Weird Science, the movie and tv show: three gay-subtext couples, two gay-vague guys, and a lot of beefcake.

Link to the n*de dudes

Weird Science (1985) is a John Hughes brat pack comedy with a paranormal twist. Nerds Gary and Wyatt's (Anthony Michael Hall, Ilan-Mitchell Smith) are discouraged because the Girls of Their Dreams are dating a pair of belligerent, obnoxious preppies (Robert Downey Jr., Robert Rusler), and won't give them a chance.  So they use a computer to create their perfect dream girl, Lisa: she is not only attractive but super-smart, plus she has magical powers.

I forget most of the plot after 40 years, but wikipedia has helpfully filled in the details, Instead of dating them, Lisa conjures them a car, gets them fake ids, and hosts a wild party, where she thwarts their adversaries and their bullying older brother, military-school graduate Chet (Bill Paxton).

She also summons a pack of rabid bikers to kidnap the Girls, so Gary and Wyatt can mount a daring rescue and win them.

It was cheesy stuff, and entirely heteronormative.  There was a scattering of the incessant homophobia that one sees in every John Hughes movie, but spewed by the evil Chet, not by one of the good guys.  That was a big win in the era.  

Plus some strong gay subtexts between Gary and Wyatt and the prettyboy preppies Ian and Max.  And quite a surprising amount of beefcake

I wanted to do a "any gay roles/are they gay in real life" profile of one of the guys, but I can't find anything suitable.

Don't pay attention to the femme-half shirt and girly beneath-the-belt stuff.  Ilan-Mitchell Smith, now a history professor, is straight in real life.

Anthony Michael Hall, the darling of the Brat Pack, appeared in Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, and Johnny B Goode, and as an adult The Dead Zone and Awkward.  Straight characters, with maybe one exception, and straight in real life.

Brat Packer Robert Downey Jr. appeared in Back to School, The Pick-Up Artist, Johnny B. Goode, became famous for Chaplin (playing the silent-era comedian), and went on to play Iron Man and Sherlock Holmes.  More straight characters, with maybe one exception, and....well, you get the idea.

At least we know that Robert Rusler is a gay ally: he befriended his Nightmare on Elm Street 2 co-star Mark Patton, and took him to some of the gay bars in West Hollywood (no, we never met).  But his tv work, in The Outsiders, Babylon 5, Snoops, Murder She Wrote, Bones, Ray Donovan...as far as I can tell, all heteronormative.  And...straight in real life.

Let's try the Weird Science TV Series.

It aired on the USA Network from 1994 to 1998. I watched on occasion, usually while on the treadmill at the gym. Gary and Wyatt are now played by Michael Manasseri and John Mallory Asher. Lisa characterizes herself as a "magic genie," and Wyatt's parents are absent, leaving his older brother Chet (Lee Tergesen) to look after/bully them.  

The "winning the Girl of Our Dreams" plotline appeared in just the first two or three episodes; later Lisa turns the boys into girls, clones them,  turns them into rock stars, traps them in a horror movie, traps them in The Twilight Zone, transports them to the Old West, and brings a video game villain to life. 

More after the break

"The Wizard of Id": 1970s satire comic strip with buddy-bonding, a gay knight, and "The President...um, I mean the King... is a fink"

During the early 1950s, Brant Parker, a political cartoonist living in Binghamton, New York, befriended high school student Johnny Hart, and encouraged him to submit his cartoons to magazines.  

Hart placed a few in The Saturday Evening Post, but his big break came in 1958, when B.C., a comic strip about sarcastic cavemen, was picked up by Comic Creators’ Syndicate.  Soon he was being lauded as the most promising of the new crop of hip young comic artists.  

Always an iconoclast, he presaged Doonesbury in introducing political satire into his daily strips.  In his  later years, he became a fundamentalist Christian, and started having his cavemen voice his beliefs.  How do prehistoric cavemen even know about Good Friday?  

A few years later, Hart approached Brant Parker, who had remained a close friend, and again breaking tradition, asked him to collaborate on a strip about the sarcastic residents of a Medieval kingdom; The Wizard of Id began in 1964, and continues today, the work of Brandt's son Jeff Parker and Hart's grandson Mason Mastroianni.

We didn't get the strip in the Rock Island Argus, but I found it in dozens of small paperback collections published during the 1970s: The Peasants are Revolting ("you can say that again"), Remember the Golden Rule, The Wizard's Back, Every Man is Innocent Until Proven Broke, I'm Off to See the Wizard ("you'd have to be").

Though named after the inept Wizard,   Wizard of Id is an ensemble strip, involving the daily interactions of many strongly drawn characters: 

Tiny, blustering King Id

Troub, a hippie troubadour

Bung, the drunken court jester

Spook, who has been in the dungeon for so long that he is a mass of  hair

Tthe Lone Haraunger, who scrawls his slogan, “The King is a Fink,” under the King’s nose

Robbing Hood, who “takes from the wretch, and gives to the peer”

Rodney, a cowardly knight.  

Id is a decidedly male preserve where women are demonized or simply ignored: the Wizard’s wife Blanche is the fat, ugly harridan who figures so prominently in the sets of Borscht Belt comedians, and the Lady Gwen has no strong personality traits, and seems to exist simply to express an unrequited love for Rodney.  Eschewing the heterosexual hijinks that preoccupy the minds of most characters in non-nuclear family strips, from Peanuts to Garfield and even Johnny Hart’s earlier B.C., residents of Id spend most of their time buddy-bonding.  

When Rodney is released from a curse that turned him into a statue, it is Bung, not the Lady Gwen, who joyfully reunited with him.  

Yodey, a dumb but massive squire, treats Rodney with an admiration that treads the line between hero worship and romance.  Even the King, who never expresses interest in women, rarely appears without Rodney or the Duke at his side.

The buddy-bonding alone  made The Wizard of Id a welcome relief from the "girls! girls! girls!" we saw on tv, in movies, in comics -- well, everywhere else.  But it gets better: there's a gay-vague character.

More after the break

Lemogang Tsipa: a gay Trojan, a warlord from Atlantis, and Shaka Zulu. With c*cks, circumcision, and Matthew McConaughey

 

Link to the n*de photos

I wanted to profile Lemogang Tsipa because he has an unusual name, which I keep confusing with Lemongrab from Adventure Time (it actually means "Recognition" in Tswana).

And because his character had a bisexual three-way (and kissed a dude) in Troy: Fall of a City, so maybe he is gay or bi in real life.  

Plus he is super-handsome.

Basic bio: Lemogang was born in 1991 in Empangani, South Africa (about two hours from Durban). His father is Pedi and his mother Tswana, so he grew up multilingual, fluent in English, Afrikaans, Xhosa, Zulu, and Tswana.

At age nine, he was diagnosed with ADHD, but he was able to channel his energy into chess, swimming, soccer, hockey -- and dramatics.  He graduated from Grantleigh College,  a boarding school in Richards Bay, and the South African School of Motion Picture Medium (BFA, 2012).

Lemogang's film debut came in the South African Felix (2013), and his first international film was Alien Outpost (2014), about the aftermath of an alien invasion.

More international film roles followed: 

He played Addo in the contemporary adaption of Roots (2016), with Malachi Kirby as Kunta Kinte and Rege-Jean Page (left) as Chicken George

Phedon in the Stephen King fantasy The Dark Tower (2017), starring Idris Elba and Matthew McConaughey (left, n*de on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends)

Patroklus, lover of Achilles, in Troy: Fall of a City (2017).

 

But most of Lemogang's work has been in South Africa:

Amandla (2022), featuring two brothers (Lemogang, Thabo Rametsi) on opposite sides of the law.

Blood Psalms (2022) is set 11,000 years ago, shortly after the House of Kemet fled the destruction of Atlantis and settled in Africa.   While the Five Tribes gather to celebrate the politically-motivated wedding of King Letsha (Mothusi Magano), his daughter, Princess Zazi, becomes pregnant with a baby whose birth will fortell the End of Days.

There are also various scheming pretenders to the throne, sorcerers, orphans with disputed parentage, and hangers-on hiding terrible secrets. 

More after the break.

Gemstones Episode 2.1: Junior likes d*cks, Kelvin likes pecs, and f*k yeah, we got both!

 

Link to NSFW review

Righteous Gemstones Season 2 is my favorite.  Season 1 muddled the Gideon-Scotty plotline, Season 3 had some infuriating queerbaiting, and Season 4 was rushed and muddled, but Season 2 did the Kelvin/Keefe and Junior/Eli romances exactly right.    

Memphis Soul Stew: Memphis, 1968. Teenage Eli Gemstone, the Maniac Kid (Jake Kelley), is playing a heel, a pro wrestling villain: "from the wrong side of the tracks, a newcomer to the League, all muscle, all attitude."  He fights dirty, pretending to reconcile with opponent Kyle Hawk, then throwing him out of the ring.  

As he fights, his manager Glendon Marsh (Wayne Duvall) cheers. Glendon's teenage son Junior (Tommy Nelson) watches, sometimes happy but usually disturbed.  Is he jealous of the attention Eli is getting?  Is he a rebellious teenager during the era of the Generation Gap?.

Junior is gay: In the locker room, Glendon offers Eli "some bonus pay on the South Side," while Junior looks on, smoking a cigarette, still either jealous or angry. As they leave, they pass a n*de guy.  Junior is so busy looking that he trips, and then looks back again.  The boy is definitely into men.

Jim Crow Must Go:  As they drive through a black neighborhood on the South Side of Memphis, near where Martin Luther King, Jr. will be assassinated on April 4th.  Junior looks out at the townsfolk in disgust. 

Suddenly they are surrounded civil rights protestors: "Jim Crow must go!" "We protest injustice."  Junior calls them "bums," which was usually applied to hippies, not African-Americans, leading me to believe that something changed between writing the script and hiring the background actors.  Glendon punches him: "they just want what everybody wants, a piece of the fucking pie."

Ok, Junior is racist, and Glendon is abusive, but why this scene? Hiring background players, costume, and staging must have been very time-consuming, with no payoff: civil rights are never mentioned again.  

The Loan Enforcer: Glendon is a loan shark as well as a wrestling manager: the job involves beating up a deadbeat.  Eli and Junior both go, squabbling over who's the boss.  

"Kill 'em!" we hear.  Psych!  It's the tv.  We meet a slovenly, drunken, foul-mouthed, abusive jackass of a husband.  While Junor subdues his wife and baby, Eli punches him a few times and asks for the money, and when he doesn't have it, breaks his thumbs. Junior laughs "derangedly" (according to the subtitles).

Afterwards Glendon drops Eli off, hands him some money, and tells him, "Buy yourself something nice." This is a feminizing statement. 

As Eli drives off on his motorcycle, we hear Buck Owens' "Tall Dark Stranger":

 They say a tall dark stranger is a demon, and  that a devil rides closely by his side.

 So if Junior is the demon, Eli must be the devil riding beside him.  How long will they ride together?

Abusive Daddies all the way down:  Eli drives to the Gemstone residence (it's not a stage name, apparently), where his abusive dad chastises him for being late for dinner. So they're eating after Eli's wrestling match?  Like at 11 or 12 pm?   There's also a mousy, skittish mom and a little sister, May-May (important in Season 3). 

Ordered to say grace, Eli jokes: "Good food, good meat, good God, let's eat," which makes May-May laugh.  Dad slaps him.  End of flashback.

We're fine with the f*ggots:  In 2022, elderly Eli Gemstone is a megachurch pastor and televangelist.  He and the satellite church ministers are discussing the case of Pastor Butterfield (Victor Williams), caught with his wife and another woman in a dance club restroom, while they were all high on Molly ("we thought they were Sweetarts").  The story made the front page of The New York Times, thanks to reporter Thaniel Block (Jason Schwartzman), who has made a career of publicizing ministerial  scandals.  Eli wants to be lenient, but the others object. 

A Spanish speaking pastor explains: "My church is ok with the maricones, but we're not ready for swinging and tropus."     Pastor Diane translates: "His church is really cool with the gays and the queers, but not so much about the swingers and the thruples."  They fire Pastor Butterfield; he tries to commit suicide.

Left: God Squad pecs

Tell the girls:  A young man rides a motorcycle to the Gemstone Compound, doing crazy stunts (this will be important later), while the background song advises:

Tell the girls that I am back in town.  They'd better beware

They may run, and they may hide.

I'll follow, and I'll be there.

 At least we know that he's not the closeted gay minister.  He turns out to be Eli's grandson Gideon, back from a job as a stuntman to assist with the Gemstone ministry.  He's going to move into the house that Eli built for his abusive dad.

In other news, Gideon's younger brother Abraham has been leaving "secretions" all over the house, like in the freezer next to the Dreamsicles.  

We cut to a church service with Eli Gemstone and his children, Jesse, Judy, and Kelvin, announcing the start of their streaming service, GODD.  We see Jesse's wife Amber, their kids, and Judy's husband BJ in the audience.  No partner for Kelvin. He must be single

F*ck, yeah:  After the service, the family drives in a caravan to Jason's Steak House.  They get out of their cars in slow motion and walk past the al fresco area, heterosexual couples reveling in their nuclear family conformity, the "job, house, wife, kids" litany of my youth made visible. The background song brags about their heteronormative success:

Turn your head when I walk by -- I got the world at my feet.
All I want out of every day, is to wake up every morning
Sun is shining, smiling, and we've covered every room 

 Wait -- where's Kelvin?

Suddenly the record scratches off. Two vans pull up with a flexing muscle Christ and the logo "Strength above All Else." Twelve muscle men emerge, wearing identical canvas gis: the God Squad! Biceps and pecs, abs, bulging flexing intruding on the smug primness of the nuclear families. Wait -- where are the bulges.  They wear cargo pants that don't show anything.

There is no romance here.  There is no heterosexual desire.  It is raw homoerotic power. The song changes to:

F*ck, yeah!  F*ck, yeah!  F*ck, yeah!

More after the break