It's Raining Men (Hallelujah!)

Humidity's rising, barometer's getting low
According to all sources, the street's the place to go.
Cause tonight for the first time, just about half past ten
For the first time in history, it's gonna start raining men

"It's Raining Men" was written in 1979, by gay composer Paul Jabara ("Disco Queen," "Last Dance"), and Paul Shaffer, then a member of the house band of Saturday Night Live.  They offered it to many vocalists, including Barbra Streisand, Cher, and Donna Summer, but they all refused.  Even Two Tons O'Fun (Izora Armstead and Martha Walsh), then performing as backup singers for pop star Sylvester, balked, thinking the song too weird to chart.

 Finally they agreed and released "It's Raining Men" on their third album, Success, in 1982.  They also released it as a single, and performed in the music video as the Weather Girls.

In October 1982, "It's Raining Men" hit #1 on the U.S. Dance Club Chart.  It also charted well in Europe.

There have been covers from everyone from RuPaul to Geri Halliwell to the Vamps to Miss Piggy.

Of course, you can't perform it without backup dancers.  The bigger, the better.

In 2014, after a British politician blamed the UK's recent floods on gay marriage, a Facebook campaign was launched to get the song on the British charts again.  It hit #21.

Why is this a gay anthem?  It has nothing to do with liberation, and it's strictly heteronormative.  The men are raining down upon women.

God bless Mother Nature -- she's a single woman too
She took over heaven, and she did what she had to do
She taught every angel to rearrange the sky
So that each and every woman could find the perfect guy

Maybe because it's fun for gay men to think of being deluged by men, especially after growing up in a desert where same-sex desire was assumed not to exist.

It's raining men, hallelujah!

It's raining men, amen! 
I'm gonna go out, I'm I'm gonna let myself get
Absolutely soaking wet!

See also: Ocho Rios

Jimmy Olsen's Secret Life, Part 2: Keefe singing, Jimmy twerking, and Gideon in his underwear.

How "I'm Coming Out" Became a Gay Anthem

"Let's Hear it for the Boy"

Cal Tolentino: Bodybuilder dates "Best Medicine's" Liam, rooms with Martin Herlihy, kisses a ninja. With two Cal d*cks.

 

Link to the n*de photos

I've been watching Best Medicine (2026) on Netflix: Josh Charles plays a gruff physician in a small town in Maine, where there are a surprising number of diseases with weird symptoms.  Turning blue?  Suddenly seeing birds?  I like the gay characters fully integrated into the community, like sarcastic teenager Liam (Josh Hoon Lee).  

In most episodes, Liam hangs out with two girls, Harley and Amelia.  But in Episode 1.9, at a high school "sleep-in," Amelia is replaced by Kyle (Cal Tolentino), joining them for a giant-sized Connect Four and a "Skeeter" game.   

In Episode 1.13, Kyle appears as the third of the rude teenagers again, protesting the plan to bring a salmon farm to the city, which would destroy the ecosystem. They're arrested for trespassing, which they find thrilling.  Later, they sit together at the wedding of gay couple Greg and George.

I couldn't figure out why they replaced the teenage girl with a boy, except to imply that Kyle was dating one of them.  In my headcanon, he's dating Liam.

When I started researching Cal to see if he is gay in real life, I got a surprise:

The dude is built.

Cal grew up in Chester Springs, Pennsylvania, about an hour west of Philadelphia.  He competed on American Ninja Warrior Junior, a reality show where you race through a multilevel obstacle course, beginning at age 11, then switched to the teen version, where he was a national finalist three times.  But he really wanted to be an actor, so the minute he got his driver's license at age 16, he started training at Playhouse West.  Also he changed his name from Caleb Plohoros to Cal Tolentino. From Greek to Italian?

While training, Cal was in three plays: A South Philly Christmas, Meisner, and Savannah. 

He broke into on-screen acting in 2025, with four short and a tv spot:

Hundred Dollar Brawler, about boxing. Cal plays the Hype Guy.

Guardians of the Outward Plain: A boy and his lion pal try to make human connections. Cal plays a Mechanic.

Godhead, not to be confused with the other 2025 Godhead short: A man searching for his lost brother stumbles into a sinister drug den. There are four characters other than addicts: Adam, Judas (Cal), and a Preacher (Sullivan Vaughan, backside on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends).

My Teenage Great Grandma, a vertical-format drama streaming on NetShort. A scientist dies in 1945 and re-animates as a teenager in 2025. Sounds wacky.  Cal's character appears halfway down the cast list.

Plus Cal and Peyton Carson wrote, directed, and starred in 4 AM: After a "rowdy Memorial Day Weekend," two guys try to go back to life as usual, but a text message results "in a painful test of trust." It's not available to stream, and I can't tell from the description and photos if they're buddies or boyfriends.

In 2026, Cal appeared in two episodes of Good Luck, Baby Girl, a short-form vertical series streaming on TikTok and Instagram.  It's about three girls trying to make it in L.A.

Two episodes of Best Medicine.

More after the break

Benjamin Ainsworth is possessed, kidnaps Dream, dances with a drag queen, rides a dragon. Plus his nose grows. With Champion and Elf d*cks

  

Link to the n*de photos and art

Benjamin Ainsworth (left) was born  in  Nottingham in 2008, and later moved to Lund, near Hull in Yorkshire.  He scored his first professional acting job in 2016, in the musical Priscilla, Queen of the Desert on the Norwegian Epic Cruise Line, six weeks in the Mediterranean and then six more in the Caribbean.  He played Benjy, son of the drag queen Tick. who sings "Say a Little Prayer/Always on My Mind."  

The same year he was cast as "a cheeky schoolboy" in an episode of the soap Emmerdale.

His next major role was the troubled boy Miles in The Haunting of Bly Manor, loosely based on Henry James' The Turn of the Screw, with the two troubled children and ghosts bedeviling the nanny.  I stopped watching in the first episode after a particularly nasty trigger (hint: "does the dog die?"), but according to a review there's a lesbian romance "drowned in sad and tired tropes" like Bury Your Gays. Yuck.

On RG Beefcake and Boyfriends: n*de Oliver Jackson-Cohen as Peter Quint, who is possessing Miles and forcing him to do bad things.

In  the first season of The Sandman (2022), Roderick Burgess captures the Dream of the Endless and imprisons him in a glass jar.  His son Alex (Ben as a boy, Laurie Kyaston as a young adult) has many opportunities to free him, but refuses, worrying that Dream will harm him or his boyfreind (Christopher Colquehon).  

So far one gay and two gay-adjacent roles.  Good job, buddy. 

There have been dozens of movies based on Pinocchio, the 1883 novel by Carlo Colladi. The 2022 version, with Ben as the puppet boy, Tom Hanks as Gepetto, and Joseph Gordon Levitt (n*de on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends) as Jiminy Crickett, is supposedly a live-action remake of the classic 1940 animated movie, with a lot of queer codes.  But in some versions Pinoke gets a girlfriend, so I wouldn't be surprised if he is changed into a real boy through a glimpse of the Girl of His Dreams.  

The IMDB description of Son of a Critch (2022-26) tells us that "Mark is 11 going on 70," and "tries to make connections with the small group of people in his limited world."  Sounds like he's got that syndrome where you grow old as a child, or maybe he's aging backward, but it's a misdirection: Mark (Benji Boy) is just smart, and his "limited world" is Newfoundland in the 1980s.  He's heterosexual; no gay people are mentioned in the series.   

Ben is posing here with the real-life Mark Critch, who plays his dad, and Colto Gobbo, who plays his older brother.

Everything is Going to Be Great (2025) covers a year in the life of the Smart Family, as they negotiate "over-sized dreams, identity, ghosts, and regional theater."  Trigger alert: this is advertised as a comedy, but Dad (Bryan Cranston of Malcolm in the Middle) dies halfway through.  

He leaves two sons, the athletic Derrick (Jack Champion), who has a girlfriend, and Lester (Ben), who wears flashy outfits, aspires to a career in musical theater, and has conversations with the ghost of gay playwright Noel Coward. Those are sizeable queer codes.  Google AI says that he's "openly gay," but according to the plot synopsis, he gets a girlfriend. 

More after the break. 

The Bravest Knight: Sir Cedric and his husband, Prince Andrew, give their daughter life lessons, with "when I was your age" stories

 

The Bravest Knight (2019) is advertised as the first children's animation to have an "openly gay main character."  Actually, that would be Paranorman (2012).   I wanted to see how "open" the gay main character was, so I watched the first two episodes.    

Episode 1, Scene 1: In a fairy tale world, Sir Cedric (T.R. Knight, left) is giving his daughter, Nia, lessons in how to become a knight. Today's lesson: how to save someone trapped in a tower.  His husband, Prince Andrew (Wilson Cruz, below), has volunteered to be rescued.  First, build a ladder -- or the prisoner could just lower a rope.  Prince Andrew has to be somewhere, so could we speed things up?  No,Siir Cedric has to tell a story.  The consort of a royal is always a rank down, so Prince Andrew and Sir Cedric. 

Scene 2: Flashback.  The preteen Cedric (Chance Hurstfield) is in his second year as a knight in training. He sees a flyer: all of the villains have broken out of Fairy Jail!  So he sets out to,,,um...arrest them?  But first he encounters a troll named Grunt (Bobby Moynihan), who tells his story.

Scene 3: Grunt used to have a bridge, like most trolls.  But Sturk, one of the villains who broke out of Fairy Jail, took it away from him.  Wait -- the notice just went up, but Grunt says that he's been bridge-less for weeks.  This timeline is convoluted.

Scene 4: Cedric abandons his original quest to help Grunt get his bridge back.  Problem: Grunt doesn't remember where it is.  While searching, they hear a woman screaming from a tower, and set off to rescue her.   She obligingly lowers her long hair for them to climb.

But it's a trap!  A witch who recently escaped from Fairy Jail  grabs them and throws them into a pit, where they meet several other would-be rescuers.  What is her end game?  Is she going to eat them, or what?  

Scene 5:  Their escape plan: they cover themselves in mud, so the witch will think they have escaped.  When she comes down to investigate, they incapacitate her with mud and climb out on the hair-rope.  Then they call the adults for assistance, and the witch is returned to Fairy Jail.

Scene 6:  Moral: Don't grab a rope unless you are sure what's on the other end.  Presumably this generalizes to: don't begin a course of action unless you are fairly certain how it will turn out.  

Episode 2, Scene 1:  Today's lesson is about jousting.  Nia is upset that her opponent will be the troll Grunt, who can't even control his horse.   "Never underestimate your opponent," Sir Cedric cautions.  And so the story..

Scene 2:  Preteen Cedric and Grunt, searching for the lost bridge, eome across a children's jousting tournament.  Another troll, Susie, is scrounging for coins under the bleachers.  

Scene 3: Cedric signs up to compete, but he doesn't have any armor, so he and his troll friends fashion a helmet from a pumpkin.  His opponent is a very small boy in a green helmet.  "Look how tiny he is!" Grunt exclaims.  "You'll win easily."  But his opponent trounces him.

Surprise -- it's a girl!  At this point one would expect Cedric to dissolve into a pool of hormones, except that we already know that he's gay.  They just shake hands.

Why is "It's a girl!" a big reveal?  We've already established that girls commonly train as knights, so why wouldn't they joust?

Scene 4:  Eliminated from the competition, Cedric and the trolls watch from the stands as the girl -- Eyame -- bests three more opponents and wins the tournament.  She is modest -- "I was fortunate today," but Cedric is effusive in his praise: "I learned more from watching you than in all my years of practicing back on the pumpkin farm!"  

Scene 5:  Susie the Troll suggests that they go to the abandoned, scary Dark Castle, which has maps of the kingdom.  Maybe it will show the bridge.  

Scene 6: Back in the present, Sir Cedric repeats the moral: Never underestimate your opponent. 

Story Arc: The flashbacks for the first season are about Cedric and grunt looking for the lost bridge, and meeting people who will apparently be important in their lives later.  But we don't get any later.    I want to know about life in the kingdom today.  Or how Cedric and Prince Andrew met.  I don't want to know about some dumb bridge.

Didacticism:   This show is obviously for young children, not adults, but still, is it really necessary to hit us over the head with a moral, twice per episode?  It seems old-fashioned and contrived.  

How Open is Cedric:  His husband appears only briefly in the first scene of the first episode, and then is never mentioned again.  The child Cedric doesn't display any romantic interest in anyone, boy, girl, or troll.  I'd say "not very open": you could easily miss it. 

To be fair, Prince Andrew appears in the first scene of several later episodes, often trying to get Cedric to settle down to official business, which is interrupted by a story.

My Grade: A-   I was bored stiff, but young children might not be, and having a gay character in a starring role in a program aimed at the kindergarten-set is amazing, even if his husband doesn't appear often.  

See also: "Craig of the Creek": Silver Fist gets a sidekick, and the gay kid gets a boyfriend

Searching for gay-subtext buddy-bonds on "The Really Loud House." With gay Dads and a heck of a lot of backsides

Fangbone!: 3rd Grade Barbarian and Boyfriend Fight Monsters

Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts: Farther Toward Gay Inclusivity than Any Other Cartoon