The Phantom and Son

When I was a kid in the 1960s and 1970s, all of the good comic strips appeared in the Times-Democrat, across the river in Davenport, Iowa.   Our Rock Island Argus featured a few lousy bargain-basement knockoffs -- Freckles instead of Archie, Winthrop instead of Peanuts -- and a lot of weird, incomprehensible dinosaur comics that were last popular when Mom and Dad were kids -- Prince Valiant, Out Our Way, Alley Oop.  
The weirdest, most incomprehensible of the lot was The Phantom, a muscular Tarzan who roams the jungle in a purple jumpsuit. wearing a ring, and has a wife and kids at home.

I found this ridiculous.

1. Hetero domesticity kills adventure.  That's why superheros are typically not interested.  Edgar Rice Burroughs had Tarzan marry Jane Porter because he didn't plan on any further adventures for the Lord of the Jungle; as a long-running series began, he had to think of more and more reasons to get Jane out of the picture.

2. A purple jumpsuit.  Lords of the Jungle always wear loincloths!  The only reason to put them in the jungle, where it's hot and humid,  is so you can draw hard muscles for your readers to ogle.

3.  Did I mention the effeminate ring?  Was the Phantom a drag queen?

The Phantom was created by Lee Falk in 1936, two years before Superman. and continues to run today.  At its peak it appeared in over 500 newspapers worldwide.

Today's Phantom, Kit Walker, is the 21st in a line that extends back to Christopher Walker, a British soldier who was shipwrecked in the jungles of Bengal, India, in 1536.  He became a masked vigilante, complete with jumpsuit and ring, and when he was ready to retire, bequeathed them to his son, the new Phantom, and so on, and so on  (I'm surprised they always fit).  The superstitious natives thought he was the same person, an immortal god, and dubbed him "The Ghost Who Walks."


Today's Phantom lives with his wife (Helen), kids (Kit and Heloise), and various sidekicks in a skull-shaped cave, where he sits on a skull-shaped throne.  He fights poachers, pirates, insurgents, smugglers, evil witch doctors, cannibals, and various baddies in what is no longer Bengal, but Bengalla Island, off the coast of sub-Saharan Africa.



The Phantom also appeared in comic book form, under various imprints: Ace, Harvey, Charleton, and finally Gold Key, where his title ran for 72 issues.

I occasionally leafed through them at Schneider's Drug Store, but quickly go bored.  No same-sex rescues, no beefcake.  Geez, at least show us a bicep now and then!

The Phantom appeared in a serial in 1943, when the studios were running out of properties, starring Western star Tom Tyler (left), but otherwise his screen appearances have been few.

A big screen version in 1996 starring Billy Zane (top photo) had the superhero fighting big business in modern-day America.  It tanked, along with the sci-fi cartoon, Phantom 2040, with Scott Valentine.

I guess the Phantom is no Tarzan.  Purple jumpsuits don't sell.

I'm holding out for the modern strips, written by Tony DePaul and drawn by Paul Ryan and Terry Beatty.  They often send in the Phantom's kids to do the adventuring.

Lee Falk imagined the Son of the Phantom as a cherubic preteen, but the modern Kit is drawn as a muscular blond teenager who has no qualms about appearing in a loincloth.

 And none of the comics I've checked show him expressing heterosexual interest (the girl he's wrestling with is his sister).








Maybe we'll finally get some gay subtexts.

See also: Alley Oop; Prince Valiant.

Hollywood: Henry Willson, Scotty Bowers, Rock Hudson: The Gang's All Here

During the glory days of studio-driven Hollywood, Jack (David Corenswet), a World War II vet with a wife and a baby on the way, wants to become an actor (no, a movie star). He hasn't been discovered yet (go figure), so he takes a job at  Ernie West's garage where the rich-and-famous fork over $200 ($2000 in today's money) to have sex with the attendants (have you read Scotty Bowers' book?).

Jack's main client turns out to be Avis Amberg (Patti LuPone), whose husband owns Ace Studios, and can get Jack work ("You take care of Mama, and Mama takes care of you.").

He won't do male clients, so he enlists Archie (Jeremy Pope), who aspires to be the first black gay screenwriter working in mainstream cinema. Archie's first client is the young, nervous Roy Fitzgerald (Jake Picking), who is destined to become movie great Rock Hudson. They start dating.

Meanwhile, Raymond (Darrin Kriss), a half-Filipino aspiring director, has had no luck getting his movie with an Asian star greenlighted, so studio exec Dick Samuels (Joe Mantello), who is gay, suggests that he work on Archie's movie.  Raymond hires his girlfriend Camille, who is black, for the female lead.

Jack tries out for the male lead. But Roy (now named Rock Hudson) has an edge: sleazy agent Henry Willson, who has the dirt on everyone and can blackmail them into casting his stable of gay-for-pay beefcake actors.

Plus Rock (left) slept with Dick Samuels.  But Jack is sleeping with Avis....

This all sounds very sleazy, an examination of the sexual exploitation of attractive men through the lens of the me-too era. But it's not.  The sex-for-screen tests exchanges are portrayed as perfectly legitimate and beneficial -- millions of people have acting talent, but how many are both hot and willing to put out?

The main problem of this system is prejudice. Jack, Archie, Raymond and their allies, all amazingly non-racist and gay-friendly for 1948 (and for 2020), are up against a system embedded with racism and homophobia.  But they're going to change all of that!  They're getting on the bus, throwing the first rock at Stonewall, and making movies about interracial and gay romance.

Ok, that didn't happen.

The sets are gorgeous, the background music spot-on, and you see fictionalized versions of Rock Hudson, Scotty Bowers, Henry Willson, Anna May Wong, Vivian Leight, Tallulah Bankhead, George Cukor, Noel Coward, Cole Porter, and Eleanor Roosevelt.   But...

Ok, that didn't happen.

Beefcake: Lots.

Gay Characters: Lots

My grade: B.

"Love, American Style": I Will Defend Your Right to Shine

Love, American Style (1969-74)  aired when I was in grade  school and junior high, late on Friday nights, when my parents were already in bed and I was watching tv with my sleepover friends or my brother, loggy and yawning, eating enormous dishes of ice cream, feeling very grown-up and somewhat mischievous. 

It was an anthology, with three humorous stories every week, all somehow related to "finding love" (all heterosexual love, of course, but who knew that anything else existed?). 

Some of the episodes were actually dramas rather than comedies ("Love and the Ledge").  Some were paranormal or science fiction  ("Love and the Vampire".  Some were only tangentially related to romance.

Sex was hinted at ("Love and the Coed Dorm"),but no one actually did the deed.  This was at heart a conservative show, aimed at an audience that was home on Friday nights -- old people and kids, both confused and disturbed by this new world of sexual freedom, longing for the old days of "true love's first kiss."

No beefcake -- at least, none that I remember.  An occasional cute guy, like teen idol Kurt Russell or Ronnie Howard of The Andy Griffith Show, but mostly oldsters. like Charles Nelson Reilly (from Lidsville) and Paul Lynde (from Bewitched).

Wait -- both of those actors were gay.

Stuart Margolin (top photo) starred in risque interstitial gag pieces,  chasing secretaries around desks or trying to glimpse a bit of cleavage.

But there was some buddy-bonding, guys working together to acquire something of value or evade an enemy, with the "finding love" tacked on at the end so the story would fit the premise. One stands out in my mind:

The guy is afraid of girls, so he asks his buddy to hide in the closet and offer advice during the date. To explain why he is going into the closet so often, he brings out items that he wants to show the girl: a bowling ball, a tennis racket, skiis -- until the apartment is full of junk.  The girl expected sex, not an episode of Hoarders, so she gets up to leave.  Then the guy kisses her,and they get engaged.

Get it: he keeps going into the closet to meet a man.  And he keeps coming out of the closet with masculine-coded sporting equipment, to show the girl that he's really interested in...well, that's about as far as they could go on prime time television in the cold winter of 1972.

I'm only thinking of the gay symbolism now, of course.  When I was in grade school and junior high, what mattered was feeling warm and safe but also dangerous, glimpsing a world built for someone else, an outsider who somehow belonged.

On a star spangled night, my love,
You can rest you head on my shoulder.
And by the dawn's early light, my love,
I will defend your right to shine.

"The Hollow": Adam is Gay

Last year I reviewed the first season of The Hollow, the Netflix animated series about three kids working their way through the various worlds of a giant video game.

1. Strong leader Adam (Adrian Petriw)
2. Cut-up Kai (Connor Parnall)
3. Sensitive, intuitive Mira (Ashleigh Ball)

 I liked the animation, and the complex plotlines, and found a gay subtext between Kai and Adam.  I didn't like how Kai kept crushing on every girl in sight.

Season 2 just dropped. In the first episode, they all awaken back home. Or what they think is back home.

While Mira and her brother have breakfast, two men are discussing changing around their work schedues to go on vacation....wait...she has two Dads!  Not just in the background, like on Ducktales, but talking, addressing her as their daughter, hugging. 

No way to de-gay them as friends, roommates, or brothers.  Let the Million Mom screeching begin.

But that's not all.

Adam has a giant rainbow flag on his bedroom wall!  Not a little one.  Not just in a blink-and-you-miss it shot.  It's obviously hanging there throughout the entire scene.

Adam is gay!

He says the word in the second episode, explaining to Kai that he's not interested in Mira. Then Mira apologizes for trying to kiss him last season -- she wouldn't have, except for the amnesia they were all suffering from.

So  Mira knew, but Kai didn't.  They were together in the video game world for weeks, maybe months, and it never came up?

I'm not happy that the writers waited until Season 2 to out Adam, and it doesn't seem to be referenced again, except maybe in a bickering subtext with new character Reeve.  (Fans suspect that they're ex-boyfriends.) 

But those are minor quibbles.

There's a gay kid in The Hollow!

In other news, actor Connor Parnell, who plays Kai, is 26 years old, a graduate of the Canadian College of Performing Arts, and gay.  Or does everyone already know that? 





See: The Hollow