The Top 14 Hunks of "The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt"

Kimmy Schmidt is kidnapped as a teenager and taken to a bunker, where she and three other women are held captive by the Reverend Richard Wayne Gary Wayne.  15 years later, she is rescued, and moves to New York to rebuild her life.  She works at various jobs and dates various guys.  She studies for her GED, somehow gets accepted to Columbia University, and finds her true calling as a crossing guard.












Subplots involve the travails of her scoobies: street-smart Lillian (Carol Kane), flamboyant aspiring singer Titus (Tituss Burgess), and socialite Jacqueline (Jane Krakowski).

The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt (2015-), currently with three seasons up on Netflix, manages to address Kimmy's traumatic past without devolving into melodrama, partially because it sidesteps some of the darker questions, and partially because it displays Kimmy as endlessly cheerful and unflaggingly optimistic, certain that whatever problem life throws at her will be a thousand times better than the bunker.

There's a strong gay presence.  Titus is not merely a stereotypic gay bff; he owns his flamboyance, insisting that this is his story, with Kimmy a supporting player.  He has a life of his own, even a sex life: he dates the newly-out construction worker Mikey, breaks up with him, dates other guys, and then tries to win him back.

And the beefcake is endless.  There's a parade of cute guys:

1. Ki Hong Lee as Dong (top photo).

2. Mike Carlsen as Mikey.

3. Josh Charles (left) as Duke, the attractive but boorish brother of Jacqueline's altruistic attorney boyfriend.

4. Andrew Ridings as Charles, tutor to Jacqueline's son Buckley, who dates Kimmy.

5. Brandon Jones (left) as Brandon, who is dating Kimmy's bunker mate Cyndee even though he's gay, because bunker women get all kinds of free stuff.

6. Daveed Diggs as Perry, a Columbia philosophy student who dates Kimmy until she discovers that he's training to become a "reverend."

7.  Derek Klena (left) as Doug, a dog groomer who Jacqueline trains to be a trophy boyfriend.

8. John McMartin as Grant, a war veteran who exchanges traumatic experience advice with Kimmy.

9. Michael Benjamin Washington as Ruben, who Titus dates until he discovers that he has a daughter named Linda.

10. Noah Robbins as Zach, who drops out of Columbia to start a tech company and hires Kimmy to do the emotional work.

11. Tim Boardman as Dylan, one of the friends of Jacqueline's stepdaughter Xanthippe.

12. Billy Magnussen (left) as Russ, Jacqueline's unattractive boyfriend, after he's "smooshed" in an accident and goes through reconstructive surgery.

13. Anthony Marks as Dom Jr., Mikey's brother.

14.  Cameron Cowperthwaite as Austin.  I don't remember who Austin was, but isn't this a great photo?

Edmund Teske, the Gay Photographer of East Los Angeles

Edmund Teske (1911-1996) was born in Chicago.  Trained as a pianist, he began to work in photography in 1933, when Frank Lloyd Wright hired him to do photographic montages of the relationship between architecture and the visual arts.

He also liked photographing men, catching them in moments of power, joy, erotic desire, or quiet reflection.

Richard Soakup, 1940 captures his first lover, whose parents ran a music studio in suburban Chicago.  Teske would photograph Soakup in many more nude and semi-nude poses.

During World War II, Teske was was rejected for military service for being gay, instead assigned to become a photographer for the Army Core of Engineers in Rock Island, where he photographed many of his friends, lovers, and coworkers nude.  They weren't physique photographs, however; he was trying to capture spirit, not muscle, the human condition rather than the human body.

In 1943 he moved to Los Angeles and went to work in the photo stills department at Paramount Studios.  He immersed himself in the gay life of 1950s Hollywood, befriending Christopher Isherwood, Joel McCrea, Man Ray, Rock Hudson, Anais Nin, Montgomery Clift, George Cukor, and Jim Morrison.

He began to experiment with photo montages, combining images of nude men to explore time and memory, beauty, decay, and erotic desire.

Don Mills and Jerry Kahn (1954-55) are photographed nude and clothed among abandoned ice boxes in Cornell, California (near Malibu).

The folk singer Ramblin' Jack Elliot, nude with guitar (1952)

During the 1960s and 1970s, Teske's work was on display at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art, and in galleries around the world.

He lived alone in East Los Angeles, with lovers but no permanent partner.

In 2004, there was a retrospective exhibit at the Getty Museum.

To be on the safe side, I'm putting the photos with frontal nudity on Tales of West Hollywood.