"Welcome to Derry": "It" prequel with interesting monsters, Cold War paranoia, 1960s racism, and "bury your gays."

 

I've seen the 1990 miniseries and the 2017/2019 movie adaptions of Stephen King's It, with Tim Curry and Bill Skarsgard (left), respectively, playing the transdimensional "destroyer of worlds" who animates every 27 years to kill kids.  The original novel has a gay character (buried right away), and the 2017/2019 adaption has a gay-subtext guy, played by Jack Dylan Grazer and James Ransone, who sort of comes out in a blink-and-you-miss-it gesture. 

So I don't have high hopes for the tv series Welcome to Derry (2025).  The usual Stephen King heavily closeted and buried-right-away traditions will be compounded by the setting: 1962 (every 27 years, remember?).  But we'll give it a look.

Scene 1: The Music Man (1962) is playing on the big screen.  Young teenager Matty (Miles Eckhardt), sucking on a pacifier, watches.  Manager Cal yells at him for sneaking in without paying, and chases him into the lobby.  A girl covers for him (always kind, nurturing girls and blustering, bullying boys, innit?).  

Notice that it's Christmastime (actually January 4, 1962), and Matty has a black eye, signifying that he's a victim of abuse (obviously --what Stephen King kid hasn't been abused?)

Matty runs out into the snow, past a billboard reading "Welcome to Derry, Birthplace of Paul Bunyan.

Several towns claim to be the birthplace of the folk hero, including Ankely, Minnesota (where they hold Paul Bunyan days every summer), and Bangor, Maine.

Left: Camper at the Bunyan festival.

Matty hitchhikes, and is picked up by a male-female couple, a Wednesday Addams-looking girl, and a young boy who spells out everythiing; "L-I-E-S,"  Not R-E-D-R-U-M? Asked where he's going, Matt says "Anywhere but Derry."

Weird family, bragging that the daughter is "our little harlot," and having the boy spell scary words like "necrosis," "kidnapping," "strangulation," and "cadaver."  "I want out!" Matty screams, and they repeat "Out! Out! Out!"  

Mom gives birth to a bloody bat-winged thing that flies around and attacks everyone before deciding to kill Matty.  

A very impressive scene. But what's with introducing a major character, then killing him off?

Scene 2: Four months later, April 1962.  A Femme Boy  is making a list of the fighter planes that fly by.  

The plane lands, and two soldiers get out: Russo and Hanlon (Jovan Adepo, seen here with his boyfriend in Watchmen). Russo complains about being stationed in small-town Derry, where nothing exciting ever happens, har har.  But the Big Boss notes that as the northernmost air force base in the U.S., it's essential to monitor Soviet air space and prep for Cold War era-nuclear war.  Wasn't Alaska a state in 1962?  

Hanlon has rented a house in town; he and the Missus are longing for "normal."

"Well, if normal is what you're looking for, you're going to love Derry."  Har-har.

Scene 3: Cut to the "idyllic" small town.  A year after Bay of Pigs led the world to the brink of nuclear war, everyone is on edge. At the high school, they practice "duck and cover."

A teen girl walks through the halls, getting stared at and pranked by jars of pickles.  Her friend consoles her.

Meanwhile, Femme Boy tells his boyfriend Teddy (Mikkal Karim Fidler), "We're not alone in the universe."  He doesn't mean gay people, seven years before Stonewall -- he means aliens.  Maybe they have one hidden in the Derry Air Base.  Boyfriend thinks he's crazy.  

"Teddy sucks balls" on his locker. Homophobic or all-purpose slur?

"Did you study for the test?"

"What's the point, when World War III is imminent?"

Femme Boy is played by Jack Molloy Legault, who fills his instagram with photos of his girlfriend (except for this one with the director).  But I assume that Mikkel Karim Fidler is gay in real life because, when his talent agency got him tickets to the advance screening of Karate Kid: Legends, his date was a boy. 

More after the break.  Caution: Explicit.

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