10.Mr. Ripley

Look, growing up can be an awkward confusing time, but that’s no reason to beat your best friend and lover to death with a huge oar and live off his trust fund in Italy until the cops catch up to you then fleeing to France as a con-artist. Just saying, Tom.

Patricia Highsmiths bloody and creepy rags to riches story of Tom Ripley, mortified readership in the 50′s, and still resonates today. Ripley, in her series involving the character, becomes a bit of a sympathetic anti-hero, and the first of the novels in the series was brought to the screen with Matt Damon as Tom Ripley, and Jude Law as the not so subtly named Dickie. Ripley then lives a life of a wealthy  American expatriate abroad until his victim/lovers ex-girlfriend shows up looking for her boyfriend.  The whole overt sexual tones of the books are about as clear as a Smiths song, and it counterpoints the characters overall moral ambiguity, which was probably the reason he was crafted in the first place.

9. Cary Grant in pretty much everything including his own life

No, for real.

Cary Grant isn’t a real person for one thing. It was the stage name of one Archibald Alexander Leach. The rumor of his homosexuality has pervaded years of Hollywood lore, and there has been significant evidence for and against his being a closeted gay man. Cary himself stated about his second marriage ‘I may not have married for very sound reasons, but it wasn’t for money’. His first two wives accused him of being a homosexual, and many believe he lived with Randolph Scott as a partner for part of his life. Subtleties in  The evidence against was just as strong though. He was married, to women, five times, and was thought of by many as a womanizer. One of his ex-wives, when confronted with rumors of his possible homosexuality quipped, “”Why would I believe that Cary was homosexual when we were busy fucking?” Grant was certainly an accomplished actor, becoming the face of many of Hitchcocks greatest Hollywood films as well as light comedies, and by all accounts a model of a noble and kind person.  So whatever the truth might have been, his sexuality is, as it is to every real person, immaterial and irrelevant to their worth as a human being.

But you’d never catch me sitting on a diving board with another well built dude. First, all my friends are out of shape sacks of crap. And we’d be sitting on top of couches made of nude women, drinking beers brewed from cocaine, and eating tiger meat that was shot with a gun shaped like a dick, roasted on a grill made of naked babes, on my weatherproof outdoor deck made of butt-nekkid hos. Because I’m straight and I need everyone to understand how uncomfortable I am with the idea of homosexuality.

8. Frankenberry

 

Check out that googly leering sort of grin, the purple eyeliner. The pink, everything pink. The chains. The leather, high heeled riding boots. The only voice I can possibly connect with that face is John Waters. The only thing missing from Frankenberry is a silk bathrobe and a pencil thin mustache and a snifter of cognac. And what, for gods sake is in his hand? it’s way to big to be a drumstick.  A spoon? Ah….oh.

7. Bebop and Rocksteady

Hi, We’re mutated animals that travel together wearing clothes that may or may not have been stolen from a Judas Priest video and gigantic overcompensating guns. For fun we chase four green muscly teenage stoner/ninjas, and harass them with our big guns.  Cowabunga, Dudes. Gnarly sexual insecurity.

 

6. Kevin McAllister

Relationships with old ass men carrying shovels,  actively attempting to seduce two idiotic dudes in his house, and he loves classic do-wop.  He gets stuck in New York and what does he do? Go to a renovated brownstone to check out the architecture: Check.  Try to sneak into and squat in a theatre: Check. Lure two men into a place he’s housesitting so he can abuse them physically: Check.

 

5. Ludo in Labyrinth

All I can say is that after the events of the film, I’m pretty sure he showed Hoggle his own Bog of Eternal Stench.

 

 

 

3. The Predator

What kind of alien hunter decides to go to vacation in central America wearing fishnets and leather to hunt a bunch of multiracial, musclebound, sweaty dudes? Not a straight one. Really pushing the fashion limits with the Skinny Puppy/Nine Inch Nails dudes with fishnets  and skulls look. I wonder if other Predators make catty comments about his Nuyorican dred thing he’s got going on up on his head. Predator got some issues he’s got to work out, and maybe that lack of confrontation of his own identity is why he so readily ended his own life while laughing.  Arnold Schwarzenegger is a bully, yo.

2. Wilson in Home Improvement

A confirmed bachelor hides his face behind a knotty wood fence while dispensing seemingly kindly advice on women and love and life to a married man and his strapping svelte teen-to-twentysomething sons?  I’m just sure Wilson had a small removable knot in his favorite panel probably at about 3 feet 7 inches from the ground.

 

1. Ned Flanders

Here’s one obvious hi-diddly-homosexual if ever there was one. At one time trapped in a stepford marriage to his beard of a wife with 3 children who are also possibly sexually confused, Ned’s been wearing the same Freddie Mercury/Bryan Cranston  moustache for over 20 years.

If there’s anyone chomping at the bit to rebel against self-imposed morals and a system of piety, it’s Ned for sure. While we can’t be sure that he, like any other person is gay, it doesn’t matter..

…because fictional characters don’t have any actual genitals to put into/around/on/about/insert-preposition-here any other fictional genitals, making the whole exercise in thinking about it pretty much ridiculous. Because really, what kind of person actually gives a crap about who anyone else is having sex with unless that person is their (fictional or non-fictional) partner?