Lee H. Montgomery: The Boy Who Fought Mutants

When I moved to Los Angeles in 1985, my mother called every week, usually early Saturday morning, and asked "What stars have you met?"  But she wasn't familiar with most of the actors of my generation, so "Michael J. Fox" got a polite murmur, "Robin Williams" a vague "Oh yeah, I've heard of him," and "Lee H. Montgomery" a blank "Who's that?"

But Lee had more than enough claims to fame (and he was a lot friendlier than Robin Williams).

He played the boy who taught his pet rat to kill in Ben (1972).  If you separate it from the premise, the theme song, sung by Michael Jackson, is a touching evocation of same-sex love:

Ben, the two of us need look no more
We both found what we were looking for.
With a friend to call my own, I'll never be alone,
And you, my friend, will see, you've got a friend in me.

In The Savage is Loose (1974), an entry in the "s*xually dangerous kid" genre that Mark Lester  and Scott Jacoby specialized in, David (Lee) is shipwrecked on a desert island, along with his Dad (George C. Scott) and Mom.  David eventually morphs into the bodybuilding hunk John David Carson (left), and tries to kill his Dad so he can mate with Mom.  About the same plot as What the Peeper Saw, but with more n*dity.

In Burnt Offerings (1976), a married couple (Oliver Reed, Karen Black) moves into a California mansion with their son David (Lee) and elderly Aunt Elizabeth (film legend Bette Davis).  As the house starts asserting  itself, it tries to drown David, and then drops a pillar on him.

Was there a fad for threatening half-naked kids in the 1970s?  It also happened in The Possession of Joel Delaney  and The Omen.

By the way, the hunky Oliver Reed hangs out in a swimsuit.  He showed his altogether during the n*de wrestling scene in Women in Love (1969).

More after the break

Robinson Crusoe on Mars

Ask any male boomer when he realized that he was gay, and he’ll most likely say when he saw Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964). I saw it in the spring of 1968, on the family’s brand new color tv set.

The plot is obviously a version of Robinson Crusoe: after crash landing on the frigid Red Planet, astronaut Kit Draper (Paul Mantee) builds a cave habitat so warm he can walk around shirtless or in a tight-black t-shirt, displaying an amazingly buff, hairy chest.

He has food, water, and a pet monkey, but he is intensely lonely. Then an alien mining company establishes a beachhead nearby, and he helps himself to one of their slaves. “I prayed for a companion,” Kit exclaims, “And I finally got one!” 

Somewhat Aztec in appearance, “Friday” (Victor Lundin) is so accustomed to the Martian cold that he can comfortably walk around in nothing but a kilt, displaying a massive, sculpted body, with golden skin, thick arms and shoulders, and a smooth, hard chest.

The two men are extremely physical in their interaction. Shortly after they meet, Kit takes Friday’s hand and places it on his own knee, an image that is intensely intimate and sensual. Kit is buried in a shower of space debris and nearly suffocates, and Friday rescues him. As they walk away, Kit wraps his arm around Friday’s waist.  At the end of the movie, they are rescued, and go back to Earth together, permanent partners.

Who would produce such a film, about two men who love each other and build a home together, in the dark homophobic days of 1964?

This was Paul Mantee’s first credited acting role; he went on to make dozens of two-fisted movies, sometimes with “man” in the title to emphasize the intended audience, such as A Man Called Dagger (1967) and That Man Bolt (1973), and he then settled down to write novels about heterosexual Italian-American adolescents.  And he obviously stayed in shape.

Victor Lundin played a series of Klingons, Indians, savages, and bad guys, and cut some country-western records. Today, on his website, he sells a cd with a song about how much he likes girl-watching.

Neither of the writers seem obvious gay allies, but when we look at the director, Byron Haskin, we find movie after movie set in steaming jungles, where men wear next to nothing and fall into each other’s arms a lot: Man Eater of Kumaon (1948), Tarzan’s Peril (1951), His Majesty O’Keefe (1953), Little Savage (1959). That explains the beefcake; what explains the bonding?

Shipwrecked: Jens Builds a Family

Blue Lagoon, Paradise, and the various  Swiss Family Robinson adaptions of the 1980s and 1990s were heterosexist fables, with the shipwreck on a tropical island just an excuse to get a girl out of her clothes and into a boy's arms.

At first glance, the 1990 Håkon Håkonsen (released in the U.S. as Shipwrecked) is no different.  Haakon (14 year old Stian Smestad), cabin boy on a ship in the 1850s, meets a young stowaway, who turns out to be a girl named Mary (Louisa Millwood-Haight).

But the romance between the two stars is minimal; they behave more like best friends than boyfriend and girlfriend.

Meanwhile hunky sailor Jens (Trond Peter Stamsø Munch) expresses no interest in women and takes a big-buddy interest in Haakon.  Although he doesn't express any romantic interest, he does acknowledge the boy's erotic desirability.  When they are on shore leave, Jens steers Haakon away from the ladies of the evening, admonishing him to “protect his valuables."











Although Jens steps aside to permit alone time with Mary, the result is not so much a romance as a familial connection.  At the end of the movie, all three return to Norway together.

The lack of a heterosexist fade-out-kiss can be attributed to the original 1878 novel Haakon Haakonsen: A Norwegian Robinson, which minimized the girl, as was common in juvenile fiction of the era (I can't read Norwegian, but she seems to disappear for large passages).   Or to director Nils Gaup, who also directed the Sami drama Pathfinder.

Trond Peter Munch has not acted outside of Norway.  Stian Smested is currently a director, specializing in documentaries.

Tunnel in the Sky

Later in life, Robert Heinlein (1907-1988) was well known as the cranky, conservative, racist, sexist "old man" of science fiction, who wrote weird, turgid, overlong, and heterosexist novels, but between 1948 and 1963, he produced 18 juveniles, about teenage boys involved in interstellar intrigue, with same-sex bonds often intense and intimate, and hardly any heterosexual dating or romance.

Tunnel in the Sky (1955) was my favorite, perhaps because its protagonist, Rod,  never displays the slightest interest in a girl.

The plot: for a high school class in this rip-roaring frontier future. Rod and hundreds of other students are zapped through a space-portal to an alien planet for survival training: "any climate, any terrain.”
They find themselves in a tropical paradise, plagued only by bloodthirsty carnivorous rabbits.

The ten days of the test pass, and then twenty, and thirty, and no time-space portal opens to zap them home. But the castaways don't devolve into Lord of the Flies savagery; they build a no-nonsense libertarian community, Cowperstown, with farming and metallurgy and square dances every weekend. Rod is elected mayor.

Not much of gay interest so far: in fact, the first thing on everyone’s mind is marriage and children.  A former pre-law student even puts out a shingle as a divorce lawyer.

But, oddly, Rod fails to marry, or date, or even flirt. When challenged, he protests that he does indeed like girls, but heterosexual romance would compromise his effectiveness as a political leader.

Such an argument makes little sense, and is based on no real life model; in fact, few men are ever elected to high political office without sporting a wife on their arm. Perhaps Rod comes up with this lame excuse to hide his actual lack of interest in girls.

Early in the survival test, Rod briefly teams up with Jack, a student from another school. They hunt, cook, and seek shelter together, and develop a chummy friendship until Rod discovers that Jack is really Jacqueline, a girl!

It is unclear why she would need to hide her gender, since girls and boys both participate in the test. But the girl pretending to be a boy is a standard plot device.  A male friend finds “him” attractive and has a bout of homophobic panic. Then he discovers that “he” is really a “she,” that is instincts were right all along, thereby “proving” that heterosexual desire is innate and natural, foolproof even when the object is disguised.

Rod, however, does not feel confused or conflicted about his feelings for Jack. When he discovers that Jack is a girl, he is surprised but not relieved, and the two do not subsequently begin a romance. Instead, he has to defend himself from the jeers of his friends, who claim that they are so competent at their heterosexuality that they realized right away that Jack was a girl. 

Eventually the rescue portal opens, but even then, Rod does not return home to a heteronormative future.  Cowperstown is home, and he is staying put.

Heinlein no doubt omitted hetero-romance from his novels because he believed his target audience of teenage boys would not be interested.  But the gay boys who stumbled upon them twenty years later found a strong validation of the legitimacy of "not liking girls."