Jose Pablo Cantilo: Walking Dead Beefcake

We've been watching The Walking Dead, a postapocalyptic zombie tv series.  It's aggressively heterosexist, eliminating or "straightening out" characters who were gay in the original comic book series, forcing you to depend on subtexts.

It also eliminates every romance between characters who are over 40, and almost every interracial romance.  What is this, Lost?

But it does offer a lot of beefcake.  Like this stunning sight, a muscleman fighting as a form of evening entertainment in colony of survivors.

He's Martinez, one of the allies of the mysterious Governor, who later becomes the leader of his own band of refugees.  No heterosexual romances during his 13-episode run, so maybe he's gay.

The actor is Jose Pablo Cantilo, born in 1979 in Marshfield, Wisconsin, on screen since 2003, mostly playing gangsters and thugs.

This seems to be the fate of most Hispanic actors in Hollywood; according to one study, over 60% of Hispanic tv characters are "immoral" or "despicable," as opposed to 33% of black and 12% of white characters.

But Cantilo has managed to break out of the mold a few times.  He played Marco, who has a one-night stand with a hooker in the relationship comedy After Sex (2007).  

And in Virtuality (2009), a tv movie about a killer loose on a deep-space probe, he played Manny, half of a gay couple, with Gene Farber's Val.   As far as I can recall, they were the first gay non-villains in any American science fiction movie.

It was a pilot for a tv series that didn't get picked up.

Today Cantilo spends most of his time going to Walking Dead fan conventions.  He is a gay ally, and an ally of Emma Watson's "He for She" campaign for gender equality.