Top Male Stars of All Time - Part II

I have that neat little device called FEEDJIT Live Traffic Feed that lists which web site each hit comes from, which site the person leaves to, and which specific blog page the person initially enters.

My friend Debbie obsesses about that information.

My friend Jason mentioned it in one of his entries, but I can’t find the specific entry right now. (Jason – Link please?)

Invariably, the specific page that draws my visitors (right now, 6 of the current 10 listings) is Top Ten Favorite Male Stars of All Time, usually from a Google image search.

Since that page is so popular, I thought I would revisit it. Then round out my Top Twenty.

Recap of the Top Ten:
1. James Duval
2. Stephane Rideau
3. Ryan Phillippe
4. Tommy Kirk
5. River Phoenix
6. William McNamara
7. Kevin Zegers
8. Ethan Embry
9. Steve Antin
10. Peter Facinelli

The Top Ten List has remained constant over the years. The rest of the list, leading to #20, does change.

Here is my current list, with pictures (click them to see larger) and some information on each person.





#11
Name: James Marsden
Current Age: 35
Where You Probably Know Him From: Cyclops in the X-Men movies
Where I Discovered Him: The 1996-1997 TV show Second Noah
Best Place To See His Body: He has long shirtless scenes in the movies Heights and Sugar & Spice, and the TV show Second Noah. He has never done frontal or rear nudity.
Has He Ever Played Gay?: In the movie The 24th Day and at least one other. (I don’t want to reveal the other movie. I consider it a SPOILER.)
Sexual Orientation: Straight.
Did You Know?: He isn’t known for his singing, but sings (well) in the TV series Ally McBeal, and the movies Hairspray and Enchanted. Although not related to actor Jason Marsden, they are actually good friends and their respective wives have been friends since they were six.





#12
Name: Jim Verraros
Current Age: 26
Where You Probably Know Him From: Season one of American Idol
Where I Discovered Him: American Idol
Best Place To See His Body: Google search (for magazine photo shoots)
Has He Ever Played Gay?: In the movies Eating Out and Eating Out 2: Sloppy Seconds. He doesn’t show any skin in either one.
Sexual Orientation: Gay. Came out in The Advocate in 2002.
Did You Know?: Both his parents are deaf.


#13
Name: Kal Penn
Current Age: 32
Where You Probably Know Him From: “Kumar” from the three Harold & Kumar movies.
Where I Discovered Him: The movie Van Wilder
Best Place To See His Body: The movies Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle (rear nude) and The Namesake (shirtless)
Has He Ever Played Gay?: Not that I can find
Sexual Orientation: Straight
Did You Know?: His real name is Kalpen Modi.






#14
Name: Sal Mineo
Current Age: Killed by a mugger in 1976, age 37.
Where You Probably Know Him From: “Plato” in Rebel Without A Cause
Where I Discovered Him: Krakatoa: East of Java – late night TV when I was a kid
Best Place To See His Body: The movie The Gene Krupa Story (shirtless) and the Harold Stevenson's painting The New Adam (full frontal nude)
Has He Ever Played Gay?: He was smitten with Jim Stark (James Dean) in Rebel. He played opposite Don Johnson in the 1971 gay-themed play Fortune and Men’s Eyes.
Sexual Orientation: Came out in the early 1970’s.
Did You Know?: In 1957, he had a #9 single called “Start Movin’ (In My Direction)”




#15
Name: Ian Somerhalder
Current Age: 30
Where You Probably Know Him From: “Boone” in the TV show Lost
Where I Discovered Him: The very short-lived TV show (8 episodes in 2000) Young Americans – written by my #9 favorite Steve Antin.
Best Place To See His Body: The movies The Rules of Attraction, In Enemy Hands, and Marco Polo (shirtless), and the TV show Tell Me You Love Me (obscured frontal view)
Has He Ever Played Gay?: Yes, in The Rules of Attraction
Sexual Orientation: Straight
Did You Know?: He’s from Covington, LA – right over the Causeway Bridge from my house. No, you probably didn’t – or cared.





#16
Name: Danny Nucci
Current Age: 40
Where You Probably Know Him From: Leonardo Dicaprio’s doomed friend from the movie Titanic
Where I Discovered Him: A 1986 episode of the TV show Growing Pains.
Best Place To See His Body: The movies Sublet (shirtless), Shark In A Bottle (rear nude), and the TV show Some of My Best Friends (shirtless)
Has He Ever Played Gay?: The movie The Unknown Cyclist and maybe other times
Sexual Orientation: Straight
Did You Know?: He was born in Austria, was raised in Italy, and moved to America in 1976.




#17
Name: Rafael Nadal
Current Age: 23
Where You Probably Know Him From: Watching tennis
Where I Discovered Him: The same
Best Place To See His Body: The cover of a magazine, a Google search, or The Tennis Channel
Has He Ever Played Gay?: N/A
Sexual Orientation: Straight
Did You Know?: He is the only male player to have won French Open, Wimbledon, and Olympic gold medal in the same year (2008).






#18
Name: Logan Marshall-Green
Current Age: 32
Where You Probably Know Him From: Played “Trey Atwood” on the TV show The O.C.
Where I Discovered Him: Played “Tyler Fogg” on the short-lived 2007 TV series Traveler
Best Place To See His Body: Short shirtless scene in a movie/TV show that I cannot yet identify
Has He Ever Played Gay?: Not that I know of, though he does more theatre work than movies/TV
Sexual Orientation: Straight
Did You Know?: He has a twin brother named Taylor Marshall-Green.



#19
Name: Andy Roddick
Current Age: 26
Where You Probably Know Him From: Tennis on TV
Where I Discovered Him: A tennis tournament that I was watching in 2000 that he won the day he turned 18. I don’t remember the name of it. I just remember never hearing of him before watching that.
Best Place To See His Body: a Google search
Has He Ever Played Gay?: N/A
Sexual Orientation: Straight
Did You Know?: Roddick hosted Saturday Night Live on November 8, 2003, becoming the second professional tennis player to host (Chris Evert being the first).


#20
Name: Jesse Spencer
Current Age: 30
Where You Probably Know Him From: Plays “Dr. Robert Chase” on the TV show House, though he hasn’t gotten much screen time in the last couple of years.
Where I Discovered Him: In the 2003 movie Swimming Upstream
Best Place To See His Body: That movie – he’s in a Speedo for most of the time.
Has He Ever Played Gay?: No
Sexual Orientation: Straight
Did You Know?: He is fluent in French.





As I mentioned in the original entry, if you enjoy male stars, you really should join my Yahoo group MaleStarsShirtless. And be sure to check out my other blog of the same name.

Labels

I finally got around to adding Labels to the end of my posts.

Adam Lambert Gay? Who Cares?

Although it's a little long, this article from today's New York Times is worth reading.

Note that the pictures are from my collection, NOT from the New York Times web site.

----------------------------

April 12, 2009
American Idol's Big Tease
By GUY TREBAY

LET'S say you are an "American Idol" contestant with a criminal history. Let's say you claimed to have had an affair with Paula Abdul. Let's imagine that you are found to have posed for topless photos or been charged with identity theft.

These are not hypothetical scandals. Each has occurred during the eight-season run of the top-rated show. And each has duly been processed out of consciousness at a speed accorded most show business scandals — forgotten in the nanosecond it takes us to move on from the latest reality TV distraction and back to our ordinary lives.

Let's imagine, then, that among the assorted warblers and strummers and leather-lunged divas that have made up the renewable cast of hopefuls on the country's No. 1 television show, you appear not as some talented hopeful with a shady backstory but as a theatrical creation with a message to sell beyond the usual will to prevail. You are swivel hipped and pillow lipped. You have an outsize talent and a fondness for Cher. You have blond hair dyed black and styled in an asymmetrical shag. At some long-ago moment, you gave in to your inner Maybelline girl.

You are Adam Lambert, the contestant widely tipped as a favorite to be the next winner of "American Idol." And the only thing standing between you and riches and the chance to play arenas may be a question currently burning up the Internet: Can a gay contestant win?

Leave aside for a moment the answer to such a question, or even whether Mr. Lambert is gay. He may be. He may not. Fox, which owns "Idol," is not saying; neither is the contestant himself.

What is notable is the intensity of the insinuations caroming around the Internet and in certain corners of the mainstream press — that and the fact that even asking whether a gay contestant can win a broadly popular reality show, whose survivors are selected by public acclaim, seems increasingly anachronistic in light of decisions in Iowa and Vermont to extend marriage rights to gay men and lesbians.

Still, ask they do. Pointing to "embarrassing pictures of Mr. Lambert circulating on the Internet," photographs that show someone who looks uncannily like the contestant tongue-wrestling another man, the conservative commentator Bill O'Reilly inquired last week on his Fox News show, "These pictures that hint that he is gay, will they have an effect on this program, which is a cultural phenomenon in America?"



Cultural critics with a broader frame of reference than Mr. O'Reilly's can easily contextualize Mr. Lambert in a long line of performers who tantalize the public with their talent and equally with their gender ambiguities. Think of Liberace. Think of Prince or Bowie or Elton John or K. D. Lang or Pete Wentz. "We have always had that person" on the pop landscape, said Aaron Hicklin, the editor of Out magazine. "The difference now is that previously the conversation about sexuality has not been as public. When Liberace was around, there was no real way to talk about this stuff."

Now, of course, there is no way and no reason to stifle conversation about the signals Mr. Lambert appears to send in the form of song choices pilfered from the hope chests of anthemic divas (Cher's "I Believe"); his bio (he was a child who enjoyed dressing up a lot but sports "not so much," said his father in an on-air interview); and a theatrical style at times so arch that his country-night version of "Ring of Fire" evoked for Sarah Chinn, the executive director of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, "Joey Arias channeling Billie Holiday channeling Johnny Cash."

According to a Gawker post last week, the "applause-o-meter" had Mr. Lambert pulling way ahead. "Might we actually get a Kris/Adam finale?" read the item, referring to Kris Allen, a generic teen idol type with a waxed cowlick and a lopsided smile. "Might, also, we get a Kris/Adam somethin' else?' Hah, doubtful. No one sees Adam without his skinsuit on, except maybe that fetching, fey little blond character they keep cutting to and describing as Adam's `friend.' "

Predictable as the snarky innuendo is, it also struck a discordant Roy Cohn note, coming in the week when Vermont's Legislature voted to override a veto by the governor and recognize gay marriage, adding the Green Mountain State to Connecticut, Massachusetts and Iowa in a list of states actively advancing the cause of civil rights for gay people. "The entire system is changing so rapidly it is not to be believed," said David Ehrenstein, a Los Angeles based film critic and scholar who writes the hilarious Fablog.

America's heartland, he said, turns out to be politically contiguous to its notoriously liberal coasts. "Iowa is apparently infested with San Francisco values," he said.

Even the White House made a point of inviting lesbian and gay families to join in an annual Easter Egg Roll.

Thus it seems plausible that a person with more than a toe peeking out of the closet might actually win the most hotly contested singing show on the planet. True, it took six years of public insinuation before Clay Aiken, the popular also-ran from Season 2, made the choice in 2008 to come out. When he did so, however, the anticipated career-stall never happened. The news was greeted with a collective yawn.

"I see us as living in the post-Neil Patrick Harris era," said Mr. Ehrenstein, referring to the actor who in 2006 trumped online efforts to expose his sexuality by publicly declaring himself gay to People magazine. "He crossed the Rubicon. He did the `sudden death' play. Supposedly you come out and your career is over. He came out and his career is in better shape than it ever was."

It is worth remembering how radical a shift this is in the public consciousness and that a half century ago, in the 1950s when the film producer Marina Cicogna first found herself in Los Angeles, as she recently told W magazine, studios forced Rock Hudson into bogus relationships with women and obliged gay actors "to lie from morning to night."

In 1959 Liberace, the camp artifact best known, as one critic wrote, "for beating Romantic music to death on a piano decorated with a candelabra," sued an English newspaper for libel for implying in print that he was gay. Given his taste for lacquered pompadours, rhinestone jumpsuits, white mink coats and pneumatic male personal assistants, it is hard now to imagine Liberace believing his public was deceived. But then it is still hard to square shifting public opinion with that of an industry that forces its gay talents to hide in plain sight.

When asked on the witness stand whether he was homosexual, Liberace emphatically told a judge: "No, sir! I am against the practice because it offends convention and it offends society." He won the suit and damages and then, much later, was named in a $113 million palimony suit by his partner Scott Thorson.

"For a long time, gay men were very sensitive to being associated with effeminacy," said Mr. Hicklin of Out. "It was highly objectionable, an example of stereotyping and caricature."

Being photographed in drag or, as Mr. Lambert apparently was at the Burning Man Festival, wearing makeup and a thigh-high halter dress revealing enough to bring a blush to the cheeks of J. Lo, is far from a career-killer these days. "There was a common set of signifiers in theater and TV and popular culture that implied gay," Mr. Hicklin said. "Gay men came to embrace all that because it came to feel far less threatening to be labeled in that way."


Also, somewhat unexpectedly, heterosexuals took up the playfulness of gender ambiguity. "The gay thing got derailed by the way many straight guys started playing with image," Mr. Hicklin said. Metrosexuals followed homosexuals out of the closet. Pete Wentz posed for the cover of Out. "Pete Wentz wears makeup and clearly is confident enough not to be threatened by any assumptions his fans or nonfans might come to," Mr. Hicklin said.

Like Mr. Lambert — whose more steadily assertive gender games are likely to reach an apotheosis this week when the "American Idol" contestants are asked to perform their favorite movie song — performers are now free to treat real or putative gayness as another show business tool, a peekaboo game, a ploy. So-called low forms of sex relationship that entertainment industry codes once kept from being depicted on movie screens are now so routine a feature of pop culture that when "Saturday Night Live" recently parodied the proliferating pop references to sexual experimentation in a sketch titled "The Fast and the Bi-Curious," the Entertainment Weekly critic Ken Tucker slapped the show down for using jargon that "feels old and overused."

Unlike other reality shows, said Joe Jervis — a gay activist blogger whose recent mention of Adam Lambert on his site Joe My God generated 50,000 hits from people searching the term "Is Adam Lambert Gay?" — the contestants on "American Idol" aren't voted off their little show business island by one another. Love them or hate them, it is up to America to choose.

"The show is squarely in the hands of the viewers," Mr. Jervis said. It is just that vox populi aspect of "American Idol," he said, that demonstrates radical changes "in the popular view of openly gay people." That may be. But it is certainly also worth noting that a Revlon habit is no surefire tip-off to gayness, latent or otherwise. Ask Marilyn Manson. Ask Devendra Banhart or Brandon Flowers or any of the other members of groups sometimes called "eyeliner bands." For that matter, why not ask Kiss?

Jeff Buckley

On Wednesday night's American Idol, Randy said about Adam singing Ring of Fire: "It's really hard to say, man. But I must say that I was one of the ones who loved Adam's Jeff Buckley take on that song. Many people don't know that that is Jeff Buckley's version."

I'm a huge Jeff Buckley fan and didn't think that he ever recorded that song. After looking through my (complete) collection of his songs, I still hadn't found it. Before he died in 1997, he had never recorded that song.

After some research, I found this article:

American Idol Judge Randy Jackson Says Adam Lambert Channeling Jeff Buckley on His Version of Johnny Cash's "Ring of Fire"?

Scour the internet as much as you like, you will not find the classic song "Ring of Fire" by Jeff Buckley. Although "Ring of Fire" has been done by at least a hundred artists since it was written by June Carter (the future wife of Johnny Cash) and Merle Kilgore, Jeff Buckley did not record a version. This does not mean that Jeff Buckley never sang the song. He just never recorded it.

So why even bring up the subject? Because American Idol judge Randy Jackson brought it up. On the American Idol results show on Wednesday evening, when Ryan Seacrest was down to the last two finalists left to decide which one would join the other two contestants on the chopping block (one would be eliminated from the three), he asked for comments from the American Idol judges about Adam Lambert's rendition of "Ring of Fire" the night before. That's when Randy Jackson mentioned Jeff Buckley in relation to the song.

Although Jeff Buckley never recorded "Ring of Fire," it is easy to understand why Randy Jackson would bring up the name. Randy Jackson is not on American Idol for just his good looks. He's also a hot producer and musician himself. He has a very good ear for music. He prides himself on his ability, which is why he often uses the term "pitch problems" or "pitchy" when referring to a performance.

Randy Jackson was comparing Adam Lambert to Jeff Buckley, at least on a vocal level. Adam Lambert's version of "Ring of Fire" was done the way Jeff Buckley would have done it. And with the same amazing vocal control as well. And perhaps just as haunting. If one were to surf one's way to YouTube and click up "Grace," "Forget Her," Or "Hallelujah" by Jeff Buckley, Randy Jackson's words start to make a lot more sense.

It really is a shame that the world lost Jeff Buckley. He was an amazing talent.

------------

Here's Jeff Buckley doing his song Grace,the title track from his first album.

Shirtless Sanjaya

Every season* on American Idol, there is at least one contestant that I really root for. Last season, it was Sanjaya Malakar. Yes, his singing got worse and worse almost every week, but I still liked him.






It only took me a year, but I finally found shirtless pictures of Sanjaya.



*To compare: My pick in the first season of American Idol was Jim Verraros. I still follow his career. I'll save shirtless pictures of him for another time.