12 Shirtless Pictures of Asa Butterfield, Sort Of

Ok, people keep telling me that #6 on the list of "Pre-Teen Teen Idols" is not Asa Butterfield.

I've never heard of that person, and never seen him before, that I know of.  It's hard to distinguish between people that you don't know, particularly when they're actors who keep changing their look. .

My only clues are that he's in his early 20s and has blue eyes.

So I just googled "Asa Butterfield shirtless," in quotation marks, and downloaded whatever came up.  If you know who he is, you can figure out which are really of him.  Otherwise, you can enjoy this group of photos of hunky guys.

1. Beach scene.  He might have blue eyes -- hard to tell.

2. Wearing glasses, and talking to monkeys.

3.  Looks like brown eyes, but maybe he's wearing contact lenses.


















4. The guy in the middle is Moises Arias.  Maybe Asa is on the right or left.

5. Eyes can't get much bluer than this.

6. Crew cut.






















7.  Those eyes are brown.

8. Looks like a homoerotic scene in whatever movie this was.

9. That's got to be Daniel Radcliffe.

10. Nice loincloth.

11.  This guy looks South Asian.

12. Asa Snowbird

See also: Pre-Teen Teen Idols

Andi Mack: Genderqueer Teen and Her Gay-Vague Posse

You know right away from the intro to the Disney Channel teencom Andi Mack (2017-) that this will be an unusual experience.   Characters created out of jigsaw puzzles and pieces of paper, close-ups half off-camera, moving around so quickly that it's hard to zero in on them, as if we are never seeing their whole truth.  And among the trinkets we see that characterize Andi's life: a gay-pride rainbow bracelet, a pink triangle.....

For the last ten years or so, nearly every Disney Channel teencom has been about a girl who wants to become a singer, but short-haired, androgynous Andi Mack (Peyton Elizabeth Lee) doesn't have that goal: she just wants some answers!

On her thirteenth birthday, her big sister Bex (Lilan Bowden) announces that she is moving back home.  AND that she's actually Andi's mother!  The people Andi has been calling Mom and Dad, Celia (Lauren Tom) and Ham (Stoney Westmoreland), are actually her grandparents.

Most girls who have babies in high school depend on the grandparents for help with everything from childcare to finances, but pretending that the grandparents are the parents sounds like a very poor decision.  But it makes for lots of interesting conflicts.

Celia and Ham (left) are not very happy about Bex pushing her way into the role of mother, being demoted to grandparents after 13 years.  They start competing over who can be the best parent.

And they retaliate by calling up the father, rock star Bowie (Trent Garrett, above), who apparently was never told that his ex-girlfriend had a daughter.  (Wait -- doesn't he have a legal right to visitation, and a legal obligation to provide child support?)  He shows up, eager to start fathering Andi.

The fluid family dynamic, so different from the usual teencom Mom, Dad, and Kids, strikes me as a reflection of the various ways that queer people make their own families.








Other than her crazy family, Andi has two best friends, Cyrus (Joshua Rush) and Buffy (Sofia Wylie), a crush, Jonah (Asher Angel), and a sports team, the frisbee-playing Space Otters, represented by Marty (Garren Stilt)

But there's a lot of to watch even in that standard group:  Cyrus, who has a big, blatant crush of his own on Jonah.





 It's so obvious that it almost looks intentional -- according to rumor, Cyrus is going to be outed as gay in a future episode, which would make him the first overt gay teen character in the Disney universe.

Maybe he and Andi will openly compete for Jonah's affection, thus straining their relationship.

I doubt it.  Disney has done a few "my gay moms sort of walk-ons," but continues to promote the myth that there are no gay children or adolescents -- gayness is something that happens to you in adulthood after a hetero-horny childhood.  So if there's a gay character, it will probably be Bex.

The only thing missing is beefcake.  The kids are too young to be teen idols (left: Garren Stitt), and the adult men haven't yet fumbled with a button.

But there's always next episode.

Adam West: Playing Gay before Batman

In the 1960s, when my friends and I watched the camp superhero series Batman (which, by the way, we didn't realize was camp), we zeroed in on Burt Ward's Dick Grayson/Robin, because he was a teenager, and because of incredibly bulgeworthy costume.  We all but ignored Adam West's Bruce Wayne/Batman.

During the decades since Batman ended, Adam West has had a substantial career playing quirky, out-of-touch parodies of himself on everything from The Adventures of Pete and Pete to Family Guy (where he plays "himself" as the Mayor of Quahog). Delightfully quirky, but not much in the muscle department.

But before Batman, the future Caped Crusader was a bona fide beefcake star.

Born in 1928 in Walla Walla, Washington, West started his career in comedy, as the host of a live children's show in Hawaii and someone named "Ham Ector" on the Philco Playhouse, but in 1959 he moved to Hollywood to join the beefcake craze -- dozens of hunky actors, many discovered by Henry Willson, were tearing up the screens with shirtless and swimsuit shots.

He became very busy immediately, with 10 roles in 1959 alone, notably in The Young Philadelphians, as a man who cannot consummate his marriage for unspecified reasons (i.e., he's gay). He rushes off and dies in an auto accident.  His wife has sex with someone else, and his "son" grows up to be Paul Newman.

 During the next few years, West guest starred in Westerns -- Sugarfoot, Cheyenne, Bronco -- notably fighting "Tarzan" Jock Mahoney on Laramie.  He starred in swinging detective dramas and sitcoms, and in 1961 he got his own tv series, The Detectives.  His movie credits included Tammy and the Doctor, the gay-subtext classic Robinson Crusoe on Mars, and the hunk-meets-feral-girl Mara of the Wilderness.

Then came Batman, and everything changed.  Beefcake roles were hard to come by: West played Cleander opposite William Shatner's Alexander in Alexander the Great (1968), and a two-fisted adventurer in The Girl Who Knew Too Much (1969), but his presence alone made them campy.

Like many men of his generation, West was somewhat homophobic; in the 1980s, he was flown to London to appear at an event, but when he discovered that it was gay-themed, he refused to appear.

More recently he commented on the gay undertones of Batman: "gay, straight, whatever.  Add them to the ratings.  If gays like the show, wonderful!"

He died on June 9th, 2017.

See also: Lane's Hookup with Batman, RObin Joker.