Give Me a Prehistoric Man

Modern man is not for me, 

The movie star and dapper Dan

Give me a healthy Joe from ages ago --

A prehistoric man.

-- On The Town

When I was about eight years old, my Grandma Davis came to visit, and took us to the store to pick out any toy we wanted. My brother Kenny asked for a bicycle, and I asked for a Cave Man Toy Set.

"Are you sure you don't want a bicycle, too?"  Grandma asked in surprise.

Certainly not.  What fun could you possibly have with a bicycle?

But just look at Cave Man Toy Set: hard-muscled guys in loincloths throwing spears and rocks at gigantic dinosaurs!  (This was before toymakers realized that dinosaurs and prehistoric humans didn't coexist).

My boyfriend Bill agreed with my decision.  We spent many hours with that Toy Set, imagining jungle explorations, nick-of-time rescues from warring tribes or brontosauri, and "my hero" hugs.


Cave men were more fun than other action figures.  Our church taught that the world was created about 6,000 years ago, so evolution was a lie, there was no prehistory, and there had never been any cave men. So in addition to the beefcake, you had the thrill of blasphemy.

My Grandma Davis wasn't entirely opposed to the idea of prehistory.  One day in her attic I found this Van Loon Story of Mankind, published in 1926, with some muscular cave men on the cover.

It looks like a children's book, but in 1926, she was 23, and she and her husband wouldn't adopt my dad and his sisters for over a decade, so I don't know who it was for.


Most museums had exhibits featuring full-sized statues of prehistoric bodybuilders.  In the Putnam Museum in Davenport, they were wearing loincloths, but in the Museum of Natural History in Chicago, they were naked!

You almost never saw or heard of a cave woman.  I got the distinct impression that our ancestors were all male, roaming around n*ked in hunter-gatherer bands.


Maybe this was before Adam and Eve, so women hadn't been created yet.

See also: Andrew Keegan: From "Teenage Caveman" and "The Broken Hearts Club" to...well, he got to kiss Dean Cain

"Journey to the Beginning of Time": Four boys fight dinosaurs in the early years of their lives, before Jules Verne, Sinbad, and "What girl do you like?"

Alley Oop: The Time-Traveling Cave Man

The Andy Warhol Museums: Erasing the Gay

You probably know that Andy Warhol, the gay-yet-homophobic pop artist, was the son of immigrants from Miková, a small town in Slovakia, near the Polish and Ukrainian borders.
 
You probably don't know that the nearby town of Medzilaborce features the Andy Warhol Museum of Modern Art, established in 1991 to celebrate Andy's Slovak heritage.

It was a tough sell to the locals, who worried that the museum would glorify the "homosexual aspects of the drug parties." So it tried to make him a good Slovak communist (later, a good Slovak Catholic).  There are paintings of butterflies, flowers, and a Russian hammer and sickle.  His gayness is not mentioned.

To emphasize his loving (and presumably heterosexual) family connections, there are also works by his mother (a drawing of the Annunciation of our Lord), his brother Paul Warhol and nephew James Warhola.

But no beefcake.  Not even this cover that James drew for Robert Heinlein's sci-fi novel Stranger in a Strange Land.

Still, locals stay away, and parents won't even allow their children to attend the art classes held on the site, for fear that the gayness will rub off on them.

There's another Andy Warhol museum in his native Pittsburgh, considerably larger, with 17 galleries and 900 paintings.  Is it any better at acknowledging Warhol's gayness?



They do a little better.

True, you can walk through the entire permanent exhibits of giant Campbell's Soup cans and silkscreens of Marilyn Monroe without ever suspecting.

And the biography page on the website discusses his college career, his Catholicism, the Factory, his celebrity interviews, his visits to Studio 54, but not his gayness.

But the gay-themed work is available for those willing to dig, like the short film, Tarzan and Jane Regained, Sort Of (1963), starring Davis Hopper and Taylor Mead (top photo).

And some of the special events are gay-inclusive. In 2012 there was a book signing and reception for Lance Out Loud, a biography of the gay icon by his mother, Pat Loud.

So, like the "outsiders" of Howard Becker's classic sociological study, it's invisible to most people, but you can find it if you're "in the know."

A Gay Scandal on London's Museum Circuit

London is the City of Museums, with 240, including some that top every tourist's to-do list: The British Museum, the Victoria & Albert, the Tate Modern, the Museum of London.  But leave some time for the Soane Museum, site of a major gay scandal.

Sir John Soane (1753-1837) was a famous architect who designed or renovated many London landmarks, including the Bank of London, Freemason's Hall, the New Law Courts, and the Palace of Westminster.  He was an antiquarian, a neoclassicist, a traditionalist in a world rocked by revolution and changing sexual mores.

 He designed his own home at 13 Lincoln Inn Fields, filled it with a huge collection of art and antiquities, and turned it into a mausoleum, a memory of a long-dead world.

He hoped that his sons would follow him into architecture, but John (born 1786) was sickly and artistic, and George (born 1789) preferred literature and the theater.  Their relationship was so strained that Soane insisted that he was a "changeling," not his real son at all.

After he left home, George published two anonymous articles savaging his father's architectural style.  But the last straw was the revelation that George was living in sin with his wife Agnes and her sister.  Scandalized, Soane cut off all contact.

Then Agnes wrote, complaining that George was violently abusive to her and her young son Frederick (born in 1816).  At first Soane ignored her, but then it occurred to him that Frederick might yet become an architect and carry on his name.  So he encouraged Agnes to leave George, and sent her 200 pounds per year to pay for Frederick's education.

When Frederic graduated in 1834, Soane got him an apprenticeship with his friend, architect John Tarring.

But 1835 Tarring complained that Frederick was involved in the gay demimonde, carousing with a Captain Wentworth (whose military career had been cut short in a scandal involving the suicide of a young officer rumored to be his lover).

Scandalized again, Soane sent one of his clerks to follow Frederick and report back on any "inappropriate behavior."

In Soane's youth gay men and transvestites patronized clandestine Molly Houses (top photo from the Mark Ravenhill play Mother Clap's Molly House), but in 1835 London they could choose from private parties, drag bars, and all-gay brothels.

Evidently the clerk found something, since Soane cut off Frederick's "per annum" and cut off all contact, "for motives which it does not become me to explain," Frederick wrote later.  He also refused to "article" Frederick, so he could never work as an architect; by 1837, when Soane died, he was living in poverty in a single room with his pregnant wife.

Soane bequeathed his house and its contents, valued at 150,000 pounds, to the British Nation as a museum.  Frederick begged to be appointed curator, but was denied.  Finally his cousin Frederick Chamier petitioned the Prime Minister, and got him appointed to a post at the Stamp and Tax Office.  He died in 1880.

You can visit the Soane Museum from 10 to 5 Tuesday through Saturday. There are no statues of naked men.  Or portraits of Frederick.