexist fable, like A Cold Day in the Park, in which establishment heterosexuals face off against the sexual ambiguity of the counterculture.

But when Genius develops an antidote to the goo, Mike dumps his girl to hook up with Horsey (Johnny Crawford of The Rifleman, left, looking jealous on a title card).  They administer the antidote by catapulting Horsey directly onto the bosom of one of the giant girls.

In many situations a human missile fired onto a bosom would be overbrimming with heterosexual undertones, but in this case Horsey is attacking, literally trying to destroy the symbol of monstrous femininity.  When he falls and seems stunned, Mike rushes to his aid.  The manly love of comrades  wins out over heterosexual practice, however aggressively pursued.