Glury Be!: “There’s Gold In Them Thar Holes!”

Glee. RuPaul’s Drag Race. The A-List: New York. Dancing With The Stars. Toddlers & Tiaras.

If you were asked to name the gayest show currently on air, these are likely to spring to mind. Still, in terms of sheer volume of constant illicit innuendo and hyper-aggressive machismo channeled through borderline erotic hostility, nothing can, well, top Discovery Channel’s Gold Rush Alaska — an everything-but-the-cumshot crank-fest whose hilarious double entendre exchanges have irony-attuned ears buzzing.

The series’s mission statement: Get The Glory Hole. No matter the risk — find it, plumb it hard and mercilessly, and pound it out until it can’t take it anymore. Then, and only then, will we get the epic gold rush we’ve been begging for on our knees.

The current vogue for Alaskan-themed True Life TV would have you believe our forty-ninth state is practically the Old West by way of Nanook of The North and not the most heavily-subsidized state in the Union, but hey, these things all have a list of writers in their end credits, so there’s truth in TV for you. Gold Rush Alaska’s superficial appeal is its tapping into the rugged individualism of hearty workin’ men driven out into the wilderness by a failing economy. It’s the dream of the self-made man. Like most Right Wing fantasies involving the shrugging off of modernity and the turning away from soft society, it’s only about two hundred years or so past being utterly obsolete. Probably there’ll be a bear at some point too, if only because all these shows need a fucking bear in them.

In theory, that’s how it should play: six Oregonian men, jobless and restless, venture out to Porcupine Creek, Alaska to prospect for gold. Ah, but not just any glimmering speck in a stream; we’re talking about the Glory Hole — a pocket of underground ore that would dick slap King Midas himself with envy. Soon, the wives must return home, leaving the men folk to fight like wolves into order to be the first one to get that hot golden lode all over him.

However, this is far less Charlie Chaplin in Gold Rush than it is a group of men — all shacked up together at the Porcupine Creek Bed & Breakfast and boasting ready-made noms de porn like Jack Hoffman, Dakota Fred, Jim Thurber, and Jim Harness (!) — seemingly set to headline When Bears Attack, Behind The Barn Door, or Lumberjack Gang Bang.

Yes, TV execs, the world has changed. The Military finally seems ready to give up the ghost, leaving only pro athletes and rappers to front their “No homo!” exclusivity. The public at large has arguably never been more aware of gay subtext in popular culture than it is now. Even traditional bastions of male authority and virility like police, cowboys, and construction workers carry a certain parodic significance that can never be turned back to the good ol’ days.

Anyway, nostalgia is so gay.

This means a group of snarling, territorial men wearing construction site helmets and constantly fondling tools, while likely playing as intended with a target demographic, is otherwise rife with homoerotic implications beyond — in the same sense that beweaved former beauty queens hunting elk or burly truckers hauling their loads entertains on a whole other unintended level.

Admittedly, us city folk are like tittering kids in health class, but how can we be expected to control ourselves when confronted with dialogue/narration like “Pull like you mean it!, “ “Wait for the glory hole to drain,” “They can chew my ass all they want! Go ahead and chew!,” “You don’t wind up with it in your sluice box!,” and “I gotta take it any way I can get it!” in the context of a series so sexually naïve that not one producer involved had the presence of mind to say “Um, yeah — we should really get a different term for that…”

Eh. No guts, no glory…