Mission: Impossible

On Sunday nights in the 1960s, if we were lucky, we'd get home from church by 9:00 pm, just in time to see a brawny hand strike a match to light a fuse, which sizzled into a fast montage of action scenes set to a jazzy score. Mission: Impossible.

By the way, the hand belonged to series producer Bruce Geller, and the score was by Lalo Schifrin.

When you're starved for beefcake in a cold Midwestern winter, even a hand is evocative.

Before 1969, my brother and I weren't allowed to stay up past 9:00, and by the 1970s it had moved to Saturday nights, when we usually had something else to do (no way to record programs back then), so I have only seen three years of episodes.

Mission: Impossible belonged to the 1960s spy craze, along with Wild Wild West, Get Smart, Hogan's Heroes, and The Man from U.N.C.L.E.  The plots: the Impossible Missions Force (IMF) engaged in Cold War espionage, usually involving wearing disguises to trick a communist leader into signing a peace treaty or prevent a communist general from taking over a "peace loving" country. An occasional Mafia don or master-criminal thrown in.

Not a lot of bonding. In fact, two of the team members, Rollin Hand (Martin Landau) and Cinnamon Carter (Barbara Bain) specialized in seducing opposite-sex targets.  But Barney Collier (Greg Morris), the electronics whiz, and Willie Armitage (Peter Lupus), the weightlifter, rarely expressed any interest in girls.

And Peter Lupus was not shy about displaying his physique.  A frequent model for muscle magazines, he  was a Playgirl centerfold.in 1974.

CHIPS: The episode where Leif Garrett is in love with his agent

Speaking of Leif Garrett, did you know that he fell in love in on CHiPs in 1979?

He plays Jimmy Tyler, a burnt-out rock star who is involved in a traffic accident. As he lies in his hospital bed, his manager, Frank Balford (Bill Daily of The Bob Newhart Show), rushes in a panic to his side. They argue: Jimmy accuses Frank of being all business, insufficiently attentive to his needs, and Frank retorts that he should be grateful that someone cares enough to handle the thousands of details necessary to maintain a rock star. They break up. Frank is heartbroken, but won’t admit it. Instead, he falls into the incoherence that we have seen often in actors and writers trying to express something that lies hidden in the depths of their characters.

Frank: When you’ve been with someone as long as I’ve been with him. . .he’s been with me. . . .

Ponch: [Helpfully.] You’ve been together.

Frank: I produced the first song he ever wrote.

Ponch: “Give In.”

Frank: That’s what brought us together. [Bitterly.] It used to mean something to him.

Ponch: Maybe it still does. If you walk away, you’ll never know.

The middle aged, less than dashing Bill Daily seems an odd choice for true love, but Daily was no stranger to gay-vague roles, and Leif’s characters often displayed romantic interest in older, less-than-dashing men.

The implication that they are a romantic couple intensifies when Jimmy, distraught over the break up, pulls his Ferrari to the side of the highway because he is crying too hard too drive; such hysterics seem somewhat odd for terminating a business relationship.

“It’s confusion in my head, trying to work things out,” Jimmy explains to the solicitous Ponch and Jon, his incoherence matching Frank’s. 

 Officer Jon invites him back to his apartment – why not Ponch, who invites stray boys home in every other episode? Maybe Ponch’s dazzling smile and tightly-packed uniform was too potent to combine with an androgyne with big hair and tightly-packed chinos. Even so, when Jon and Jimmy appear chummy in bathrobes the next morning, drinking milk, it is hard not to imagine that they are immersed in a “morning after” glow.

Jimmy soon realizes that he is lost, both personally and professionally, without Frank, but there will have to be some changes made before he is willing to take him back. “I feel things!” he exclaims. “I’m not just a piece of merchandise!” (Surely the original line was “piece of meat.”)

Officers Ponch and Jon, who like many sitcom stars have little else to do but engineer romances, devise a complex scheme to reunite the couple. Jon talks Jimmy into performing at “Skate with the Stars,” a charity roller disco exposition, and Ponch importunes Frank to attend with some of his celebrity friends. Neither realizes that the other will be there. Frank enters as Jimmy is singing “Give In,” the song that brought them together (coincidentally featured:

Give in to all the fire in your heart.

You know I want to enter every part

Of your heart and soul.

Let yourself go, give in.

Though Frank turns abruptly to leave and Ponch has to restrain him, his eyes mist up at the memory of Jimmy entering “every part” of his. . .um. . .heart and soul.  

 After some “what’s he doing here!” posturing, the officers literally shove the two together. Frank promises that he’ll “hire some people” so it won’t be just business anymore; they’ll “spend some time together." They hug – not a tepid Hollywood grab, but a weepy, full-body, head-nuzzling, never-letting-go hug. 

 The camera pans out to freeze-shots of Jon grinning, Ponch leering, and then Jon looking embarrassed when he sees the two still clinched.

 “I think we can let them go,” Jon says.

Only then does the hug break, and the actors shake hands. This seems to be a mistake, an out of character Leif telling Bill Daily “it was a pleasure working with you.” The last image we should see, the image has remained fixed in my mind, is of the two men, certainly lovers, holding each other tightly.

The Three Jacksons

During the late 1990s,  there were three teen idols named Jackson vying for a place in the hearts of gay boys and heterosexual girls.  All three had the wholesome, innocent quality that preteens and tweens find dreamy, and all three played in some movies with gay characters.

Before you start making homophobic comments: I am not stating that they are personally gay, or that they personally played gay characters.  I am merely stating that they appeared in movies or tv series which contained gay characters.

At the time even teen magazines sometimes got them mixed up.  

1. Joshua Jackson (born 1978).  Starred in Dawson's Creek (1998-2003) with John Wesley Shipp, plus:
 Apt Pupil (1998): Brad Renfro has a homoerotic subtext.
Cruel Intentions (1999): Joshua plays a gay stereotype.
The Skulls (2000): homoerotic buddy bonding.
The Laramie Project (2002): gay themed
Lone Star State of Mind (2003):  a movie with gay characters in it.
Cursed (2005): a movie with gay characters in it.

Distinguishing characteristics:not photographed shirtless very often; not particularly buffed or tanned, but still quite attractive. Still popular, star of the heterosexist paranormal sci-fi series Fringe.  Strong gay ally.  Appeared in the GLAAD Media Awards.

2. Jeremy Jackson (born 1980). Played on Baywatch (1991-1999) as Hobie, son of head lifeguard David Hasselhoff, plus:
Ring of Darkness (2004):  gay character.
DTLA (2012): tv series about gay men.

Distinguishing characteristics: always shirtless, always tanned.  Bodybuilder's physique. Doesn't mind semi-nude shots; guest Chippendale dancer. Conservative Evangelical Christian who is pro-gay.

3. Jonathan Jackson (born 1982). Starred as Lucky on General Hospital (1993-1999), plus:
The Deep End of the Ocean (1999): gay character
Trapped in a Purple Haze (2000); gay character


Raised Seventh-Day Adventist, converted to Eastern Orthodox Christianity.  Doesn't like gay people. ( I got this from an interview in which he stated that he wouldn't work with gay people. )

The Lost Boys: Cory Haim's Bubble Bath

The Lost Boys (1987) was directed by Joel Schumacher, who is gay, and starred teen idol Corey Haim, who was widely rumored to be gay at the time. The plot, about high schooler Sam Emerson (Corey) discovering that his older brother  Michael (Jason Patric) has been seduced by androgynous vampire David (Kiefer Sutherland), is overloaded with homoromantic same-sex bonds: Sam and and Michael, Michael and David, Sam and the vampire-hunting teen Frog (played by Corey's real-life best friend, Corey Feldman).


There are endless beefcake scenes and vows of same-sex commitment, but only one act of heterosexual intercourse, with Michael's body on display and the woman's hidden from view, instead of the usual scenes of a nude woman atop a fully-clothed man. Surely even the most oblivious heterosexual can find such blatant slippages and subtexts!

But not one of the nearly 200 user reviews on the Internet Movie Database or nearly 500 fans who posted to a Lost Boys message board noticed the beefcake, the lack of attention to girls, or the many homoromantic bonds.

 One fan did ask “Is Sam gay?” and as evidence, pointed out that:
1. He has a poster of contemporary heartthrob Rob Lowe on his bedroom wall
2. He wears a “Born to Shop” T-shirt
3. He takes bubble baths
4. He has a pet dog.
5. He sings an old novelty song with the line “I’m a lonely girl, ain’t got a man.”
That is, he uses gender-transgressive behavior (like owning a dog?) as proof.



But even those broadly-drawn gender-transgressions are lost on most fans. One stated, “I’ve seen that movie probably somewhere around fifty times, and never once stopped to think that [Sam] was supposed to be gay.”  They never stop to think that any fictional character is gay, unless he is Wearing a Sign.

 Fans commenting on the "Is Sam gay?" post enthusiastically pointed out that Sam was not Wearing a Sign, so he must necessarily be taken as heterosexual.

About the beefcake poster: “It was his grandfather’s idea, to give him a manly role model! It has nothing to do with being gay!” (Would Grandpa really consider androgynous prettyboy Rob Lowe a better candidate for displaying machismo than contemporary man-mountains like Arnold Schwarzeneggar, Sylvester Stallone or Chuck Norris?)

 About the “Born to Shop” t-shirt: “It was the fashion in 1987! It has nothing to do with being gay!”

Or they bring up the  myth that only adults are gay: "He’s fifteen years old, too young to be gay!”

Or the myth of the Discovery of Girls: “He hasn’t begun to notice girls yet, it doesn’t mean he’s gay!”

Anything they can think of that helps them keep on believing that the world of fiction belongs to heterosexuals only.

See also: Tad Hilgenbrink, Corey Haim for the 2000s.; and Clarence: Gay Characters on Kids' TV.