Back to "Blue Lagoon": Christopher Atkins's Killer Smile

An autographed photo of Christopher Atkins nude to his treasure trail (OK, campy gay word, but I like it) shows a defiant, self-assured young man who might have modeled for those Roman coins at the time of Hadrian's beatification and euhemerization of his dead beloved, Antinous.  Atkins was fresh and wholesome in his early breakout film, The Blue Lagoon, and every gay and bisexual male in America was eager to see what kind of actor would be introduced to the world by an out gay director.  When Atkins transformed the young and hung partner of Brooke Shields into an adult sexy Ladies Only dancer in his next film, A Night in Heaven, his body had matured and was in league with that of any of today's superheroes.  And he still had that killer smile.  A night in heaven, indeed.

James Dean, "Gadge," and Mr. Ray

James Dean with Dick Davalos in East of Eden

James Dean, as much an American icon as Presley or Brando, worked with three American film directors whose personalities could not have been more contradictory.  As far as I know, only Nicholas Ray (Rebel Without a Cause) had a seemingly bisexual instinct, but the director who, knowingly or not, got closest to that element in Dean's makeup was Elia Kazan.  (George Stevens had to work with a miscasting, as it is easier to cast an older man to play a younger one than vice-versa, but in the early scenes, Jett Rink is an earthy, seethingly sexual beast.)  East of Eden by Steinbeck was made for Dean, whose most played type was the misunderstood youth.  This made him accessible and appealing to youth in general, just as it played to the fantasies of gay and bisexual youth in particular.

I talked my mom into buying me a red nylon windbreaker because every male at school seemed to be getting one.  Dean wore one in Rebel.  "Chicken race" became the hottest topic of conversation in high school hallways.  (Few if any kids actually tried it, one suspects.)  And although the relationship of Dean and Sal Mineo in that film only hints at the latter's same sex orientation, there is nothing blatant about their scenes; the audience is focused on Dean, as Mineo is, merely as a matter of hero worship.  This is an innate tendency of us all.  But the photo above could have come out of a 21st century movie it is so suggestive: two young, good-looking men, perhaps after having sex, relax in their room.  A young person unfamiliar with Dean -- or with this particular film -- might immediately leap to that conclusion.  The recorder is so obviously phallic and it is in close vicinity to the crotch.  Davalos looked well-fucked or merely exhausted from the fucking.  I'd like to have the studio still.

Mineo met a tragic end when he got into S&M and was murdered by rough trade (or rough something).  He did some remarkable work in theatre, e.g. mounting the Miguel Pinero play, Short Eyes, a harrowing tale of a child molester in general population of a prison.  Mineo was an out gay male.  That could easily explain his absence from the screen in later years.  Perhaps, now that Obama has OK'd same sex marriages, Hollywood will drop its pretense to being a "family" industry and allow more LGBT actors better participation, even roles written with "normal"  LGBT characters.  No, "normal" doesn't mean "good."  I'd love to see some really brilliant gay or lesbian antagonists.

A Half Century of Infatuation with Alain Delon

My earliest obsessions were males.  The Boy Scout Manual had plenty of boys my age, and there were musclemen magazines I would hide on shelves of my bedroom until my mom discovered them and pretended her son was not queer.  The movies yielded idols aplenty, from Jody McCrae to Tab Hunter, but always I adored the pretty boys; not Presley, who for some reason did not appeal to me, but men like Alain Delon and Tony Perkins, both rumored to be bisexual (Perkins died of AIDS and was linked to Mr. Hunter, who "double-dated" with Tony so that Confidential magazine would be thrown off the scent of scandal).  I cannot recall the first time I saw Delon, but I was instantly infatuated: a fan.  I still think of him as the prettiest man ever born, and when I say "pretty" I mean handsome. (The very fact that I must use words to say anything admits of their uselessness.)  It's tomato/toma'to, this pretty vs. handsome, for too many people a Harrison Ford is handsome, and he left me cold even in his youthful roles, a kind of "Establishment" type.  I will post photos of pretty men and comment on them from time to time.

Although I would not see it until many years after its release, Count Luchino Visconti's Rocco e i suoi fratelli (Rocco and His Brothers, 1960) showed a youthful Delon at his most beautiful.  There was a frank homosexual subplot in the film: one of Rocco's fratelli is a skilled but amateur boxer whose career is guided by a wealthy promoter who attempts to seduce him.  Cinematographer Giuseppi Rotunno captures Delon's physical attractiveness better than any lighting cameraman since.  Delon was only 25 when he made the film and a relative newcomer, his most important screen role previously being Tom Ripley in Rene Clement's Purple Noon (remade as The Talented Mr. Ripley, from the novel by lesbian author Patricia Highsmith).