George Nader- vintage gay beefcake

Was he a good actor?

OK actor. I remember him in the camp classic THE FEMALE ANIMAL, with Heddy Lamarr and Jane Powell (!) as her man-hungry daughter.

He also did a film in 1958 called NOWHERE TO GO where he played a prison escapee. The female lead is Maggie Smith in her first credited screen appearance.

Hubba-hubba!

Gorgeous, sexy, masculine. Damn, George Nader is a a bona fide hunk.

Who topped?

He was also in the hilarious movie ROBOT MONSTER.

Here's George's makeout session being interrupted by the monster — a gorilla suit with a diving helmet attached.

R14 OP literally mentioned it.

R13 neither fucked. You can just be friends. George was in a serious relationship

I forgot he wrote Chrome. I read that years ago.

I would like to read it.

He was a Henry Wilson product.

Good looking, meh actor and closeted homosexual.

By all accounts a nice man and a loyal friend to Rock Hudson.

I doubt they fucked (both tops) but I bet Rock nailed the boyfriend.

I thought Rock was a bottom

I find it refreshing and not a little bit sad that it does not seem like George could afford a shirt.

I could swear that when one of the Hollywood tabloids (Confidential?) threatened to out Hudson, Nader was offered up as an alternative as Hudson was a major star at that point and Nader wasn't.

But a Google search didn't come up with anything, so I guess is it's just another rumor.

sweet and sexy

He was fine as hell in that Season 1 episode of [italic]The Andy Griffith Show.[/italic]

But omg [italic]Laramie?[/italic] Episode Second season (I think)? George Nader AND Robert Fuller? Together? Fire. Only thing missing was John Smith and his tasty looking VPL.

Didn't he and DL fave Lizbeth Scott do a movie together? Only saw it once, when I was 7/8/9. I'll see if I can find it streaming somewhere. Can't imagine watching it through a different lens.

[quote]Didn't he and DL fave Lizbeth Scott do a movie together?

I'm not sure that they ever appeared in the same film, but their names were often mentioned together in books about old gay Hollywood and "Confidential" magazine's outing scandals.

No cock pics from the photographer's private collection? Back in those days if you wanted nude male pics you went to your magazine store and asked the guy and he'd have a few copies of something behind the counter that you could buy. European or blackmarket stuff.

R25 wtf. Dude. Please.

R18 clearly doesn’t know one had to be a closeted homosexual

[quote]I could swear that when one of the Hollywood tabloids (Confidential?) threatened to out Hudson, Nader was offered up as an alternative as Hudson was a major star at that point and Nader wasn't.

I've found multiple references to this online, yet none have anything to back it up. And significant details change from one retelling to the other. (In some, this occurred in the mid-50s. In others, it's the mid-60s. The Confidential article was about Rock at a gay party. Or it was about a secret recording of Rock talking about having sex with men. Or that he and Nader were having an affair. And Agent Henry Willson is said to have made the deal — or maybe it was Universal Studios?) I can't find a copy of any Confidential article outing Nader, and I seriously doubt that an acceptable "deal" could be made that would substitute the star of Magnificent Obsession and All that Heaven Allows with that of Robot Monster. It's one of those stories that seems to have taken on a life of its own.

A similar tale has it that it was actor Rory Calhoun who was offered up to Confidential so they wouldn't publish their story about Rock. The dirt on Calhoun was not that he was gay, however, but that he had a criminal record and had served time. This story is better documented, as the Confidential article does exist and Calhoun even talked about it. "‘They [Confidential] found out about it and called me,’ he said. ‘They asked if I wanted to talk about it. I said, hell yes. It turned out to be an upbeat story, not an expose so much as a success story.’" Maybe because it reinforced Calhoun's 'bad boy' image, it doesn't seem to have had a huge effect on his career.

William J. Mann's "Behind the Screen: How Gays and Lesbians Shaped Hollywood 1910 - 1969" contains the occasional interesting aside about Nader. There's eventually a three or four page section about the concerns publicists had that he'd be outed, and their anxiety about how to sell him as heterosexual.

Here's a quote:

[quote]After Movieland reported in July 1956 that Nader's "engagement" to Crayne had changed to "friendship," Universal mounted a clever, aggressive campaign to bolster his hetero credentials. The studio hoped to deflect any growing suspicion about his bachelorhood not by obscuring it but rather by calling attention to it.

It was unconvincing, however:

[quote]In May 1957, Screen Parade featured him in a "Wanted" poster, saying, "This man is dangerous! He may make a clever get-away!" In language as old as Hollywood itself, writer Chris Williams opined, "Perhaps there'll be a girl he hasn't as yet met who will knock down his defenses and have him running to the altar--or again maybe some moonlit night he'll look at Martha or Dani or one of the other lovelies he dates and think--this is it! And forthwith head to the preacher."

Universal then knew they weren't fooling anyone and quietly dropped his option. That's when Mann mentions Ray Stricklyn, a supporting actor in a few '50s films, whose career also died around the same time. Mann notes that neither Stricklyn nor Nader were box office draws, and unlike Hudson they weren't willing to play the PR game, which made them disposable as Hollywood grew more homophobic in the '50s and '60s than it had previously been.

Rory Calhoun was no box office king but he was a bigger star than Nader (who had done schlock like "Robot Monster", after all) and a more plausible person to have been sacrificed for Hudson than Nader. Calhoun had a niche in Westerns, which were still big in the 50s. He did a lot of westerns, as well as detective dramas on tv after his fall from grace and that's probably the career he would have had anyway. He'd already been around with Selznick and 20th Century Fox. Universal wasn't much of a studio in those days and working for them after working for Selznick and 20th meant he was on his way out as a film actor. Hudson was the kind of rising newcomer they rarely had in those days.

R15 Authority on gay men's sexuality.