Denny Miller: Gilligan's Island, Tarzan, Quark, frontal nudity, and moments of gay promise

 

Picture it: a blustery October day sometime in the 7th or 8th grade. I am sitting in the living room after school with my brother and sister, drinking hot chocolate and watching a rerun of Gilligan's Island (1964-67), the sitcom about "seven stranded castaways" on a tropical island.  Visitors from the outside world drop by in almost every episode, and promise to help, but something always goes wrong.  This time, in the episode "Big Man on Little Stick" (February 20, 1965), the visitor is Duke Williams, a blond muscleman in bulging cut-off jeans -- he was caught in a tsunami and surfed the 250 miles from Hawaii (just go with it).  

I am overwhelmed by joy.  I have seen shirtless men in comic books, and in Tarzan movies, but never on tv, and Duke Williams is beautiful!  I can't take my eyes off him.

It gets better: Duke could surf back to Hawaii and send help, but he doesn't want to, because he likes the girls, Ginger and Mary Anne.  So the castaways have to convince him that they already have boyfriends.  The Professor has no trouble kissing Ginger, but Gilligan doesn't like girls; Mary Anne has to grab him by the ears to force a kiss.    

(Spoiler alert: when he gets back to Hawaii, Duke hits his head on a rock and forgets about the castaways, so they're still stranded.)

Wait -- my parents, teacher, Sunday school teacher, everyone tells me again and again that someday soon, I will "discover" girls, drop my same-sex pals and pictures of musclemen instantly and without hesitation, and devote the rest of my life to the pursuit of feminine curves and smiles.  It happens to every boy.  There is no escape. Yet  Gilligan -- played by Bob Denver, a thirty year old man -- has escaped. 

Duke Williams, played by Denny Miller, becomes an icon of hope.

I don't remember seeing Denny Miller in anything else, but I probably did.  He has a very full biography on the IMDB: Born in Bloomington, Indiana in 1934 as Scott Miller, grew up in Silver Spring, Maryland and Baldwin, New York, and Los Angeles.  He received a full scholarship to play basketball for UCLA.  He was discovered by a talent scout during his senior year (1956), and cast in Some Came Running (1958) with Dean Martin.

Next came a modern, up-to-date beach boy Tarzan the Ape Man (1959). It was apparently a poor knockoff that he filmed in eight weeks, with most of the jungle scenes grabbed from Johnny Weissmuller movies.  Still, he bragged that he was the sixth in the grand tradition of movie Tarzans.

Including the silent era, it's Elmo Lincoln (1918), Gene Pollar ( 1920), Dempsey Tablar (1920), James Pierce (1927), Frank Merrill (1928-29), Johnny Weissmuller (1932-1948), Lex Barker (1949-1953), and Gordon Scott (1955-1960), so Denny was #9.

At some point he changed his name to Denny Miller, and got a string of guest spots, mostly in tv Westerns:  Overland Trail, Have Gun -- Will Travel, Riverboat, Laramie, The Rifleman. He may have also made ends meet with physique photography in the burgeoning early 1960s gay subculture.

More after the break. Caution: Explicit.

Joe Canoli's canoli: frontal nudity and erotic promise from the groovy 1960s

Readers were asking about Joe Canoli, one of the random hunks in the Season 2 Gemstone Memes. 

Walter Kudzincz, born in 1925, began photographing his well-hung buddies and boyfriends, establishing a catalog of guys in skimpy outfits pretending to be cowboys, pirates, or gladiators, trying to avoid being overtly homoerotic, as was required by the strict censorship and intense homophobia of 1950s society.    You could get them via mail order, or in "fitness" magazines like Physique Pictorial and Tomorrow's Man.  

In 1952 Walt met Jim Stryker, an 18-year old recent high school graduate, pranking his friend by urinating on him from a tree branch.  Stryker became his friend, lover, and the top-selling model in the gay male subculture for the next ten years.

In 1962, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that male nudity was not necessarily obscene, and in 1965, magazines began printing frontal nudity, allowing Walt to challenge the "chaste," closeted gay models of the earlier generation.  It was the era of the psychedelics revolution, the sexual revolution, the youth counterculture, and the more open, out gay subcultures that would culminate in Stonewall and the Gay Rights Movement.  The modern gay man was willing to admit that he liked to look at cocks as well as muscles.

So Walt's Champion Studio models got naked.  Sometimes their photos were campy and cool, brightly colored, "mod," groovy.  Sometimes they made fun of the posing-strap cowboys and football players of the uptight 1950s.  Sometimes they were unabashedly erotic.  

I'm covering a lot about the life of Walt Kudzincz because I have found almost nothing about Joe Canoli.  This  is the earliest photo I could find, taken between 1962 , when rear nudity was permitted, and 1965, when you were allowed to go frontal. 

More after the break