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May 6, 2015

David Faustino: Deliberate Gay Subtexts

David Faustino is best known for the acerbic Married..with Children (1987-1997), which skewered the Reagan-Bush Era obsession with "family values" by presenting a heterosexual nuclear family in the most unflattering light possible.  He played sarcastic son Bud, who, in later seasons, developed an amazingly muscular physique.

After Married, David played gay characters in Get Your Stuff (2000) and in Killer Bud (2001), and in Ten Attitudes (2001), he played "himself," not gay but on the gay dating circuit (for a sleazy reason).

In 2008 he was cast as the lead in The Gay Robot, a pilot for a tv series about...um, a gay robot.  The project was never filmed, but the script might have been tweaked into the movie Robodoc (2009)



David hasn't played any specifically-identified gay characters since, but he often introduces gay subtexts deliberately into his work:

In his web series Star-Ving (2009), he plays"himself" as a has-been, starving actor whose only source of income is a sleazy porn shop.  There is a deliberate gay subtext in his relationship with his best buddy, Corin Nemic (another "has-been" actor from Parker Lewis Can't Lose), plus a lot of nudity (mostly in a failed attempt to demonstrate how "ugly" the extremely attractive Faustino is).







The web series Bad Samaritans (2013) is about some minor criminals assigned community service.  David plays Dax Wendell, their deliberately gay-vague parole officer, who had delusions of grandeur and often got into dangerous situations.

According to his tweets, David is heterosexual but a strong gay ally.

3 comments:

  1. You forgot the sort of Randian subtext to Married... It honestly foreshadowed the rise of neoliberals with Marcy, who, while often just seeing the Bundys for Schadenfreude, develops a rapport with them: Peggy and Kelly are women, everyone but Peggy works (and Marcy is a banker), Bud's smart (and Marcy is a banker). Marcy's feminism is also of the first-world problems variety most of the time. So, when Al goes in for spinal surgery and the doctors accidentally circumcise him (yeah, it's malpractice, and they hardware it), there's Marcy advocating the practice (which neoliberals tend to fetishize as a panacea for some reason) even in this case because she prefers it, even though, you know, she's always saying Al is ugly.

    There are apparently groupies for sitcom sons. Johnny Galecki (a sitcom son-in-law really, but whatev) experienced it. Jeremy Jackson had girls throwing their panties at him when he was twelve. Joey Lawrence was the only reason anyone watched Blossom. I remember JTT-mania in the 90s. Batman wasn't really a sitcom, though it's sitcom-adjacent (60s sitcoms were just as ludicrous.), and Burt Ward had a ton of groupies, not all of them women, in his leotard. And then you have David Faustino.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hmmm--and there I was watching "Blossom" for Blossom's sake. 'Course, I've never been one to just follow the crowd.

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