Jeff East: Tom Sawyer's boyfriend, Disney teen, young Superman, naked fratboy, Pumpkinhead prey.

If you were young in the 1970s, Sunday night meant either church or The Wonderful World of Disney, countless movies set in the wilderness chopped up into 40-minute segments.  It was dreadful, but at least you got to see a cadre of teenagers personally selected by Walt or Roy Disney to represent "youthful masculinity":  Tommy Kirk, Kurt Russell, Tim Considine, James MacArthur.  

And if you could tell your fundamentalist, "movies are sinful" parents that you were going to the library downtown and sneak into a matinee, you could see Jeff East and Johnny Whitaker playng boyfriends.

Born in 1957 in Kansas City, Jeff had virtually no acting experience when he was chosen from among 1,000 hopefuls in open auditions to play Huckleberry Finn in Tom Sawyer (1973), with Johnny Whitaker as Tom.

They appeared together again in Huckleberry Finn (1974), with a romance that would be impossibly overt today.

Plus they both showed bare chests and bare butts, which would never be permitted today.  

Jeff went on three Wonderful World of Disney movies about big animals.  Disney loved animal stars.

Return of the Big Cat (1974): he has to save his sister from a cougar.

The Flight of the Grey Wolf (1975): he tries to re-introduce a wolf into the wild.  Nobody flies.

The Ghost of Cypress Swamp (1977): he has to save his dog from a panther, and runs afoul of a crazy guy.

This was the era of the big name teen idols like Shawn Cassidy, and a guy who fought panthers couldn't compete.  Jeff got very little attention in the teen magazines.

Jeff moved on to his first "adult" role as a college student who participates in a deadly hazing in The Hazing (1977),  also released as The Case of the Campus Corpse to make it seem like a comedy.  

Again he takes everything off -- he spends about half the movie in nothing but a revealing jockstrap.

Displaying his butt again.

And he has a painfully intense, gay-subtext romance with his costar, fellow college student Charles Martin Smith.

 

Charles Martin Smith's butt in Never Cry Wolf (1983), about a government researcher living with wolves.  

What's with these guys and their wildlife?

More butts after the break

Tony's Hot/Hung Photos, Part 3: An enormous cock, Adam Devine, Corey B's sausage, and Mickey Mouse

This is a collection of hot or humorous photos of Tony Cavalero, best known as Dewey on The School of Rock,  Ozzie Ozbourne in Dirt, and Keefe on The Righteous Gemstones, with a few of his friends

1. Sorry, Tony, a cold dip before the hookup is a deal-breaker.

2. I don't care if Adam offered to join us...wait...

3. Mickey Mouse is a muscle fan.

4. And Tony is into Rodent Boys.

5. What happens in Disneyland, stays in Disneyland

6. Is it too late for that cold dip and hookup?

More after the break.  Caution: Explicit.

Shia LaBeouf: From gay-subtext teencom to heterosexual porn. At least he shows us his dick a lot.

Even Stevens (2000-2003) was one of the first, and best, of the Disney Channel teencoms, featuring middle-school boyfriends Louis and Twitty (Shia LaBeouf, A.J. Trauth).  Episode plots emphasize their romance:

Louis becomes jealous when Twitty starts hanging out with a girl.

Louis becomes jealous when Twitty starts hanging out with a boy.

Louis becomes a celebrity, straining his relationship with Twitty.

 I remember an episode where they were sitting together on the couch, not on opposite ends like most people, but squeezed in with their thighs pressing together.  "They're not even trying to hide it," I thought.  

Add Nick Spano as a hunky older brother and Fred Meyers as older sister's swishy bff, and you have a gay-subtext classic. 

Seasons change, teencoms are cancelled, and the actors move on.  Nick Spano, top photo, majored in English literature at UCLA and now runs the Re/Creation Cafe.  

AJ Trauth, left, lives in Ohio. 

Fred Meyers is a paramedic.

As far as I can tell, they're all heterosexual in real life.

And what about Louis Stevens, Shia LaBeouf?

He moved into dark, depressing indies about lost, dying, grieving, and enraged youth:

A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints: as his friends are killed or kill themselves, Shia believes that he is protected by the saints.

Bobby: The night of Robert Kennedy's assassination

Disturbia. A teen under house arrest "rear-windows" a serial killer.

When he veered into science fiction, as in Transformers, it was always a boy and a girl gazing into each other's eyes forever.

He shows his penis on screen for the first time in the 2012 music video Sigur Rós: Fjögur píanó, which looks Icelandic but is actually in English.  It's about a boy and a girl gazing into each other's eyes forever.

More dick and a Catholic priest after the break

The Jonas Brothers: I wanna be like you

 

The Jonas Brothers, consisting of Nick (born 1992), Joe (born 1989, left), and Kevin (born 1987), were already popular performers, recording several albums and appearing on MTV, the Cartoon Network, and Nickelodeon --  not to mention the White House -- before Disney took notice around 2006.

But after that the group was a Disney Channel juggernaut, recording new versions of movie classics like "I Want to Be Like You" (from The Jungle Book), appearing on Hannah Montana and Camp Rock, and finally getting two tv series of their own, The Jonas Brothers: Living the Dream (2008-2010) and Jonas (2009-2010).

That didn't keep them from releasing new songs: 14 singles and 16 music videos between 2005 and 2010, plus two more in 2013.

And from releasing beefcake photos.  Like Justin Bieber, they drew the special interest of fans looking for random arousal.  Joe seemed especially vulnerable; his moments were tagged "joners."

Like most boy bands, their lyrics were heterosexist, with lots of "girl! girl! girl!"  But some dropped pronouns.  And their version of  "I Wanna Be Like You"  sounds decidedly homoerotic:

What I desire is man's red fire
To make my dream come true
Give me the secret, mancub
Clue me what to do
Give me the power of man's red flower
So I can be like you

I wouldn't mind getting a little of that power of man's red flower myself.

The brothers are gay allies.   In an interview with The Advocate in 2012, Nick (left) noted that they loved their gay fans: "They’ve been incredible over the years. My brothers and I totally look forward to meeting them, because they really respond to our style."

In 2013 they appeared on the cover of Out magazine.

Their boy band days are long past, but Jonas Brothers are stil performing together.  Joe has also embarked on a solo career, and appeared as himself in tv shows like Dash and Lily and The Righteous Gemstones.

Joe nude, sort of, after the break