"Mid-Century Modern": "Golden Girls" with gay guys. Plus Bomer's backside, Adam's c*ock, and Tommy's bj

Link to the d*cks

In West Hollywood in the 1980s, every Saturday night at 9:00 pm, you could hear "Thank You For Being a Friend" coming from every apartment:

Thank you for being a friend

Traveled down a road and back again

Your heart is true

You're a pal and a confidant

as gay men sat down for a surcease from the AIDS crisis to  watch the adventures of The Golden Girls, four golden-aged ladies sharing a house in Miami.  Somehow they always ended up with cheesecake, and we did too.

Then they would head out to the Rage or Mugi or the Faultline, hoping to end up like Matt Bomer in the top photo.

180 Saturday nights with cheesecake, hookups, and Sophia's one-liners.  I'm misting up.

From left to right: Ditzy Minnesotan Rose, beset-upon Dorothy, horny Southern belle Blanche, and hanging back because the kitchen table only seats three, wisecracking Sophia.

Hulu has just dropped a 2025  homage to The Golden Girls, Mid-Century Modern, except it's in Palm Springs rather than Miami, and it features gay men: ditzy Jerry (Matt Bomer), horny Arthur (Nathan Lee Graham), beset-upon Bunny (Nathan lane), and wisecracking Sybill (Linda Lavin).  Lavin died in December 2024, but she appears in all ten Season 1 episodes.

I'm going to review Episode 1.6, "Maid Serviced," in which the guys hire a "se xy but unqualified" housekeeper.  

Scene 1:  I watch with the sound off to avoid annoying laugh tracks, but I'm imagining "Thank You for Being a Friend" as we zoom into Bunny's mansion (Bunny?  what kind of name is that for a guy, regardless of how swishy he is?).   It's the kitchen where the Girls ate cheesecakes, but now it's Arthur and Bunny at the table, Jerry cooking.  Arthur complains about the leaky sink; Bunny, busily sorting his pills "by Jew," ugh, assures him that a plumber is working on it now, and Jerry says that he dated a plumber once, with no details or dirty double entendres.  Come on, Blanche, say something about your pipes!

The pill-sorting turns into a girl-group song: "He had it coming."   This is painful to watch.  Why is it that gay guys on tv act nothing like any gay guy I've ever met in real life?  

Scene 2: Jerry asks if it's ok to store his energy drinks in the fridge.  Arthur: "I can answer for her.  Miss Havisham wants everything arranged like it was when she still had hope."  Calling gay men she?  Come on, is it 1958?  

Mom enters and announces that the housekeeper quit.  She said she didn't sign up to clean for three men. "I told her, what three men ?  They're gay. Together they barely add up to one."  Being gay makes you a woman, I get it.   The Will and Grace gang used to say the same thing. 

Bunny wants to prove that it's the other guys' house, too, so he suggests that the three of them work together to hire a new housekeeper.  Mom: "What about me?  Did women lose the right to vote?"  Not right now, but by summertime, probably.

Scene 4: Interviewing an applicant who podcasts about her cleaning hacks.  "I'm obsessed with cleaning.  My friends say I'm a little anal." Jerry: "My friends say that, too."  He has gay se*x, har har.

She demonstrates her trick for opening a jar.  "There's nothing too tight for me to open."  Looking at you for a dirty double entendre, Jerry.  Nope, Arthur says it.

"We're all impressed, and think you would be perfect..."  The next applicant, hunky Bo (Adam Hagenbuch), comes in..."Sorry, the job is filled."  I saw that joke coming a mile away.  Jerry, I said "coming."  Where's your dirty double entendre?

The complement him: "You're so handsome, you should have a one-man show, Bo on Broadway.  People would come to that.  I'd come every night."  There it is.

The interview: he's been in Palm Springs for two months.  He came with his boyfriend, but they've broken up, so he's single. 

Gay and single!  The guys squeal and shriek with absurd over-eagerness, as if they've never seen a hot guy before.  Come on, this is ridiculous.

They're ready to hire him, but he's confused.  "What about the push-ups?  In every other job interview, I have to do push-ups."  Naturally.

While they are watching with absurdly over-eager glee, Mom calls Bunny into the kitchen and warns, "Never hire someone that you want to schtup."  It's ok if you don't pressure them into it.  Bunny insists that he is the best qualified.

More after the break.  

Alice and Tommy: There's a new girl in town, with a teen idol son

Most 1970s comedies involved people who lived in big cities like Minneapolis (Mary Tyler Moore), Indianapolis (One Day at a Time), Chicago (Bob Newhart), and New York (The Jeffersons). .  But not Alice  (1976-85). Linda Lavin played Alice Hyatt, an aspiring singer en route from New Jersey to L.A. to jump-start her career, when her car stalled outside Mel's Diner in "small town" Phoenix (it actually had a sizeable population).

She took a "temporary" waitress job that lasted nine years, and meanwhile bonded with her boss, gruff, beefy Mel (Vic Tayback) and fellow waitresses: gutzy Flo (Polly Holliday), whose risque catchphrase "Kiss mah grits!" became a phenomenon; and mousy Vera (Beth Howland).  Alice also had a cute, wisecracking son, Tommy (Philip McKeon, left). 

Three ladies, a kid, and a bear?  I wasn't impressed.  Besides, Alice ran on Sunday nights, after the oldster-favorites 60 Minutes and All in the Family, opposite Battlestar Galactica or Chips.  I didn't start watching regularly until about 1980, when it was squeezed between One Day at a Time and The Jeffersons. 

It was a pleasant surprise.  The banter between the four regulars was sharp and witty, the plotlines were not terribly heterosexist, and there was ample beefcake: cowboys and muscular truck driver patrons of the diner, the various men dating the regulars, and Tommy's school friends.  Hunky Denny Miller (right) even played a gay character, the school coach: after he comes out, Alice hesitates about allowing Tommy to go on an overnight camping trip with him, but finally relents. Score one for tolerance!

Speaking of Tommy, during the last half of the series, he was 15-19 years old, the prime time for teen idols.  But he didn't get much play in the teen magazines, just a couple of shirtless and swimsuit shots.

This was the era of Scott Baio, Willie Aames, and Billy Warlock, so maybe he lacked the muscles to make a big splash.

There's a Philip McKeon hookup story on Tales of West Hollywood.

Several of the cast members were gay or gay friendly.  Vic Tayback and Polly Holliday were both rumored to be bisexual, and Phil McKeon, who has never married, is rumored to be gay (gay or not, he's even more handsome than when he was playing Tommy).

 His tv mom,  Linda Lavin, has performed with the Orlando, Florida Gay Chorus, and in 2012, she played the mother of a gay son in The Lyons on Broadway.

Fall 1982: The Gayellow Pages

Sometimes people who are around my age, especially those who grew up on the East or West coasts, wonder how I could have been unaware that gay/lesbian people existed until I was nearly 16 years old.  How I could have avoided seeing the word "gay" in print until the summer after my 19th birthday? After all, there were gay characters in movies in the 1960s, and on tv as early as 1971.  Dozens of gay books.  By 1980, Gay Pride Parades (then called Gay Rights Marches) were being held in a dozen cities around the country.

But the gay characters appeared in movies and tv programs that I wasn't allowed to watch, the gay books did not appear on the shelves in any library or bookstore that I had access to, and the nearest Gay Pride Parade was in Chicago.

I knew about "fairies" (feminine men) from my earliest childhood, but I didn't know about gay people until the fall of 1976, when Denny Miller played a gay man who mentored Tommy (Philip McKeon, left) on Alice. I didn't know that they wrote books until the spring of 1980, when I saw Fred's hidden bookshelf, and even then I figured there were only about a dozen in existence.  

I knew about gay bars, bath houses, and adult bookstores, but I had never been in one.  I knew about pornographic magazines.  And that's all.  I figured that since being gay was illegal (it wasn't, at least not in Illinois), there couldn't be any organizations or publications, no community, nothing except clandestine closet bars and porn magazines. 

In the fall of 1982, I began graduate school in Bloomington, Indiana.  On the night of September 25th, I went to an adult bookstore near the campus and asked "Do you have anything gay?", hoping for some porn.  I got got copies of Mandate, In Touch, and Christopher Street, and a directory called the Gayellow Pages.  

It was issue #12.  That means it was first published in 1970!  There were gay communities at least as far back as 1970, and not only bars and bath houses, but "Businesses, churches, organizations, accommodations, publications..."

And not only in big cities.

There were 16 listings for Madison, Wisconsin. 6 bars, 2 bookstores, a community center, two health services, a legal service, a liquor store, a religious group, a place called "the soap opera," and a women's center.

Kicking myself for not going to the University of Wisconsin, I looked up Bloomington.  A little more sparse: a bar called Bullwinkle's, a women's center,  and a gay student group.  When I called the student group, I got the message: "All conversations are recorded and delivered to the police," so I hung up quickly to avoid being arrested.  But still, it was obvious that there were many more gay people than I ever imagined, and they were much more organized than I ever thought possible.

Philip McKeon after Alice

Philip McKeon was one of the biggest teen stars of the 1970s, mostly for his role as Tommy Hyatt, son of single mom Alice Hyatt (Linda Lavin) on Alice (1976-85), and also because he was the brother of Nancy McKeon, the tomboy Jo on The Facts of Life (1979-88).   But he had a respectable career in buddy-bonding and gay-vague roles, without Linda and Nancy around.

Born in 1964, the tall, grinning blond got his start as a child model at age 4, and soon moved on to television commercials and theater.  Linda Lavin saw him in Jason and Medea, a retelling of the Greek myth, and recommended him for Tommy.

While working on Alice, Phil did the usual Love Boat/ Fantasy Island guest shots, plus Leadfoot (1982), a cautionary tale about a teen who drives too fast, thus jeopardizing his life and that of his best friend Murph (played by fellow teen star Peter Barton).

In an episode of Amazing Stories (1986), Phil plays a World War II solder who is saved, along with other members of his platoon, by the outcast Arnold (Larry Spinack), who may have been a ghost. There's some glimmers of buddy bonding.

In Red Surf (1989), a drug dealer named True Blue (Phil) is busted by the police, talks too much, and draws the ire of crime boss Calavera (Rick Najera).  So his two buddies, Atilla (Doug Savant) and Remar (George Clooney) must rush to the rescue.

He also starred in a few horror movies before moving into direction (Edge of Nowhere, The Young Unknowns) and production, including Where the Day Takes You (with David Arquette as a bisexual prostitute), Teresa's Tattoo (with a full contingent of 1980s hunks, including Matt Adler, C. Thomas Howell, and Lou Diamond Philips),  Murder in the First, and The Jacket. 

Both Phil and Nancy McKeon were the subject of gay rumors, but they never made any public statements.

Phil McKeon died on December 10th, 2019, after a long illness

See also: Pedro hooks up with Philip McKeon

Mid-City Modern, Episode 1.6: "Golden Girls" with gay guys, Bomer's butt, a Hunk's cock, and McKeon's hookup

Peter Barton's Powers

When I met Peter Barton, he was guest starring in some tv shows, doing live theater, and calling his agent every day, trying to transition to a macho 1980s leading man.  But just a few years before, he had been a soft, androgynous teen idol.

Born in 1956, the former medical student started his acting career in 1979, as the teenage son on the short-lived sitcom Shirley!  Only 13 episodes were filmed, but that was enough for the teen magazines to adulate Peter as the Next Big Thing.  He was handsome, muscular but not a bodybuilder, and just androgynous enough to meet the gender-bending expectations of the era of Culture Club and ABBA.

Dozens of shirtless, speedo, and semi-nude shots followed, plus a starring role in Hell Night (1981) with Vincent Van Patten, in Leadfoot with Philip Mckeon, and in a movie-of-the-week, The First Time (1982).  Peter also appeared in a tight swimsuit in an episode of Battle of the Network Stars.  Many gay boys found in him a kindred spirit, gazing at his movies or swimsuit spreads and thinking "He's one of us."

Then his big break came: The Powers of Matthew Star, one of the many kid-friendly sci-fi series in the 1982-83 season (others included  Voyagers!, The Greatest American Hero, and Knight Rider).  Strangely, it aired just before the drag queen-friendly Madame's Place.

The plot was similar to Shazam!, which aired on Saturday mornings a few years before: teenager with superpowers lives with an older man.  In this case, Matthew, or E'Hawke (Peter Barton) was a prince from a planet orbiting Tau Ceti, hiding out on Earth from enemies who wanted him dead.  He went to Crestridge High School and lived with his guardian, Walter, or D'hai (Louis Gossett Jr.), who was working undercover as a science teacher.

I watched occasionally, but it was a little too "Saturday morning tv" to draw a big audience.  Besides, Matthew had a girlfriend, there was no homoerotic buddy-bonding, and there was not enough beefcake.  Most gay kids quickly changed the channel to The Dukes of Hazzard on CBS.  Powers was cancelled after only 22 episodes.

Peter's teen idol fame ended shortly thereafter, as more muscular actors like Willie Aames and Scott Baio rose to the limelight.

In 1988, he got his big break, a starring role on The Young and the Restless.  Other soaps followed, plus the detective series Burke's Law.

Today Peter lives in upstate New York with his daughter.  He has never married.

See also: My Celebrity Dates, Hookups, and Sausage Sightings