The twelve scruffy hunks of "Animal Kingdom." WIth a lot of bare butts

  

Someone recommended Animal Kingdom, not to be confused with the Animal Kingdom at Disney World, the Animal Planet network, or a tv show entitled Animal Control.  This one is a drama TNT featuring the struggle for succession in a crime family led by...Smurf?  "Ok, boys, I want you to go smurf out those rival smurfs and bury their smurfs in the smurf."

Link to The 12 bare butts of "Animal Kingdom"

There are a lot of sons, grandsons, and boy toys, even a gay one.  Most are sleazy, scruffy, and tattooed, not my cup of tea.  But most get bare butt scenes, so you don't have to look at their face.

1. Scott Speedman as Baz, adopted Smurf, who wants to try new crime techniques instead of Mama Smurf's old fashioned smurfing. 

2. In flashbacks to 1992 and 1996, Baz is smurfed by Darren Mann, left

3. Shawn Hatosy as Pope, eldest Smurf, who suffers from mental illness and does a lot of risky smurf. Plus he's smurfed in prison.

4.  Kevin Csolak smurfs as Pope in the flashbacks.

5. Ben Robson as Craig, middle Smurf, who parties and does drug instead of paying attention to the smurfing. 

6. Jake Weary as Deran, youngest Smurf, the moral smurf who is trying to distance himself from the family, running a surfing shop instead of smurfing crime. He is closeted for a long time, but when he finally comes out they are fine with it. 

More butts after the break

10 Gay Surprises of Sweet Sweetback's Baadasss Song

In 1971, Melvin Van Peebles had had enough of the Man, and set out to bring the Black Community together with a movie about a hero who triumphs over white oppression.  He had no money, so he shot a lot of scenes with a hand-held camera, used leftover footage from other projects, and did a lot of trippy montages and visual gymnastics.

I expected an angry Black Power movie, with lots of violence and heterosexual sex.  But I was not expecting so much gay content.  Here are the 10 Gay Surprises of Sweet Sweetback's Baadassss Song:

1. In the first scene, a group of prostitutes gaze lustfully at a young boy (Melvin's son, Mario Van Peebles).  One takes him to her room, strips him, and initiates sex.  We see a glimpse of his penis and a lot of his bare butt as he thrusts71, thrusts, thrusts. (Don't worry, this photo shows neither.)

2. The boy grows up to be Sweetback, after a slang term for a gigantic penis, and we see it, gigantic and aroused, on camera, as Melvin Van Peebles prepares for sex with a woman.  We see it again several times, and quite a lot of his bare butt as he thrusts, thrusts, thrusts in unsimulated sex scenes.  Yes, it's all heterosexual, but frontal nudity was unheard-of.

3. Sweetback works as a performance artist in a gender-bending sex show: a woman is seduced by an elderly man who becomes a woman, and then becomes the naked, aroused Sweetback, all thanks to the efforts of a drag queen Fairy Godmother.

4. Two white police officers appear, wanting to arrest a black man -- it doesn't matter who --so Sweetback volunteers.  On the way to the station, they break up a Black Power rally and arrest the teenage Mu-Mu (Hubert Scales).  They beat him severely, and Sweetback rushes to the rescue, injuring the cops. Gay-subtext rescue!

5. Now the cops want him dead.  Sweetback hopes to take refuge in the home of Beetle (Simon Chuckster), the owner of the brothel, an extremely feminine, gay-coded man, naked except for a towel and a shower cap.  Beetle sympathizes with Sweetback, but he can't stay there; it's too risky.  Later, still shirtless, Beetle is beaten, deafened, and killed by the police.

6. Sweetback tries to take refuge in a church, but the pastor tells him that Mu-Mu has been captured again, so he rushes out.  More gay-coded emotional intensity.  The "damsel in distress" is a guy.

7. Sweetback rescues Mu-Mu, and they seek refuge in a deserted house.  Presumably they're about to have sex when the police break in.

8. Mu-Mu is injured in the ensuing fight.  A black biker (John Amos) offers to take Sweetback to Mexico and escape, but instead he insists that Mu-Mu be taken into town for medical care.  Sacrificing his safety for Mu-Mu.

9. By now Sweetback is a folk hero, so as he runs toward Mexico, dozens of random people, presumably being interrogated by the police, claim that "I ain't seen Sweetback."


Including three lisping, mincing gay stereotypes. Who nevertheless participate in the struggle, try to discomfort the police officers by flirting with them, and key into the Gay Liberation movement by identifying themselves as  "militant queens."

9. One doesn't expect Melvin Van Peebles (who still has a physique) to be gay-friendly.  After all, in the shooting script, the three militant queens are identified as "fags."  Yet he has appeared in several gay-positive movies, such as Love Kills (1999).

10. His son Mario is rumored to be gay, and played a gay character in Multiple Sarcasms (2010).

Grant Wood: More Than Pitchforks and Cornfields

When I was growing up in Rock Island, we had a lot of local celebrities.  Grant Wood wasn't one of them, even though he was the most famous American artist before Andy Warhol, and he was local, from Anamosa, Iowa, just north of the Quad Cities. He spent his life in the area, overseeing Stone City Art Colony nearby, and teaching at the University of Iowa, about 45 minutes away.

We ignored Grant Wood because of American Gothic, the second most famous painting of all time, and the most parodied.

It gave the Midwest a bad name.  The goggle-eyed farmer with pitchfork looks like he's about to go storming off to protest civil rights, or gay rights, or violence in comic books.  The weepy woman, her beauty faded by the boredom and isolation of farm life, dreams of escape.

Even today, if I admit to being from the Midwest (I usually don't), I get "How awful it must have been for you!  Nothing to do but watch the corn grow and fight all those redneck bigots!"

Um...no.  We had more to do than watch the corn grow: we had symphonies, live musicals, operas, ballets, art galleries, and museums. And about those bigots:  Iowa had the first class in Gay Studies in the world, and was one of the first states to get gay marriage.

So I didn't know much about Grant Wood until I started investigating John Bloom, who sculpted the statue of a naked man that I got for Christmas in junior high.

In 1926, the aspiring artist won a prize for an oil painting, "The Burial," at the Iowa State Fair.  The judge, celebrity painter Grant Wood, invited him to join his new Stone City Art Colony.  For the next two years, they lived together, in a converted ice wagon (rather a small space!). Together they worked on murals for libraries and post offices all over the state.

In 1934, when Grant went to the University of Iowa, he took John with him.

In 1935, Grant married Sara Sherman Maxon (the marriage ended in divorce three years later).  John moved to Davenport, where he married Isabel Bloom in 1938.

Sounded a lot like a spurned lover.

Sure enough.  A new biography, Grant Wood: A Life, by R. Tripp Evans, reveals that Grant was gay.  When he got to the University of Iowa, some faculty members in the Art Department suspected, and they already looked down upon Grant for rejecting the status quo of European Impressionism -- ergo his screen marriage and giving John Bloom the boot.

After his divorce in 1938, Grant had a series of handsome male "roommates."  This riled the homophobic faculty so much that, superstar or not, they wanted him out.  They waited the fall of 1941, when he was on sabbatical, and invited a writer from Time magazine to investigate "sexual improprieties."  The University President managed to put a kibosh on the story and quickly moved Wood into a new division.  However, he didn't get a chance to return to the faculty that loathed him.  He died of pancreatic cancer in February 1942.

But if you look carefully at his work, you can see the glimmers of homoerotic desire.

And even that stupid American Gothic isn't heterosexist.  Everybody thinks the woman is the farmer's wife, but she's his daughter.

Christopher Atkins, Gay Icon

Why is Christopher Atkins a gay icon?  To the best of my knowledge, none of his characters have been gay, although he did have a part in It's My Party (1995), about a gay man (Gregory Harrison) with AIDS.

Link to nude photos

And his character on Dallas (1983-84), Peter Richards, a psychology major who mentors Ewing heir John Ross Jr., can be read as gay-vague, even though he is bedded by an older woman.

Blue Lagoon (1980), the movie that made him a superstar, is entirely heteronormative.  Boy and girl grow up on a desert island together, Adam and Eve in Paradise before the fall, with no need for anyone or anything else.

Then he played a swashbuckler (The Pirate Movie), a stripper (A Night in Heaven), a lifeguard (Wet and Wild Summer), a sexy vampire (Dracula Rising), a professional gambler (Shoot), and. . .well, just about every profession that has been featured in a Harlequin Romance, always with a fade-out kiss.

Is it because of his body?  It was not muscular, but it was slim, toned, tanned -- and visible.  During the 1980s he was  more comfortable displaying himself on camera than any other actor in legitimate film, and he's still going strong. He's had so many nude scenes that it's hard to keep track of them all.

But is beefcake enough?  Arnold Schwartzennegger has appeared nude a lot, also, but he's hardly a gay icon.

Maybe it's because of how his body was displayed.  Men on display on screen are usually in instrumental poses -- they are fighting or having sex.  We're not supposed to be desiring the bodies, we're supposed to be admiring their utility.  But Christopher's poses were usually ornamental -- he was standing, or dancing, or lying on a bed, doing nothing, displaying his body for its own sake, as an object of beauty.

Christopher thinks it's his penchant for nudity (what other major star has nude pictures of himself on his own website?).  In a recent interview, he stated: "The 80s was a big time for the gay movement and here came a movie (Blue Lagoon) where it was male nudity being prominant rather than female nudity and so [I] became sort of an iconic poster child at that time."

Maybe it's his amazing gay-friendliness.  During the 1980s, most male actors refused to acknowledge that they had gay fans, or acknowledged them with a hysterical protest of their own heterosexuality, but Chris genuinely liked and supported his gay male following.  When I was living in West Hollywood, he even gave me a private viewing of his famous cock.

And he's in even better shape now than he was in 1980.

See also: Nude Photos of Christopher Atkins 

A Date with Kris leads to Christopher Atkins' Dick