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

Frank Frazetta: The "Good" Muscle Artist

During the 1970s, any comic book about Tarzan, Conan, or any other barbarian hero was likely to show him heavily-muscled, half naked, holding a sword aloft, with a naked woman clinging to his legs. There weren't any gay magazines yet, at least none available for kids in small Midwestern towns, so they became gay teen pornography -- it was easy to ignore the naked woman.

We didn't know who drew the covers, so we just called him the "Good" Muscle Artist.












Turns out that he was a Brooklyn-born bodybuilder tunred cartoonist named Frank Frazetta (1928-2010), who began drawing comics in 1944, at the age 16.  At first he specialized in "funny animal" and semi-naked lady titles, but in 1954 he went to work for Al Capp on the venerable L'il Abner.  

By that point, Abner was married to Daisy Mae, with a son and mostly domestic adventures, but still, they gave Frazetta experience in drawing heavily-muscled men and semi-naked women.  By the 1960s, his covers were re-invigorating the sword and sorcery genre, with Robert E. Howard's Conan and Kull and Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan and John Carter of Mars as musclemen.  Here's a Conan cover with a gorilla instead of a naked lady at his feet.

Although heterosexual fans believed that he was drawing for them, envisioning their dream worlds of having powerful muscles and naked ladies lying at their feet, he was an "equal opportunity ogler," adept at showing the erotic power of everyone and everything.

I've heard that he was bisexual in real life, and that he was homophobic.  Maybe he was both.

During his long partnership with Ralph Bakshi, Frazetta worked on several animated features, as well as album covers and posters for a dozen movies.

Late in life he opened a Frazetta museum in East Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania, to showcase his fine art.

Most devoted to muscular barbarian heroes.

See also: Jim Steranko: Escape Artist Turned Comic Book Illustrator; and Boris Vallejo

Barbarian Heroes: Conan, Brak, Kull

Depression-Era pulps often invoked the unimaginably ancient and unimaginably decadent civilizations based vaguely on the Orient: the cities all warrened with harems, opium dens, dungeons,  lairs, and oubliettes; the rulers all fat, bejeweled, and lecherous; the people childlike; the laws brutal; the religions by turns esoteric and superstitious: the distant past worlds of Hyperborea and Atlantis, the distant future world of Xiccarph, or the aging jungle-cities of Mars.

Placing Adventure Boys in realms of Oriental myth allowed for a lushly sensual homoromance.  In H.P. Lovecraft's "Quest of Iranon”(1921), a young man wanders a stern, unfriendly world in search of the city of Aira, where there are “men to whom songs and dreams. . .bring pleasure.”  He meets “a young boy with sad eyes” who also dreams of escape, to a city where  “men understand our longings and welcome us as brothers, nor even laugh or frown at what we say.”    They travel together, happy in a way yet always longing.  They grow old together and finally die, never finding their true home.
  
Often the outskirts of these unimaginably ancient cities were teaming with mighty-thewed, sword-wielding barbarians -- Henry Kuttner’s Elak, Clark Ashton Smith’s Tiglari, Robert E. Howard’s Conan, Brak, and Kull (played by Kevin Sorbo in the film version).  Their plots usually involved a masculine/feminine colonizer/colonized myth, with the muscle man rescuing a naked woman from some effeminate, ruby-ringed satrap.



Fellow muscle men appeared only as bullies, cads, or at best, untrustworthy companions who ended up betraying the hero -- except when the barbarians are teenagers rather than men. Then they rescue no naked women, and their same-sex bonds are true.

Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian spends his seventeen stories in Weird Tales rescuing the requisite naked woman and being betrayed by men, except in the only story set in his adolescence, “The Tower of the Elephant” (1933).   About sixteen years old, a “tall, strongly made youth” with “broad, heavy shoulders, massive chest” and so on, Conan sneaks into the Tower of the Elephant with the hope of stealing a fabulous jewel hidden there.  At this point, plot conventions decree that he find a naked woman.  Instead, he finds a naked man.





An alien named Yag-kosha, elephant-headed but otherwise human, has been blinded, crippled, and imprisoned in the tower by an evil sorcerer.  They become friendly, and Yag-kosha asks Conan to rescue him through the strange-sounding expedient of cutting out his heart.  Conan never hesitates about killing monsters and enemies, but he will not kill a friend, and complies only when Yag-kosha assures him that he will not die.  In fact, he uses the magic of the heart to take revenge on the evil sorcerer, and then, restored to his original strength and beauty, he jubilantly flies away to join his companions on his home planet.

This story is fascinating because it precisely mirrors the adventures of the adult Conan, only transformed from hetero-erotic to graphically homoerotic.  In the shimmering tower, the adult Conan would find a female object of desire (naked, beautiful, benevolent) contrasted with a male threat (clothed, hideous, evil).  However, the teenage Conan finds a male, both object of desire (naked, benevolent) and threat (blind, crippled, aged, with a hideous face “of nightmare and madness”).  Then ritualized death and resurrection removes the threat, leaving only desire: Conan perceives the new Yag-kosha as beautiful.

Even the hints of heterosexual intimacy that the adult Conan often enjoys with the naked ladies he rescues  are mirrored when the naked Yag-kosha gets to “know” Conan by caressing his chest and shoulders with his soft phallic trunk: “its touch was as light as a girl’s hand,” Howard tells us, suggesting a tender, gentle sexual congress.  Conan’s desire here is for the male, a yearning for masculine intimacy that must be sublimated beyond all recognition among the adults in Cimmeria but can be expressed freely, with only a veneer of euphemism, during the paradox of youth.

The DC Comics Jungle

When I was a kid in the 1960s and 1970s, DC Comics were not known for their beefcake -- Batman, Superman, and their superhero coworkers were fully clothed all the time.  You had to go to Gold Key to get your quota of loincloth-clad jungle hunks.  But suddenly in the 1970s DC got on the bandwagon, and a dozen jungle, prehistoric, far-future, and sword-and-sorcery musclemen appeared all at once.

A precursor, Congo Bill, who wore a Jungle Jim style pith helmet, appeared in various DC Comics in the 1940s and 1950s, until he was transformed into a giant gorilla in 1959.  He got his own 7-issue series in 1954-55.  His sidekick was the loincloth clad Janu the Jungle Boy, a pint-sized Bomba who spoke in "Him no friend" patois. Here he worries about the competition.

B'wana Beast appeared in two issues of DC Showcase in 1967.  He drank a special magic elixer in a cave on Mount Kilimanjaro that allowed him to talk to animals, including his gorilla sidekick. A special magic helmet allowed him to control them.

DC took over the Tarzan title from Gold Key in 1972, and printed adaptions of the original Edgar Rice Burroughs stories: Tarzan of the Apes, The Return of Tarzan, Jungle Tales of Tarzan, Tarzan the Untamed, Tarzan and the Lion Man and Tarzan and the Castaways.  It lasted until 1977.

Korak, Son of Tarzan also migrated from Gold Key from 1972 to 1976.

The anthology series Weird Worlds  adapted some other Edgar Rice Burroughs books, including the John Carter of Mars series (shown here with the Conan-style woman supine at his feet),  plus the far-future sword-and-sorcery hero Ironwolf.   It lasted for 10 issues (1972-1974).

Kamandi, the Last Boy on Earth, inhabited a post-Planet of the Apes world of sentient animals from 1972 to 1978.

Tor, a warrior from "The World of a Million Years Ago!", with his monkey companion Chee-Chee, bounced around several comics companies after his debut in 1953.  DC had him for 6 issues beginning in 1975.  Those are sentient apes fighting him.

Claw the Unconquered, a Conan the Barbarian clone all the way down to the woman lying supine at his feet, also began in 1975, and lasted for 12 issues from 1975 to 1978.  His deformed hand, a "claw," wasn't caused by an accident or birth defect: his father was punished for consorting with demons.












Another sword-and-sorcery hero, The Warlord (seen here in cosplay), debuted in an anthology series called 1st Issue Special in 1975 before going on to a successful run in his own title (1976-1988).  He was an American pilot who accidentally flew into a hole at the North Pole and ended up in Pellucidar...um, I mean Skartaris, where he rescued the scantily clad Princess Deja Thoris...um, I mean Princess Tara.

Kong the Untamed, a blond prettyboy caveman (top photo), ran for 5 issues in 1975.













Two backup sword and sorcery hero in The Warlord eventually spun off into their own titles: Arak Son of Thunder, left (who changed from Conan clone to Mohawk Indian) from 1981 to 1985, and Arion, Lord of Atlantis,  from 1982 to 1985.

Pop quiz: how many of the 14 Lords of the Jungle have a "k" sound in their names?

Answer: 7.  I guess something about "k" spells "jungle."

See also: The Comic Book Jungle; Kamandi

Fafhrd and Grey Mouser

When I was in college, the Bookstore Gang was all wild over Fafhrd and Grey Mouser, a sword-and-sorcery duo that Fritz Leiber had been writing about since the 1930s.  Their adventures were being collected in a series of anthologies:

Swords against Wizardry
Swords in the Mist
Swords and Ice Magic
Swords and Deviltry
Swords against Death

Fafhrd is a 7'0 Conan-style barbarian, and the Grey Mouser is a 5'0 sneaky thief.  They wander the barbarian world of Nehwon (i.e., "Nowhen"), stealing cursed jewels, fighting evil sorcerers and renegade gods, exploring strange new lands, brawling, drinking, and wenching.

Yes, they go "wenching."

It wasn't Tolkien.  There was no Dark Overlord to conquer, they didn't spend a lot of time singing mournful songs, and there was sex.  Or whatever stood in for sex in those days.

Eventually they both settle down with wives and kids, become domesticated, and their adventures end.

But in some of the stories, at least, they were a homoromantic pair.

At least, that's how I read it.

Fritz Leiber also wrote Conjure Wife (1943), about men in a small college town who discover that their wives are all witches, and out to do them in.  Nuff said.

Swordsmen and Sorcerers of the 1980s

For over a century, people have been rejecting naturalistic literature to write heroic fantasy.  In Britain, mostly  about unlikely heroes who travel through magic-laden Medieval landscapes to fight ultimate evil (e.g., The Chronicles of Narnia, The Lord of the Rings). In America, mostly about heavily-muscled barbarians who travel through magic-laden ancient worlds to settle personal vendettas (e.g., Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, Conan the Barbarian).  

Neither type had much luck in the movies, maybe because of the need for special effects.  Or the difficulty in presenting an entire world without lengthy, boring exposition ("The kingdoms of Caldarand and Bobinur have been at war for centuries....)  Or the distinct preference for naturalism in movie-going audiences.

During the 1960s, I can think of only The Magic Sword (1962).

During the 1970s, Wizards (1977), and a terrible animated version of The Lord of the Rings (1978).

Then Arnold Schwarzenegger tore up the scenery as Conan the Barbarian (1982) and Conan the Destroyer (1984), and suddenly every bodybuilder who could read a script was being squeezed into a loincloth and given a magic sword to wield:
Clash of the Titans (1981)
Beastmaster (1982)
The Sword and the Sorcerer (1982)
Ator (1982)
Krull (1983)
Hercules (1983)
Deathstalker (1983)
The Blade Master (1984)
Ladyhawk (1985)
Iron Warrior (1986)
Masters of the Universe (1987)
The Barbarians (1987)...well, you get the idea.

The plots were simple 1980s man-mountain plots, with an evil wizard instead of a drug lord, and a weirdly-named Medieval world instead of Southeast Asia.

And they had a similar appeal for gay kids and teenagers.

1. Endless quantities of beefcake. Muscle men, slim sidekicks, and little kids in loincloths or naked.  Unfortunately, also endless quantities of cheesecake, including lots of female breasts.  Bare. There's always a female warrior who fights semi-nude.

2. The buddy-bonding is strong and powerful, more emotionally compelling than the requisite romance with The Girl.  In Deathstalker, the Deathstalker (Richard Hill) is patently in love with Oghris (Richard Brooker).  In The Barbarians, Kutchek and Gore (Peter and David Paul) never fall in love with anyone (else).

  In Beastmaster, Dar (Marc Singer) forms an alternative family unit with Seth (John Amos) and young prince Tal (Josh Milrad).

3. There are usually kids around for the kids in the audience to identify with.  We see the barbarian hero's early childhood tragedies, to give them a personal motive for adult vendettas.

4. There is usually no fade-out kiss.  The Barbarian is a creature of the wilderness.  He saves civilization but does not reside there, so at the end of the movie, he usually moves on.

By 1995, the fad had run its course, along with the cinematic interest in man-mountains, as beefcake fashions returned to the trim and athletic.

See also: Man-Mountains of the 1980s

Jim Steranko: Escape Artist turned Comic Book Artist

Jim Steranko (born 1938) started out as a stage magician and escape artist, following in the footsteps of Harry Houdini.

With a beefy physique to match.

In the late 1960s, while Frank Frazetta was busily revitalizing Conan the Barbarian, Steranko revitalized Marvel Comics, drawing The X-Men, Captain America, Strange Tales, and Nick Fury: Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.  He also wrote one of the first histories of comic books (1971).

I didn't read Marvel comics much when I was a kid, but I knew Jim Steranko's work from the covers of many paperback sword-and-sorcery novels that he illustrated during the 1970s.

His covers differed from the usual Conan and John Carter of Mars stuff: they usually pictured the mighty-thewed barbarian heroes without naked ladies attached to their thighs.

And the stories inside were often free of "rescuing the princess" hijinks.  David Van Arnam's Lord of Blood buddy-bonds barbarian hero Valzar and his servant Lynor.

Isn't Kelwin a rather silly name for a barbarian hero?  He should be winning science fairs, not battling the "yellow-skinned wizards of Hunan."

I bought The Mighty Swordsmen at a used bookstore in Paris without realizing that there was a naked lady on the cover.

Apparently I missed a lot of the ladies in Steranko's work.

I didn't notice his compendiums of pin-up girls, or his comic book art, crowded with shirtless, muscular men and ladies in skintight leather outfits, like that of Mrs. Peel on The Avengers. 

But at least he was an aficionado of the male form.

And recent versions of his Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. title feature a lesbian character.

See also: Werewolf by Night; and Kamadi.

Boris Vallejo: Bodybuilder turned Fantasy Artist

During the 1970s, the covers of your Conan, Tarzan, John Carter, Doc Savage, and miscellaneous barbarian hero books were likely to feature a heavily-muscled, naked or nearly-naked muscle-god fighting off monsters, giant snakes, or weird gods, usually with a naked steatopygous lady clinging to his feet (it's really hard to fight that way, but it keyed into the heterosexual fanboy's fantasy of conquest).

If they were comic books, the illustrator was Frank Frazetta.

If they were print novels, the illustrator was Boris Vallejo.

Both started out as bodybuilders, both began their careers in 1954, and moved into the field of fantasy illustration in the 1960s. They are neighbors, in Scranton and Allentown, Pennsylvania.

But the Peruvian-born Vallejo was more naturalistic in his drawings, he used a brighter color palette, lots of gold skies and gleaming muscles, and his work was more erotic -- these barbarian heroes had obvious bulges. .

He drew covers for many paperbacks, as well as posters for such films as Barbarella (1968) and National Lampoon's Vacation (1983).

Also oil paintings, like this glowing Icarus.

A friend of the gay community, Vallejo drew this poster in 1979 to commemorate the renovation of the famous St. Mark Baths in New York.

His wife, Julie Bell, is also a former bodybuilder and illustrator, who has a similar style, except her women aren't clinging to the legs of muscle gods: they're female bodybuilders and barbarian heroes in their own right. She has illustrated over 100 covers for science fiction novels since the 1990s.

Richie Brose: 1980s Beefcake Star Opens a Restaurant

This is the physique of a pizza chef.

Richard Brose may not be a household name today, but he was a regular guest star on 1980s tv.  Whenever a casting agent needed a man-mountain, especially for a Sylvester Stallone parody, , they would "call Richie."

He was working as a bodyguard at Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas when Arnold Schwarzenegger's Conan the Barbarian became a mega-hit (1983), and Universal Studios opened an "Adventures of Conan" attraction.  They needed a Conan.  Richie auditioned, got the job, and kept it for the next ten years.

In 1984, Pee-Wee's Big Adventure was casting a scene where Pee-Wee Herman rides his bike through a movie studio, disrupting a lot of movies being filmed.  Richie got the part of "Tarzan."

For the next 6 years, he often drove down from the San Fernando Valley for guest spots on tv:

He played a wrestler on Night Court (1985).

"Chesty" on Trapper John, M.D.(1985).

"Rambo Type Man" on Misfits of Science (1985).

"Hambro" on Hunter (1986).

A Hunk on Perfect Strangers (1986).

A fitness trainer on Charles in Charge (1988).

But his real love was cooking.  He opened a restaurant in Antelope Valley, and in the 1990s he relocated to Vancouver, Washington to open New York Richie's.  He now owns several pizza places in the northwest, but he returns to show biz from time to time.  He played Batman at Magic Mountain, and in 2006 he became an associate producer of Being Earnest, an adaption of the gay-subtext classic.

No indication of whether he's gay or not, but not a lot of gay men flee Los Angeles for the haven of LaGrande, Oregon.

Hunt Bowman, the Conan Clone of Planet Comics

During the 1940s and 1950s, a Flash Gordon-Conan clone named Hunt Bowman appeared in Fiction House's Planet Comics series.  In a ruined post-Apocalyptic Earth control;ed by evil Voltamen from the Planet Volta (where else would they come from), one "brawny barbarian" leads the fight for freedom.

 His associates are the Martian Princess Lyssa and Bruce, a human who happens to be inhabiting a Voltaman's body (coincidentally the body of the king's son).

So far so good.  Sounds like a lot of opportunities for beefcake and buddy-bonding, if not outright gay sumbolism.  Hunt Bowman sounds like a male stripper's name, and look at his weird short-shorts and leather-fetish harness that leaves his nipples free for the clamps.

And his best friend is named Bruce.

But Planet Comics was not known for its beefcake.  Quite the opposite.

Here are two panels from a story about Hunt and Lyssa escaping from a Voltamen craft to the ruins of New York City.

In the first, Hunt's arm and shoulder get a quarter of the space, and Lyssa's breasts about half.

In th second, Hunt's body is completely covered by Lyssa's bare legs.

The covers are even worse.  Every single one shows Lyssa or some other half-naked babe being menaced by a monster, with Hunt absent.  In the one cover where he's present, he looks like a midget dwarfed by the gigantic Lyssa.  Actually, he's far, far away.

This is the only cover giving Hunt substantial space without blocking him with girls' legs, although he's stil pushed off to the side, while a girl's body occupies the center stage.

There's a Hunt Bowman on Facebook.  Somebody named their kid after the barbarian hero.

Reb Brown: Man-Mountain from the Future

In the way of Arnold Schwarzenegger's Conan the Barbarian (1982), studios started scouring the countryside for man-mountains that they could shove into loincloths for barbarian hijinks.  Yor, the Hunter from the Future (1983) is one of the more infamous attempts, with tacky sets, a horrible theme song, and a ludicrous plot about a cave man who fights dinosaurs, blue-skinned people, sand mummies (don't ask), and flying saucers.  And he turns out to be living in a post-Apocalyptic future!

Everyone thought that superbly muscled 34-year old Reb Brown, who played Yor, was named after the Confederate Army's Johnny Reb, but he was actually born as a more humdrum Robert Brown in Los Angeles, and adopted the Southern redneck name for reasons unknown.

A football star at USC, then a pro boxer, and deputy sheriff, he had been bouncing around movies and tv since the snake-horror Ssss (1973); he gets snaked to death while soaping up his enormous pecs in the shower.  He appeared in such muscle-flexing roles as Football Player in The Girl Most Likely To (1973), Lifeguard on The Rockford Files (1975), and Weightlifter in Six Characters in Search of an Author (1976).  

In 1978 and 1979, he played Captain America in two tv-movie adaptions of the comic book hero.  Not the most becoming outfit, but it least it's bulgeworthy.

After Yor, Reb starred in some of the standard "Man-Mountain rescues someone in Southeast Asia" actioners, some of which resulted in ample homoerotic buddy-bonding (he bonds with Sylvester Stallone in Cage, 1989).  All of which resulted in ample shirtless and semi-nude scenes.

Plus a few more movies so bad that they rated Mystery Science Theater 3000 riffs, such as Howling 2: Your Sister is a Werewolf (1985) and Space Mutiny (1988). 

Gradually he moved out of acting into production.  Probably not gay in real life.