Aaron Carter: The golden boy of the fall of 2000 comes out as bi, shows his d*ck, has a hard life. Brother Nick: "Hurts to love you."

Link to Aaron's n*de photos

Aaron Carter, the younger brother of Nick Carter of The Backstreet Boys, burst into teen idol fame with his debut album (entitled Aaron Carter, naturally), released in 1997, when he was just nine years old. It sold a million copies.  A second album, Aaron's Party: Come and Get It (2000), sold two million copies and peaked at #4 on the U.S. charts.  

To those who were young in the fall of 2000, songs like "Bounce," "Aaron's Party," and a highly risque version of "I Want Candy" became symbols of a golden age of innocence,  became an icon of the fall of 2000, along with "Who Let the Dogs Out," "Kryptonite," and "Dance with Me."

 

The sizzling star appeared as himself on Sabrina the Teenage Witch (2001) and Lizzie McGuire (2001), and started high-profile romances with Hilary Duff (Lizzie) and Lindsey Lohan (The Parent Trap).

New albums were released in 2001 and 2002, but in the post-911, War on Terror world, that golden age seemed impossibly naive, and Aaron's star faded.  He continued to tour and release new songs, but none of them charted.  Focusing on his acting, he played:

Harry (one of the daughter's boyfriends) on two episodes of 7th Heaven (2004)

A classmate of the live action Fat Albert (left, with Shedrach Taylor III as Rudy).

A Hannah Montana-like incognito popstar in Popstar (2005).  Former popstars David Cassidy and Leif Garrett (right) appeared.

Marty in I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With (2006), with Jeff Garlin (soon to star in The Goldberg) as a man looking for someone to each cheese with.

Brian in College Fright Night (2014), about a vampire infestation at a college, with former teen stars Todd Bridges and Dustin Diamond in the cast.

More after the break

Leif Garrett: The teen Idol who out-swished Liberace in the glam 70s

Link to the nude photos

Even in the glam-rock 1970’s, when swishy postures were sexy and the androgynous became superstars, Leif was so absolutely girlish in every word and gesture, polarized so far into the feminine, that only the pronouns of “he” and “him” gave any indication that this person should be taken as male. 

 And, in spite of a recurring role on Family as the “boyfriend” of aggressively masculine tomboy Buddy (Kristy McNichol), it was impossible to imagine Leif ever sleeping with a girl.  

Even the teen magazines made quite a mystery of Leif’s romantic interests. One 1977 article, promising “99 Fax About Leif,” divulged only that he enjoyed playing Monopoly, he preferred being shirtless, and he had never told a girl “I love you.” Perhaps he had told a boy, as they lounged around the house shirtless, playing Monopoly?

Leif seemed conflicted about how epicene his public persona should be. At first he was adamantly, defiantly girlish, but when fans began complaining that parents wouldn’t allow his pinups because he looked too much like a girl, he adopted a new persona, sullen and inarticulate, and, he hoped, masculine. I

Instead he became androgynous, a Caravaggio youth.  The teen magazines did their part: an article in Tiger Beat announced that his first love was skateboarding “next to music and girls, of course,”  and another assured readers that “Leif is a He-Man,” detailing his enthusiasm for jogging, swimming, and horseback riding (still, nary a macho sport in the lot).

Leif released his first album, entitled Leif Garrett, in the fall of 1977, before he was old enough to drive a car; the cover shows him in a maroon shirt, unbuttoned all the way down to his navel, revealing a smooth, firm, but undefined chest, shoulder-length blond hair, and a round androgynous face. The overt eroticism of the cover art belies the romantic innocence of the tracks, mostly covers of rock classics such as “Johnny B. Goode,” “California Girls,” and “Surfin’ USA.” Nevertheless, several tracks manage to avoid the “girl” filler, making Leif a possible successor to gay-friendly Shaun Cassidy

In Feel the Need, released during the summer of 1978, Leif could almost be a drag queen. Now the songs stray far from the heteronormative “Runaround Sue” to “I Was Made or Dancing” and “Without You,” which omit pronouns and girls’ names.

Here he looks like Tim Curry in The Rocky Horror Picture Show.  

 

Leif's teen idol star fell quickly during the 1980s, when glam gave way to cowboy machismo, so he returned to television, with a swishy role in The Outsiders, trying too hard in Cheerleader Camp, and guest spots, sometimes playing himself, on a variety of tv dramas. He continued to tour, as a solo performer and in his new band, Godspeed, performed in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, and in the 2000s, parodied himself in Dickie Roberts, Former Child Star.   He even parodied his various arrests and drug problems on The World's Dumbest Criminals.

No one could possibly have imagined it in the 1970s, but this person who out-swished Liberace was actually straight! It was just  matter of his natural femininity combined with androgynous glam expectations.  In real life, he's had a variety of girlfriends and no hints of boyfriends.  Actually, I'm not aware of any statements indicating awareness that LGBT people exist. 

The nude photos are on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends

See also: Preston Oliver: Teen idol with four tv roles, two boyfriends, and "Ask Me Toney"

Jacob Sartorius: Femme teen idol into heterosexism, cowboys, and frontal nudity

Shawn Stevens: The Teen Idol that Failed

In the 1970s, Shawn Stevens had the soft, cuddly, puppy-dog cute, aggressively feminine presence that pushed Shawn Cassidy, Leif Garrett,  Scott Baio, and many others into teen idol heaven.  Why did he not make it to the heights of fame, with millions of middle schoolers kissing his poster and writing "Shawn Stevens" surrounded by little hearts in their chemistry notebooks?

It could be that the field was a little over crowded, with a dozen soft, cuddly, puppy-dog cute, aggressively feminine teens and post-teens strutting their stuff. You can only fantasize about kissing so many boys in a single week.

It could be that he lacked the talent, or the connections.

But I suspect that it was his strong religious beliefs, which kept him from moving to the next level: taking off his shirt, shoving lead pipes down his pants, shifting from dreamy to sexy as his target audience grew up.

According to his very detailed biography on IMDB, Shawn was born in Morristown, New Jersey into a fundamentalist Church of Christ family (his great-grandfather was a prominent Church of Christ minister who founded several Christian summer camps for inner-city youth).  His parents were also besties with fundamentalist ex-teen idol Pat Boone.

His family moved to California when he was 13, and he became deeply involved with musical theater, starring in youth productions and singing with the upbeat group The Young Americans.

When he was 19, a small role filmed in Utah led him to a lifelong devotion to the Latter-Day Saints (aka the Mormons).

Then he got his big break: the shortlived tv drama The MacKenzies of Paradise Cove (1978), about five orphans who adopt a grizzly fisherman (think Punky Brewster times five), shot Shawn into stardom.

Suddenly Shawn was in the spotlight:

He became the National Spokesman for the March of Dimes.

He hosted the Miss Teen America contest.

The mayor of his home town proclaimed "Shawn Stevens Day."

He got Tiger Beat fave rave articles.

He got a record contract.  No actual records, but he did get to perform "New York State of Mind" on an episode of Fame, and he became buddy-buddy with androgynous superstar Leif Garrett.

1981 was a banner year: guest spots on Too Close for Comfort, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, The Facts of Life, and Captain Kangaroo, a recurring role on a soap opera, the teenage son on Savage Harvest (about a family attacked by lions while on safari in Africa).

And then it fizzled out.  During the next few years, a smattering of guest spots, another soap opera gig, and after 1985, nothing.  Shawn began working on promotional videos for the LDS.  According to Deseret News, they resulted in 600,000 conversions, which is probably a lot more than he would have drawn to the church as a guest star on Sheriff Lobo.

Still, one wonders, did Shawn deliberately end his Hollywood career for the higher calling of Mormon proselytization, or was it unavoidable, as time and again he said "I'll do anything for my art, but I won't take my shirt off."

"Or show a basket."

Religious zeal comes with a price.

Shawn's imdb bio paints everything as joyous, bounteous, and God-directed, of course, but reading between the lines, you can see hints of failures and disappointments, and a flight into the arms of the Church.

The good news: after 30 years, Shawn is back on the big screen, mostly in Mormon or otherwise Christian productions:
The Cokeville Miracle (the aftermath of a hostage crisis with a miraculous resolution)
Sacred Vow (marital infidelity is forgiven)
Drop Off (a drunk gets redeemed)
Love Everlasting (two high school outcasts find love with each other and with the LDS)
In Emma's Footsteps (the wife of Joseph Smith carries on the Mormon work)

Plus three episodes of the post-Apocalyptic Day Zero.

So if you can handle the beaming certainty of religious zeal and an utter lack of gay characters or subtexts of any kind, you have a chance to see Shawn again.

I imagine he still refuses to take his shirt off, though.

Top 10 Beefcake Horror Movies: The 1970s

Horror movies in the 1970s upped the blood, guts, and overall grossness content to compete with tv, but unfortunately backed away from the nonstop nudity of the swinging 1960s.  Still, there were plenty of muscular guys around, taking showers, climbing into bed, or being strapped to tables for weird experiments.  You just had to know where to look.  Here are the Top 10 Beefcake Horror Movies:

1. Daughters of Darkness (1971): John Karlen, the gay-vague Willie Loomis of Dark Shadows, plays a hip artist who stumbles upon a couple of female vampires.  You get a lot of butt shots, and a glimpse of Willie's willy in a shower-sex scene.

2. Malpertuis, aka The Legend of Doom House (1971): A Belgian movie about an androgynous sailor (Matthieu Carrier), who is abducted and brought to a creepy house populated by Greek gods, all of whom have sexual designs on him.

3. Frogs (1972). About homicidal frogs.  Sam Elliot (left) doesn't seem to own a shirt, and beefcake model Nicholas Cortland gets frogged to death in the shower.

4. Flesh for Frankenstein, aka Andy Warhol's Frankenstein (1973): Baron Von Frankenstein tries to build a sex-machine monster out of Srdjan Zelenovic (top photo), while his nude boyfriend, Andy Warhol regular Joe Dallesandro, tries to save him.  But be careful -- there are an awful lot of bare breasts on display.

5. Devil Times Five (1974). Five crazy kids, including future teen idol Leif Garrett, invade a winter resort and cause mayhem.  But guest Taylor Lacher still has time to strip down and make out with his wife.  There's also a seduction of a mentally-challenged handyman.

6. The Devil's Rain (1975).  If you didn't get enough of a shirtless William Shatner in his early teen idol days or on Star Trek, you can see him here as a guy battling small-town Satanists.  Look for the film debut of John Travolta as "Danny."

7. The Reincarnation of Peter Proud (1975): Michael Sarrazin, who took off his clothes frequently in 1970s dramas, here hangs out in the swimming pool a lot while figuring out that he's the reincarnation of his girlfriend's murdered Dad.

8. Track of the Moon Beast (1976).  If ever a movie was tailor-made for the Mystery Science Theater 3000 riffs....College student Chase Cordell gets hit by a meteor fragment and goes on a rampage.  He also took off his shirt in the grindhouse Sins of Rachel (1972).

9. Eaten Alive (1977).  A hotelier in the South handles unhappy guests by feeding them to a giant crocodile.  Robert Englund, who would go on to play Freddie Krueger in the Nightmare on Elm Street series, displays rather a nice physique as a victim named Buck.

10. Coma (1978).  Half-naked musclemen (and women) are being kept in comas to harvest for organs. Among them is Tom Selleck, a few years before he became Magnum, P.I.

CHIPS: The episode where Leif Garrett is in love with his agent

Speaking of Leif Garrett, did you know that he fell in love in on CHiPs in 1979?

He plays Jimmy Tyler, a burnt-out rock star who is involved in a traffic accident. As he lies in his hospital bed, his manager, Frank Balford (Bill Daily of The Bob Newhart Show), rushes in a panic to his side. They argue: Jimmy accuses Frank of being all business, insufficiently attentive to his needs, and Frank retorts that he should be grateful that someone cares enough to handle the thousands of details necessary to maintain a rock star. They break up. Frank is heartbroken, but won’t admit it. Instead, he falls into the incoherence that we have seen often in actors and writers trying to express something that lies hidden in the depths of their characters.

Frank: When you’ve been with someone as long as I’ve been with him. . .he’s been with me. . . .

Ponch: [Helpfully.] You’ve been together.

Frank: I produced the first song he ever wrote.

Ponch: “Give In.”

Frank: That’s what brought us together. [Bitterly.] It used to mean something to him.

Ponch: Maybe it still does. If you walk away, you’ll never know.

The middle aged, less than dashing Bill Daily seems an odd choice for true love, but Daily was no stranger to gay-vague roles, and Leif’s characters often displayed romantic interest in older, less-than-dashing men.

The implication that they are a romantic couple intensifies when Jimmy, distraught over the break up, pulls his Ferrari to the side of the highway because he is crying too hard too drive; such hysterics seem somewhat odd for terminating a business relationship.

“It’s confusion in my head, trying to work things out,” Jimmy explains to the solicitous Ponch and Jon, his incoherence matching Frank’s. 

 Officer Jon invites him back to his apartment – why not Ponch, who invites stray boys home in every other episode? Maybe Ponch’s dazzling smile and tightly-packed uniform was too potent to combine with an androgyne with big hair and tightly-packed chinos. Even so, when Jon and Jimmy appear chummy in bathrobes the next morning, drinking milk, it is hard not to imagine that they are immersed in a “morning after” glow.

Jimmy soon realizes that he is lost, both personally and professionally, without Frank, but there will have to be some changes made before he is willing to take him back. “I feel things!” he exclaims. “I’m not just a piece of merchandise!” (Surely the original line was “piece of meat.”)

Officers Ponch and Jon, who like many sitcom stars have little else to do but engineer romances, devise a complex scheme to reunite the couple. Jon talks Jimmy into performing at “Skate with the Stars,” a charity roller disco exposition, and Ponch importunes Frank to attend with some of his celebrity friends. Neither realizes that the other will be there. Frank enters as Jimmy is singing “Give In,” the song that brought them together (coincidentally featured:

Give in to all the fire in your heart.

You know I want to enter every part

Of your heart and soul.

Let yourself go, give in.

Though Frank turns abruptly to leave and Ponch has to restrain him, his eyes mist up at the memory of Jimmy entering “every part” of his. . .um. . .heart and soul.  

 After some “what’s he doing here!” posturing, the officers literally shove the two together. Frank promises that he’ll “hire some people” so it won’t be just business anymore; they’ll “spend some time together." They hug – not a tepid Hollywood grab, but a weepy, full-body, head-nuzzling, never-letting-go hug. 

 The camera pans out to freeze-shots of Jon grinning, Ponch leering, and then Jon looking embarrassed when he sees the two still clinched.

 “I think we can let them go,” Jon says.

Only then does the hug break, and the actors shake hands. This seems to be a mistake, an out of character Leif telling Bill Daily “it was a pleasure working with you.” The last image we should see, the image has remained fixed in my mind, is of the two men, certainly lovers, holding each other tightly.