Robert Conrad – Sidelineland

With three days left in 2009, I have three more favorite moments in blogging to document as I look back over 2009. Unquestionably, a series of favorite moments for me has been my ongoing series “What Turned Me Gay.” My WTMG posts have generated the most comments, by far. I sort of stumbled into the recurring theme of a retrospective on my youthful development into a Mo with a wrestling kink. Little did I know that what turned me gay turned so, so many of you gay as well.

I’ve lost track of my first entry for What Turned Me Gay… I’ll have to dig around in my archives to see what happened to my fond memories of seeing bodybuilder Bob Paris on the cover of a muscle magazine when I was an adolescent. From Bob to Billy Jack Haynes to Robert Conrad, what I’ve rediscovered about myself is that my past is littered with objects of lust who confirmed and reconfirmed for me that whatever else I was to become, I was, without a doubt, a gay boy who got off on seeing hard bodies hammering on one another.

From Jon-Erik Hexum to Miles O’Keeffe to Steve Reeves, in my youth I was delighted by a steady stream of gorgeous men with big muscles showing plenty of skin.

From the 1984 mens gymnastics Olympic champions to Greg Louganis, the athletes, the actors, the characters and grapplers all enflamed my imagination and engorged my… lust for gorgeous men. And frankly, there’s something liberating about the realization that some of these guys would probably resent being named on a list of things that turned me gay. Just like me being gay, it doesn’t matter what they think or believe or want. It just is.

I realize that text is not the most effective avenue for communicating sarcasm, but I sincerely hope that readers have been able to detect my tongue firmly planted in my cheek. In fact, I don’t believe any of these fine, fine men get credit for turning me gay, because I don’t believe that I ever made a “turn.” I believe I have always been gay, so there was nothing to be changed, and there’s most certainly nothing for me to be changed back into. If “What Turned Me Gay” tells me anything, it’s that I have always lived in a world filled with beautiful men catching my eye, arousing my erotic imagination, and getting me in touch with the joys of passionate lust.

I don’t know how many more objects of lust from my youth I’ll be able to scare up in the coming year. What Turned Me Gay may have to get retired soon. But as I look back at all the studly stars and hardbody wrestlers who “turned me gay,” I lift my glass in a toast: for every moment that they made my pulse quicken, for every flash of muscled beauty that made me light-headed, I’m a better man today for it. Ching, ching…

James West made me gay. Well, I suppose it was Robert Conrad playing James West in “Wild, Wild West” that made me gay. Well, it was probably the frequent appearances of Robert Conrad shirtless, often tied up and tortured, that made me gay (and into domination!).

Just to be clear, I wasn’t old enough to see the original run of Wild, Wild West. I caught it in one of its endless rerun cycles. Even as a young kid, I remember being in complete awe of Conrad. Every episode was guaranteed to feature him with his tight pants showing off that fantastic ass. And every so often, not infrequently, he’d be captured by some evil genius, forced out of his shirt, and tied up to endure threats of destruction.

Conrad had a chiseled jaw, hot-n-hairy pecs, and a tight six pack plunging down the high-rise pants he always wore. He was a tight little package with a drop-dead gorgeous face. Just to look at him in stills would have been subject for a wet dream, but to see him struggle against his bonds, to squirm and flinch in pain, to be captured and (at least temporarily) under the dominating control of an evil nemesis… yep, I owe a lot of what I am today to James West, via the beautiful suffering-stylings of Robert Conrad.

The producers clearly understood what we tuned in to see, putting him back on the small screen for a couple of perpetually shirtless seasons of Baa Baa Black Sheep. Another decade later, I had such high hopes when I saw him again in the pilot for High Mountain Rangers, costarring his hottie sons, Shane and Christian.

Sadly, High Mountain Rangers had no traction, and Robert did little else on screen after that. Happily, the image of James West, his wrists tied behind his back, his shirtless, hairy chest flexing and struggling, those tight pants hugging every curve of that rocking butt… very happily, that image remains seared in my memory as the thrilling inspiration to a young gay boy’s imagination.