Before Civil Unions, A Gay Takeover

Colorado’s recent acceptance of civil unions reminded me of a social experiment in little Alpine County, California, shortly before Ellen and I moved there in 1973.

The Oscar and the killer whale

It was nice to see Jeff Bridges win the best actor Oscar for Crazy Heart. He’s been at it a long time, with obvious relish and humor.

What’s not to love about The Dude in The Big Lebowski? (“Hey, careful, man, there’s a beverage here.”) As the late, great Pauline Kael said of Bridges’ style: “[he] may be the most natural and least self-conscious screen actor who has ever lived.”

I taught his older brother Beau how to ski at Bear Valley in California when Ellen and I were there in the early 1970s. The whole family hung out at Bear: Jeff, Beau, their actor father Lloyd. Jeff was the handsomer, more famous brother. He had already earned an Oscar nomination for The Last Picture Show in 1971. But I drew Beau, and that was cool. He made progress on skis. They were all regular folks.

Thanks to the small screen, Lloyd was the one, actually, who rocked my boat. I had worshipped him as Mike Nelson, the scuba-diving hero of Sea Hunt, which ran, in stark black-and-white, for three seasons from 1958 to 1961. Mike Nelson could dodge the zig-zag bullets fired at him from a boat above, and he could survive the bad guy cutting his air hose in a vicious underwater tango.

But the episode that is seared into my brain still was the one in which killer whales home in on a disabled dinghy. Those six-foot tall dorsal fins, like ink-black conning towers, gliding, with ultimate menace, and the outboard motor won’t start, the man’s arm pulling and pulling the cord. . .

This image came rushing back a couple of weeks ago when the captive killer whale, Tillikum, dragged a Sea World trainer underwater and drowned her.