It was a couple of years after Tarzan the Ape Man came out that I finally saw it. I was a teenager, and I almost couldn’t quite believe that Miles O’Keeffe was real. I thought his face wasn’t well suited to Tarzan. He looked more like a fashion model than the king of the jungle. But that body… the loin cloth… and the scene where he gets bearhugged by the African warrior… what a source of ecstasy! Seeing his nearly naked body getting tossed around like a ragdoll still makes me light-headed. Those incredibly long, muscled legs were entrancing, with the peek-a-boo loin cloth offering an occasional glimpse of bare, beautiful butt cheeks.

It wasn’t until much later I saw the Ator movies, but I was all over the Sword of the Valiant as soon as it came out. What a disappointment… the pageboy haircut and the dumbfounded look on his face throughout the movie was pretty much the opposite of sexy. However, the scene of Miles shirtless, tortured on the rack, surely sowed the seeds of my recessive S&M traits. His acting career never really took off, but those skin shots of Miles O’Keeffe from my early adolescence taught me the vivid lesson of what joy there was to be found in seeing such a strikingly beautiful male form.