The Face of Pure Evil at Denkmann Elementary School

 Link to the n*de photos ( subjects over 18)

This is the Face of Pure Evil
 

And the House Where Evil Dwells.

When I was a kid, it was painted grey, and that attic window had bars on it.

I lived on 41st Street, the the north side of Denkmann Elementary School  My boyfriend Bill lived two blocks north, by 18th Avenue -- a busy street that I was not allowed to cross.

To the east was Darry's house (we hadn't met yet), and eventually  Country Style Ice Cream.

To the south was Dewey's Candy Store, Gary's house, and  eventually the Nazarene Church.

To the west was Schneider's Drug Store, where you could buy comic books. 

But we never took the direct route to Schneider's.  We walked all the way up to 18th Avenue and around to the back, to avoid The Maniac and his house.

There were lots of Mean Boys at Denkmann who would steal your lunch money, call you names, or pound you for infractions of the rules of grade school behavior. Like Dick, who hung out by Dewey's Candy Store and pounded you for being a "girl."  Or Mark, who hung out by the south door, and challenged smaller boys to fight him.  But The Maniac was by far the worst.

Most bullies choose one or two victims to torment; everyone else is safe.  But the Maniac was indiscriminate, targeting everyone except girls and bigger boys.  He interpreted the most innocent statement or gesture, even standing too close to him, even looking at him, as an insult that must be redressed: "Now we have to fight!"

If you refused, he attacked on the spot, or if you were inside the school, ambushed you on the way home.

If you agreed to fight, you met your doom later, on the west side of the school yard, a desolate space of dead trees and yellow grass across the street from his house.

Snarling like a rabid dog, The Maniac punched and kicked you everywhere, in the face, the chest, the belly, the balls.  When you collapsed, bloody and sobbing, he poured dirt on you, spat in your face, and moved on.

When you tried to tell teachers, they simply said "No one likes a tattle-tale."

When you tried to tell parents, they  simply said "You have to learn to fight your own battles."

The only escape was to avoid the Maniac: don't sit near him in the cafeteria, don't stand near him at recess, run home as fast as you could after school, and at all costs stay away from the House of Evil.  Don't go anywhere near 40th Street.

But one day during the summer after third grade,  I was stupid.  Mom asked me to return a cake-decorating kit that she borrowed from the Old Lady Schoolteachers for some PTA event.  They lived on 40th Street, two houses south of the House of Evil.

 I should have walked all the way around Denkmann School, but it was hot, Cartoon Showboat was coming on soon, and besides, the Maniac might not even be home.  So I cut diagonally across the parking lot and the schoolyard and came to 40th Street exactly parallel to the Old Lady Schoolteachers' house.

I peered at the House of Evil -- it looked deserted -- took a deep breath, and crossed the street.  I was in the yard -- almost up to the screen porch.  Almost safe.

"Hey, Fairy!"

The Maniac!  He must have been lurking in the shadows, waiting for a victim to appear!  And now he was standing right next to me, fists clenched, a snake ready to strike....

The full story, including what happened to the Maniac, is on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends 

See also:  Oliver!, the Boy with Soft Hands

The Boy on the Prospect List

How to Eat Fried Worms: They Tease You Because They Like You. With gay subtexts and Luke Benward grown up

Finn Kaifur: Icelandic college student studies ballet, takes a polar plunge, shows his stuff. With bonus Pete White and n*de model Shaun Ross  Mentions bullying

Björn Mosten: His "Love and Anarchy" n*de hugeness made him a star, but he's also played a gay boarding school bully and Oddgeir's buddy.

My Boyfriend and I Play "Fighting Prince of Donegal"

This is the Scholastic Book Club edition of Fighting Prince of Donegal, by Robert T. Reilly.

It may not look like much now, but when I was in fourth grade at Denkmann Elementary School, it appeared among the selections offered by the Scholastic Book Club.  I was entranced.

This was no wimpy fairy-tale prince in love with a princess.  He was a Fighting Prince, strong and powerful.  I had never heard of Donegal, but it was obviously a mystical, distant country with castles on high mountains, outlined against an orange moon.

My boyfriend Bill and I both ordered copies.  They wouldn't arrive for four to six weeks.

We talked about the book every day.  Would the Prince have muscles?  Would he have a best man?  Would he rescue his best man, who would then sigh "My hero?" and melt into his arms?



We made swords out of cardboard and played "Fighting Prince of Donegal."  My brother got to be the villain, who would lock Bill in the dungeon (the lilac bushes outside my house) so I could rescue him.

We often talked about what the Prince looked like.  If you read the ad very carefully, you could see that the book was originally published in 1958 and called Red Hugh, Prince of Donegal.  That meant a red-head.  He must look something like this.

Or, from an adult point of view:

We looked up Donegal in the Golden Book Encyclopedia.  It was a county in Ireland, on the northeast coast.

There was a book in the Denkmann Library called Donegal Stories, but it was all fairy tales, which we  hated.

Would those books ever arrive?

Bill's big brother Tom told us that a couple of years ago, Disney made a movie version of The Fighting Prince of Donegal, starring Peter McEnery.

"Did he rescue a boy or a girl?" I asked expectantly.

"Neither one," Tom said.  "He gets rescued by an older guy.  I don't remember his name.

The older guy in the 1966 movie is Henry O'Neill, played by Tom Adams. And Hugh does get a girlfriend. 

The books arrived around Halloween.  We ran to Bill's house and upstairs to his room, thrust aside our other selections --  Journey to the Center of the Earth, Arrow Book of Ghost Stories, The Forgotten Door, 13 Ghostly Tales -- and opened our books and started reading.

It was the most boring thing I had ever read!


After a few minutes, I looked up.  Bill was leafing through the pages, looking for the "good parts."

I skipped ahead to the end and announced "Red Hugh gets a girlfriend!"

Bill and I looked at each other.  He put the book down and glanced at our cardboard swords in the corner.

"Wanna play Fighting Prince of Donegal?" I asked.

He nodded.  "But this time I wanna rescue you, and you have to melt into my arms and say 'My hero!'"

Update: Hugh Roe O'Donnell (1572-1602) led a confederacy of clan chiefs to resist English Protestant incursions into their territory.  Although he ultimately failed (the English controlled Ireland for the next 300 years), he became a symbol of Irish nationalism.  He married Rose O'Neill as a political move, not because she was the Girl of His Dreams, and divorced her after five years, for reasons that are unclear (according to a 1986 biography).  The couple had no children; maybe one of them was sterile.  Or maybe the Fighting Prince was not particularly interested in the ladies.

See also: Manawyddan Son of the Boundless: a gay Theosophist writes about two gods in love

Gay Teens in the Summer of Love.

Connor Newall: The Hottest Property in Fashion buddies with Alfie Williams, models in gay ads, plays gay guys, shows his....

Why the Devil Has No Penis

When I was a kid at Denkmann Elementary School in Rock Island, my friend Greg, had a small oil painting on his bedroom wall: a muscular guy plunging headlong from a sky of thundering, blue-black clouds.  Naked, his backside bare, looking angry, not terrified, as he veers toward the dark mass of land below.

I found it disturbing, and also fascinating.  Who was this guy, why was he falling, and why was he so nonchalant about it?

Later, after Greg moved away, I surmised that the painting depicted Lucifer, the greatest of angels in Christian myth, who began a war to dethrone God, and as punishment was cast down to Hell, where he became the Devil.

 John Milton's Paradise Lost presents Lucifer as a tragic figure, striving against oppression even when he can't win.  Others see him as a queer figure, subverting the hetero-normativity of Adam and Eve in the Garden.

I've never found that particular painting -- it must have been an original -- but Lucifer appears in a lot of artwork.  His muscles are drawn in loving detail, every curve and bulge in place.

All but the penis.  He has none (except maybe Jason Lewis, who played Lucifer in the 2007 movie).

Notice the wisp of fabric hiding the Morning Star's manhood Lucifer in the Bower of Adam and Eve (1805), by Stephen Rigaud.

Or Pietro Calvi's muscular, winged statue (1883), with a rock outcropping covering his privates.

William Blake's 1808 depiction is androgynous and sexless, and so are most modern versions, like Michael Creese's Lucifer (2013)

Painters and sculptors who have no qualms about frontal nudity in their depictions of Biblical heroes, epic heroes, Greek gods, famous people, and the guy next door suddenly get skittish when they portray Lucifer, and obscure or erase his sexiest part.

How can we explain the absence of Lucifer's penis?

My suggestions:

1. Because Lucifer is "beautiful," a full set of male sex organs would make him too stunning to bear.

2. His fall from heaven has "unmanned him," left him without male power and potency.

See also: Why Hot Stuff Wears a Diaper.

Summer 1971: Donald Duck's Double Life

When I was a kid in the 1960s, my favorite comics were the Harveys (Casper, Richie Rich), followed by Gold Key jungle heroes (Tarzan, Korak, Brothers of the Spear), and then Archie, and maybe some Marvel and DC if I could get them.  Disney's Donald Duck was not as low on the list as Bugs Bunny, but it was down near the bottom.

The problem was that Donald led a double life.  I liked the stories where he was an adventurer, brave, resourceful and intelligent, setting out with his rich Uncle Scrooge to explore lost Atlantis, the Yucatan, Tibet, Antarctica, or the Seven Cities of Cibola, in plotlines as macho as Treasure Island, as passionate as Time Tunnel.  It was a man-only world, with no damsels in distress to be rescued and no girls waiting back home at the story’s end.

In fact, no one expressed any heterosexual interest at all, though the nephews sometimes swooned over male crooners and teen idols.  (During the 1990s, Don Rosa retconned the characters to give Uncle Scrooge a long-ago romance with dance-hall girl Glittering Goldie).

But in other stories, Donald transmutated like a zombie into a single father living in the town of Duckburg, where he was saddled with a series of dismal jobs: janitor, gas station attendant, door-to-door salesman, delivery boy. And  he had a girlfriend, Daisy Duck, who was constantly natting her disapproval of  every single one of his interests, hobbies, goals, and dreams (precisely like Poil's disapproval of Spooky's passion for scaring).

The two could not be more different. Donald exuded toughness and aggression, Daisy was dainty to the point of idiocy. Donald bellowed at baseball games, Daisy drank tea at the Tuesday Afternoon Ladies’ League. Donald puttered around in junkyards, Daisy puttered about in her petunia bed.







It was disgusting! Donald had not only abandoned his life of swashbuckling adventure, he could not even enjoy the simple pleasures of boxing matches and working on cars. Instead, he sat bored on a frilly white chair at the Bon Ton, while Daisy tried on hats. Why would he do it? If they shared no common interests whatsoever, why would he even want to hang out with her?

In "The Double Date," Daisy and Donald go on a double date with Clara Cluck and Rockhead Rooster.  Donald and Rockhead exhibit an instant, eye-bulging attraction to each other, and become so engrossed in discussions of cars and sports that they ignore the girls.  They even dance together at a party.  Daisy and Clara agree that "They shouldn't see each other again."

One rainy afternoon in the summer of 1971, when we were sitting on the floor in Bill's family room, reading comic books, I brought up my concerns.  "I don't get it.  Donald Duck has a lot more fun on his adventures with Uncle Scrooge, and he doesn't anything that Daisy likes.  Why does he hang out with her?  What's the big deal?”

Bill's older brother Mike happened to be passing through on his way out, wearing a raincoat and tossing his keychain in the air. He pulled the comic from my hands and leafed through it, murmuring “Hmm…very eenterest-ing,” like the Nazi spy on Laugh-In. Then he returned it with a grin. “Een mine professional opinion, Uncle Scrooge ees a boy, und Daisy Duck ees a girl.”



“So what?” I asked.

Mike  laughed, and reached down to tousle my hair. “So what!” he exclaimed in his normal voice. “Just wait ‘til you discover girls. Then you won’t ask ‘so what’? You’ll say ‘gimme her number!’”  And he was gone. I heard him repeat “so what!”, chortling to himself, as he clomped through the kitchen and out the back door.

Suddenly chilled, I scooted over to sit next to Bill, our backs against the couch.  He smiled, and we sat together, quietly.

Abandon the Seven Cities of Cibola to drink tea from fragile cups and discuss poetry! The idea was absurd!

See also: Heterosexualizing my Childhood Hero

Bill and I Fall Asleep Reading Uncle Scrooge

When I was a kid in the 1960s, it was hard to find comic books.  I didn't get a regular allowance until junior high, and when I did manage to earn a quarter or a dime, Schneider's Drug Store would be out of my favorite titles. I depended mostly on gifts from my uncles, or hand-me-downs from my cousin or the big kid down the street.

So one of my fondest childhood memories is of the summer of 1971 -- a few weeks before my Aunt Mavis took us to see The Time Machine.  My boyfriend Bill, my brother, and I went to the Denkmann Elementary School Carnival, and  I won a whole box of Disney comics that somebody donated-- Donald Duck, Walt Disney's Comics and Stories, Uncle Scrooge --  over 20 in all.

In those days new comics cost 15 cents, so that was quite a score!

I could do without the Donald Ducks, with Donald being forced to sit on a chair at the Bon Ton while Daisy tried on hats, and the Walt Disney's Comics and Stories were uneven, but each of the Uncle Scrooges was a gem.

In each issue Uncle Scrooge traveled to a far-flung corner of the world with Donald and his grand-nephews (Huey, Dewey, and Louie) to manage his various business enterprises or acquire more wealth.

They are captured by the Harpies while searching for the Golden Fleece.
They rocket to a solid gold moon created by a Venusian explorer.
They find the Mines of King Solomon.
They visit the kingdom of Tralla-La in Tibet.

History, astronomy, mythology, chest-pounding adventure, either before or at the same moment that I was discovering Treasure Island, King Solomon's Mines, Coral Island, Journey to the Center of the Earth, and the books in the Green Library!

It was a male-only world, with no damsels in distress to be rescued and no girls waiting back home at the adventure's end.  Uncle Scrooge is elderly, his life nearly over, and he has never expressed the slightest interest in a woman.

But my memory has another layer:

I did not read the comics alone.

Bill invited me to stay over at his house so he could "help me" read, squeezed into his small bed in the room down the hall from his big brother Mike.

I read long into the night, long after Bill loosened his grip on a comic, his eyelids fluttered shut, and he began to snore. Once he shifted position until we were pressed together, his soft chest rising and falling, his lips parted slightly, his face illuminated in the golden light of his cowboy lamp.

When I was ready to sleep, I lay against his chest, and he put his arm around me.

I had slept over with Bill many times before, and I would sleep over again, but that was the only time we slept in each other's arms.

Fall 1987: Heterosexualizing My Childhood Hero

My friends and I at Denkmann Elementary School in the 1960s liked Disney comics -- Donald Duck, Uncle Scrooge, Junior Woodchucks -- but they were hard to find.  Schneider's Drug Store didn't stock them. We had to depend on that one kid who had a subscription, or in the stacks of comics that went on sale every summer at the Denkmann School Carnival.

When we left Denkmann, no more carnival, no more Disney comics.  By the late 1970s, they weren't available anywhere, so I assumed that they were no longer being published.

But I read and reread the few adventures that I owned, with Uncle Scrooge, and his nephews and grand-nephews traveling the world to seek out lost civilizations and ancient treasures: the Philosopher's Stone; the Golden Fleece; the Seven Cities of Cibola; the Mines of King Solomon; the Treasure of Genghis Khan.

There were a few science fiction and humor stories.  Occasionally a character from Greek or Norse mythology showed up.  But mostly it was boys' adventure, like Robert Louis Stevenson, H. Rider Haggard, and the books in the Green Library.

There were no women in this macho world.  Donald Duck never mentioned that Daisy was waiting back home, Huey Dewey, and Louie treated girls as nuisances, and Uncle Scrooge?  During his many careers as cowboy, prospector, explorer, salesman, and financial tycoon, he had never even been on a date.

During college, I bought a massive tome, Scrooge McDuck: His Life and Times (1981), which reprinted some of the best Uncle Scrooge stories, and found a woman mentioned: in "Back to the Klondike" (1953), Scrooge recounts how, when he was a young prospector, a devious dance hall girl named Glittering Goldie drugged him and stole his solid gold nugget.  He tracked her down, got the nugget back, and forced her to work at his claim for a month, to teach her the value of "honest work."

That's all.  No romantic entanglement suggested.

When I was living in West Hollywood in the 1980s, Gladstone began reprinting some of the old Uncle Scrooge comics, plus new stories by cartoonist Don Rosa.  He sent Scrooge back to the Klondike in "Last Sled to Dawson" (1987).  And made Glittering Goldie his old girlfriend!

Goldie appeared in several more of Don Rosa's stores during the late 1980s and 1990s, and played a major role in the faux biography of Uncle Scrooge published in 1997.  We find out what really happened during the month they spent alone in Scrooge's cabin on White Agony Creek.  There's even a dirty joke:

En route to the claim, they encounter a giant mastodon partially frozen in the ice.  "Ok, let's get a move on," Scrooge commands.  "Between the legs!"

"I beg your pardon!" Goldie stammers, thinking that he means....

Realizing his faux pas, Scrooge reddens.  "Um...er...the way to my cabin is between the legs of the mastodon."

What can we make of this incessant heterosexualization of one of my childhood heroes?

Don Rosa's comic book stories weren't for kids, but for adults who had grown up with the Uncle Scrooge books. Adults who were old enough for "mature" themes, like girlfriends and "between the legs" jokes.

But children's media was quick to follow suit.  The Ducktales tv series (1987-1990) cast Glittering Goldie as Scrooge's love interest in four episodes. Plus Scrooge flirted with an ongoing series of female reporters, heiresses, and gold-diggers, before, after, or during the adventure.  He was heterosexual.

See also: Donald Duck's Double Life.