I learn about gay sex in the church parking lot

 


When I was a kid, our Nazarene church had only one preacher, whose main job was screaming and banging the pulpit for an hour three times a week (researching and writing sermons is more time-consuming than you may think).  

But when I was in ninth grade, we got a Youth Minister, in charge of kid and teen activities like Junior Joys, Nazarene Young People's Society, the Afterglow (a party after the Sunday evening service), and Canvassing (going door to door to witness).

The Preacher might be elderly, but the Youth Minister had to be young, cool, and attractive enough to keep kids interested.  Ours was Brother Bob, fresh out of Olivet, in his early 20s, tall, with enormously broad shoulders, a barrel chest, and gigantic hands.

Unfortunately, I never saw him shirtless -- he always wore a suit and tie, the Nazarene equivalent of a clerical collar.  But when I went down to the altar to get saved or sanctified, he came down and wrapped his huge hard arm around me, and I could feel his hard barrel chest against my back.

You could hardly miss the gigantic Mortadella+ swinging around in his pants every time he moved. Particularly in NYPS, when we were kneeling to pray, and he walked from person to person to see if we needed help: his crotch was exactly at eye level.  And at least once, when he hugged me after altar call, I felt it press against me like a salami stuffed in his pants.

One Sunday night at the beginning of tenth grade, I walked out into the parking lot during altar call to escape from the frenetic shouting, and saw Terry and Dave, twelfth grade best buddies, talking in the shadowy area by the church bus.

Dave was a member of church royalty, with perfectly cut black hair, perfect teeth, and an athletic physique.  
Terry was slim, with dirty-blond hair almost too shaggy to meet Nazarene standards, an aspiring Gospel singer from an unsaved family.  He backslid every few weeks and had to go down to the altar again.

I didn't usually associate with twelfth graders -- the three year age gap seemed unbreachable.  But I had to say "hello," or they might think I was spying on them.

"Ten inches, easy!" Dave was saying.  "Brother Bob's is bigger than Brother Dino's by a long shot.  No way it's happening!"

"I'm telling you, she's got nothing to worry about," Terry countered.

They were discussing a man's dick!  "Have you guys really seen Brother Bob down there?" I asked.

"I have!" Dave said. "Just before NYPS tonight -- he was at the urinal next to me in the bathroom. Man, that guy's a giant!  Bigger than Brother Dino!  Sister Cindy could never take all that -- it would break her in half."

Like all preachers, Brother Bob was married -- to Sister Cindy, very short, slim,  petite. His hand could almost fit around her waist.  They were like Fred and Wilma Flintstone.

"Oh, and you think going down on it will work better?" Terry asked.  "The mouth is smaller than the [vagina], wise guy!"

Go down on it? 

"I'm hung like a horse," Dave said. "Girls are always saying 'oh, it's too big, it hurts'!  But they go down on it with no problem at all."

"Let's let the kid decide."  Terry turned to me and put his hand on my shoulder.  "Say you were a lady, and your guy had extra-extra-extra large equipment."

I imagined Brother Bob, naked, his muscles damp with sweat, his enormous uncut Mortadella aroused and waiting.

More after the break

Modern Family Episode 5.17: Gay stereotyping, traditional gender roles, Adam Devine, and a nude Dylan bonus

 


I watched the first five seasons of Modern Family (2009-2014), but stopped when we moved to streaming services.  Back then, I posted about rampant gay stereotyping and explicit homophobia, especially with Adam Devine (Andy the Nanny). I don't remember why, so to check, I reviewed Episode 5.17 (2014), the last before the two-part season finale.

Note: There are 12 members of the Modern Family, so pairs and trios split up for separate plots.  Although they are scattered through the episodes, I will cover them separately.

Set-Up: Family dinner at Patriarch Jay's house.  He suggests watching basketball next, adding with a sneer that his adult son Mitchell wouldn't be interested because he is gay.  Mitchell counters: "Unlike you, I don't need a reason to watch men in shorts."  The possibility that men might find basketball players attractive ruins the game for Jay.  Forget Andy -- Jay is the homophobic one!  


The A Plot:
Mitchel and Cam, the gay couple, and teenagers Manny and Alex (a girl).   They are all going to an art museum to see a Kandinsky Exhibit.  Jay finds it inconceivable that a straight boy would be interested in art.

On the way, they criticize the rest of the family's lack of refinement.  Jay buys his books at the grocery store!  The best way to get Claire to fall asleep is to show her a movie with subtitles!  

Then they discover that the Kandinsky exhibit is closed!  Problem: Cameron doesn't know anything about art, so he read up on Kandinsky so he wouldn't be embarrassed.  But now they're discussing Matisse, and he 's lost.  After making a fool of himself, he goes to wait in the car.  Dude, art is for everybody. They have self-guided tours and texts to help you understand everything.

 Next Mitchell reveals that he doesn't know anything about art either.  He leaves in embarrassment. Two remain.  But Manny doesn't know anything about art, either!  Why did they want to go?

 The B Plot: Claire, Gloria, and Lily.  Cam and Mitchell explain that they're out buying a flower-girl dress for their  daughter to wear at their wedding.  Why both of them?  So the dress isn't too mundane (Claire) or "cucaracha" (Gloria).  I remember cringing at the constant stereotyping. Gloria is from Colombia, depicted as a horrible country where everyone lives in absurd poverty and gets shot all the time. 

Gloria insists that Lily keep trying on dresses, because she only has sons and never gets to go dress shopping.  Claire doesn't even like dresses; she didn't wear one at her own wedding.  Gloria is shocked.  "You must try one on! Then you can go back to your boy clothes."  So Claire tries on some wedding dresses, and is transfixed by the wonderfulness of gender-normative behavior.


The C Plot:
 Jay, his teenage grandson Luke (left, recent photo).   The boy mentions that he's planning to buy a pottery wheel for his ceramics class. Jay is upset, assuming that Luke is gay, but he explains that he is taking art to meet girls. Jay points out a problem with this plan: the girls in the class will think you're gay, and not want to have sex with you. He suggests learning woodworking instead.  Wood shop was a required class for boys in my junior high.  I mostly tried to avoid being noticed, and got a D-.

In the woodshop, apprised that a tool is a table vise, Luke begins singing "Edelweiss," and Jay lays down the law: "I've already been through this with Mitchell.  This is what we're trying to prevent."  Woodworking won't keep your grandson from being gay, Dude. But he already said that he likes girls.

Jay says that he wants to teach Luke all the things he need to know to be a man, because his son Mitchell and Gloria's son Manny were both fruity, and not interested.  He demonstrates his machismo by benching 205 pounds! (wow, I can only do 180).  Impressed, Luke says: "Tell me everything you know about women."  This is super-problematic.


The D Plot:
Claire's husband Phil, her daughter Haley, the nanny Andy.  He is trying to think of a romantic anniversary gift for his girlfriend, who is deployed out in the Coast Guard. Maybe banana bread?  Phil suggests making her a video instead, depicting all of the things he's willing to do for her.

First up:  pretending to be swimming underwater with sharks (no beefcake).  Whoops, Haley walks into the frame, ruining it!   She suggests a visit instead, but the girlfriend is doesn't get shore leave very often. 

Andy's face is shining, so Phil goes off to fetch some makeup.  He is careful to specify that it's his WIFE's makeup, so Andy won't think that he's gay.  What's with the homophobia? 

Haley's date is late.  Andy gets all conciliatory: "that's rude.  A real man would be more considerate of the most incredibly beautiful, wonderful woman on the face of the Earth."  You have a girlfriend, remember?

More after the break

Eight Penises and Packages of South Carolina


 The Righteous Gemstones is set in Rogers, South Carolina, either a stand-in for Charleston or a suburb.  I've visited Charleston, Walterboro (about an hour west) and other cities several times, most recently in October 2022  (no Gemstones sites -- I was not yet aware that the show existed).  Here are some photos of South Carolina penises and packages that I may or may not have seen in real life

The nude photos are all from public websites or posted with permission of the subject.

1.Walterboro nude




2. Spiderman, ready for trick-or-treating in Charleston's French Quarter









3. At home, Charleston











Old City Market, Charleston







4.Halloween Parade











5. Gullah Island

More after the break









"The Final Girls": Psycho-slasher parody with two queer characters and Adam Devine's bulge


In The Final Girls (2015), not to be confused with Final Girl (2015), actress Amanda and her daughter Max are driving home from an audition that she bombed.  She complains that she is typecast as a "scream queen" due to a role in the famous psycho-slasher movie, Camp Bloodbath, back in the 1980s.  She was the Final Girl, the one who didn't have sex, and therefore got to live.  

But not in real life: at that moment, they get into a car crash.  Mom dies!  

 Three years later, Max is in college, studying with her Love Interest Chris (Alexander Ludwig) and a couple of female friends, when horror fan Duncan (Thomas Middleditch, below) talks them into going to a midnight showing of the movie and its sequel.



Remember, Max is still mourning her mother.  Why go to a movie where a psycho-slasher is trying to kill a younger version of her?  But she goes.  Otherwise be lousy story.

Suddenly, zap!  They are trapped in the movie...and the psycho-slasher is stalking them, too!  They have to use their wits and knowledge of the genre to defeat him.

The first character they meet is Kurt (Adam Devine), an obnoxious jock with the inflated ego and braggadochio of Adam's usual characters, but much more mean-spirited.  He is also apparently bisexual -- he hits on boys and girls both, and thinks that gays "have a cool lifestyle."  Interestingly, instead of a homophobic slur, he tells Chris to "suck a turd." 


Like most psycho-slashers in the movies of the 1980s, Billy (Daniel Norris) targets teenagers having sex, so so when Kurt strips down to his bulge while his girlfriend waits in the next room, Chris the Love Interest rushes in to distract him.  Try showing him your dick -- oh, wait, the killer is attracted to gay sex, too.


The other queer character is Blake (Tory N. Thompson), who also black.  You know what happens to the black guy in psycho-slasher movies, right? Gulp! 

Next the visitors from our universe try warning the characters about the psycho-slasher.  Remember, Max is interacting with the movie version of her own mother, so she'd rather not see her skewered.

The plan backfires: everyone runs away screaming.  

Kurt and his girlfriend try to drive away, but they hit a totem pole and die (Kurt is pretzeled).   But in the original movie, they survived!  The intruders have tampered with the plot, and now all the rules are off.  No one will survive.

Well, some survive.  You'll have to watch the movie to find out who. 

Beefcake: Quite a lot of Adam.

Heterosexism: No one actually has sex, for obvious reasons. Some girl boobs.

Queer Characters: Kurt and Blake,  through queer codes instead of self-identification.  But this is supposed to be the 1980s, when you were lucky to get that much representation.  Writers M.A. Fortin and Joshua John Miller are a gay couple, and speaking to their own experiences as horror fans.  

My grade: A-

Underground Railroad: a gay slave rides a real railroad in a surrealistic South, with a Gemstone alum and nude actors

 


The Underground Railroad was a network of safe houses and allies that helped enslaved African-Americans escape to the North, or after the Fugitive Slave Act, to Canada.  

The 2023 tv miniseries suggests that it was a real railroad, a series of trains and tunnels run by an intricate bureaucracy. As Cora and her friends and love interests head north, pursued by slave-catcher Arnold Ridgeway, they encounter bizarre communities and have adventures that comment on the racism in the pre-Civil War South and the contemporary U.S.

I reviewed Chapter 1, "Georgia."


Scene 1: Surreal montage of people running backwards, falling into a chasm, being all bloody, and finally Cora telling us: "The first and last thing my mama gave me was apologies."  Cut to Caesar (Aaron Pierre, left) asking Cora to head north with him, for "good luck."  She refuses.  The way they keep pushing their heads at each other, they appear to be a romantic couple



Scene 2
: Whooping and dancing in the slave compound.  Cora brings the older Jockey some food.  Their owners appear: Terrence (Benjamin Walker, left), who runs the other half of the plantation, disapproves of the "lenient" way that James treats his slaves. So they ask a kid to recite the Declaration of Independence.   They mean the Declaration of Secession, so the Civil War is on.  How is anyone heading North?   He can't do it right, and he accidentally touches them, so Terrence has him beaten to death. And Cora, for intervening. They are left chained to the whipping post all night.

Scene 3: In the morning, the ladies tend to Cora's wounds, and Caesar takes her home. Later, his wife Frances says "I know about men like you. You sneak off in the night and roll around in the swamp with other mens on your back."  Ok, so Caesar is gay.  She's fine with it, but master brought them together to reproduce, and if they don't, Master Randall will cut off his dick, so get with your husbandly duties!  

Scene 4: Prideful (Lucius Baston), the black overseer, tells Cora that she's being moved.  She resists (I can't imagine why -- her new owner can't be much worse)

Cut to James walking through the woods.  He's nice to a little boy named Hezekiah  then coughs and collapses. 

Cut to Terrence in the fields, telling the slaves that his brother James has died, so now he owns the whole plantation, and will stop being "lenient": no more parties, no more outside work, and he'll be overseeing the "breeding,"  Perv just wants to watch couples doing it.  He also wants to have sex with Cora.


Scene 5: 
Slave catcher Ridgeway (Joel Edgerton, left and below and his assistant, a young black kid named Homer (Chase W. Dillon), have a very muscular escaped slave, Big Anthony (Elijah Everett), in a cage. They return him to Terrence's plantation. 







Ridgeway advises Terrence to place some moles in the fields to rat out talk of escape.  An underground railroad has appeared to abet runaways. Terrence doesn't believe it, but Ridgeway asks him why some escaped slaves disappear forever, as if they've gone to a new world. An alternative reality with no slave trade?

 They discuss his biggest failure -- he couldn't capture Mabel who escaped long ago, when Terrence's father was alive.  Terrence avers that Mabel was evil -- even her daughter Cora is evil -- so his failure to find her is understandable.

Wait -- her daughter?  Maybe she knows something!  Ridgeway interrogates/ sexually assaults her. 

More after the break

Christopher Atkins: Nude photos of my West Hollywood friend and 1980s gay icon (who never played a gay role)

 


I met Christopher Atkins a few times when I lived in California: my friend was starring with him in a Smokey and the Bandits rip-off.  

Recently we became facebook friends. Well, me and 3,800 other people.  But I'm one of the few who responds to his posts.










"Come on, Christopher, it's big, but not big enough to write your entire name and a heart on." (I didn't really say that.)











Christopher was one of the first actors to go full frontal on the big screen.  Several times.Here he shows off in his iconic but immensely heterosexist Blue Lagoon (1980).  At the time, he hated performing nude.











In A Night in Heaven (1983), he played a male stripper at a ladies-only club. 

In real life Christopher has been a gay ally since the start of his career.  While other actors were insisting that only women enjoyed looking at their physique, he was happily discussing his appeal to gay fans in magazines like The Advocate.










More after the break

The boy on the Prospect List

 


When I was growing up in Rock Island,  anyone who set foot inside the Nazarene Church for any reason, but didn't "get saved" and become a member, was placed on the Prospect List.

Even if they just came for Vacation Bible School, or to cheer for a friend at a Jump Quiz Tournament.

They stayed on that list forever, unless they asked to be removed or the Church Board decided to purge the list of names from many years ago.

(All models are over 18)

Every August, about a month before the fall revival, our Sunday school teacher gave each of us the contact information for 10 age- and -gender appropriate Prospects.  We were supposed to make it our business to "win them for the Lord," or at least invite them to church.

During the next month, we received 1 point for each Prospect that we prayed for, 2 points for each letter or post card, 5 points for each telephone call, and 10 points for each in-person visit, plus an extra 10 point if they actually came to church.

You might think that the Prospects would be buried in letters or harassed by constantly-ringing telephones, but in fact most people settled for prayer. It's a daunting prospect to cold-call someone you don't know, who has been to your church just once.

During the fall revival, the kid, teenager, and adult with the most points received awards, usually Bibles, while the whole congregation clapped and yelled "Amen!"


During the summer after 5th grade, the first year I was eligible, I wimped out with "prayer only."

In 6th grade,  I sent a few post cards.

In 7th grade, I tried phone calls, only to get two "wrong numbers" (which didn't count) and one "You made a mistake -- I never went to that church."

During the summer after 8th grade, I decided to go all the way with a personal visit.

I was fascinated by a name that appeared on the Prospect List every year: Francis DePew, who came to Vacation Bible School one summer, but never appeared again. He was in the same grade as me, and he lived on the Hill, but he didn't go to Washington Junior High.

That meant he went to Jordan Catholic School!

The Preacher told us all about Catholics!  When they weren't worshipping idols and being brainwashed by evil priests, they were laughing in the face of God, drinking, smoking, dancing, playing cards, going to movies.  But their favorite form of sin was the sex orgy, men cavorting with other men's wives, teenagers having sex without being married, all manner of abominations, as in the days before the Flood!

All manner of abominations?  I had to meet this Francis DePew!  Maybe I could get him to the altar, where he would cry and apologize to God, and I could wrap my arm around his waist and hug him.

Besides, Catholics were as difficult to win for Christ as Muslims!  He would be good practice for when Dan and I became missionaries to Saudi Arabia.

During the August before 9th grade, Dan and I rode our bikes past Francis DePew's house nearly every day.

He lived a few blocks from the church, nearly across the street from the Saukie Golf Course that the Preacher was always complaining about.

A nice house, big but nothing special.  I got  a little frisson of dread imagining the Satanic orgies going on inside every night.

Then one Saturday afternoon, we hit the jackpot: a cute, muscular teenage boy, washing a car, with his shirt off!

We stopped. "Hey, cool car," I said.

"Thanks.  It's my brother's. He pays me a dollar to wash it, and when I get my driver's license, I can have it."


"Are you Francis DePew?"

"Frank."  He eyed me suspiciously.  "Do you go to Jordan?"

"No way!"  I exclaimed, offended.  "We go to Washington. I..um...I'm on the wrestling team, and I thought I recognized you from a tournament."

"No, we we don't have wrestling.  I was on the football team last year, though."

"Oh, that's it! From a football game...I thought you had the build for wrestling."  Dan nudged me, signifiying that I had said too much.  Or maybe he wanted to be included in the conversation.  Why should I hog the cute guy?  "Um...I'm Boomer, and this is Dan."

"Hi."  Frank shook hands with us both.  "Do you play football?"


How was I going to get the conversation away from sports and onto church?  "Um...no, I'm too busy with Jump Quiz."

"What's that?"

"It's a great sport," Dan offered.  "You have to use your brain and your muscles.  Especially your legs.  We could teach you..."

And then invite him to come to a tournament, and get him saved!  I thought excitedly.  But the Jump Quiz was about the Bible.  The Preacher said that Catholics couldn't read or even touch Bibles -- the holiness zapped them like an electric shock.

"Do you...do you know anything about the Bible?" I asked tentatively.

"Oh, I know a little bit."

A few days later, Frank invited us to his house -- my first time ever in a Catholic house. It wasn't scary at all, except for the "evil" crucifix in the living room.

We set up folding chairs on the patio, and took turns reading the questions and competing one-on-one, with breaks to throw a frisbee to his dog. Frank knew about as much about the Bible as I did, and his muscular legs made him a jump quiz natural.

After an hour, we declared the game a tie, and Frank's mother invited us into the kitchen for sodas and ice cream sandwiches.

"That was fun," Frank said.  "And it really gives your legs a workout.  We should use it for football training."


"It's a big deal at my church.  We have the local eliminations in October, and then the district, and you can go all the way to the Internationals, and get a college scholarship. You should...."  But Frank was being so nice that I felt guilty about the mercenary goal of winning him for Christ.  "You should start a team at your church."

So I didn't win the Prospect. Instead, he won me.

I met a nice guy, and I realized that Catholics weren't as scary and evil as the Preacher kept saying.   In fact, the first person I spent the night with, two years later, was a Maronite Catholic boy from Lebanon.