Bronson Pinchot: A gay icon of my childhood turns out to be straight. Then it gets worse. But at least we see his dick

For many years, tv has disguised gay couples as heterosexuals with some other reason for being together -- they work in the same office, or share an apartment, or are brothers.  So censors, skittish network executives, and shrieking homophobic audiences remain clueless, but if you're "in the know," the gay subtext is obvious.

Bronson Pinchot broke into film as Tom Cruise's buddy in Risky Business (1983)..  After several years of playing swishy gay-vague characters, such as Dennis on Sara and Lloyd in After Hours, he was cast in the gay-vague buddy sitcom Perfect Strangers (1986-1993).  He played Balki Bartokomous, an exuberant free-spirit from the faux-Greek country of Mypos, who descends upon his stick-in-the mud distant cousin Larry (Mark Linn-Baker) in Chicago.  You can anticipate the the standard "let's do something wacky"/"but I have a dentist appointment" plotlines.

It's supposed to be a brief visit, but the two end up falling in love, their affection explained as fraternal love, and Balki stays on.

I watched during the first season when Perfect Strangers led into Head of the Class and Night Court on Wednesday nights.  A surprising number of plotlines could be read as negotiating a same sex romance.

Larry: "Balki is cute and all, but how can I build a future with someone who doesn't even know how to fill out an IRS Form 1088-B?" 

Balki: "Larry is good in bed, but he's so shy and reserved. How can I draw him out of his shell?" 

Apparently the network had a problem: the guys were too obviously a gay couple.  So during the second season plotlines increasingly involved dating girls, culminating in steady girlfriends Jennifer and Mary Anne (Melanie Wilson, Rebeca Arthur).

Obviously a screen.  Could they be sitting farther apart on that couch?

More after the break.  A lot more.

"Workaholics" Episode 7.3: Blake sucks a....Adam sucks....well, there's lots of gay sex jokes, and everybody loses their pants

  

Link to NSFW version

I haven't reviewed an episode of Workaholics for awhile, and Episode 7.3, "Monstalibooyah," is notable for its nonstop beefcake and huge number of queer codes.

Scene 1: The guys are spending the day at their company's time share condo, only 11 blocks from the beach!  They plan a crazy party, but Adam cautions, no naked Twister: "Sex Twister makes my dick blister."  He offers to show them, but then Ders wants to show them a scar on his dick, too.  They start working to get semis, then realize what they are doing and change their minds. Is it just me, or is it getting homoerotic in here?

Scene 2: They explore the condo. Ders: "A Fiat!" Adam: "A jacuzzi!" Blake: "Ketchup!"

They reveal their goals for the day. Adam: Get filmed doing something stupid, so he can get on the reality show Kookslams.  Ders' goal: get a hickey so everybody at work will think he got laid. Blake: smoke weed out of a "cock shell."  He means conch shell, of course.  And they all want to watch the sunset together.  Awww...

Scene 3:  They drive the Fiat to the beach, wearing only jeans, Adam's muscles pouring out, and play a homoerotic game of volleyball, paralleling the iconic scene in Top Gun that had a generation of gay kids figuring it out.  Wait -- their opponents are little girls.

Suddenly they are distracted by three bikini babes walking toward them in slow motion. Ders calls dibs on one who looks like she gives good "hick jobs."  Or you could have sex with her.

They ask the girls' plans for the evening: try to score some Molly and then hang out at the beach club. Why not come back to their place for a crazy party instead?  Just as the girls are considering it, Carson and his sidekick (Steve Talley,  Temple Baker, left) show up to warn the girls about hooking up with strangers.  They call the guys "chicken donkers," which seems to be a made-up slur.

Ders suggests a game of volleyball: the winner gets the girls.  But Carson and his sidekick are acting more like overprotective brothers than boyfriends. 

Besides, that's sexist: "They're not property!"  Carson throws the guys' volleyball into the ocean. It belongs to the condo; they'll be charged hundreds of dollars!  They rush in to retrieve it, and soon discover why you don't go swimming in jeans.  They have to ditch the jeans, or drown. 

They return to dry land naked, covering their dicks with their hands. Blake finds a "cock shell" to shove his junk into.  Passersby laugh  at their size, but they explain that small dicks are regular-sized now, shrinking due to energy drinks.  

Scene 3: They steal clothes that someone left on the beach: Ders gets a "Paddy's Irish Pub" t-shirt from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia,  Blake a lady's dress, and Adam a dad outfit.  

Sunset is in two hours, and they haven't met any of their goals yet!   Maybe they can get Ders his hickey by bringing the girls some Molly.  Blake and Adam cause a distraction while Ders steals the stash of a drum circle.  

But the drum circle catches on, and chases them!  They hide with a bridal party, putting on their little femme hats as a disguise: "You guys are so pretty!" Adam exclaims. Yeah, they're hot.

Scene 4: The girls said that they were going to hang at the Beach Club, so the guys sneak in, disguise themselves as staff, and shove shrimp down their pants, presuming that in fancy clubs, "shrimpermen" distribute shrimp one at a time. They approach the girls, announce that they have scored some Molly, and invite them back to the condo to suck on Ders' neck.  But Carson and his sidekick appear and order them to leave the girls alone.  Then the Drum Circle dudes, wanting to clobber the guys for stealing their Molly!   

Steve Talley bonus after the break

"Top Gun: Maverick": Is beefcake enough?

  

Link to the NSFW version

Remember the shirtless volleyball scene in Top Gun (1986)?  Who doesn't?  In an era when you rarely saw men's bodies on screen, except maybe a glimpse of chest while they were schtumping ladies, we got closeups of perfectly chiseled men, with no women anywhere around.  The Daily Beast says: "If you were a certain kind of teenage boy in 1986, the beach volleyball scene spoke directly to you.  And what it said was 'You're gay now.  Good luck.'" 

Of course, the guys themselves are written as straight; the main plot is a hetero-romance; Tom Cruise is aggressively homophobic.  The queer code was all in the beefcake.  Decider says that it "encompasses the sexual repression of the decade."

In 2022, a sequel, Top Gun: Maverick, featured some of the original cast and actors playing their children.  The guys are still written as straight, with a hetero-romance as the main plot, and Tom Cruise is still aggressively homophobic.  Nevertheless, The Daily Beast calls it the "gayest movie of the year," due to a shirtless football scene.  40 years have passed, and we still get nothing but beefcake?

Ok, then, let's look at the beefcake.

1. Tom Cruise as "Maverick," the focus character in the original, now a flight instructor teaching other Top Guns.

2. Miles Teller, left , as "Rooster," son of his best friend in the original.

3, Jon Hamm, left, as "Cyclone," the commander.

4. Glen Powell  as "Hangman," a pilot

5. Ed Harris as "Hammer," Maverick's superior officer. 

6. Val Kilmer, left, as "Iceman," Maverick's former rival

More beefcake after the break

Tom Cruise: Homophobia, gay subtexts, beefcake, and nudity

 

I know, I know, he's a Hollywood homophobe who sues at the slightest hint that he might be one of those horrible, disgusting LGBTQ persons.  But back in the Golden Age of the 1980s, everybody in West Hollywood thought that Tom Cruise was gay (I repeat, thought.  They were mistaken, Mr. Cruise).  His name -- a reference to gay cruising?  His demeanor.  His gay subtexts.  

His beefcake: he displayed his chest and abs in nearly every movie, and sometimes gave us more. 

Link to NSFW article

As early as Risky Business (1983), we got shots of Tom dancing in his underwear and masturbating under the covers in his bed.  Who cared that it had an absurd heterosexist plotline?  What movie in the 1980s didn't?  Or that the scene with the trans hooker was dripping with homophobia and racism.  Every movie in the 1980s was dripping with homophobia and racism.

Top Gun (1986) gave us muscular semi-nude soldiers and a blatant gay subtext in the relationship between Tom and Val Kilmer.

Cocktail (1988) depicted a swishy, campy, super gay-coded stunt-bartender serving up the decadent 1970s lifestyle -- and getting a boyfriend -- for audiences terrified of Jerry Falwell, hate crimes, and AIDS.

Interview with the Vampire (1994) featured an obviously-gay vampire couple played by Tom and Brad Pitt. They even have an adopted vampire-daughter.

During the 1990s, reports of Tom's homophobia began to appear, and the gay subtexts began to disappear.  Apparently he became gay-savvy enough to notice them and have them removed from the scripts.

But we still have the beefcake images, and the occasional flashes of nudity.

See also: Tom Cruise: All the Wrong Moves

The nude photos of Tom Cruise are on the NSFW site, RG Beefcake and Boyfriends

Movies in the Fall of 1983: Tom Cruise's Gay Panic, Lou Ferrigno's Muscles, Christopher Atkins' Frontal, and Robby Benson's Everything

In  1983-84, I was in my second year of my M.A. in English at Indiana University, working at the Eigenmann Hall Snack Bar, living in an upstairs apartment in downtown Bloomington with my friend Viju, and hooking up with impunity: I was 22-23 years old, new to gay bars, and AIDS was just whispered rumor, with no connection to everyday life.  But I was still interested in a monogamous romantic relationship, so I expected every hookup to end with a date.  Some did; I managed to go to 20 movies in theaters that year, so many that I have to divide this list into two. 

August: Risky Business. The movie that made Tom Cruise a star.  I don't remember what the "risky business" is -- a brothel, maybe? I just remember the racist, homophobic scene with the drag queen sex worker who shows up at high schooler Tom's house when he calls an escort agency.  Not to worry, he recommends a young, attractive female-presenting person who turns out to be the Girl of Tom's Dreams.  The drag queen, Jackie, is played by Bruce A. Young, who is heterosexual and masculine-presenting in real life.  In 1983, it took guts to play even an offensive stereotype gay character.

August: Hercules.  Bodybuilder Lou Ferrigno in a peplum-style sword-and-sorcery adventure.  He wins the Girl of His Dreams.  I would hook up with him, briefly, in a couple of years.

September: Educating Rita: my friend refused to go to this, assuming that it was a sex comedy ("Educating Rita in how to do it better"), but actually it's a My Fair Lady-style "opens a lower-class girl to the joys of academe" drama.  Michael Caine doesn't fall in love with Rita, and in the end, she's admitted to Oxford. 

October: All the Right Moves.  We would see anything with Tom Cruise (sigh).  Of course we thought he was gay; who knew that he was actually homophobic?   This one is about a high school boy named Stef, who plays...ugh...football and wins the Girl of His Dreams.  Or something.  Who cared?  You got to look at Tom Cruise for two hours.

November: Running Brave.  We would also see anything with Robby Benson (sigh), even another sports movie.  A First Nations guy leaves the reservation to compete in the Olympics as a runner and win the Girl of His Dreams.

November: A Night in Heaven.  AND we would see anyting with Christopher Atkins, hoping that his full-frontal spot from Blue Lagoon would repeat itself.  Here he plays a college student who works as a stripper, and ends up falling in love with one of his customers, who happens to be his professor (a lady, of course).  Her husband does not approve.  No gay content -- Chris strips only for the ladies.  But at least he gives us a full-frontal scene.

December: Scarface.  A nauseating number of guys being machine-gunned to death.  I felt sick.  But Al Pacino as a modern day drug lord has ample buddy-bonding going on with his "mentor" Robert Loggia.   Ok, they betray each other, but what do you expect with the heterosexist mandate: all women are good and nice and kind, all men either brutish bullies or snakes-in-the-grass.

Movies in 1982-83: Dustin Hoffman in Drag, Rob Lowe in Drag, Two Mighty-Thewed Barbarians, a Gay Murderer, and Tom Cruise

 

1982-83 was my first year in grad school at Indiana University.  Moving from a college with 2,000 students to a R1 Research University with 40,000, I went crazy.  Who cared that I was supposed to be working toward a degree in English?  Let's sign up for Mandarin Chinese, Arabic, Russian Folklore, and East Asian Anthropology.  

I was finally old enough to go to bars, so I was at Bullwinkle's in downtown Bloomington two or three times a week, hooking up in earnest ( I was heavily closeted at Eigenmann Hall, so I littered my room with Playboy and Hustler magazines and pretended that last-night's hookup was with a girl).  When you have a choice of going to a movie or hooking up, which takes precedence?  Still, there were two theaters in walking distance,so I managed to go 13 times.  In retrospect, most of the movies were dreadful.

August: The Beastmaster.  Wouldn't you?  Conan knockoff Mark Singer has a whole coterie of helpers, including a post-Good Times John Amos, a little boy, the Girl, and two ferrets who are good at biting through ropes.

August: Querelle: "Each man kills the thing he loves."  An adaption of the novel by Jean Genet, promoting the myth that being gay (actually bisexual) disrupts your morality so severely that you are compelled to become a thief and a murderer, and betray everyone who loves you.  But it was a real gay-themed movie with real gay-themed sex scenes, and Brad Davis (top photo) was cute. I was too closeted to see it in Bloomington, so I drove into Indianapolis.

September: Endangered Species. Indiana University was similar to Augustana College in one way: ever to mention even a passing interested in science fiction or fantasy marked you as an infantile, boorish Philistine.  So I had to sneak around to see both gay-themed and science fiction-themed movies.  This one wasn't worth it: Robert Ulrich of Vegas and The Girl investigate cattle mutilations.

October: Android.  This one wasn't, either.  Klaus Kinski and The Girl fight androids in deep space.  I didn't go to another science fiction/fantasy movie until I was back in Rock Island for the summer.

November: Creepshow.  A horror anthology meant to reflect the experience of reading those old EC horror comics, like Tales from the Crypt.  Five stories, mostly about about transgressors who get an ironic comeuppance.  The only one I remember stars Adrienne Barbeau as the abusive wife of milksop college professor Hal Holbrook.

December: The Year of Living Dangerously.  "You're in graduate school.  It's time to leave juvenile science fiction trash behind, and go to serious, artsy movies."  Mel Gibson and The Girl live through the Indonesian Revolution of 1965 and, like, think deep thoughts and stuff.  Notable for Linda Hunt playing Chinese-Australian photographer and voyeur Billy Kwan.  A woman playing a man was shocking at the time.

December: Tootsie: although men playing women was not a problem.  Tired of all of the discrimination men face in Hollywood, Dustin Hoffman becomes Dorothy, aka Tootsie, gets a cushy soap opera job, and teaches the women how to fight back against sexual harassment.  A guy falls in love with him (as Tootsie), and he falls in love with the Girl, so of course he has to come out as a man. The Girl is ok with lesbians, but the guy..."The only reason you're alive is that I never kissed you."  Intense homophobia presented as matter-of-fact.

January: None

February: None.

March: Spring Break.  The poster shows guys climbing a "mountain" that turns out to be a girl in a bikini.  The plot is about a guy falling in love with The Girl and saving his beloved spring break motel from his evil politician Dad.  So why did I go?  

I don't remember.  Maybe I thought there would be some beefcake amid the wet t-shirt and mud-wrestling contests.

April: Liquid Sky: a weird, artsy, surreal, postmodern movie about drugs, murder, reality mediated through film, and maybe aliens.  

April: Loosin' It: four guys in the 1960s including then-unknown Tom Cruise, trying to have sex with girls, including then-unknown Shelly Long .  It tries to key into the 1950s nostalgia craze, the "Smokey and the Bandits" Southern sheriff craze, and the teen sex comedy craze, all at the same time.  Again, I don't remember why I saw it: maybe looking for beefcake?  

May: Return of the Jedi.  The one with the teddy bears.  And Darth Vader's death.

June: Wargames. Matthew Broderick and The Girl think that they're playing one of those newfangled video games, but actually they're starting a nuclear war.  I saw this because I could go to science fiction movies again, and because of Matthew Broderick, the beefcake bonanza of the 1980s.

June: Twilight Zone: The Movie. An anthology remaking episodes of the classic ironic-horror series, which I had not yet seen. An anti-Semitic guy zaps into the Holocaust; elderly people get zapped into kids; a boy who can zap anything into anything has a bad temper; a man sees a gremlin on the wing of his airplane. No gay content.

July: Class: College boy Andrew McCarthy falls in love with roommate Rob Lowe, and accidentally sleeps with his mother. Strong gay subtext.  For an added bonus, in the first scene, Andrew catches Rob wearing ladies' underwear, and assumes that he's...you know, before he explains that it's a prank.

July: Krull: another Conan the Barbarian ripoff, featuring another of Robert E. Howard's characters (he did write other things, you know).  Except this Conan, Ken Marshall, is not exactly mighty-thewed, and doesn't bare his chest (there are beefcake photos online, but after the first 6 warned that I couldn't "download them safely," I gave up.)

"Legend": Tom Cruise Grins, Tim Curry Growls, and Everyone Gets Drenched with Pollen

When Legend premiered in April 1986, I was living in West Hollywood, where everyone assumed that 23 year-old Tom Cruise was gay.  But no one I knew saw it.  Last night we watched the director's cut, and I found out why.  

Scene 1: In his brightly-lit lair, the Lord of Darkness (Tim Curry with horns and 9-inch nails) gives plot exposition to his lackey, Blix, who speaks in rhyming couplets:  He was about to make it so the sun wouldn't rise again.  But then two unicorns appeared out of nowhere, so Blix has to get rid of them first.  Also, the only thing that can stop his plan is inn-o-cence.

Scene 2:  Inn-o-cence, aka Lili, is wandering slowly through a forest where bails of pollen, flower petals, and glitter are floating around, obscuring the camera and covering her face (how can she breathe?).  There are several long close-up shots of her face as she grins idiotically.  She is apparently very high.

Eventually she arrives at a peasant's house, where she can't seem to remember her lines.  

Peasant woman:  "Would you like a biscuit?"

Lili:  Grins idiotically.  "Ummm....what?  Oh...um....I love coming here."  

Peasant woman:  "I'll get you a biscuit."

Scene 3:  Back to the forest obscured by bails of pollen.  Lili yells "Jack!" about a hundred times.  Then Jack (Tom Cruise) appears, and she says "Jack!" another hundred times, while he grins idiotically.  Lots of tight close ups of their faces covered with glittery stuff.  Jack has bad teeth.

  Then they stare at each other for a long, long time.  Just when I think that he's feral and doesn't speak, Jack says that he'll finally take her to the place she's been begging to go to for months.  

Scene 4:  Stalked by Blix and his comic-relief lackeys, Jack and Lili go to the place, a nondescript piece of the pollen-drenched forest, and stare for a long, long time, while I wonder what the big deal is.  Then two unicorns appear. "They'll only be here for a short time," Jack says.  Then why was Lili begging to see them for months?

Lili starts to walk over to them.  Jack stops her in a panic. "NO!  You absolutely cannot go near a unicorn!  It is absolutely forbidden!   It is the worst sin of the pollen-drenched forest!"

But Lili ignores him and walks over, while Jack stares in horror.  She touches a unicorn horn.  They go rogue and run around her, neighing angrily, while she kneels and screams.  (No one notices that Blix and his lackeys have used the confusion to blow a poison dart into one of the unicorns.)

Wait -- why were Blix and his lackeys stalking the girl?  How did they know that she would lead them to the unicorns?  Or does the Lord of Darkness want her, too?  Her inn-o-cence is a threat, or something?

Scene 4:  Later, Lili gets horny (she touched a unicorn horn and got horny -- get it?), and tries to seduce Jack, who is not sure if he's ready for sex.  She sweetens the deal by throwing her ring into the lake and offering to marry him if he retrieves it.  So he dives into the water and looks around.

At that moment, Blix and his lackeys approach the dead unicorn and sever its horn, which is the source of all magic in the world.  Huh?

Suddenly the pollen-drenched forest turns into a snow-drenched forest, where snowflakes and for some reason bubbles obscure the camera and collect on people's faces.   The lake is now iced over.  Lili runs away, leaving Jack to drown.  But he breaks through the ice and survives.

Scene 5:   Lili runs to the peasant's house where she got the cookie. Everyone inside is frozen in place.  She hides as Blix and his cronies come in to fool around with magic and do some plot exposition. 

 Then the Lord of Darkness shows up: they have successfully killed one unicorn, but a second is left, so the sun will rise again.  Take care of it!

Meanwhile, Jack is approached by Honeythorn Gump (David Bennett), a pedophile's dream -- a little boy in a loincloth -- who is extremely high.  He stares at Jack for a long time, grinning idiotically.  Then he gets his eyes to bulge and yells "A human touched a unicorn!  The worst sin in the pollen-drenched forest!  Did you think you could perform such a sacrilege without consequences?"  Hey, it was Lili.  Jack tried to stop her.

Honeythorn says that he won't kill and eat Jack if he answers a riddle.  Jack answers, and Honeythorn has a meltdown, screaming and kicking and rolling around on the ground.  Wait -- you agreed to the riddle penalty.  

Then, all nice, Honeythorn says "Let's gather the gang and try to fix this."  His lackeys consist of two comic-relief dwarves and a ball of light that looks identical to the pollen floating around, but turns into a horny fairy when no one is looking.

That's enough scene-by-scene analysis.  Next there's a lot of staring while grinning idiotically, some magical foes, and the Lord of Darkness (who suddenly has a father, the King of Darkness) deciding that he wants to marry Lili. 

 Jack rejects the horny fairy, who then refuses to rescue him from a dungeon (fortunately, she rescues her friends, who are in the same dungeon, so he can kind of tag along)  He saves the day by reflecting sunlight into the castle, which blasts the Lord of Darkness off into space.  

Back in the pollen-drenched forest, Jack says goodbye to Honeythorn and his lackeys, kisses Lili for a long time, makes plans to see her tomorrow, and then returns to Honeythorn and his lackies.  Wait -- he said goodbye, as if he wouldn't see them again, and one five-minute-long kiss later, he's back?  None of this makes any sense.

Beefcake:  Nope.  No one shows any skin except for the prepubscent David Bennet and Kiran Shah, who plays an elf saved from being baked in a pie.  Obviously you take a guy's clothes off before cooking him.

Gay Characters: Maybe Honeythorn is into Jack.  Jack is unwilling to have sex with Lili or the horny fairy, but that may be because he's a forest creature, and sex represents civilization or something.

Heterosexism:  Jack and Lili are in love, of course.  The Lord of Darkness turns out to be hetero-horny.

My Grade: Ugh. Tell your actors to lay off the weed, and cut back on the pollen!