The Flying Nun

My parents weren't as anti-Catholic as my church.  We were allowed to watch movies with Catholic characters, especially nuns:  The Sound of Music (1965), The Singing Nun (1966), A Change of Habit (1969,).  (With Elvis Presley, right, as a hunky priest).

And on Thursday nights, squeezed in between  Batman and Bewitched so you couldn't skip it if you tried, The Flying Nun (1967-70), a "girl power" sitcom that all but eliminated hetero-romance.

Novice nun Sister Bertrille (Sally Field, previously of Gidget), assigned to a convent in San Juan, Puerto Rico, develops an amazing power: she can fly!  It's no miracle: she has a petite frame, and all of the nuns wear hats with flappy wing-like things that are perfect for taking off.  The Reverend Mother naturally disapproves, like Darren in Bewitched and Major Nelson in I Dream of Jeannie, and insists that Sister Bertrille stay grounded, especially when a representative of the Vatican is visiting.

Critics thought it silly and derivative, Sally Field hated it, and TV Guide named it #42 on the list of the 50 Worst TV Shows of All Time (just above Woops!, about the hilarious adventures of the survivors of a nuclear holocaust).  The adults kept changing the channel to Hawaii Five-0 or The Glenn Campbell Goodtime Hour (one of the dreaded variety shows).  But kids all wanted Sister Bertrille as our big sister; she was cool, adventurous, funny, and never too busy to play.  Girls and boys alike bought (or asked for) the coloring books, comic books, lunch boxes, and toys.

And there was a special attraction for gay kids:

1. No heterosexual romance.  Nuns didn't date.

2. Hispanic beefcake.  Scores of hunky Hispanic (and non Hispanic) actors were trotted in so that Sister Bertrille could help a gangster reform, a boxer regain his confidence, a handyman become a bullfighter, and a priest overcome his fear of public speaking.

3. There was a full contingent of teen idol guest stars, including Craig Hundley (left), Manuel Padilla Jr., Michael Gray, Paul Petersen, Keith Schultz, Dwayne Hickman, and Boyce and Hart.






4. Carlos (Alejandro Rey), who ran the local casino,  was often annoyed and infuriated by Sister Bertrille's hairbrained schemes.  They became friends, but he never displayed any romantic interest in her.


Even today, you almost never see a male-female friendship on tv. From Sam and Diane (Cheers) to Ross and Rachel (Friends) to Mulder and Scully (The X-Files), no matter how much they deny it or bandy around words like "arrogant" and "infuriating," any male-female pairing inevitably results in romance.  And in the 1960s, male-female friendships were even more rare.


So seeing Carlos and Sister Bertrille together gave gay boys "permission" to be "just friends" with girls, to hang out with them but not approach them as dark mysterious creatures whose curves and breasts held the key to manhood.

The Gay Villages of Sonia and Tim Gidal

When I was little, my search for a "good place" often led me to the My Village books.  Tim Gidal (1909-1996) was a a pioneer in the field of photojournalism and a respected academic at the New School for Social Research.  In the interest of fostering international understanding, he and his wife Sonia published My Village in India (1956), a photo-story about the everyday life of a real ten-year old boy in a rural village.

It became so popular that they started scouting out villages in other countries, eventually traveling to 23:

1956: Austria
1957: Yugoslavia, Ireland
1958: Norway
1959: Israel, Lapps (Norway)
1960: Bedouins (Jordan), Greece
1961: Switzerland
1962: Spain, Italy
1963: Denmark, England
1964: Germany, Morocco
1965: France
1966: Finland, Japan
1968: Korea, Brazil
1969: Ghana
1970: Thailand
They only stopped when the couple divorced.



Each story was written in present tense and covered a few days in the life of a 10-12 year old boy: shepherding in Yugoslavia, fishing in Norway, tending to a vineyard in France.  He also went to school, played with his friends, talked to other villagers, went to a festival or took a field trip to a big city, and sometimes solved a minor mystery.  On the way you learned something about the history, language, and culture of the country (probably for the first time).

No gay people or same-sex romances were ever mentioned.  So why did these books offer a glimpse of a "good place"?

1. The boys were all exceptionally cute, from my preteen vantage point, and in warm climates they often stripped down to swim or fish or frolic.  Even in cold climates: the Norwegian boy stripped down for bed, and the Finnish boy was photographed completely nude in a sauna.

2. Their fathers, older brothers, and neighbors all lived off the land: they were farmers, shepherds, fishermen, loggers.  That meant endless photographs of muscular adult men.


3. American media of the 1960s was full of preteen boys "discovering" girls.  But the Village boys never expressed the slightest interest in girls.  Indeed, they didn't seem to know any, other than their sisters.

4. However, they often came in pairs that were extremely expressive by American standards: always hugging, wrapping their arms around each other, lying side by side, even kissing each other on the cheek.  To my preteen mind, it was obvious that they were boyfriends.

See also: Looking for Love in the Encyclopedia

The Beefcake Art of Velazquez

In school, when you learned about Diego Velazquez (1599-1660), the great painter of the Spanish Golden Age, your teacher probably talked about how he introduced realism into the heavily stylized world of Renaissance art by depicting everyday people, drunks, peasants, workers, and dwarfs as well as the elite.

You probably didn't hear a word about his beefcake paintings, but Velazquez was also a master of the muscular male form.

This John the Baptist in the Wilderness (1622) developed some nice biceps on his diet of locusts and honey.









When you see reproductions of The Triumph of Bacchus (1628-29), they usually zero in on the three drunk workers, Los Borrachos, leaving off the beefy Greek gods who are providing the wine.

Apollo at the Forge of Vulcan (1630) also introduces a Greek god into a modern, realistic scene.  Are we supposed to find those blacksmiths grotesque?  They have obviously been working out!

Joseph's Tunic (1630) recounts the Biblical scene where Joseph's brothers bring his coat to his father Jacob to claim that he was killed by a wild animal.  But who is paying attention to that?  Your eye is drawn to the muscular backside of one of the brothers.

Christ Contemplated by the Christian Soul (1626-28): that kid is the soul, contemplating a rather beefy Jesus tied up for a non-Biblical bondage scene.

Maybe I would have liked Spanish class a little more if the teacher had brought up the beefcake instead of pontificating on the multivarious points of view in Las Meninas

Kaliman and Solin: Magician and Boy Pal

Spanish class didn't offer a huge selection of teenage adventurers with boyfriends, or teen magazines featuring frontal nudity, but it did give gay students some spectacular beefcake and a Batman and Robin-like adult-juvenile relationship.

Kaliman, el Hombre Increible, an orphan adopted by Prince Abul Pasha of Kalimantan, Indonesia, grew up to immensely muscular, gifted with magical powers, and dedicated to fighting injustice.

He first appeared on Mexican radio in 1963 (where his program still runs), and soon moved into weekly comic books.  Over 1,000 issues have been published to date. There is also a Colombian version read throughout Latin America.

Kaliman wears a turban emblazoned with a K and an all-white outfit, though he often takes his shirt off before fighting the bad guys.

He has antecedents in Mandrake the Magician and other magical superheroes of the pulps, but he is a distinctly Latin American creation, with the colorful enemies -- the vampires, aliens, mad scientists, and evil cultists -- that one would expect of a Santo or Blue Demon.

Sometimes he rescues attractive women, but he rarely expresses any romantic interest in any of them.

Most often he rescues his youthful companion, Solin, whom he picked up in ancient Egypt.  Solin's age is not specified, but he looks 12-14.  Because he is depicted with black curly hair and a cute girlish face, because he wears eyeliner and mascara, and because he becomes "the damsel in distress" nearly as often as Robin, fan fiction writers sometimes transform him into a girl.

But when he must rescue Kaliman or perform some other act of bravery, Solin proves more than capable.  There are hints that he will take over the job of protecting the world from evil when Kaliman retires.

There have been two movies (1972, 1976), with a third in the works.  Kaliman was played by the American Jeff Cooper, who unfortunately wasn't as buffed as his comic book counterpart.

Solin was played by Nino del Arco and Manuel Bravo.

Garcia Lorca: The Homophobic Gay Poet and his Boyfriend

When I was studying Spanish literature at Augustana College, I never, in a million years, would have guessed that Federico Garcia Lorca (1898-1936) was gay (or for that matter his boyfriend, surrealist painter Salvador Dali).

How could I guess when his three most famous plays are:

1. Yerma (1934), a tragedy about a woman who can't have children.

2. Bodas de Sangre (Blood Wedding, 1933), about two men who kill each other over the love of a woman.

3. La Casa de Bernarda Alba (The House of Bernarda Alba, 1945), about a woman who can't stand her daughter's lack of chastity.  This one has no male characters at all.





And when his poetry is all about heterosexual longing:

"The Lizard is Crying": boy and girl lizards are crying because they lost their wedding rings.

"Two Mariners on the Beach": one dreams of "the golden breasts of Cuban girls."

"Thamar and Amon": he "was gazing at the round and low moon, and he saw in the moon his sister's very firm breasts."

(Painting of Lorca as St. Sebastian is by Alice Wellinger)

"Ode to Walt Whitman" is even homophobic.

 Lorca decries the "pansies" (maricas) of New York, horrible perversions of the spiritual love described by Walt Whitman.  They don't just gaze longingly at each other, they actually touch each other!  Disgusting!

Pansies of the cities, of tumescent flesh and unclean mind,
Mud of dreams, harpies, unsleeping enemies of Love
Pansies of the world, murderers of doves!
Let there be no quarter!
Death flows from your eyes!

Wow.

But he was definitely gay.

For a long time his family and scholars alike tried to closet him, but after his overtly homoerotic Sonnets of Dark Love was finally published in 1983, many studies have appeared analyzing the gay subtexts in his poems and plays, and revealing a tortured gay life in conservative Spanish society.  Even his murder by Nationalists during the Spanish Civil War has been interpreted as less a political assassination than a homophobic hate crime.

Javier Beltran played a non-heterosexualized version of the poet (with Robert Pattinson as Dali) in Little Ashes (2008).

Ode to Walt Whitman?  Maybe a case of "protesting too much."

See also: Rimbaud: A Season in Hell

Papa soltero: Telemundo Teens on the Beach

When cable became common in the 1980s, the number of stations available increased from 3-4 to hundreds,  and Boomer kids from small towns in the Midwest got Telemundo, and heard Spanish spoken for the first time (outside of the classroom and the PBS series Que Pasa, USA?)

I didn't like the telenovelas and Sabado Gigante, which looked like a circus sideshow, but I liked some of the movies (Santo the Vampire Fighter, La gran aventura), and Papa Soltero (1987-1993), a sitcom starring Cesar Costa as "Cesar," a single Dad who works as a tv producer and lives an upscale Mexico City apartment.



In Spanish class, all you ever heard about Mexico was adobe pueblos full of people wearing sombreros and sarapes, and maybe the Mexican Revolution of Los de Abajo, so just the premise was exciting.

It was like a Spanish version of Hey, Dad...! Cesar was divorced, and saw his kids only during the summer.  Then his ex-wife died, and Cesar got saddled with them full-time: college-aged Alejandra (Edith Marquez), teenage Miguel (21-year old Gerardo Quiroz), and precocious preteen Cesarin (his real-life brother, 13-year old Luis Mario Quiroz).  By the way, that's not a flower in his hair, it's the station logo.

What was the gay connection?

1. A ton of beefcake.  The family appeared for breakfast wearing bathrobes; they slept in their underwear; they bathed, hung out in locker rooms, went to the beach in speedos.  They had muscular friends who were allergic to shirts. By the time the series ended, even "little" Cesarin was a 19 year old hunk, with biceps and a penchant for speedos.

2. A minimum of heterosexual hijinks.  American sitcoms are obsessed with making their teenage boys as girl-crazy as possible, but Cesar spent far more time dating and romancing than either Miguel or Cesarin.

3.After Papa Soltero, Luis Quiroz played gay roles on telenovelas and is reputedly gay in real life.

See also: Que Pasa, USA?

Aliados: Argentine Teenagers Save the World

Lots of UFO contactees tell us that this is the final era of humanity.  We have only a short time to prove to the Galactic Overlords that we can do the right thing: end war, stop environmental degradation, switch to solar energy.  If we succeed, we will be invited to join the Federation.  If not, our planet will be "cleansed."

The Argentine sci-fi series Aliados (Allies) draws on that plot.  Six teenagers are chosen by the Feminine Energy Creator to save "the human project."  They have only 105 days.

Unfortunately, they have problems of their own, each with its own catch phrase.

1. Noah (Peter Lanzani, left), a hedonistic millionaire's son: "Self Satisfaction at Any Cost."

2. Anorexic pop star Azul (Oriana Sabatini): "Brilliance and Pop Destruction"

3. Maia (Mariel Percossi), a violent bully: "The Pleasure of Hurting."

4. Manuel (Agustin Bernasconi): a shy, insecure bullying victim: "The Voice of Suffering"

5. Homeless juvenile delinquent Franco (Julian Serrano, left): "Alienation in a Pure State"

6. Valentin (Joaquin Ochoa), an orphaned victim of child labor: "Prisoner of His Loneliness"

Seven "Beings of Light" have agreed to help them.  They have catch phrases, too:

Ian (Pablo Martinez, left), the leader, from a place beyond time and space: "Secrets of the Soul"

The others are connected to the teenagers:
1. Noah gets his "soul mate" Venecia (Jenny Marinez) from the Astral Plane: "Love in Action."

2. Azul is inhabited by Luz (Oriana Sabatini), from the Causal World: "The New Message'

3. Maia gets Ambar (Lola Moran), from the planet Sirius: "Peace Disguised in War"

4. Manuel gets Inti (Nicolas Francella), from the planet Upsilon Andromeda B: "Fire that Heals"

5. Franco gets Devi (Caroline Domenech), an enlightened human: "Between Heaven and Earth"

6. Valentin gets Gopal (Maximo Espindola), from the Land Beyond the Mirror: "Reflections of Friendship"

Complex stuff, full of New Age jargon, with some Hinduism thrown in, and the plotlines are even more complex, full of alliances, betrayals, hidden agendas, and people who aren't what they seem.

It's a major hit in Latin America.  There are both broadcast episodes and online webisodes, plus a music soundtrack, two video games, a theatrical performance, and a Club Aliados that countless thousands of kids and teens have joined.

Notice that some of the human-Light Being pairings are same-sex.  The episode I saw seemed to have a gay subtext between Valentin and Gopal (left), and others have found links between Noah and Ian.

However, there aren't any specifically gay characters.  Producer Cris Morena has been criticized for erasing gay people from the Cosmos.

You can see the episodes through the official website.

Las Brujas de Zugurramurdi: Two Spanish Screen Hunks Finally Kiss

One of the highlights of the Brussels International Fantastic Film Festival last month was Las Brujas de Zugurramurdi (2013), released internationally as Witching and Bitching.  It's about two divorced men  José  and Tony (Hugo Silva, left, and Mario Casas), who are embroiled in financial trouble and custody battles due to their evil ex-wives.

Dressed as a soldier and Jesus Christ, they plan a daring robbery of one of those "We Buy Gold" shops.

 Josés son comes along (because it's visitation day), and they co-opt a taxi driven by Manuel (Jaime Ordonez), who has women trouble of his own.

The four men try to escape into France (so they can live in Disneyland).  Unfortunately, they have stolen a cache of cursed gold rings.

En route through Basque country, they run afoul of three witches, who want the power of the rings, and intend to eat them.  But first they torture the hapless thieves in various ways, such as forcing  José and Tony to kiss.

It sounds rather homophobic, but there's such a strong gay subtext between the two that you can interpret their revulsion as embarassment, as their hidden attraction comes to light.

Besides, there's a bona fide gay couple, and an "androgynous" boy.

Besides, Spanish audiences have been waiting for the two screen hunks to kiss for years.

Both actors are gay-friendly. Mario Casas played a gay character in the film Mentiras y Gordas (Sex, Party, and Lies, 2009), and has been interviewed by gay magazines (the words on his chest are "I shave with a razor.")

Appearing at Madrid's Gay Pride Festival and photographed dancing at gay clubs, Hugo Silva is widely assumed to be gay, but he hasn't made any public pronouncements.

Sergi Lopez: Gay Characters and Frontal Nudity in Three Languages

You probably remember Sergi Lopez as the evil Captain Vidal in Pan's Labyrinth (2006).  The polyglot actor (fluent in Spanish and French as well as his native Catalan) has appeared in over 60 movies, specializing in psychotic killers, amoral conmen, and other evil types.

But he also plays gay-subtext characters.  In With a Friend Like Harry (2000), his Harry reunites with high school friend Michel (Laurent Lucas), seduces him, and takes over his life.

In Parc (2008), a chance meeting between two married heterosexual men in the park (Sergi, Jean-Marc Barr) turns into a cat-and-mouse game of manipulation and desire.

And gay characters.  In Les derniers jours du monde ("Happy End," 2009), as the end of the world approaches, Theo (Sergi) confesses his love for his straight friend Robinson (Mathieu Almaric), and then commits suicide. I know, the gay gay always dies, but to be fair, Robinson and everybody else on Earth also dies.  And there's a frontal-nude shot of Sergi that's more than worth sitting through the angst.

Sergi doesn't play a gay character in Pa negre ("Black Bread," 2010), but he does play the mayor of a town where a gay boy uncovers a dark secret.

 

Violetta: 10 Teen Hunks on 1 Disney Channel Soap

The telenovela is a Latin American genre, an evening soap opera about wealthy, attractive people who fall in love a lot while scheming to take control of empires.  Teen telenovelas are especially popular among the junior high set, so the Disney Channel has jumped on the bandwagon with Violetta (2012-).   

Violetta (Martina Stoessel) is a teenage girl who wants to become a singer like her dead mother, against the wishes of her father.   She has a series of female friends who support her and enemies who try to destroy her as she tries to decide whether the Rich Boy or the Poor Boy is really The One.

As in most Disney Channel teen series, the amount of beefcake is staggering.

1. German (Diego Ramos, left), Violetta's hunky dad, and the ruler of a construction empire.

2. Matias (Joaquin Berthold), who is scheming to destroy him.

3. Tomas (Pablo Espinosa), The Poor Boy: quiet, artistic, and passionate.

4. Leon (Jorge Blanco), The Rich Boy: arrogant, and self-assured.

5. Andres (Nicholas Garnier), Leon's gay-subtext best friend.

6. Maxi, the gay-vague fashion plate.

7. Facundo (Maximiliano Ponte) and 8. Beto (Roberto Sultani), professors at the music academy.

9. Federico (Ruggero Pasquarelli), the new kid (top photo).

10. Diego (Diego Dominguez), his best buddy.

Runner for the King: A Dream of Hispanic Freedom

When I was little, I loved Runner for the King (Rowena Bennett 1944), about a boy named Roca who is part of a relay of runners in the Inca Empire of South America.  They deliver messages to and from the king in the form of knotted cords, or quipu.

But as Roca tries to deliver the latest message, things go wrong.  A relay station is abandoned, a rope bridge is cut; he must go through the jungle, where he is attacked by a jaguar.  He rescues his friend Cachi from the savages who are planning an attack, and they run together to deliver the message personally to the Inca.  

Cachi and Roca's perilous run entered my dreams.  My friend Bill and I were racing across a vast sandy desert beneath a midnight sky. In the distance I saw a city of sharp jagged towers, brightly lit with green lights. We ran for countless hours, for all our lives, never tiring, never stopping to rest.  The landscape never changed, the sun never rose, the city grew no closer. Yet we were content.


Sometimes as we ran, I glanced over, caught Bill's eye, and he smiled. It was the same smile that Chekhov and Sulu shared in their room on the Enterprise, and Rich and Sean at the inn in rural Ireland. It was the most important sight in the world

Later I read Temple of the Sun (Evelyn Sibley Lampman, 1964), about a 12-year old boy named Chimal, whose quiet life with his best friend in the ancient Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan is disrupted by the arrival of Cortez and his conquistadores.
















And I saw Royal Hunt of the Sun (1969), with the Conquistador Pizarro (Robert Shaw) capturing the extraordinarily muscular, semi-nude Atahualpa of the Incas (Christopher Plummer) and holding him for ransom.  But the plan becomes complicated as he develops feelings of respect, affection, and finally love for the god-king.

All I knew about Latin America at the time was Pre-Conquest, about vast empires rising from the jungles, Aztecs, Incas, and Mayas, who wore loincloths and built step-pyramids and worshipped the Feathered Serpent and validated same-sex love.

In the fifth grade, we had a choice of Spanish or French.  I took Spanish, and soon learned about Maximilian, Bolivar, Juarez, Santa Ana, and Zapata.  I soon read Los de Abajo, Don Segundo Sombra, the Ficciones of Jorge Luis Borges. I watched Santo, El Blue Demonio, La Gran Aventura, Papa soltero.  I dated Hispanic men. Eventually I learned about gay Latin American writers, like Arenas and Puig.

And I ran. Track in high school, cross-country in college, 5-Ks, 10-Ks, fun runs.  I've been running ever since.

Que Pasa, USA: Bilingual Beefcake

I took Spanish every year from fifth grade through high school, but it might as well have been Klingon.  We never met a native speaker except for a teacher, we never heard it spoken on the street, we never saw it written on signs or posters.

So when PBS began to air Que Pasa, U.S.A.? in 1977, we watched eagerly, and even wrote reports on it to present to the class.

It was a sitcom about a family of Cuban immigrants in Miami.  The grandparents, Abuela Adela and Abuelo Antonio, spoke only Spanish.  The parents, Pepe and Juana Pena, spoke some English.  And the teenagers, Joe and Carmen, were native English speakers.

To accommodate both English and Spanish-speaking viewers, characters translated for each other, repeated statements twice, or made their meaning clear through context.

The plots mostly involved culture clash between traditional Cuban and "modern" American mores.  The grandparents are aghast when Carmen dates a black man.

 Joe does a report on gay people for his school newspaper (including a night in a gay club for research), and everyone assumes that he is gay.

In addition to the gay plotline, Rocky Echevarria, who played Joe, provided ample beefcake.  He usually wore an open shirt and extremely tight jeans, and there were occasional bathrobe or swimsuit shots.

Renamed Stephen Bauer, he went on to a long career as action heroes, gangsters, and streetwise cops, including the homoerotic best buddy of Al Pacino's Scarface (1983).  His penchant for very tight pants continued.

He also originated the gay character of Martin in  Bent on Broadway (1980), and starred in the gay-themed Versace Murder (1998).

In the 1980s, we began to get Telemundo, which opened up a whole world of Spanish-language programs, including Papa soltero