Mario Lopez: please, please, please don't be gay!

If you're like me, Saved By the Bell was a big part of your childhood. The big question was whether you preferred Zack Morris or A.C. Slater. At the time, I liked Zack, who was so fantastically cool, smart alecky and always trying to get away with something, even if he was a clone of Ferris Bueller and Parker Louis Can't Lose.

I may have to rethink that, considering how cute and dimpled A.C. Slater was, even if he did sport that ridiculous Meximullet. There was this bizarre, hooty, awed audience noise whenever he flexed, which on average was once per episode.

What about Mario Lopez? Frankly, he could go either way: if he turned out either to be gay or straight I'd find either possibility astonishing.

Still, something does definitely set off my gaydar. Perhaps it's that he goes on about how being in Chorusline is his lifelong dream, or the fact he has a superhot girlfriend that he doesn't actually live with.


Every time I watch Saved by the Bell now, I think of that Harlan Ellison story where the sound editor was set to "sweeten" the laugh track of a television series, and used the sound waves to have a conversation with a long dead woman. In the end, the sound track was actually booing and hissing the series!

Black Fantasies for Gays and Ladies

There's a well known phenomenon among straight women (especially Caucasian and Latina women) and gay men who love black men, and as of yet there is no term to describe that social trend ("Jungle Fever" is more associated with black men that love white women). I have a theory why this is. If you give a name for something, it's an acknowledgment something is going on and exists.

One great contribution by the playwright David Henry Hwang to the language was the term "Yellow Fever" to describe white men that have a thing for Asian women. I remember I burst out laughing the first time I heard the term, because it was something I saw going on around me. For instance, when I first read the ultimate "airport" paperback, "Meg" by Steve Alten, the moment he described his heroine with the magic word "Asian" I knew just what was going to happen next!

I was always amused by Yellow Fever because it seems to happen with men that are unfamiliar with or have close contact with actual Asians. As astonishing as it seems to me at times, not everybody is from New York City. I remember once meeting a guy cousin of mine from Arizona that had a bad case of Yellow Fever, and it came up that I had a Vietnamese friend that had acne.

He was a little astonished. "I didn't know Asians had acne."

I couldn't stop laughing. "Of course they can get acne. They're not some kind of magical elf."

The website Stuff White People Like, in addition to painfully unfunny humor about Starbucks Coffee and the TV show "Friends," has a few gags about Asian women. You know, I can't stand that website. It's a funny thing about self-deprecating parody: it very quickly becomes a coy kind of self-admiration.

Likewise, I'm startled by how many of my gay friends have an extreme (dare I say it?) blackfantasy. I don't even pretend I have enough readers to possibly do something like make a contribution to the English language, but hey, who knows, I just put it out there! In fact, it seems shockingly all-but universal, but almost no one is talking about this phenomenon.

What I find interesting is that, despite the fascination for black men among white gay males, there seems to be a lot of conflict between the two groups. African-American culture, even more so than Latino culture, is notorious for homophobia. Likewise, there's a lot of conflict in New York City between middle and upper class homosexuals and blacks as a result of the "gentrification" of many traditionally black neighborhoods. Many black residents of these neighborhoods see the loss of their neighborhood's identity, and find themselves pushed out by higher housing prices.


Unexpectedly, female sex tourism is a big market, especially in places like the Caribbean, where you have institutions like the so-called "Rent-a-Rasta." Because female sex tourism is practiced by women on men, it shouldn't receive a free pass from criticism as a fundamentally exploitative relationship. It happens in any third-world or developing country there are beaches and lots and lots of underemployed men.

A good place to start for anyone interested in the phenomenon of female sex tourism is with the movie Heading South with Charlotte Rampling, about female sex tourism in Haiti in the 1970s. If you want a double-bill, follow this up with Wes Craven's best movie, The Serpent and the Rainbow, about Haiti in the 1980s, where apparently secret police officers were regularly moonlighting as zombie-creating voodoo priests.

Another good choice would be How Stella Got Her Groove Back, which did for the tourism industry of Jamaica what "Crocodile" Dundee did for Australia. Stella was almost the Disneyfied version of sex tourism.

Read this Reuters article, written about older white women tourists to Africa:

Some choice quotes:

They are on their first holiday to Kenya, a country they say is "just full of big young boys who like us older girls."

Many of the visitors are on the lookout for men like Joseph. Flashing a dazzling smile and built like an Olympic basketball star, the 22-year-old said he has slept with more than 100 white women, most of them 30 years his senior.

Incidentally, I hope everyone forgives me for the totally gratuitous images of the hunky Brazilian Orso Orfeo. But jeez, I'm a size queen, I can't help myself!

BOYS BEWARE!

This 1950s instructional vid on the creeping menace of homosexuality, sensationally titled BOYS BEWARE! has to be seen to be believed.



What's really amazing is, if you make the whole scenario a little less creepy, it can actually double for a gay wank fantasy! Young boy befriends a cool older guy that he becomes friends with and confides in...

Seeing something like this, I come to the conclusion that we're a heck of a lot smarter than our parents' and grandparents' generation was. All through this entire article there are a million points that set off a big flashing red light that makes us go WARNING! WARNING! WARNING! Yet alas, our narrator pays them no mind.

If your parents are boomers (mine came in at the late end of the baby boom), the one thing they've probably hysterically incalculated in you is that EVERYTHING CAN KILL YOU. It takes something like this to show us that the world is, actually, fundamentally safe. Most people that hitchhike actually survive, for instance.