Bill Cable: 1980s nude model and gay porn performer, boyfriend of Elvira and Pee-Wee Herman, rock star in "Basic Instinct"

If you grew up in a heteronormative desert, like most gay boys in the 1970s, with nude and even shirtless guys vanishingly rare in magazines, movies, and tv, West Hollywood in the 1980s was a Paradise.  You could buy a dozen glossy, full-color magazines aimed at gay men with every conceivable taste and interest:

Drummer for leather and BDSM

Blueboy for dating advice

Mandate for muscle

In Touch for humor 

Inches for...well, you get the idea.

All of them were illustrated by full-page and centerfold photos of men, artistic and raunchy, always naked, sometimes aroused.  

You saw this guy everywhere, but probably didn't realize that Cable, Stoner, and Bigg John were all the same model.  Now we know.

He was Bill Cable, born William  Laurence Cumpanas in northern Indiana in 1946.  His grandparents were from Dalmatia (now part of Croatia), and he grew up with a strong sense of his Croatian identity,   

His family moved to Los Angeles in 1950.  He played football at North Hollywood High School and the University of Nevada, but a  massive head injury forced him to quit.  In 1970, he returned Los Angeles to pursue a new career as a model.

Bill modeled in all of the famous gay magazines of the 1970s and 1980s, plus gay porn pictorials for Colt Studios and The Athletic Model Guild.  

He also appeared in straight porn pictorials, mainstream fashion ads, and the influential After Dark magazine.  And in gay postcards, which you bought with no intention of actually mailing.

He posed nude in Playgirl three times, for:

"Long Cool Summer" (July 1973)

Victoriana (November 1974)

"Beauty and the Beast" (May 1975)

Bill's movie career began with a non-speaking role as a leatherman with a whip in the gay porn Bijou (1972).  Next came some collaborations with straight pornographer Carlos Tobalina: Last Tango in Acapulco (1973), Jungle Blue (1978), and Flesh and Bullets (1985).

Sometime in the early 1970s, Bill and Carlos wrote, directed, and starred in  What's Love (restored in 1987), "which deals with the themes of romantic obsession and Christian blasphemy."  From the various synopsses, it appears that, Carlos plays a cop who gets in touch with a magical self.  Bill as Jesus seduces him and his wife. 

More after the break

Dane's Polar Plunge: A 365 day Lake Tahoe Challenge. With Scott Gaffney, Danish dicks, and nude guys at Notre Dame

 

I don't usually do profiles of non-actors, but this is amazing.  His name is Dane, he's a student at North Tahoe High School, and he's jumping into Lake Tahoe every day for a year.   Even on Day 190: Water temperature 39.3, air temperature 32.  That's Fahrenheit. 

 

Day 173: Gray, cloudy. Water temperature 37.3, air 33.0.  Dane walked through the snow-- barefoot! -- toward his icy plunge.

On Day 184, he brought his Dad, professional skiier Scott Gaffney Water temperature 48.5, air 55.

On Day 120, he brought the North Tahoe High School Varsity Basketball Team -- at least the ones brave enough to try. Water temperature 39 degrees, air with wind chill 19.  

The Wildflour Baking Company in Tahoe donated some donuts.  How about space heaters?

I can't imagine being interested in the aesthetics of the penis after all that icy plunging, but here are some guys running naked through the snow.

More after the break.  Caution: Icy.

A classic gay-subtext romance in "Godzilla v. Kong: The New Empire." Plus some penises, of course.

 

For Movie Night this week, we sawGodzilla v. Kong: The New Empire (2024).

I didn't actually understand what was going on most of the time:

 There was a Hollow Earth, which you can only get to through a space warp.

A Lost Civilization that predates anything on the surface, where people communicate through telepathy and use crystals to manipulate matter and antimatter.

A Chosen One.

A tribe of giant apes that live next to a volcano, and keep a giant glowing stegasaurus captive.  King Kong joins them, becomes their leader after fighting an evil dude, and adopts a baby ape.

Another giant stegasaurus, which fights King Kong in Egypt and takes out the Great Pyramid of Giza.

Nearby Cairo is an Orientalist myth instead of a modern city with skyscrapers and Starbucks.  

Is that a gay couple?

A giant glowing moth.

A fight between the two dinosaurs and two apes that takes out Rio de Janiero.

I guess you just have to say "Look!  Monsters fighting!"

Five people go to the Hollow Earth to check on Disturbances in the Force or something.

1. Mikael (Alex Fern, top photo), the driver of the transport vehicle, who gets eaten by a man-eating plant right away.  

2. Ilene Andrews, an expert on the Iwi Culture of Skull Island, where King Kong lived before he moved to the Hollow Earth.

3. Her adopted daughter Ji, the last of her tribe, who doesn't speak.

4. Tripper (Dan Stevens, left), a roguish, devil-may-care monster veterinarian.  

5. Conspiracy theory podcaster Bernie (Brian Tyree Henry).

When Tripper shows up, you assume he's going to be smooching with Ilene by fadeout.  That's what happens in 300,000 action adventure movies, right?  

Nope.  He mentions that they were friends in college, but gives no hint of a past or present relationship. Instead, he starts flirting with Podcaster Bernie, who is suspicious at first but warms up to him.

They hug.

More after the break

Shane Gray: Stunt performer, pole vaulter, boy scout, man's man, with a potential p*enis and locker room hijinks

  

I was running low on Righteous Gemstones cast members to profile, so I checked the stunt performers for Episode 4.1, and found Shane Gray.

He was fun to research because there are a lot of Shane Grays in the world -- an African musician, an Arkansas "husband and father," a baseball player, someone who is recently deceased and extensively mourned on Facebook,  plus the fictional Shane Gray of Camp Rock, played by Joe Jonas.

Our Shane Gray is a "Stunt Man, Stunt Rigger, Action Actor, Eagle Scout."  

He attended Thousand Oaks High School, where he was a pole vaulter and had an entry in the Westlake Village Student Art Show.  He graduated in 2022.

He works with his father,  Jason Gray, another "husband and father" who runs his own rigging company and has 200 stunt jobs listed on the IMDB. 

In-your-face heteronormativity?  That explains why I didn't profile Jason.  Plus he has no beefcake photos.  Shane does.

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The IMDB lists five stunt jobs for Shane.

He was a stunt rigger for the music video Die for You, by The Weekend (2021).

Fire safety in an episode of American Horror Story (2022): he gets set on fire.

Utility stunts in Fade to Black (upcoming), a horror movie starring John Carroll Lynch, Thomas Barbusca, Gavin Leatherwood, and Scott Evans.

Utility stunts in The Wolf and the Lamb (upcoming), a Western starring Zach McGowan (left), Eric Nelsen, Mike Manning, and Elias Kacavas

Stunt performer in The Righteous Gemstones Episode 4.1 (2025)

Shane has a very brief Facebook page, some newspaper articles about his boy scouting and pole vaulting, and a Youtube Channel with some audition videos.  Here he auditions for the role of Monkey D. Luffy at the Universal Fan Fest 2025.

N*de photos after the break