I had my 1st crush, before I could have ever formulated the concept or known why I felt so dizzy & tingly while watching The Hardy Boys serial on my favorite show- The Mickey Mouse Club. Michael Constantine & Tommy Kirk! I couldn’t stop feeling dreamy about them. Oh, how I wanted to be a Hardy Boy & solve mysteries along with those 2 boys. I almost couldn’t make it through Swiss Family Robinson with all the shirtless males & Tommy Kirk as close to naked as I could have ever imagined, & I magine I did.
Tommy Kirk was one of Walt Disney’s leading male star of the late 1950’s & early 1960’s: Babes In Toyland, The Shaggy Dog, The Absent-Minded Professor, Son of Flubber. His regular presence on the Wonderful World of Disney rocked my young world.
Tommy was the All American Boy. Someone I related to & wanted to emulate. His clean good looks, honest face & comic timing, & wholesome roles were how I aspired to be an actor. Little could I have understood that Tommy was gay.
Kirk knew his sexuality would create problems with his career as well as his strict Baptist parents. Kirk: "I consider my teenage years as being desperately unhappy. I knew I was gay, but I had no outlet for my feelings. It was very hard to meet people &, at that time, there was no place to go to socialize. It wasn’t until the early 1960s that I began to hear of places where gays congregated."
At age 23, Kirk was involved with a 15 year old boy he had picked up from a public pool. The boy's mother went to Walt Disney to complain, & Walt decided Kirk had become a liability, & personally fired him. His contract was dropped, but the studio did allow him to come back for The Monkey's Uncle (1965), which coincidently was Annette Funicello’s last Disney film as well.
Kirk: “My early sexual experiences as desperate & miserable. Mostly brief encounters, very back alley kind of things. When I was about 17 or 18 years old, I finally admitted to myself that I wasn’t going to change. I didn’t know what the consequences would be, but I had the definite feeling that is was going to wreck my Disney career & maybe my whole acting career. Eventually, I became involved with somebody and I was fired. Disney was a family film studio & I was supposed to be their young, leading man. After they found out I was involved with someone, that was the end of Disney."
It was 1964 & Kirk was 23 years old & had been a star for more than a decade, & he was "box office poison." His films during this time included the campy Pajama Party & Mars Needs Women. Kirk: "After I was fired from Disney, I did some of the worst movies ever made & I got involved with a manager who said it didn’t matter what you did as long as you kept working." Kirk’s personal life also took a downward spiral: "I wound up completely broke. I had no self-discipline & I almost died of a drug overdose a couple of times. It’s a miracle that I lived through it all."
Kirk eventually left show business. Kirk: "Finally, I said, to hell with the whole thing, to hell with show business. I’m gonna make a new life for myself, & I got off drugs, completely kicked all that stuff." For 20+ years, Kirk has had his own carpet & upholstery cleaning business headquartered in the Valley. He wants to be remembered for the Disney work, especially Swiss Family Robinson, his favorite.
Kirk turns 69 today… one of my favorite numbers. Thanks Tommy Kirk for teaching a young boy how to be horny.
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