429: A Choice of Viewing on Television

ABC. 10.30 P.M. (1)
NOT TONIGHT, CLYDE
Two FBI agents decide to move in together. Edgar has a headache and Clyde burns the roast.
Edgar: Paul Lynde. Clyde: Charles Nelson Reilly

SARKY AND BITCH (2)
Amalgamated Megalomaniacs in association with B.E.N.T. Television presents the week-by-week story of those tough-talking, go-getting bum-kissing boys on the Nancy-Squad: It’s “Sarky and Bitch!” Starring Michael Double-Glazing and David Arsehole as Lieutenants Sarky and Bitch. This week’s story: “Cum in San Francisco”. Sorry, “Come In, San Francisco!”

TUESDAY RTV2 9.30 (3)
Andy Warhol's GARBAGE
Trevor and Kevin, two gay garage attendants near Doncaster, learn that they have been refused admission into the WRAC. 'Heady' Bob ,a transvestite AA man, who is saving up to have the Operation and join the RAC, stops by to tell them his tests at the Special Clinic are positive. They spend the afternoon in desultory conversation, ringing up the Speaking Clock.
"Superb. Masterful. Yummy." The Lancet
Rating: Odd

SATURDAY RTV2 3.00
BLOOD ON CAMP ISLAND (Frog-Rank)
Close male friendship between chaps and Japs in raw tale of eye-scratching and savage bitchery. By the director who made “Horseguards in Love”.
Rating: Gayish

SUNDAY RTVI 8.30
CAMPARET
Liza Minelli ("the toast of kings, the delight of queens") plays Christopher Isherwood, a character created by W. H. Auden. Also starring Joel Gay as the naughty man in the funny make-up. Set in the bitchy days of Berlin in the early thirties, this is a treat for everybody in their early thirties.
Rating: Fab

LITTLE HOMO ON THE PRAIRIE (4)
Little Homo is kidnapped by a band of Cherokee Indians. Homo seduces the Cherokee chief and they plan a marriage. But the nuptials are spoiled by Little Homo’s dad, who steals the boy back. In the ensuing action, Dad falls in love with Chief as well. Little Homo: Tatum O’Neal. Dad: Roman Gabriel. Chief: Merv Griffin.

RECTUMA
Japanese-made sci-fi epic about an atomic mutation, a gigantic walking rectum the size of the World Trade Center who gases and besmirches the country before being subdued by an army of homosexuals.

MEIN CAMP (5)
Ken Russell's story of how Hitler's homosexual love affair with Rommel loses him the war. Rommel is played by Rudolph Nureyev, and Montgomery by Peter Pears

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A round-up of gay-related gags from various TV guide parodies

(1) National Lampoon, February 1978
Edgar and Clyde at the FBI are of course J. Edgar Hoover and his close associate Clyde Tolson, and this plays off the long-standing rumours about the actual nature of their relationship, recently raised in 1978’s “The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover. Paul Lynde and Charles Nelson Reilly are two rather camp American light entertainment actors

(2) “The Outer Limits” (written and performed by Nigel Planer and Peter Richardson), at The Comedy Store, 1979
“The Outer Limits” was the “Firesign Theatre”-inspired duo instrumental in the creation of alternative comedy, “The Comic Strip Presents” and “The Young Ones”. The bit above is actually the intro to a parody of close cop duo “Starsky and Hutch” (if you hadn’t guessed). For all that alternative comedy was about not indulging in the prejudices of old-fashioned comedy, this skit uses an awful lot of the milder slurs at the expense of the sensitive masculinity of the leads. The rest of it is just a parody of the shortcomings of Starsky and Hutch: the show’s senseless hyperkineticism, the character’s enthusiastic stupidity and emphatic stating of just how disgusted they are by crime to show how sensitive and intelligent they genuinely are. (Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy fans may remember Shooty and Bang-Bang). The characters are just played as stereotypical brash Americans, but without any apparent gay mannerisms or camping it up.

(3) “The Rutland Dirty Weekend Book”, Eric Idle, 1976
A parody of Andy Warhol films, long renowned for their gay subject matter, here transferred to the banality of Enlish life rather than New York bohemia. Then a parody inspired by a rearrangement of the title of classic British WWII POW film “Camp on Blood Island” with some jokes about bitchy gays, Ken Russell films ("Women in Love"'s naked male wrestling), and the long-standing rumours about the sexual availability of the Horseguards.

(4) “This Week’s TV Programs”, by Gerald Sussman, with Danny Abelson, Tony Hendra, and Ted Mann - National Lampoon, December 1978
A parody at the expense of “Little House on the Prairie”. Tatum O’Neal was actually a girl, but the Macauley Culkin child star of the day. Merv Griffin was an American talk show host about whom there long-standing (how many times have I written that now?) gay rumours.

(5) "After Star Wars, What?”, Barry Took - Punch, 4 January 1978
A throwaway gag from a whole selection of silly future movies. Not much done with the idea of gay Nazis, and instead says more about perceptions of Ken Russell's pictures during the 1970s. Took demonstrates the same paucity of possible names who would be recognised as gay. Really, I mean, Peter Pears.

303: Cocksuckers & Bloodsuckers - Gay Vampires 3

"Disco Beaver From Outer Space", National Lampoon HBO Special, 1978

You should go to http://ukjarry.blogspot.com/2007/12/39-dragula.html first, since much of this sketch is adapted from Tony Hendra’s original “Dragula” comic in "National Lampoon", November 1971. That’s the first case of the bloodsucker / cocksucker joke, though its not reused in this version. Indeed, for all that I’m not a great fan of that piece, it’s certainly better than this sketch. This material is cannabilised here since this special was partly produced by Hendra.



Part 1


Part 2

Peter Elbing as Dragula
Lynn Redgrave as Professor van Helsing
James Widdoes as Lou Murray

First off, it really doesn’t help that this looks really cheap, and shoddily shot. The bits in the first half which are adapted from the comic are not handled well. The second half, which is new material, and tries to spin off the more familiar Dracula material looks as though it’s been filmed during the first run-through.
The only credit I will give it is that Peter Elbling puts some effort into his performance as Dragula. Of course, Elbling has always been a somewhat arch and mannered performer, but not unenjoyable with it, which doesn’t hurt if you’re playing a gay version of Dracula.
His performance makes something of the common idea of the cultured, elegant vampire, ideas about louche Europeans, and then showing how these overlap common assumptions about stereotyped gay attitudes. He at least manages to put some spin on some clunking lines. Honestly the second half frankly falls below the standards of a Bowery Boys film, with poor puns, and the lame shtick attempting to bite the editor.
How on earth Lynn Redgrave ended up in this as Professor Van Helsing? Maybe community service?
The additions in the first section aren’t gold either. To give it its due, when the hardhat is vampirised it’s hard to think how any gay signifier wouldn’t seem crass in context. Although whimpering “I feel pretty” is quite lame. The audience is supposed to recall that the rest of the verse goes “I feel pretty and witty and GAY”. And the gay version of the vampirised hardhat isn’t very au courrant. When you think about what gay men were getting up to at the time, a sissy making limp-wristed primping gesture and feyly saying “I’ll go get the other girls” is a few years behind the times.
The homoerotism of old hockey footage is a new addition. Though “Monty Python” got there first with its celebrating footballers.

Indeed all the vampirised gays are coy mimsy performances. This reaches its nadir when James Widdoes as the magazine editor is turned gay. The office decor, and his costume with the sunglasses, and his over-emotionalism all look looks as though they’ve been cribbed from “La Cage aux Folles” (1978)
Dragula being repelled by meatloaf, brut, and tasteless crass Americana is a sort of joke about finicky design queens.

266: Fag Rock 1 - Rim Shot

They tried to change the world with their shiny trousers, rouged nipples and space alieny androgynous antics

I’m far from erudite about rock music, so the following is probably even less accurate than my usual guff-spumes.
Anyway, the early/mid 1970s saw the arrival of assorted brands of rock music stigmatised by traditional rock fans as “fag rock”.
“Fag rock” performers tended to dress in extravagant styles, suggestive of drag sometimes, they tended to camp about on stage, and when they weren’t singing the table of contents from “The Best Science Fiction 1972”, they were hinting at sexual ambiguity. If they were feeling particularly brave, they might even claim to be a little bit bisexual.
In England there was “glam rock”. In America there was The New York Dolls. And there was the transatlantic success of David “Laughing Gnome” Bowie and Elton John. And Jobriath for the special bonus points section of this quiz.
Gender-bending had been addressed in songs like The Beatles “Get Back”, The Kinks “Lola”, and the Rolling Stones had dragged up for the cover of “Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby”, but those had been one-offs, not the basis for an entire musical catalogue.

These are the comedic responses to this music at the time. In at least half of the cases they’re no more thoughtful than the jokes about The Beatles when they first became popular. I’m sure I could trawl through old copies of NME, Rolling Stone and any number of old rock mags for unenlightened jokes from hacks embittered by the pollution and disgusting emasculation of their pure, manly rock n’ roll. In which vein see this later sketch about The Village People on Saturday Night Live. Although when you look at a band like “Sweet” performing, they’re probably more than halfway to deliberate sexual parody anyway. Since music was another area where homosexuality was making itself expressed, these don’t employ the comic contrast of jokes about gay cowboys or soldiers, but are satirical exaggerations of a current social trend. In at least a couple of instances it’s an attempt by the humorist to one-up the bands in effeminacy and outrage.

An imaginative, if not wholly effective, means of acquainting yourself with this musical period is Todd Hayne’s film “Velvet Goldmine”. Even if you don’t care for the music, there’s the very pretty Jonathan Rhys-Meyers and Ewan Macgregor to occupy the eyes. And even Christian Bale, before he decided that a more tight-arsed interpretation of Russell Crowe’s award-winning impression of the delivery of several hundredweight of gravel was the way to go with his career.



“Rim Shot” National Lampoon, October 1972.

A parody of the tendency for rock bands to feature provocative covers on their albums and include ever-more controversial material in their songs. How far can you go? Besides describing the harsher effects of drugs, hymning anal sex, why not analyse pretences to heterosexuality while being blown by another man. Bad taste ahoy! This pastiche is supposedly a long suppressed Rolling Stones album. The lavatory mis-en-scene recalls the “Beggar’s Banquet” cover. Don’t bother trying to figure out who’s supposed to represent whom. (from left to right)Tony Hendra, Michael O’Donoghue, Michael Gross, P.J. O’Rourke, and Sean Kelly

252: K-Y Comics Presents Dixie Nixon and the Boys in the Bund

by Sean Kelly and Tony Hendra. Art by Larry Hama and Ralph Reese
in “National Lampoon” February 1974

Edward Heath’s unwavering sobriety and conspicuous lack of any sexual or emotional attachment suggested an intense grinding sublimation making him a curiously ambiguous figure ripe for such queer quips. With Heath cartoonists and satirists could only indulge in innuendo, though, for fear of making any too absolute a statement. Besides, all the fun was in the suggestion. Particularly since Heath was such a prissy, sulky, sensitive self-regarding lump.
This comic can indulge in such lavishly grotesque gay travesties and caricatures because Richard Nixon and co were so tediously straight as to be almost unbelievable. So why not make it as unbelievable as this load of screaming, lascivious stereotypes to suggest a different type of scandal more reminiscent of the Decline of Rome.
There is an almost admirable amount of ingenuity in Hendra’s and Kelly’s combining of camp bitchery and sexual outrageousness with the convoluted details of Watergate. What the writers go after are all the most outrageousness stereotypes to spice up the dense facticity of the real life scandal. They go far beyond any sissy imagery, it’s all crude double-entendres, extravagant transvestism, and non-stop promiscuity.
If you want, I think a strong case can be argued that a very definite smear is intended on Nixon and co with such extreme gay clichés. Frankly, Hendra’s assumptions about what makes for a good homosexual gag amount to smears in themselves.

48 - Religion: Tony Hendra

From “The Catholic Sex Index” by Tony Hendra, “National Lampoon”, December 1974

Homosexuality
Originally a theological term used to describe the sexuality of God-made Man, referring to His love for all mankind and in particular for His Apostles, this function of the term being most accurately expressed in the time-honored salute, "Ecce Homo." Now debased to mean simply the love of one person for another of the same sex and by extension the perversion of the procreative act between them, and therefore a de facto mortal sin, homosexuality has recently been the object of some courageous and stimulating new thought, at least as it applies to members of the male sex. Cardinal Benedetto Colone, Dean of the Sacred Office of the. Impious Vulva since 1847, has; argued convincingly that the Redeemer's spiritual love for his disciples may in fact have been mirrored a corporal'-that is to say, a carnal one; although for reasons of discretion, no mention is made of such episodes in the New Testament, Christ's admonition to His Apostles at the Last Supper (an all male gathering), is quite distinct: "Take, eat, this is my body." In addition, both He and subsequently his disciples refer clearly to the fact that He will "come again" and that there will be a "second coming," the verb "to come" having the same ambiguity in Aramaic as in present-day English. All indications, argues Cardinal Colone, are that Christ practiced and intended his disciples - and, of course, their successors through Apostolic succession - to practice a physical as well as a spiritual love for mankind. Not only does this view tend to correct the previous, somewhat Monophysite emphasis on Christ's purely spiritual love, it also explains the Church's hitherto only partially understood demand that the shepherds of her :flock refrain from sexual contact with women.

Sodomy
Basically the act of placing Bishop Peter anywhere other than in Sister Mary Vulva, as in the anus, in the mouth, in the naval, in the ear, in the armpit, in the nostril, in the hand, in a hole, in a fruit, in a missal, in an altar rail, in a candle-stick, in a lavabo set, in a thurible, in a crosier, in a monstrance, in a reliquary, in a sanctus bell, in a tabernacle, anywhere. Long considered the unforgivable sin, sodomy is now the subject of intensive theological research designed to show that for an extremely small numb r of people in very specialized vocations who have the training to cope with its inherent dangers, sodomy may after all be less a sin than an obligation.

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While American humour is often charcterised as being heavily Jewish, most of the writers for "National Lampoon" were Irish Catholics. This means there are a higher then usual numer of jokes about the IRA, but actually less about religion. Tony Hendra came from England, and even he was Catholic. In fact it is Hendra who writes many of the humorous pieces about Catholicism over the years. In later years he would write a serious book about a monk who was a deep spiritual influence upon him.
Homosexuality and Jesus are long standing topics which keep clashing up against each other. In 1967 Hugh Montefiore, the Vicar of St Mary's, stirred up controversy when he said "Why did He not marry? Could the answer be that Jesus was not by nature the marrying sort?" Hmmmmm?
Also there has long been talk relating to Jesus and St John, "his beloved disciple", "he whom Jesus loved" - which is just how rumours get started, yes?

39 - Dragula

written by Tony Hendra, illustrated by Neal Adams, cover by Frank Frazetta
"National Lampoon", November 1971

Broad plotting and a heap of swishy gags, as Hendra plays crass heterosexuality off against simpering stereotypes.
That opera isn't gay enough enough, and instead Gilbert and Sullivan is the level of triviality which Hendra thinks Gay culture will sink to, is a little odd.
"The Merv hasn't changed" poster is a reference to talk show host Merv Griffin, who was long rumoured to be gay, but which was only confirmed after his death.

34 - Gay Lib: National Lampoon

Editorial by Tony Hendra and Sean Kelly in “National Lampoon” May 1977

In approaching the question of homophilia, or "gayness,” it is important to remember that while it is in execrable taste to make fun of cripples, there is nothing reprehensible about ridiculing Republicans.

So long as homosexuality was understood to be a result of childhood trauma or glandular deficiency, it was hardly a fit subject for humor, and those that indulged in "queer-baiting;' "fag-bashing;' or "fruit-looping" were to be deplored. Now, however, that we are assured by homophiles themselves that the love that dare not speak its name is simply a political act arising from political choices, the practices of queer-baiting, fag-bashing, and fruit-looping would appear to be nothing more than the healthy exchange of opinion in the forum of democratic debate.

The arguably naive question arises whether a man whose chosen form of political expression is shoving his fist up some loved one's rectum is fit to be president. It maybe that, as many gays profess, we have already had such presidents, in the persons of George Washington, Franklin Pierce, et al.; it does not follow, however, that enjoying some Greek qualifies any Johnny-on-the-street to assume high office.

But perhaps we are attacking a straw man. Perhaps, as the Reverend Malcolm Boyd privately emphasizes, frequent and prolonged oral-genital contact between members of the same sex is not a political act, but a religious one. Not, as it were, an unnatural act so much as a supernatural one. But in what sense is giving or receiving a blow job a religious act? Certainly there would appear to be a superficial precedent established in the immortal injunction "take, eat - this is my body"; those words, however, were delivered by and on behalf of the Savior of all mankind. The category does not appear to include Golden Shower Gil or that hot little number in the naugahyde knickers.

In a similar vein, can we say that pederasts should not be school-teachers, coprophiliacs proctologists, sadists policemen, or piss-freaks firemen?
Why cannot Eros be served by a tug on your buddy's nipple-ring? Can love sweet love not as well appear through a hole in the wall of a lavatory stall? May not the friction of two crewcut mons spark the same divine fire that burnt the topless towers of Ilium? Why not indeed?

For the majority, the vast and powerful heterosexual majority of us, these questions remain ineffable. Let us take comfort in the certainty that while the blacks, the native Americans, and the poor we shall have always with us, we shall only have to endure for one generation the puling of this by definition unreproductive minority.