Tom and Huck

In Tom and Huck (1995), an idiosyncratic take on Mark Twain's classic Tom Sawyer, the standard elements are retained: Tom paints the fence, gets engaged to Becky Thatcher (with a tight-close up kiss), has a fake funeral, gets lost in the cave.  But as the title suggests, the relationship between Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn is emphasized.

Tom is played by fourteen-year old Jonathan Taylor Thomas, whose short stature and baby face could easily mark him as prepubescent, especially given his previous cute-boy roles.  Huck, in contrast, is played by Brad Renfro (left), thirteen years old but already a head taller and considerably more mature looking than Thomas, and already saddled with a reputation for being bad, wild, and irascable.

Brad Renfro’s Huck is a creature of the wild, as unpredictable and enigmatic as forest sprite.  He appears without warning, lodged in a tree or lying on a river bank to comment on the action of the fools with the dispassionate interest of a Puck.

In one scene he appears unexpectedly before Tom, naked, his body coated with mud.  He explains – it is a form of camoflauge – but still we are shocked at the sight of an elemental spirit. Indeed, his wilderness home is no hut or cabin, but an earthen pit, the sort of place one might visit at night to conjure hobgoblins.

Huck has no need or desire for human relationships. When Tom says softly “I thought we was friends,” Huck retorts “You thought wrong. I ain’t got no friends.”

But Tom desires him with a intensity beyond friendship, beyond even erotic longing.  Though he knocks around with acts of minor mischief, conning his schoolmates and torturing his cousin, he yearns to be naked and muddy, to need no one, to be free.

Yet he also yearns for a connection with Huck: he seeks out the sprite, invites him places, gazes at him with glassy-eyed wonder, sometimes dares to put touch his shoulder or put an arm around his waist.  This version omits the traditional homoromantic idyll on the island, since, in a terrible paradox, if Tom ever succeeds in establishing a connection with Huck, it will destroy the very “no-strings” freedom that he finds so attractive.





Huck is mistaken, of course: he does need human relationships, and Tom is indeed his friend.  In the cave with Injun Joe, he risks his life to save him – not Becky, who has long since escaped, but Tom alone: “When a friend’s in trouble, you can’t run away.”

With an elemental human connection (and, coincidentally, a fortune), Huck accepts the Widow Douglas’s offer to civilize him.  He puts on pants and enrolls in school and church.    Now Tom feels betrayed.  He decides to stay in the pit and replace Huck as woodland sprite, proclaiming “Somebody’s got to carry on!”  But Huck convinces him that one can be both uninhibited and civilized, and the two walk off together to plan their minor acts of mischief. The outsider has become a schoolboy through the evocation of friendship, with Becky Thatcher long since forgotten.

Joe Slaughter: Dancer/Model/Bullying Survivor

It's hard being a male terpsichorean (dancer) in high school.  You face constant homophobic harassment from the jocks, the bullies, and even the teachers.

And it's even harder if you're heterosexual, working out and stripping down with 5,000 girls, all of whom treat you like a buddy and aren't up for dates.

But Joe Slaughter survived both the homophobia and the horniness to become a successful dancer, touring with superstars like Miley Cyrus, Rihanna, and the Pussycat Dolls.  He has modeled for brands like The Gap and Calvin Klein (and he's not shy about underwear and semi-nude shots).

Checking out his killer physique, one wonders if he really had a problem finding girls to date. 

Checking out his killer bulge, one wonders if the jocks and bullies were harassing him to hide their homoerotic attraction.

He has recently broken into acting.  In Step Up 3D (2010), the first 3-D dance movie, he plays Julian, the leader of the evil House of Samurai dance crew, who disapprove of his sister's romance with Luke (Rick Malambri) of the rival House of Pirates.  Lots of gay subtexts all around.

In Music High (2012), a music teacher tames a group of surly juvenile delinquents with -- you guessed it -- music and/or dance. Joe plays the gay-coded William.

Joe has also played dancers or models in several tv series, including CSI, The Bold and the Beautiful, and Femme Fatales.

Joey Lawrence: from Blossom to Bodybuilder

Joey Lawrence was a child star of the 1980s, appearing in kid-friendly movies (Little Shots, Summer Rental), sitcoms (Silver Spoons, Gimme a Break), and after school specials.  At the age of 14, he landed role as Joey Russo, brother of the unconventional Mayim Bialik in Blossom (1991-1995).

Gay boys  were more interested in Joey and Blossom's older brother, Tony (Michael Stoyanov), or in their hunky Dad (Ted Wass), or in Blossom's hunky boyfriend (David Lascher), and lesbians watched for the buddy-bond between Blossom and her best friend, Six (Jenna Von Oy).  Joey was mostly left on the sidelines, observing the action, uttering an occasional "Whoa!" to denote surprise, all but ignored by teen magazines.  Then, in a 1992 episode, Joey's shirt was "accidentally" ripped off, revealing a tan, slightly hairy, muscular chest that for some reason the teenager had kept hidden.   The studio audience gasped in amazement. Suddenly Joey -- and the producers realized that his chest was a bigger audience-draw than the catchphrase "Whoa!" 

He initiated a teen idol career, filming music videos while shirtless.  He appeared shirtless on the cover of his first album, Joey Lawrence, in 1993 (but not the more serious Soulmates in 1997).

After Blossom, his tv and movie appearances usually required his shirt to be off a lot.  He became more and more buffed as the 1990s progressed.  

Many of his movies involved buddy-bonding, most notably in the boys alone drama Jumping Ship (2001) with his brothers Matthew  and Andrew.  It appeared on the Disney Channel and then vanished, never to be released on DVD.  He also played a gay character in Confessions of a Sociopathic Social Climber (2005).

Today Joey -- now Joseph -- mostly draws the crowds with his singing, dancing, and acting talent.  Not that he ignores the power of his physique; in June 2012 he stripped with the Chippendales for a special 3-week engagement. Unfortunately, it was heterosexist, for "women only."

Otherwise Joseph is a staunch gay ally. 

Jughead's Girlfriends

Today Archie comics is unique in children's media in featuring an open, out gay teenage character, but during the 1980s and 1990s, it made an attempt to heterosexualize its most famous "woman-hater," Jughead Jones.

In a story prophetically entitled “Genesis. . .the Beginning” (Jughead Digest  36, 1985),  Jughead is up late one night when a beam of light flashes out of his TV set and renders him unconscious.  The next morning he has received a facelift, and there is an odd masculine symbol affixed to his beanie.  “I feel reborn. . .” he exclaims.  “I have strange tingling sensations. . .It’s like I have an inner power.  I have a desire to talk to. . .to touch. . .my gosh! A girl!”


Reggie doesn’t believe that his friend has suddenly been converted to heterosexuality: “That boy is one sickie!”  But Archie comes to his aid: “This is going to make him more normal!  He’s always been an oddball!”

Further stories during the late 1980s and early 1990s indicated that the publisher John Goldwater expected the readers to buy the explanation that Jughead had always liked girls, but was inhibited by lack of self-confidence, that his real self was a “self-confident, girl-loving, prowling wolf."

In a letter to the readers reprinted incessantly during the period, he noted slyly that Jughead had “changed” (but failed to give any details), and invited readers to comment on which version they liked better.

The consensus was overwhelming: readers liked the old Jughead, needed someone to stand apart from the boy and girl-crazed antics of his peers and demonstrate that heterosexual desire was not necessarily an universal of human experience.


Nevertheless, the girl-loving Jughead remained.  During the last 20 years, Jughead has been involved in  passionate affairs, tempestuous love-hate relationships, and casual dates with amateur psychologist Trula Twyst, health food nut Googie, jazz fan Debbie, and long-time admirer Big Ethel.

Paradoxically, the girl-hating Jughead is still around, often in the same issue; in Jughead 130 (2000), Jughead is in love with Trula Twyst in one story, but in another he saves an attractive female movie star from drowning and refuses a kiss as a reward.  For several years, his capsule biography on the Archie comics webpage referred both to his girlfriends and to his “rather abnormal dislike of girls."