GLR Review March-April 2019

P HILIP M OORE I N ITS EARLY DAYS, The Advocate often featured semi-nude males on the covers. You would have found a nearly nude Jon Voight from Midnight Cowboy , for example, on the September 1969 edition. A headline announcing the “First Gay Riots” points readers to page 3. (Another, larger headline promises “18 Groovy Guys”). The cover six months earlier was even more risqué: a shirtless Sal Mineo, looking hard and mean and older than his thirty years of age, pulling down the shirt of a then unknown nineteen-year-old Don John- son. Johnson looks soft, his dark eyes dramatically pleading. The implication, of course, is that he is about to be raped. The bold- faced headline reads: “Sal Mineo’s Big New Hit: Brutal, Exciting!” The image was one of several that were made fifty years ago to promote Mineo’s version (and the West Coast premiere) of John Her- bert’s prison drama Fortune and Men’s Eyes . The photos are all very theatrical, leveraging Johnson’s smooth body, Mineo’s fame, and the play’s infamous reputation as brand provocation. There’s Johnson in his underwear, Mineo yanking down Johnson’s underwear, both men in the nude. In 1969, nudity onstage was still a novelty—biog- rapher Michael Gregg Michaud suggests that Mineo was the first male celebrity to take it all off on- stage—let alone the suggestion of anal sex. Clearly the publicity pho- tos were meant to shock some 1969 audiences and arouse others. The photos are how I first learned about this play. As a movie junkie, I was amazed the first time I came across them on the Internet. Don Johnson’s butt exposed by Sal Mineo! It was like a perverted pop culture hallucination. Don Johnson, the actor whose Miami Vice poster was on my older brother’s wall and who was said by Graham Norton to have practi- cally invented the ’80s (think three-day stubble, no socks, and pastel colors for men). Sal Mineo, for his part, twice nomi- nated for an Oscar, was best known for his role in Rebel Without a Cause , in which he played one of the first gay characters on film. Even before Mineo’s version, Fortune and Men’s Eyes shocked people with its ho- mosexual and prison life content. Young Smitty is sent to prison for a minor crime. His aggressive cellmate Rocky offers an op- tion: basically, submit sexually to Rocky in exchange for protection from fifty other horny inmates. He gives in to Rocky. An- other cellmate, the loquacious Queenie, eventually prompts Smitty to fight back— suggesting that he’s “nobody’s punk.” Smitty does so and ultimately mutates into the aggressor, able to have his way with the other men. Don Johnson summed things up in a 2014 interview: “It was a very, very controversial play.” In effect, Mineo had taken what some people regarded as a boring, dialogue- heavy play and sexed it up with nudity and action. This included a forced strip-and- shower scene at the start of the play, some kind of masturbation at the end, and—most infamously—the rape scene that in previ- ous productions had only been heard off- stage. The Advocate called that scene “sexy as hell” while also noting that “the brutality knocks you senseless.” To accomplish this scene, Mineo found the perfect collaborator in a street smart, ambitious, angelic-looking performer unafraid to be nude onstage. And perhaps Mineo saw something in Johnson that reminded him of himself. After all, both actors were known for their sensuous lips and sensitive eyes. Certainly he must have seen Johnson’s potential star power, or perhaps he was just attracted to him. The rumors would circulate for years, and while Johnson denied that anything sex- ual had occurred, he also noted that the suggestion helped to sell tickets. Looked at today, the photos have a dif- ferent meaning because we know that Mineo had only a few more years on this planet before his untimely demise at age 37, while Johnson is still working today. The play would be Mineo’s last significant cultural contribution and Johnson’s first. After Fortune , Mineo struggled to find de- cent projects. Even Herbert didn’t help, re- fusing to sell Mineo the rights for the film adaptation, apparently displeased with the additions to the play. Meanwhile, we know about the varied career that Johnson would go on to have, from underrated artistic movies in the early 1970s to mainstream and decade- defining success in the 1980s, to character and often comic parts into the 2000s. He turns seventy this year. We can only imagine what projects Mineo might have done as he embraced his sexuality. One potential project stands out. Ap- parently in the early 1970s he met with James Baldwin in Lon- don over the possibility of doing a film version of Giovanni’s Room . It is easy to see why he would be attracted to Baldwin’s book about complicated sexuali- ties: at this point he was having sex with both men and women. While the film never happened, I can’t help but picture how Mineo (and Don Johnson as Giovanni, of course) might manifest beauty and shock within the contours of Baldwin’s story and the relaxed censors of the early 1970s. Alas, such work wasn’t meant to be; Mineo died in 1976. As for the play itself, fifty years later, now that Boys in the Band , Torch Song , and Angels in America have all had recent revivals on Broadway, perhaps we can anticipate a reappearance of Fortune and Men’s Eyes . It would be interesting to see how a far a modern director would go in today’s more relaxed times (at least on Broadway). Inevitably, it would be seen as a commentary on the extraordinary boldness of the original play. Philip Moore is a doctoral candidate at Gratz College in Melrose Park, PA. The Play That Broke the Barriers ART MEMO   