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Chad Allen's a gay detective in "Shock to the System"

Marc Breindel

Humphrey Bogart may have been cool, but did you ever see Sam Spade take a bubble bath with his sexy male lover? Out gay actor Chad Allen's alter ego Donald Strachey solves crimes and goes down on his boyfriend in "Shock to the System," making him more man than Spade will ever be, in my book.

"Shock to the System" is a hard-boiled detective story featuring one of the world's first gay private dicks. Actually, "Shock" is more medium-boiled, sort of a cross between "The Maltese Falcon" and "Hart to Hart," with a few gratuitous locker-room scenes thrown in just for fun. Sure, there's crime and danger, but the tension happily never rises much higher than on "Murder She Wrote" or "Noah's Arc."

Donald Strachey, private eye, has already won a loyal following through Richard Stevenson's mystery-book series on which the film is based. "Shock to the System" is Detective Strachey's second screen outing produced by Here! TV, and the second time the hunky, pint-size Chad Allen -- star of TV's "My Two Dads" and "Dr. Quinn: Medicine Woman" -- has donned Strachey's wifebeater and fedora.

So, what exactly distinguishes a gay detective from a straight one? In Strachey's case, it starts with the clientele. Our hero has been profiled in an Advocate magazine article that apparently every gay person in America has read, so when someone needs a gay-friendly gumshoe, he's the one they call. And that's not the only rainbow tint to this noir-ish film. Stevenson cleverly sets the murder Strachey investigates in an "ex-gay" program, so the detective ends up exploring the world of "homosexual conversion therapy."

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