Michael J. Fox/Alex P. Keaton

Michael J. Fox was the first celebrity I ever  met.  Shortly after I moved to Los Angeles in 1985, I met a guy who knew him from acting class, and the three of us had lunch at a place on Melrose Boulevard.  He was very nice, and completely gay-positive (and heterosexual, even though my insanely jealous boyfriend Ivo claimed to have dated him).

 Unfortunately his sitcom Family Ties (1982-89) wasn't.

It was one of the 1980s "family values" comedies, like Growing Pains, Life Goes On, and Home Improvement. about liberal ex-hippies (Meredith Baxter Birney, Michael Gross) with politically conservative kids (Scott Valentine was daughter Mallory's boyfriend). Michael played the teen Alex P. Keaton, a Young Republican whose money-grubbing provides most of the jokes.


Gay people did not exist in the world of Family Ties -- if they did, Alex's ultra-liberal parents would certainly have had gay friends.  However, sometimes Alex plays the "is he gay?"  game.  In order to impress a girl, he dons an apron to cook dinner. When Dad criticizes this gender transgression, he counters "I hope you don't mind -- I borrowed your apron.  I got quiche on mine."  The joke plays with the expression "Real men don't eat quiche."


In "Little Man on Campus," he fails his first test, and asks his sister Mallory why she fails so often:

Mallory: When I take a test...my mind starts wandering.
Alex: What do you think about?
Mallory: Boys.
Alex: (Waits for the howls of laughter to subside). Let's hope it's different for me.

Pretending to be gay as a joke only works if you don't have any significant same-sex friendships, so Alex carefully avoids sidekicks.  Wacky next door neighbor Skippy (Marc Price) hangs around because he has a crush on Mallory; they become friends anyway, but Alex carefully polices the relationship, even rejecting the standard sitcom stage business of sitting pressed together on a couch (so they can both be in a closeup).  In one episode, they somehow fall onto the bed together.  Skippy nonchalantly continues their conversation, but Alex recoils in horror and jumps away.  Since no gay people exist, this rejection has an even greater emotional impact than the homophobia of Teen Wolf, marking even nonsexual friendships as bad, wrong, and disquieting.

A few episodes suggest -- but immediately reject -- the possibility of romantic love between Alex and a male friend. In "Best Man," Alex's friend Doug (Timothy Busfield) gets engaged.  He treats Alex and his fiancee as emotional equivalents, hugging them and squealing "You're both so cute!", but still, Alex feels threatened by the new relationship and refuses to be his best man.  When he finally understands that he will still be an essential part of Doug's life, he hugs Doug so tightly at the altar that the minister, in "jest," asks which couple is going to be married.

In the two-part episode "A, My Name is Alex," Alex's friend Greg (Brian McNamara) is killed in an auto accident, and Alex is so distraught that he requires psychiatric help.  But after digging into his subconscious, the psychiatrist fails to find any homoromantic feelings, just guilt because Alex refused to accompany Greg on the errand that killed him, and the recognition of his own mortality.

How does someone who is so gay-friendly play someone so anti-gay on tv?

It was the 1980s?

See also: My Date with Michael J. Fox. Plus Marcus and the Scary Bulgarian Bodybuilder.

Russell Johnson: The Professor and His Gay Son

Everyone in West Hollywood knew Russell Johnson, who played the Professor on Gilligan's Island.  I met him once, and saw him a few times at events.  He was a gay ally, primarily due to his son David..

Everyone in West Hollywood knew David, too -- Alan (my ex-porn star roommate) dated him.  He was a fixture in the bars, at the French Quarter, and at the AIDS Project of Los Angeles.  Later he was named AIDS Coordinator of the City of Los Angeles (he died in 1994).

Russell's career began during the 1950s, with lots of roles in Westerns and sci-fi movies: look for him in the MST3K rendition of The Space Children (1958). 

In the late 1950s, he moved into tv, with guest spots on Twilight Zone, Thriller, Laramie, Rawhide, and such hip-detective series as Adventures in Paradise and Hawaiian Eye.  But Boomers will always remember him for Gilligan's Island, a "trapped far from home" sitcom about seven people who set sail from Honolulu for a "three hour tour" and end up trapped on a desert island.

The Professor was an egghead of the old school, an expert in every field of science from astronomy to zoology, who constantly amazed kids in the 1960s by concocting radios from coconuts.  His utter lack of interest in the two female castaways, Ginger and Mary Anne, gave me some of my first gay subtexts.

And some of my first beefcake, in his occasional shirtless scenes.

Although typecast as the Professor, Russell continued to work steadily during the 1970s and 1980s.  But he devoted most of his time to raising AIDS awareness and taking care of David.

His last screen role was in 1997, in Meego, about an alien boy hiding out on Earth. He played "The Professor."

Russell died in 2014.

Lou Ferrigno and Bill Bixby: Bodybuilder and Buddy

Speaking of bodybuilder buddies, when Bill Bixby finished his gay subtext series My Favorite Martian and The Courtship of Eddie's Father,  he cashed in on the 1970s superhero craze in The Incredible Hulk (1977-82).

He played the antiheroic Marvel comic book character Bruce Banner, heterosexualized by being renamed David (Bruce "sounded too gay") and a getting a dead wife. When he gets angry, David transforms, Jekyll-Hyde style, into the green-skinned, muscular Hulk, who has super-strength, subhuman intelligence, and a nasty temper.  Fortunately the Hulk knows enough to avoid harming good guys or bystanders, and he usually disarms or scares the bad guys rather than killing them.

Like The Fugitive, David is wandering the countryside, trying to find a cure for his "problem," fleeing an tabloid reporter (Jack Colver) obsessed with him, and getting involved with people's personal lives along the way.

The Hulk was played by 26-year old bodybuilder Lou Ferrigno (left and top), a multiple Mr. Universe and Mr. America contender whom I met when I was working for Muscle and Fitness; he appeared on the cover at least once a year.

Other than the documentary Pumping Iron, this was his first screen appearance, but soon his physique and his inspiring story -- he had been nearly deaf since childhood, and had a slurred voice -- propelled him into fame.  After The Incredible Hulk, he had starring roles in Hercules (1983), Sinbad of the Seven Seas (1989), The Cage (1989, with James Shigeta as the villain), and The Incredible Hulk TV Series (1996-97), where the Hulk could speak.   A special favorite of kids, he appeared as himself on Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood and Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?

I don't know if there were any gay subtexts in the series -- it was on Friday nights, so I never saw it -- but there was an off-screen bromance.  Bill became Lou's mentor and confidant, and like Paul Newman and Rocky Graziano twenty years before, they were often seen socializing together off the set.

I remember them coming into the Muscle and Fitness editorial office together, looking for all the world like a gay couple, especially Bill in his tan suit and sunglasses.

In his memoirs, Lou stated that he doesn't like to watch The Incredible Hulk now because it is too sad.  Bill "was like a brother to me.  We grew together.  I miss him."

Bill Bixby was a gay ally, of course, and Lou Ferrigno always seemed perfectly fine with the adulation of gay fans.  When he appeared on the reality series The Apprentice, he was fine with the elderly gay icon George Takei commenting on his  hotness of his semi-nude body, but got upset over a joke that criticized his fashion sense.

Lou is now appearing on the webseries The Incredible Ferrignos, in which his entire family, all certified personal trainers, offer make-overs to families with unhealthy diet and exercise habits.

Lou Ferrigno, Jr., (born 1984) starred in two of David DeCoteau's nearly-gay movies: 1313: Hercules Unbound! (2012) and 1313: Night of the Widows (2012).

I get more of a gay-friendly vibe from Brent (born 1990).  He's not an actor, but you can see lots of shirtless pix on his facebook page.

Peter Parros: Hookups with the Hunk of "Knightrider"

I never saw Knight Rider (1982-1986), with 1980s hunk David Hasselhoff as a secret agent with a magic talking car. I had other things to do on Friday nights, and besides, the premise made me uncomfortable:
The title is a pun on "night riders," the Ku Klux Klan.
Michael Knight works for the Foundation for Law and Government, which sounds right-wing reactionary.
And the car, KITT, is voiced by William Daniels, who played a disgusting homophobe on St. Elsewhere.

But I did like Peter Parros, who played Michael's sidekick in Season 4. A scene where they are tied up side-by-side in muscle shirts got saved to a VHS tape, and made the rounds of West Hollywood parties, along with frequent stories of hookups.  (But usually in a three-way with David Hasselhoff, which made the veracity of the stories suspect.)

Is there anything else you need to know about him?

How about: Knight Rider was his first starring role.  He moved on to play a variety of soap opera hunks, on One Life to Live, The Young and the Restless, and As the World Turns.

In The Haves and the Have Nots (2013-), a soap opera with a primarily African-American cast, Peter plays David Harrington (nice soap opera name!), who is supportive of his gay son in spite of his wife's homophobia.

Peter has never made any public coming-out statements, but I know several guys in West Hollywood who claim to have seen his beneath -the-belt attributes  (in a word, spectacular).

Douglas Barr: The Gay Casting Couch

During the heyday of the Village People, they even found their way onto prime time: When the Whistle Blows was a sitcom about three hunky construction workers, Buzz (Douglas Barr, left), Randy (future soap hunk Phillip Brown), and Hunk (former pro-football star Tim Rossovich), plus their female coworker.  Like the Village People, they were all gay-coded but "really" heterosexual, spending their time off disco dancing and solving people's personal problems (one of the episodes was even entitled "Macho Man").

Though it was heavily promoted by the network, it aired on Friday nights, when the intended audience was out disco-dancing, so  only nine episodes aired in the spring and summer of 1980.

This was 31-year old former model Douglas Barr's first acting credit -- male models were always assume gay in the 1970s, so he had been the recipient of many casting-couch invitations by gay producers, directors, and casting agents, but he states that he always said "no" (he said "no" to female invitations, too).

He relied only on his talent, charm, handsome face, and obvious beneath-the-belt advantage to land his next role: disingenuous Howie Munson, sidekick to trucker-stuntman-bounty hunter Colt (Lane Majors) on Fall Guy (1981-86).  I've never seen it, but I understand that there was some buddy-bonding, and some shirtless and swimsuit-clad shots.

Along the way, Doug played a trapeze artist in a revealing leotard on Fantasy Island, and was displayed in a speedo on Battle of Network Stars.  Mostly he played men who fall for women, but in the "Rallying Cry" episode of Hotel (1985) he played half of a gay couple involved in a custody battle.

Next came more buddy-bonding: The Wizard (1986-87), about a little-person genius inventor (David Rappaport) who has globe-trotting adventures along with his sidekick-bodyguard-best buddy (Doug).

I met Douglas Barr at a party in 1987, but at the time I hadn't seen him in anything, so I didn't know he was a celebrity.  I knew that he was very nice and had a great physique.

Later he starred in Designing Women (1987-91) as Bill Stillfield, boyfriend and eventual husband of Charlene (Jean Smart), naive receptionist of the interior design company.

Since Designing Women, Doug has been involved with directing, especially tv movies with titles like Perfect Body, Sex, Lies, and Obsession, and Beautiful Girl.  He's written a few such movies himself, including The Cover Girl Murders and Taking a Chance on Love.  Not a lot of gay subtexts.  But he had more than enough early in his career.

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

Eddie is an Eye-Witness to Prince Charles Having Sex with an Extremely Muscular Scottish Athlete

Boomer: Hi, Eddie.  Did you know that I'm the sixth cousin, once removed, of Prince William?  His mother, Princess Diana, and my mother share great-great-great-great grandmothers.

Eddie:  Brilliant!  You should pop over to Kensington Palace and say hello.  Maybe Wills will invite you in for a sandwich.

Boomer:  I don't think so.  William probably has about six thousand sixth cousins.  You're much closer to the royal family than I could ever be..  You went to Eton with Harry and got a sausage sighting of him in the shower.  You've met William, Charles, Prince Andrew, Princess Anne...the Queen?

Eddie: Not formally, but I've been in the same room with her.  I was eight years old, not impressed.

Boomer: I know what you mean.  I met President Johnson when I was five, and the only thing I could think was 'He's not cute'!  But I was wondering, with all the insider scoops you've been privy to over the years, if you can substantiate the 'Prince Charles is Gay' rumors.

Eddie:  Not gay, though, really?  Bi, maybe.  My Dad tells me he had a girl for every day of the week before he met Diana.

Boomer:  I found a list on the internet: Caroline Longman, Lady Tryon, Laura Watkins, Angela Keating, Camilla Hipwood, Rosie Vestey, Davina Morley...well, the list goes on and on.  If he slept with all of those women, he'd be a regular Lothario.  But was there time on any of those days of the week for men?

The rest of the story, with explicit details of Prince Charles, the future king of England, having explicit gay sex with an extremely muscular Scottish athlete, with nude pictures of the athlete, is on  Gay Celebrity Dating Stories.

Jackie Coogan's Boyfriend

When I met Keith Coogan in 2013, nearly the first thing I asked was, "Whose idea was the underwear scene in Toy Soldiers? (1991).

You're making a movie about the boys at an elite boarding school being held hostage by terrorists.  Whose idea was it to have the cast, composed entirely of teenage hunks, in their underwear all the time?

Not that I minded. I especially didn't mind getting an eyeful of Keith's bulge.

Keith insisted that there was no homoerotic intent.  Those scenes took place at night, when they were stripped down for bed.  They got to choose their own underwear, so he wore his regular "tighty whities."

Not that he minds the attention from gay fans: he's been a gay ally his whole life.  He learned all about gay people a long time ago, from his grandfather, Jackie Coogan

Famous to Baby Boomers as Uncle Fester on The Addams Family, Jackie Coogan was one of Hollywood's first child stars, co-starring with Charlie Chaplin in The Kid (1924) at the age of 7.

He went on to play Peck's Bad Boy, Oliver Twist, Toby Tyler, and Huckleberry Finn before moving into a long career as an adult character actor, appearing in everything from College Swing (1938) to Captain Caveman and the Teen Angels (1977).  He had four wives, including World War II pin-up girl Betty Grable.  He struggled with heart and kidney disease through his life, and finally died of heart failure in 1984, at the age of 69.

Daughter Leslie Diane, born in 1953, left home at age 15, and married, had Keith, and divorced within the next year.  Keith grew up in poverty, his mother working odd jobs and getting government assistance; for awhile they lived in a changing room on the tennis court outside the Malibu mansion where Leslie worked as a housekeeper.

Leslie wasn't happy about Keith's decision to become an actor, but she agreed to drive him around for auditions; he began doing commercials at age 5, got his first movie role at age 8, and landed a recurring spot on The Waltons at age 9.

Grandpa Jackie was a constant presence in his life, visiting every summer,  advising him on his acting career ("always know exactly where your money is going"), telling him stories of Old Hollywood.  Raunchy stories about men caught with their pants down in actresses' dressing rooms, all male parties where the guy with the biggest penis won a prize (Ramon Novarro always won.)   One of his favorite stories was about his teenage boyfriend, Junior Durkin:

The Boy Who Fought Mutants: Lee H. Montgomery

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 "sexually 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 nudity.

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.

When Lee hit adolescence, his chunkiness melted away, and he did the standard tv movies and guest spots on Chips, Family Ties, Fame, Hotel, and Dallas.

By this time, Lee had a tight, firm, hirsute physique, and he knew what to do about it.  In Night Shadows (1984), also released as Mutant, he displays his chest at all times, even the most inconvenient (while renting a room, at the doctor's office five minutes after the doctor says "You can put your shirt back on").  Incidentally, there's also a strong homoerotic subtext as Mike (Lee) cries for his dead "brother" Josh (Wings Hauser).

Many of Lee's teenage and young adult performances feature displays of his chest and abs, and strong buddy-bonds: Prime Risk (1985) and The Midnight Hour (1985), the episode "Man to Man" of Highway to Heaven (1986), and one of the more controversial of the Schoolbreak Specials, "Hear Me Cry" (1984), about two high school boys who make a mutual suicide pact.

His characters are often uninterested in women, though a girl is usually thrown in, almost as an afterthought, to provide a heterosexist fade-out kiss.

In 1986, Lee retired from acting to concentrate on his music.

I met him at a party in 1987, and assumed he was gay, but I don't really have any evidence one way or the other.  The story is on Tales of West Hollywood.

Jeff MacKay

The problem with meeting celebrities is that you usually don't recognize them, and then their feelings get hurt.

I never saw Black Sheep Squadron, Tales of the Gold Monkey, Magnum PI, or The Transformers, so how did I know that the guy I met was a celebrity.  I didn't even know that he was an actor, although it's a safe bet in West Hollywood

He was living in Hollywood, a few blocks from Mann's Chinese (and near where the Gay Community Center is today).

He told me that he was born in Dallas but grew up in Oklahoma City, and....

That's all I knew about him, except he had a nice smile, a husky, hirsute physique, and his name was "Jeff."

Later he revealed that he was Jeff MacKay, the actor.  I pretended to know who he was, but really I didn't.

After that night I never saw him again.

He died in 2008 after a long struggle with alcoholism, leaving many family members and friends with fond memories of his kindness and good humor.

I'm sorry I didn't get to know him better.

Spring 1980: Malcolm Boyd, the Fighting Priest Who Can Talk to Kids

Malcolm Boyd and Mark Thompson

When Fred the Ministerial Student and I visited Des Moines in the spring of 1980, we went to Drake University to hear an Episcopalian priest named Malcolm Boyd speak on social justice.  Thomas, the priest with three boyfriends, knew him, so the next day we all had lunch (no, Malcolm wasn't one of the boyfriends).

 All I knew about Malcolm was his book, Are You Running with Me, Jesus? (1965), a series of brief prayers about contemporary concerns, such as political injustice, racial inequality, sexual freedom, and gay people:

This is a gay bar, Jesus....Quite a few of the men here belong to the church as well as this bar. If they knew how, a number of them would ask you to be with them in both places.  Some of them wouldn't, but won't you be with them, too, Jesus?

Still, I was shocked to discover that Malcolm Boyd was gay himself -- and out, the first openly gay cleric in any mainstream religious body in the world.  He came out in a newspaper interview in 1977, and in 1978 he wrote Take Off the Masks, suggesting that Christianity should not only be tolerant, but gay-positive.




Born in 1923, Malcolm began his career as a movie producer, but felt the call to the clergy and graduated from seminary in 1954.  During the 1960s, he was famous his work in the Civil Rights movement, and for his hip religious poetry at the Hungry I nightclub in San Francisco.  He was the inspiration for the Doonesbury character Rev. Scott Sloane, "the fighting priest who can talk to kids."

In 1982 he moved to Los Angeles to become the priest at St.-Augustine-by-the-Sea Episcopal Church in Santa Monica.   He has written over 30 books, including Gay Priest: An Inner Journey (1987).

Mark Thompson, his partner of over 30 years, has written many books on gay spirituality, including The Fire in the Moonlight: Stories from the Radical Faeries, about the group that Sparky T. Rabbit helped to found.  They believe that gay people have a unique spiritual role as gatekeepers to the other world.

Edson Stroll: Bodybuilding Opera Buff

I met Ed Stroll when I was working for Muscle and Fitness in Los Angeles: dashing, energetic, and still extremely buffed in his 50s. He was working in real estate, but he spent most of his time at the Marina del Rey Yacht Club, and knew everything there was to know about high culture: concerts, ballets, and especially opera.

And, whenever he could spare a moment, playing high-powered businessman types on Murder She Wrote, Hotel, Dynasty, Simon and Simon....

I didn't know that he had been in show biz for over 30 years. Or that his real name was Edson.

Born in 1929, Ed trained as a bodybuilder, actor, and singer, performing on stage in Shangri-La, Carousel, On the Town, and other plays before breaking into tv with guest shots on How to Marry a Millionaire, Sea Hunt, Lock-Up, and Men into Space.  

He starred in two famous episodes of The Twilight Zone: "Eye of the Beholder", about a society where the idea of beauty is our "ugliness"; and "The Trade-Ins," in which an elderly couple shop for hot new bodies.

He starred in the military comedy McHale's Navy (1962-66), as Virgil Edwards, "the handsome lover boy of the crew" (according to Wikipedia; I've never seen it).











He appeared in Snow White and the Three Stooges (1961) as Prince Charming, and The Three Stooges in Orbit (1962), as romantic lead Captain Tom Andrews.

Not a lot of gay content, but you don't really need any when you spend all of your time hanging around gay men.

I assumed he was gay; he never said he wasn't.

When he died on June 18, 2011, his obituary stated that he was survived by Anita Winters and his two dogs,  Eddie and Sugar Baby.    I have no idea who Anita Winters is.

Spotting Celebrities: Merritt Butrick

Someone asked for a complete list of all the celebrities I met in Los Angeles from 1985 to 1990.

It depends on who counts as a celebrity.  A lot of my friends in L.A. had done something, Teen #2 on Family Ties or Party Guest #1 in The Coca Cola Kid. 

And what counts as "met."  I saw Don Grady at Gay Pride, became a "bookstore friend" of Richard Dreyfuss, bought a love seat from Cesar Romero, worked out in the same gym as Max Gail, had lunch with Michael J. Fox, and talked to Nate Richert at the Gold Coast without realizing who he was.   Does that count?

But several celebrities made a lasting impression.  We dated, or they dated my friends, or we ran into each other a lot, or maybe we just walked together for a mile or so at an AIDS Walk.  We found points of common interest.  They became people, not just images on a screen.

I met Merritt Butrick in 1988, when he was playing a muscular hustler who wreaks havoc on an older man's life in the theatrical play Kingfish.


I didn't know at the time that Merritt was famous as gay-vague slacker Johnny Slash on the high school sitcom Square Pegs (1982-83).

And as Captain Kirk's son David in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (1986). Or that he had a vast range of tv and movie roles, from cowboy to vampire.

I had  never seen any of them (I still haven't).  But I knew that Merritt was quiet, intelligent, driven, serious about his craft.  And that he wouldn't have time to reach his star potential.

He died on March 17th, 1989, of AIDS-related pneumonia.