James Royce Edwards

If you've been anywhere near a muscle magazine in the last ten years, you know fitness model and personal trainer James Royce Edwards (left).

But he is also an accomplished singer, dancer, and actor.  Of course, his theatrical roles tend to emphasize his physique.

Early in his career, when he was still doing regional theater, he starred in several Disney plays, including Tarzan, The Little Mermaid, and Aladdin.  

Plus The Little Shop of Horrors, Grease, Footloose, Bye Bye Birdie, The Rocky Horror Picture Show Live (as Rocky, naturally), Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat (as both Joseph and the Pharaoh), and Miss Saigon.

Off-Broadway, he's starred in the boy-band comedy Altar Boyz (which has a gay altar boy), Wanda's World, Ty Belvedere, and Matthew Passion (which juxtaposes the death of Christ recounted in the Book of Matthew with the murder of gay college student Matthew Shepherd).

And he's starred on Broadway or in national tours of Hairspray, Mamma Mia, Pippin, All Shook Up, Les Miserables, and How the Grinch Stole Christmas.

Top photo: he poses in underwear with Michael Jason Blaine (his stage son Theo) in Pippin.

When there are no gay texts, he ensures that there are gay subtexts.  Here's a "Brokeback Mountain" scene from Pippin.

You can also see James on tv in True Blood, Passions, and in the movie Star Child.

Nicholas D'Agosto: Hustler, Sex Researcher, Cheerleader

Dirty Girl (2010) is about a promiscuous straight girl who goes on a road trip to meet her biological father.  She takes her chunky gay bff, who is trying to escape his violently abusive parents.  It has three things to recommend it:
1. The gay bff (Jeremy Dozier) is chunky, not svelte (although still a swishy stereotype named Clarke).

2. He actually has sex, with a hitchiking hustler (Nicholas d'Agosto).

3. He doesn't turn straight at the end.

Jeremy Dozier has slimmed down since. His other movies include Bad Behavior (2013), about a babysitter fighting off the bad guy, and Rock, Paper, Scissors (2013), which seems to be about three friends playing Russian roulette.

Nicholas d'Agosto has taken off his clothes in a number of other movies, mostly teen sex comedies and horror spoofs such as Drive Through (2007) and Extreme Movie (2008).  

He is naked most often in Fired Up! (2009), in which two goofballs (Nicholas, Eric Christian Olsen) sign up for cheerleader camp in order to get girls, but find that they actually like cheerleading.  They have a swishy gay-stereotyped roommate (Adhir Kalyan)

Nicholas is currently starring as Dr. Ethan Haas on Masters of Sex (2013), about the homophobic sex researchers Masters and Johnson.  There's a closeted gay character.

Ramon Novarro and the Gay Hustlers

Ramon Novarro (1899-1968) was one of the great beefcake actors of the silent movie era.  He was cast mostly as "exotic" Middle Easterners (The Arab,  A Lover's Oath, The Barbarian, The Sheik Steps Out) or Mediterranean types (The Road to Romance, In Gay Madrid, Call of the Flesh), plus an occasional Native American.

Almost always as romantic leads.  He was advertised as "a new Valentino."  He was gay, but stayed strictly closeted, although he refused a "screen marriage."

Very few photos have survived of Novarro with his lovers.

In those days before the Hays Code, you stripped your stars out of their clothes as much as possible.  Novarro has semi-nude scenes in Ben Hur: A Tale of Christ (1925), The Pagan (1929), The Barbarian (1933), and probably lots of other movies that haven't survived.

With the rise of talkies and new 1930s models of masculinity, roles became scarce, but Novarro continued to work in movies and on stage, and later on television.  In the 1960s, he had guest roles on Dr. Kildare, Combat, The Wild Wild West, and Bonanza, in addition to appearing as himself in various nostalgia programs.

On October 30, 1968, he invited Physique Pictorial model Paul Ferguson and his brother Tom to his North Hollywood home for sex.  Believing that Novarro had a lot of money hidden away, they tried to beat him into revealing its location, and finally choked him to death with a large art-deco phallus.

They both received sentences of life in prison, but were paroled within seven years.  You didn't do much time for killing gay men in the 1960s.

See also: Ben Hur, a Gay Tale of Christ.

Maleficent: A Disney Fairy Tale That's Not Heterosexist

When I was a kid, I hated fairy tales. All about princes rescuing princesses, or else being told "if you accomplish this quest, I'll give you the princess."  I'd rather get a prince.

And the worst of the lot was Perrault's Sleeping Beauty.  You can't even say her name without objectifying women, and what's with the sexual symbolism?  A girl lies sleeping, waiting for a guy to climb into her bed and "awaken" her?  

Maleficent (2014) turns the tale on its head, starting with the evil fairy herself: she's a young girl with horns and bat-wings (Isobelle Molloy), who enjoys zooming through the stratosphere and playing with the various elves, fairies, and nature spirits of her kingdom (no one explains why she was named "Evil-doer").  She and the human Stefan (Michael Higgins) meet and fall in love, and on  her sixteenth birthday, he gives her "true love's kiss."     

But the adult Stefan (Sharito Copley) betrays her and cuts off her wings in a scheme to become king.  Now crippled and desolate, the brooding Maleficent  (Angelina Jolie with prosthetic cheekbones) gets revenge by putting a curse on his newborn daughter, Aurora: on her sixteenth birthday, she will fall asleep, and can only be awakened by "true love's kiss." 

As Maleficent and her crow-turned-human sidekick Diaval (Sam Riley) watch Aurora (Elle Fanning) grow up, they begin to care about her, and even invite her to live among the fairies.  As her sixteenth birthday approaches, Maleficent tries to remove the curse, but is unsuccessful: she falls asleep right on schedule.  

Aurora had been flirting with Prince Philip (Brenton Thwaites) earlier, so Maleficent drags him to the castle and forces him to kiss her, but it's not "true love's kiss."  

You'll never guess what finally awakens Aurora.  I was completely surprised.  

Hint: it's not hetero-romance.

Hetero-romance is of minimal importance in this brave new world.  None of the adults display the slightest heterosexual interest, not even King Stefan, and there is no wedding at the end. Instead, same-sex or cross-sex friendships drive the plot.

I especially like the platonic friendship between Maleficent and the gay-coded Diaval.

Incidentally, Sam Riley's nude scene provides the only beefcake in the movie, although both Brenton Thwaits and Jackson Bews (the teenage Stefan, top photo) have displayed respectable physiques elsewhere.