Michael Lembeck: The "One Day at a Time" and "Gorp" hunk takes off his shirt, directs gay tv

Speaking of One Day at a Time (1975-84),  the biggest hunk who entered the lives of the single mom Ann Romano and her two daughters (Barbara and Julie) was not William Kirby Cullen or Scott Colomby, but Michael Lembeck as the smiling, bearded, hairy-chested, tight-jeans wearing Max Horvath.

He first appears on October 14th, 1979, as the best man at  elder daughter Julie's wedding -- who falls in love with Julie himself.  She calls the wedding off to date him, and eventually they marry and have a child.  

By the last season, Julie has run away, leaving Max a single dad. In an interesting triangulation, he is sharing a house with Barbara and her husband Mark (Boyd Gaines).

I wasn't watching One Day at a Time by that point -- it was suffering from "we're out of ideas, so let's change the entire premise" syndrome -- so I don't know if Anne's adopted son Alex (Glenn Scarpelli) lived there, too.

Born in 1948, Michael Lembeck was the son of Harvey Lembeck, famous as the juvenile delinquent foil in the Frankie-and-Annette beach movies.  He was visible through the 1970s, with guest spots on The Partridge Family, Happy Days, Love American Style, and Room 222, and a recurring role on Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman (1976), as newcaster Clete Mizenheimer.  Plus several important movie appearances.

In Blood Sport (1973), mooning over high-school football star Gary Busey.

In the war drama The Boys in Company C (1978), as the wise-guy Vinnie Fazio, who buddy-bonds with Billy Ray (Andrew Pike).

More after the break

Beefcake and bonding in British boys' annuals

From the 1930s through the 1980s, British boys spent Christmas day unwrapping and reading "annuals," thick hardback books with stories and pictures derived from weekly story papers: Hotspur, Champion, Knockout, Perfect Book for Boys, Best Book for Boys, dozens of titles.

There were also annuals for girls and children, but the boys' annuals were notable for two reasons.

1. Shirtless and semi-nude covers and interior illustrations.  Hundreds of muscular teenage boys and men on display, many more than in the American adventure boys series.

They were playing sports, camping, fighting monsters. They were alone and in pairs.  Their muscles glistened in the Christmas firelight.

2. The stories inside did not involve the dating, romances, and overall girl-craziness that obsessed American teen stories in the 1950s and 1960s. They were about boys meeting, being rescued by, and establishing permanent relations with other boys and men.

More after the break

10 Things I Hated About Summer (and Still Do)

Finals are all submitted, graduation is over, the students and faculty have scattered.  Summertime is here.  Three months of boredom, sitting in the house all day every day except to go to the gym, nothing to do but prep for the fall and gain weight.

It was the same way when I was a kid.  My favorite season was fall, when school started, with new books and classes, and the leaves started to change, and there was a little chill in the air.  And it was marked the beginning of the great holiday season that began with Halloween, picked up momentum with my birthday and Thanksgiving, and careened into Christmas.

Winter was great, too, with bright skies and biting cold air, wrestling tournaments, sledding, and snow men. I even liked shoveling snow (my brother and I started a snow-shoveling business).

Spring was ok, but a little rainy and muddy, and no good holidays.  Valentine's Day?  St. Patrick's Day?

And summer -- don't get me started!

Here are the Top 10 Things I Hated About Summer  

1. With school out, there was nothing to do.

2. It was too hot.

3. But my parents insisted that I play outside, where there was nothing to do.

4. I could get sunburned in 10 minutes (in those days, we didn't use sunscreen).

5. There were thunderstorms almost every night, so we had to unplug the tv, thus missing our favorite programs.

6. There was nothing good on anyway, just reruns.

7. I had to go to bed when it was still daylight, and I could look out the window and see all the other kids in the neighborhood playing.

8. My parents kept holding barbecues, picnics, and other activities where you had to eat outside, off paper plates, with the bugs and the dirt, and the wind that  blew everything away.


9. We always went on a horrible week-long camping trip, with nothing to do but swim in muddy water, sit in a rowboat waiting for a fish to bite, and walk around in the woods.  What gay kid wants to mess around with that gross stuff?

10. And I spent another week at Nazarene summer camp, sleeping in drafty cabins, with nonstop sermons (mostly about boys liking girls) and sports, and the bathroom down a mosquito-ridden path

But there were a few things that made summer bearable (almost).

See also: the Kensington Runestone.

The Kensington Runestone

Every summer from kindergarten to college (when I decided to stay home), my parents dragged me on a week's camping trip somewhere up north, to Minnesota, Michigan, Wisconsin, or Canada.  It was usually pretty dismal, with no tv, no museums, no historic sites, nothing to do but hunt, fish, swim, and mess around in boats.

But during the summer after eighth grade, we went camping in Alexandria, Minnesota, site of the Kensington Runestone.

Young Swedish immigrant Olof Ohlman discovered the 200-pound slab of sandstone covered with Medieval runes in 1898.  It tells about a group of 30 Vikings who left Vinland "on an exploration journy" in 1362, and somehow made it to Minnesota.  One day some of them went fishing, and returned to find the men they left behind "red with blood and death," probably attacked by Skraelings (Indians).

Historians at the time -- and my junior high history textbook 70 years later -- stated categorically that no Europeans made it to the New World before Columbus, so this was a startling discovery, and immediately controversial.  The academic establishment decreed the runestone to be a fake, carved by Ohlman for financial gain.

In 1907, a historian named Hjalmar Holand bought the runestone, and spent the rest of his life trying to prove it genuine, describing how Vikings could well have made it to Minnesota in books like Westward from Vinland (1940) and A Pre-Columbian Crusade to America (1962). 

Most historians today contend that Holand was wrong: the runestone is indeed a forgery. But Alexandria loves its claim to fame.  There's a runestone museum and gift shop, and a 28-foot statue of a Viking, Big Ole.

Today, regardless of whether they believe that the Vikings got as far as Minnesota, all historians recognize that they reached the New World before Columbus, and established a permanent settlement in L'Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland.

What's the gay connection?

1. The Vikings who explored Minnesota were all male.

2. Olof Ohlmann was rather cute.

3. My junior high history textbook was wrong.  The adults either didn't know about the Viking exploration of America, or they were lying about it.  What else were they hiding? Maybe the upcoming "discovery of girls" that everyone at Washington Junior HIgh was always evoking was a lie, too.

"The Package": A movie about a penis, with bonus penis pics. What could go wrong?

 

You recall that Adam Devine rarely goes more than a sentence or two without mentioning his penis?  In 2018, he and the guys produced The Package, a movie about a penis.  He didn't write or direct, but still, it' about a penis.  I can't wait. 

Link to NSFW version

Scene 1: Sean (Daniel Doheny) is carefully putting on his pants while in the kitchen, Mom slices up an eggplant (foreshadowing, anyone?).  His bud Donnie (Luke Spencer Roberts, ginger) picks him up for a camping trip.  Uh-oh, he's hacked into the family's tv to show them fat lady porn.  Gross!  He then criticizes Sean's shorts, which cover "your belly button but not your balls."  Sean criticizes his moustache, but Donnie counters that with the 1980s nostalgia craze, he'll be "swimming in puss."  Ok, these guys are hetero, but...a penis!

Left: Google says that this is Luke Spencer Roberts.  I think it's really someone else named Luke Roberts.  But I've never heard of either of them before, so what's the difference?   

Scene 2: Next they pick up Jeremy (Eduardo Franco, who you may know from The Binge).  They criticize him for being a virgin, and counters by pretending to jerk off with a walking stick.  He invited some girls!  Donnie is irate; he wanted it to be guys only.  I hear that.  They happen to be Donnie's ex and Jeremy's twin sister/

By the way, Jeremy has a girlfriend, too, but only online.  The guys think he's being catfished by a guy.  Ten to one he'll come out as gay.

Top photo: When you google "Eduardo Franco" and "nude," you get Nino Ceperkovic.  I don't understand why.

He insists that Sean have sex with his sister, because as twins they share a psychic bond, and he'll feel it too.  Sean finds this disgusting, but only because it would be psychic-incestuous, not because it would be homoerotic.

Scene 3: On the way to the campsite, they make fun of Donnie for sharting during blow jobs.  Donnie counters by sending Sean a photo that makes it look like he is giving a blow job to his crush's ex boyfriend.  Thankfully, Sean is not offended; he laughs. 

Jeremy leads them "deep up Mother Nature's puss."  I don't care for the vagina references.  Let's hear more about cocks!

Left: Daniel Doheny, who apparently played a gay character in something called Alex Strangelove.  I haven't seen it.  Who wants to be told that gay love is weird, bizarre, abnormal, strange?

They set up camp and divide into boy and girl groups.  Everyone is obsessed over getting Sean to screw his crush.  He had a chance with her at the Rent cast party: she touched his thigh and invited him onto the roof for sex, but he couldn't stand up because he had a boner: "You were cock blocked by your own cock!"  Rent has gay characters.  These guys know that LGBT people exist. 

The pressure for Sean and his crush to screw continues into the night.  Finally they are eating s'mores around the campfire.  Jeremy goes off to piss; the guys follow to mess with him.  For some reason, he is slicing through his stream with the knife he showed them earlier...and when the guys distract him, he accidentally slices his dick off!  It flies off against the full moon.  

Sean climbs to a cliff, calls 911, and orders a medevac.  Now they just have to keep Jeremy from bleeding out, and find the penis!

Complications:  They find it, but it suffers a lot of damage before the medevac comes.  One of the girls throws up on it.  Another tries to roast it over the campfire (idiot!).  Finally they put it on ice. 

Then the medevac leaves, but they send it off with the wrong ice chest!  They still have the penis!  They have to get it to the hospital within the 12 hour time frame.

Mishap after mishap.  Their cellphones are destroyed.  They get lost hiking down the mountain. They fall into a river.  They run afoul of a hetero-sleazy little boy (Chance Hurstfield, who has grown up a bit).  His Dad attacks, thinking that they molested him.  The penis is bitten by a snake, so Sean has to suck the venom out (fortunately, there are no homophobic "giving a blow job" references).  

A convenience store clerk helps them clean the dick, thinking that Jeremy was a soldier injured in the line of duty.  When he discovers that they are high school students, he goes ballistic and shoots arrows at them. "The only dicks I touch are mine and my husband's."  This is apparently a "gay people exist!  hilarious!" joke.

Then the penis is attached to a redneck (Blake Anderson): his own was cut off by his girlfriend!  I don't think that's possible. Fortunately, she comes in and cuts it off again, so they can gie it to Jeremy.

Conclusion: The two couples reunite.  Jeremy's on-line girlfriend is real after all.  Darn, I thought he was going to come out as gay.  The end.

My Grade: This movie is not about penises, it's about three heterosexual couples falling in love.  Watching disgusting things happen to a 3-inch cylinder is not as homoerotic as I thought.  Not at all funny.  No gay characters or subtexts -- well, except for the convenience store guy, and he was only gay as the punchline of a joke.  A big, big disappointment. F

The bonus penis pics (still attached to the guy) are on the NSFW version of this review.

The Crosby Kids

Bing Crosby (1903-1977), roommate of gay jazz legend Bix Beiderbecke, grew up to be the laid-back crooner that had 1940s teenyboppers swooning, starred in White Christmas, and had six sons. Growing up as celebrity kids took its toll on them, as did Bing's harsh, authoritarian parenting style, and his insistence that they follow in his footsteps.  None of them became famous, but they had some success in the early 1960s performing as the Crosby Boys, and some of them were familiar to the Boomer generation as actors.

1. Gary (1933-1995), left, starred in some lightweight romantic comedies, such as Mardi Gras (1958) and Two Tickets to Paris (1962), and guest starred on many tv series.  In middle age he played authority figures on Adam-12 and Emergency.

2. Davis (1934-1991) acted only occasionally, notably with his brothers and the Rat Pack gang in Sergeants Three (1962).

3. Philip (1934-2004), Davis's twin brother, had two buddy bonding roles, in Robin and the Seven Hoods (1964)  and None But the Brave (1965).  Coincidentally, he buddied with Rat Packer Frank Sinatra in both.

4. Lindsay (1938-1989) starred in several outlaw-biker movies, including The Glory Stompers (1967) and Bigfoot (1970).

5. Harry (born 1958), left, was best known to the Boomer Generation, playing Bill, the camp counselor who plays strip Monopoly and gets slashed in Friday the 13th (1980). He had small roles in several other movies. Today he is an investment banker.

6. Nathaniel (born 1961) (left, hugging Harry) stayed out of acting, and coincidentally the only one who has any gay rumors.  He's a professional golfer.

Who was Gay on "Salute Your Shorts"?

Salute Your Shorts (1991-1992) was one of the first teencoms on the fledgling Nickelodeon network, a sitcom for and about kids.  It was set in a never-ending summer camp, Camp Anawanna (as in "I don't wanna be here"), where a disparate group of tweens got into scrapes.  Only 26 episodes were filmed, but they were rerun constantly through the 1990s, and became a cherished childhood memory for millions of gay and straight kids.

All of the teen characters were written as heterosexual -- every program aimed at a juvenile audience, then and now, insists that no gay people exist.  But one of the male actors was gay (actually bisexual), and infused his character with a pleasantly subdued homoerotic desire that was obvious to those "in the know."

Ready to guess?

1. Eric Macarthur as "regular guy" Michael Stein (top photo).  He hasn't done a lot of acting lately, though has developed an impressive physique, which he displayed in the "nude gay flirtation" scene in the raunchy comedy Bottoms Up (2006).

2. Blake Soper (left) as his "regular guy" replacement, Ronnie Foster.  Now Blake Sennett, he's the lead guitarist for the indie rock group Rilo Kiley.

3. Trevor Eyster (below left) as the science nerd Sponge. He was a busy child star, but left the industry after Salute Your Shorts to attend high school.  He has worked as a realtor and flight attendant, and is interested in returning to acting.

4. Michael Bower (second right) as his buddy, the hefty Donkey Lips.  He's been acting steadily, with credits including the gay-positive Popular.  He also wrote and directed Focus the Series, about a wacky focus group.

5. Danny Cooksey as bad boy Bobby Budnick. He's had a career as an actor and musician.  Currently he is the lead singer in the band Shelter Dogs and a voice artist.  And he's a strong supporter of gay marriage.

Give up?

The answer comes after the break:

Mark Trail: A Substandard Tarzan

This is not a parody beefcake cover; it's the real thing. Mark Trail Magazine, the Magazine of Adventure for Boys, gave Boys' Life some strong competition during the 1960s, with articles about rough-and-tumble activities like camping, horseback riding, shooting, skiing, and fishing.

And, apparently, building rafts in your underwear.

It was based on Jack Elrod's comic strip Mark Trail, started in 1946 and still syndicated in 175 newspapers.

Mark Trail was a sort of North American Tarzan, an adventurer more at home among redwood trees and grizzly bears than in the city.  He lived in Lost Forest National Forest, where he shot pictures for Woods and Wildlife Magazine (a take on Field and Stream).  His assignments got him into jams involving rampaging grizzly bears or (more often) villainous poachers, gun-runners, and...well, um poachers.

His comic strip was very popular during the 1950s and 1960s.  There was a radio series, a tv pilot starring Todd Armstrong (Jason and the Argonauts), and even a series of books, from Mark Trail's Book of Animals to Mark Trail's Cooking Tips.  

But Mark Trail was no Tarzan.
1. Darkest Africa offered much more interesting animals than the United States.  Lions, jaguars, 20-foot pythons, crocodiles vs. grizzly bears and...um...squirrels.

2. Darkest Africa had cannibals, leopard cults, and lost civilizations.  The United States had....um, poachers.





3. Outside of the MGM movies, Tarzan worked alone, or with a teenage sidekick.  Mark Trail had a girlfriend, Cherry Davis, and a series of flirtatious female photographers, damsels in distress, and villainesses to contend with.

4. Tarzan was loincloth clad and muscular.  For that matter, real naturalists tend to be quite muscular, like Stan Brock of Wild Kingdom.

But Mark Trail almost never took his shirt off, and when he did, he displayed a scrawny, unimpressive physique.

Artists have the choice of drawing muscular physiques or not.  Why wouldn't they?

See also: Top 10 Nature Show Hunks.

Nicholas D'Agosto: Hustler, Sex Researcher, Cheerleader

Dirty Girl (2010) is about a promiscuous straight girl who goes on a road trip to meet her biological father.  She takes her chunky gay bff, who is trying to escape his violently abusive parents.  It has three things to recommend it:
1. The gay bff (Jeremy Dozier) is chunky, not svelte (although still a swishy stereotype named Clarke).

2. He actually has sex, with a hitchiking hustler (Nicholas d'Agosto).

3. He doesn't turn straight at the end.





Jeremy Dozier has slimmed down since. His other movies include Bad Behavior (2013), about a babysitter fighting off the bad guy, and Rock, Paper, Scissors (2013), which seems to be about three friends playing Russian roulette.







Nicholas d'Agosto has taken off his clothes in a number of other movies, mostly teen sex comedies and horror spoofs such as Drive Through (2007) and Extreme Movie (2008).  

He is naked most often in Fired Up! (2009), in which two goofballs (Nicholas, Eric Christian Olsen) sign up for cheerleader camp in order to get girls, but find that they actually like cheerleading.  They have a swishy gay-stereotyped roommate (Adhir Kalyan)






Nicholas is currently starring as Dr. Ethan Haas on Masters of Sex (2013), about the homophobic sex researchers Masters and Johnson.  There's a closeted gay character.

Meatballs: Bill Murray mentors a gay kid at summer camp

I never liked Bill Murray. When he first appeared on Saturday Night Live in 1977, I was still somewhat homophobic, and I found his flamboyantly feminine manner and Castro Clone outfits disquieting.  Though I was out by 1979, my initial disquiet remained, so when my brother recommended Meatballs (1979), I said "No way!"  But then he made a cryptic comment: "It's the kind of move you'll like."

Bill Murray played hetero-horny summer camp counselor Tripper Harrison, who leads the boys in his care on panty raids at girl’s camp across the lake, and meanwhile romances female counselor Roxanne (Kate Lynch). Heterosexual desire is assumed the goal of every journey and the motivation for every action; an Internet Movie Database reviewer writes that it is about: “teens and young adults living their summer with no concerns other than guys hooking up with girls and girls hooking up with guys.” Even in his pep talk to the track team, Tripper presumes that the only reason boys participate in sports is to get girls:

Even if we win, if we win, hah!. . .It just wouldn't matter because all the really good looking girls would still go out with the guys from Mohawk [the rival camp] because they've got all the money! It just doesn't matter if we win or if we lose. It just doesn’t matter!

Director Ivan Reitman got his start with the sleaze-fests Foxy Ladies (1971) and Cannibal Girls (1973), and went on to produce Kindergarten Cop (1990) and Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot (1992), films that manage to defuse the erotic potential of man-mountains Arnold Schwartzenegger and Sylvester Stallone by making them comedy dupes. Could we expect even a moment of love to intrude into Meatballs?

But then there was Rudy.

Chris Makepeace, a fifteen-year old Montreal native with dark blue eyes, pale soft skin, and oddly red lips, plays the shy and feminine Rudy, who falls in love with the boisterous Tripper. In an early scene, Rudy notes that Tripper jogs past his cabin every morning, so he conspires to jog himself and arrange an “accidental” meeting. Though oblivious to the romantic signals -- or pretending to be to avoid having to tell the boy "sorry, not interested" -- Tripper accepts Rudy’s friendship with panache, and even adopts him as a special project, coaching him to become star of the camp track team.

 Oddly, Tripper never tries to force heterosexual desire upon Rudy, never asks what girl he would care to sleep with or invites him on a panty raid. Perhaps on some level, everyone concerned with the film knew that it would do violence to the character of Rudy to make him abandon his sweetly romantic attraction to Tripper and fixate on some girl.

Chris Makepeace went on to play many other characters informed by same sex desire; he fell in love with high school bully Adam Baldwin in My Bodyguard (1980), sleaze-teen Lance Kerwin in The Mysterious Stranger (1982), and a young Tom Hanks in Mazes and Monsters (1982), before settling down to the more heteronormative Captive Hearts (1987) and Aloha Summer (1988).

 More recently, in Synapse (1996), he played a man who gets his brain transplanted into a woman’s body, allowing him both gender-bending and nudity. To the best of my knowledge, he has never married.

Boys' Life

I lasted for about three weeks as a Cub Scout.  I didn't know about their anti-gay policies, of course, but I wasn't interested in building race cars, models of battleships, or bird houses.  It was like the agony of shop class, only with adults hovering around, insisting that I was having fun.

I didn't like the pledge, or the salute, or the song "God Bless America" that ended every session.

 But I did like the scouting magazine, Boys' Life, which offered stories, games, and comics about boys bonding with each other, usually with no girls around.  Sometimes there were interesting bodybuilding tips, and even more interesting photos of bodybuilding teens.

Or articles about scouting in exotic foreign locales.  Not as evocative as the My Village books, but still offering scattered glimpses of the "good place."

My grade school held a Scout Jamboree every spring, where you could get free copies of instructional manuals for merit badges.  There were dozens, covering everything from philately to rock-climbing, with genuinely valuable information.  And tons of beefcake photos, especially in the manuals for swimming, diving, rowing, physical fitness, and judo.

By the time I got to high school, I had three or four different editions of the lifesaving manual.  My parents found this odd, since I never took any lifesaving classes.