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Post by myhomeo on Mar 8, 2018 12:57:15 GMT -5
I did know Franklin Pangborn is something of a Gay icon, but I didn't know about Johnny Arthur.
It does strike me there are more 'sissy' adults in the Gang films than kids. Most likely, they liked playing the blunt, rough-edged kids against the fluttery, flustered types.
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Post by Buppster on Mar 8, 2018 16:56:01 GMT -5
I think you've got a very valid point there, the whole basis of the comedy with Johnny Arthur on his birthday was the way he was getting increasingly flustered with the very matter of fact Alfalfa, just as Pangborn has exactly the same problem with Spanky. Nevertheless statistically I think that the original post also raised a valid point. Even if you discount extras there were still a lot of kids in Our Gang over the two decades plus that it ran for and even on a conservative estimated of the ratio of gays to straights in any given population it seems very likely that at least some of those kids must have turned out to be gay in later life, whether they kept it secret or not. I know that I've read speculation about Jackie Copper's liaisons in the 1930s and 1940s in particular. Whether there was any real basis to those suspicions or whether they were simply idle gossip mongering I have no idea. Not that any of it matters in the slightest really. I mean it was all an awfully long time ago anyway.
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Post by Buppster on Mar 28, 2018 6:11:00 GMT -5
He wasn't in Our Gang but he was active as an actor during the same era as Dickie Moore and Jackie Cooper, in the early 1930s. There have been a number of references over the years to the probability that rising teenage star Junior Durkin (Trent Bernard Durkin) was gay. Click the link below for the Wikipedia entry about Junior Durkin. Junior Durkin at WikipediaJunior appeared in Little Men (1934) with Frankie Darro (who, in his autobiography, Junior Coghlan described as being essentially bisexual), Dickie Moore and Tommy (married with five sons) Bupp. He also appeared in Hell's House (1932) with Junior Coghlan. He's probably best known for two movies that he made with Jackie Coogan, Tom Sawyer (1930) and Huckleberry Finn (1931). Click the link below for a period newspaper account of the fatal crash. Pine Valley, CA John Coogan Sr. Other Killed, May 1935
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