Best Chest in the Wild Wild West

To my knowledge there’s never been a “When Did You First Know?” poll, but if there were, I’d bet heavily that “watching Wild Wild West reruns” would take the number one spot for gay/bi men who grew up in the 60s through 80s. In forum after forum whenever this question is asked, several replies commenting on Robert Conrad’s chaps, cheeks, and, especially, chest immediately hit the board. And whenever someone brings up the subject of Conrad as Old West secret agent James West, any number of guys volunteer that watching his handsome face and muscular pecs/abs/buns, frequently in leather chaps and/or bondage, was how they first knew they were attracted to men.

It’s easy to see why. Even without Conrad, The Wild Wild West was one of the campiest and kinkiest TV shows in the most campy-kinky decade of all, the Pop Sixties of Andy Warhol and Batman and Emma Peel. Combining as it did Western, sci-fi, and spy genres, The WWW took advantage of every opportunity those genres offer – which is plenty – for softcore bondage and shirtless hero striptease. In this context, almost any handsome, decently built actor playing the part of the oft stripped-and-bound James West would have become the object of budding young homosexual lust. But because that actor was the incredibly ripped and exquisitely handsome Robert Conrad, The Wild Wild West was off-the-charts sexy.

 

Conrad had the perfect male torso (make that the perfect male upper body, since his biceps, shoulders, forearms and even back muscles were all perfection as well). His pecs were sharply defined, thick, shield-shaped filets of macho man-meat; his abs looked like they were etched in steel by Dr. No’s laser beam. And both were coated with just the right amount of beautiful brown man-fur.

And then there was the face. At the start of The Wild Wild West, Conrad was in his prime and was about as handsome as any leading man Hollywood has ever produced. He looked like some mad scientist – Dr. Franknfurter if not Dr. Loveless - had taken Tony Curtis and genetically reworked him to make him simultaneously both prettier and more ruggedly masculine. Conrad’s bright green eyes (which often looked blue, depending on what he wore), his walnut brown hair, his round boyish face all combined to make him - no other word for it - gorgeous, but his rugged jawline, sharp cheekbones, and heavy beard kept him from looking too pretty or boyish.

But of course, no man is perfect, and in some departments Conrad came up short – all too literally. He was probably no taller than 5’7” and from the waist down he was a bit less hot than from the waist up. His thighs and even calves were muscular but for my tastes too thick and stumpy-looking. On Hawaiian Eye, where he often wore little more than swim trunks and where he was accompanied by taller male, and sometimes even female, stars, he often looked more like a sidekick than a hero, more of a young punk than an alpha male, especially alongside Van Williams or Anthony Eiseley. The producers and directors on Wild Wild West seemed to have been well aware of Conrad’s shortcomings, however, and accentuated the positive, giving him cowboy boots with significant heels and dressing him in a distinctive quasi-Latin American bolero-vaquero outfit, with tight high-waisted pants that made his legs look longer and more slender. They also refrained from shaving his abs as was done on Hawaiian Eye (although on WWW from episode to episode the manner of and degree to which Conrad’s torso fur is trimmed varies from Shatnerian-shaven to practically Baldwinesque), which definitely pumped up the manliness factor. Thus prepared, the WWW producers/writers/directors then, whenever possible, took his shirt off and often tied his wrists behind his back, to prominently project his pecs and abs. “Shamelessly Shirtless Sexiness” would have been as good a description of WWW as “Weird Way-out Western.”

Conrad went on to other notable roles, especially in “Baa Baa Black Sheep”, where he portrayed Pappy Boyington, and on “Battle of the Network Stars”, where he played an asshole (himself), but none of his subsequent roles have endured in the public memory as WWW has. This is due in no small measure to the show itself of course; it was fun, strange, innovative, and action-packed, featuring some of the best fight scenes every filmed up to that time as well as some of the coolest gadgets that 19th superspy technology had to offer (if you want to see the origin of steampunk, look no further than Dr. Loveless’s lab). But the greatest reason for its enduring popularity was Conrad himself, whose James West set a new standard for secret agent studliness.