Drake Hooks Up with Radio "Teen" Dennis Day

San Francisco, September 1996

Drake the Teddy Bear artist is moving to Guerneville, a gay resort town on the Russian River, and although it's only 75 miles north of Castro Street, it's not Castro Street, so his friends are behaving as if he's moving to Siberia.   We've thrown him a going away party, with gifts of a pith helmet, binoculars, malaria pills, and a machete (for carving out trails in the jungle).  And, since he's said repeatedly that he's not into twinks -- nobody under 40 need apply -- we got a twink to dance nude and swing his long 19-year old cock in Drake's face.

San Francisco parties usually don't include celebrity hookup stories, mainly because there aren't very many.  Guys typically move directly from small towns in the Straight World to Castro Street, with no stop in Hollywood in between.  But Drake grew up in a show business family in Old Hollywood -- there's a picture of him at age two or three, awkwardly balancing on Humphrey Bogart's knee -- and, feeling nostalgic, he tells us about how, after high school, he went to work for Desilu and invited every big and not-so-big star into his bed:

"How about naming some names?"  Corbin asks.

"Sure.  Tony Curtis, Marlon Brando, Gordon Scott, Cesar Romero...well, it's easier to name the stars I haven't been with."

"How about Tony Dow?"

"No, no twinks.  I'm not into them now, and I wasn't into them then.  And not Rock Hudson.  He wasn't into me.  But anyone else...name him, and I've probably been with him."

Desi Arnaz?  Yes.
Desi Arnaz, Jr.?  No.
Farley Granger?  Yes
John Wayne?  No
Richard Long?  Yes
Richard Benjamin? Yes.
Bill Bixby?  Yes

The game goes on. Sean Connery, Roger Moore, Ed Asner, Don Rickles, Charles Bronson, Sonny Bono, Fabian, Paul Anka, Caroll O'Connor, Donald O'Connor, Frank Sinatra, Billy Dee Williams. Nat King Cole, Robert Redford, Paul Newman, Richard Thomas, Richard Dawson, Don Adams, Don Rickles, Don Ameche, Elliot Gould, Ryan O'Neill....

Out of over 50 male actors and singers of the 1950s and 1960s, Drake has been with 20.  40%.

"Which is your favorite?"  I ask.

Without hesitation, Drake names: "Dennis Day."

We look around, mystified.

"You know, Dennis Day?  On the Jack Benny radio program?"

In case you need a refresher on gay history, Jack Benny was a comedian who pretended to be gay for 30 years, on the radio (1932-1955) and on tv (1950-1965), playing "himself" as a prissy, vain, mincing, lisping queen, pretending to eye the muscular stage hands, pretending not to be interested in women, even pretending that real-life wife Mary Livingston was just a friend.

Dennis Day (1916-1988) played a sheltered, naive, squeaky-voiced, gay-vague teenager, still living with his working-class parents, who Benny hired as a singer (his speciality was incongruously sentimental Irish ballads).  His dialogue with Benny ranges from starry-eyed hero worship to passive-aggressive sarcasm, with not a few obvious gay jokes.

When a female movie star makes a pass at him, he recoils in horror.

He is taken to a psychiatrist because he is so "unusual."

He wolf-whistles at Benny wearing bicycle shorts.

Drake, growing up in the macho 1940s with a bodybuilder father, had few if any models of boys who could be artistic and sentimental, who didn't like girls, who liked boys.

On the radio, you could play characters of all different ages.  Drake was crushed when, at about age 10, he met the "squeaky voiced teenager":  Dennis Day was actually in his 30s, with a wife and five kids, two older than Drake!

Hollywood, September 1958

Drake was a recent high school graduate working as a production assistant for December Bride at Desilu.  The Jack Benny Program was filmed on a nearby soundstage, and Dennis Day was a semi-regular. 

Drake could easily have dropped in on some pretext, but he avoided it.  He wanted to keep his memory of the radio Dennis Day, the cute gay teenager of his childhood fantasies.

Another show filmed at Desilu was Date with the Angels (1957-58) starring future Golden Girl Betty White as the scatterbrained, wild-scheme-concocting Vickie Angel, and Bill Williams (father of future Greatest American Hero William Katt) as her by-the-book insurance agent husband.

"Did you go down on him?" Zack asks.

"No, but ask me about Betty White's husband at the time, Lane Allen."

 Betty was quite a gay ally, even then, and managed to get a full coterie of Friends of Dorothy into the cast: Richard Deacon, Nancy Kulp, Sheila James Kuehl, Chuck Connors, Mary Jane Croft.  Drake often dropped by to chat with new and old friends.

One day in the summer of 1957, he found Betty and Bill on a set built to look like Sardi's restaurant, in a plot about Vickie meeting various celebrities, but failing to convince her friends.   Liberace...Hugh O'Brien...and waiting in the wings, reading his script, Dennis Day!

He was over 40 years old, but still boyish, still an icon from Drake's memory.

 You'd think that someone who has sat on Humphrey Bogart's lap and played softball with David and Ricky Nelson would be blasé about meeting a tv star.  But Drake found himself unaccountably star struck.

Tongue-tied, he approached and said something like "Mr. Day, I don't know if you remember me, but we met when I was a kid...."

Day gave him an up-and-down glance. "Well, you've grown up quite nicely, haven't you?"

Liberace, who was wandering about, trying to pick up the production assistants, put his hand on Drake's shoulder and whispered. "You'll never get him.  Lord knows I've tried."  He patted Drake's butt and walked on.

"Did you do Liberace?" I ask.

"No.  Liberace was way too fruity, and way too aggressive.  He would practically unzip you before you had a chance to say 'Hello."

"Get me to do what?" Day said, feigning innocence.

Drake knew that game!  Day was on the make.  Thinking fast, he said, "To...um...listen to a song I wrote.  Give me a professional opinion."

"Why, certainly.  I'm always glad to encourage new talent.  Let's go to my dressing room, and you can give me an earful.  Or do you need a piano?"

As they walked to the dressing room, Drake was in a panic.  He wasn't a good singer, and he couldn't make up a song on the spot!

It was a very small room, barely big enough for two.  Day sat in the only chair, folded his hands, and looked up expectantly.

The only thing Drake could think of was a song he had heard on the radio that morning:

Bye-bye, love.  Bye-bye, happiness.
Hello, loneliness.  I think I'm going to cry.
Bye-bye, sweet caress.  Hello, emptiness.

"Ok, Ok!" Day said, laughing.  "That's great, but which of the Everly Brothers are you?"

Drake hung his head.

"Oh, don't be glum.  I know what you really came here for."  Before he realized what was happening, Day had unbuttoned Drake's pants and was fondling his cock.

Drake immediately hardened.  He loosened his pants so they would drop to the floor.  Day wrapped his hand around Drake's  cock and began masturbating him.

Then Drake fell to his knees, pulled Day's pants down, and began bobbing up and down on Day's cock -- average sized, thick head, ruddy --

"No, no -- up here.  I want to look at you," Day murmured, bracing himself against the make-up table.

Drake rose to his feet again and let Day masturbate them both.  He reached beneath Day's shirt to feel his warm hard chest, pinch his nipples.  Then they kissed ...and spurted almost simultaneously.

"Whoa, what a gas!" Day murmured.  They wiped off with some tissue and got dressed.  "Tell Betty thanks for the hospitality."

Drake saw Dennis Day a couple of times after that, but always in a group, so they never hooked up again.

San Francisco, September 1996

"Why is that your favorite story?" Mickey asks.  "It was just a hookup, not a romance, and it doesn't sound that great.  Dennis Day wasn't muscular or hung.  He wasn't even that famous."

"But he was gay," Drake said.  "Or bi.  He didn't just accept a blow job from some queer, he wanted men.  Even though he was married for 40 years and had 10 kids, he wanted men.  Can you see how powerful that was to a kid in 1958, who thought there were only a few gay people in the world?  We really are everywhere."

"Even in Guerneville."

Captain Ernie and his First Mate

 

Back before Nickelodeon, the Disney Channel, Netflix, and DVDs, you got your dose of kids' tv in two places:

1. On a sugar-rush five hours of cartoons every Saturday morning.

2. Weekdays after school, on local kids' tv shows hosted by an army of clowns, hobos, cowboys, and pirates.

The Quad Cities was on the Mississippi River, so we had Captain Ernie's Cartoon Showboat.

The tall, commanding Captain Ernie (Ernie Mims) stood on the deck of the Dixie Belle, to announce Bugs Bunny and Hanna Barbara cartoons and Three Stooges shorts.  Then he opened his "Treasure Chest" and passed out prizes to the kids in the studio audience.

When I was in fourth grade, my boyfriend Bill and I were in the audience.  I got a plastic "pirate cape," and he got a cardboard sword.

The cartoons and prizes weren't the only attraction: Captain Ernie was cute, with squarish hands, a hairy chest, and a pleasant suggestion of muscle.

Sometimes he performed skits with his "First Mate," Sidney.

I didn't know what a "first mate" was, but it was obvious that Captain Ernie and Sidney lived together on the Dixie Belle, and neither had girlfriends or wives.  Obviously a gay couple!

I found out that they weren't really a couple in fourth grade: one of the kids in my class at Denkmann was Captain Ernie's nephew.  Turns out Ernie Mims had a wife and kids after all, and Sidney was just an intern, a student at the Palmer College of Chiropractic, up the street from WOC TV.

Still, many of the iconic moments of my childhood took place in front of Cartoon Showboat, or with Captain Ernie: a local celebrity, he appeared at the Celtic Festival, the Bix Beiderbecke Jazz Festival, the Pow Wow, the annual Christmas parade, and various ribbon-cuttings and supermarket openings.

During the 1970s, our first PBS station brought the competition of the kinder, gentler Mr. Roger's Neighborhood and frenetic but non-violent Sesame Street, and in 1974 Cartoon Showboat was cancelled.  By that time, I was in junior high, too old to watch.

Ernie Mims went on to become the weatherman.

The last time I saw him was in the spring of 1979, during my freshman year of college  I was working at the Carousel Snack Bar when Captain Ernie -- not in character -- came up and ordered an ice cream cone.

As I passed it to him, our hands touched.

I wanted to say "Thanks for a great childhood," but I played it cool.

Sausage Sightings of Adult Devon Sawa and Jonathan Taylor Thomas

Vancouver, Canada

Cal me Rick.  In 1999, I was a a senior at King George Secondary School in Vancouver, a Glee Club geek, pale, skinny, eyeglassed, kind of homely, with a pretty good voice but no social skills.  I knew I was gay, but I wasn't out yet.

Then my buddy told me about auditions for minor parts in Final Destination (2000), starring Devon Sawa (the 21-year old star of Casper, The Boys Club, Wild America, and Idle Hands).   I figured it would look good on my uni apps, and I had a little crush on Devon, so off I went.

 I got the part -- one line and crowd shots, took about an hour -- but somehow Devon noticed me.  We went out to lunch, and then to the Aquarium, and before I knew it I was coming out to him -- the first person I told!  And that weekend he escorted me to my first gay bar.

We never hooked up -- he said I wasn't his type.  But I never forgot the emotional connection and support.

One night he asked me, "Of all the actors in Hollywood, other than me, who would you most like to sleep with?"

Without a blink I said "Jonathan Taylor Thomas."

I watched every episode of Home Improvement (1991-1999), even though I despised that awful, homophobic Tim Allen, and the "real men" grunting, playing sports, and talking about tools.  I had enough of that growing up in Vancouver, thank you.  But Jonathan Taylor Thomas (1981-), a teen dream fave rave, an androgynous prettyboy with soulful grey eyes and puckered lips.

How could you help putting his poster on your bedroom wall and kissing it every night?

Even though your parents misinterpreted your interest in Home Improvement and kept giving you tools for Christmas.

"Jonathan's pretty cool," Devon said.  "We've been friends for years.  Tell you what -- come visit me in L.A. sometime, and maybe I can arrange a meeting."

When filming ended, he went back to L.A., and I went on to the Victoria Conservatory to study voice, but we stayed in touch.

I finally did visit at Christmastime in 2001, and was disappointed by two things:

1. Devon is straight, or maybe bi. He was dating Danielle Fischel of Boy Meets World!  I did get a date with Ben Savage out of the deail, but that's a story for another time.

2. Jonathan Taylor Thomas had left Hollywood to study philosophy at Harvard, and wasn't in town for a hookup.

The next few years of my life were rough: I flunked out of the Conservatory, broke up with my boyfriend, lost my brother, tried to make it as a singer, and finally went back to uni for my teaching credential.  I got my degree in 2008, and became a high school music teacher, first in Hamilton, Ontario and then in Toronto.

Devon and I became "Christmas and Birthday Card" friends.  I was invited to his weddings, to Jessica and Dawni, but didn't go.  The last time I saw him in person was in Montreal in 2006.

My schoolboy crush on Jonathan Taylor Thomas dimmed a bit when I saw his gay-themed movies, Speedway Junkie (1999) and Common Ground (2000), and read his homophobic response to the reporters' standard question: "Does playing a gay character mean that you are gay?"

JTT: "Of course not!!!!!   I've played murderers.  Does that mean I'm a murderer?"

In his interview with The Advocate, his response was just as vociferous: "It's a blatant lie."

I didn't see him in any more movies, and assumed that he had left Hollywood for good.

[

According to Popsugar, he graduated from Columbia in 2010 and left Hollywood, returning only to direct three episodes (and guest-star in four) of his pal Tim Allen's sitcom, Last Man Standing (2013-2016).  I don't know who the boyfriend is,]

Last summer, I had to go to Los Angeles for a conference, and I emailed my friend Devon to ask him to lunch.

"Lunch, nothing!" he responded.  "You're staying with me in Calabasas.  That is, if you don't mind a houseful of kids and cats."

More after the break.