Benjamin Lasnier, the Shirtless Internet Sensation and His Hot Male Friends

Danish teenager Benjamin Lasnier started his internet career two years ago, and quickly acquired over 6 million followers on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter (400 likes in 10 seconds).

His songs, available on youtube, itunes, and tunein, include "Love You Out Loud" (2015). "Everythang" (2016), and "Somebody to Hurt" (2017).


He's been called "The Hottest Young Singer Out Now" and a "Justin Bieber Looklike," but I think he looks better than the contemporary tattoo-covered Bieber.

He's got a professional album out now, and has won a Nickelodeon Kids' Choice Award.

He's also good at posting physique pics on his social media sites.

And he has some hot male friends.

Well, actually, quite a lot of hot male friends.

I don't know if he's gay or not, but the lyrics I saw weren't heterosexist.

And he has A LOT of hot male friends.

Perry Anzilotti: From Usher to Marijuana Chef

The other day on the treadmill at the gym, I saw an episode of Seinfeld from 1993, "The Movie," in which the gang goes to the movies, and is  beset upon by ticket lines, multiple theaters, saving seats, and indominable ushers.  It's notable for one of Seinfeld's few homophobic scenes, and for one of the ushers, an amazingly cute short guy -- of course, all short guys are cute, but this one was jaw-dropping.

So I looked him up: Born in Chicago in 1959, Perry Anzilotti has been on screen since 1989, in sitcoms including Dear John, Wings, Married..with Children, The Office, and Modern Family, and in movies including Angus (1995) and Bean (1997).He played a lot of Italian guys named Vito,  and he was the Snackwell "Cookie Man" mascot.

He had a starring role in Sydney (1990), as the younger brother of a small-town detective, but it only lasted for 13 episodes.

His longest-running role was the anaesthesiologist Perry on ER: 22 episodes, 1994 to 2009

Perry also wrote and directed the short film Summer Sex (2006), and produced Old Maid (2005), about "a dyke who takes her weekly card game way too seriously."  I haven't been able to find out much about it, but one hopes that it's not homophobic.

Today Perry Anzilotti has retired from acting and runs a snack company called PerryWinkles: cookies, crackers, cereal, and such infused with marijuana.  Part of the proceeds go to Realm of Caring, a non-profit organization dedicated to researching marijuana as a treatment for some types of epilepsy.

He has also published a book of  recipes, and appeared on Wake and Bake, a youtube program about cooking with marijuana.

He's probably gay.

1. No wife mentioned.
2. One of his tweets invites a friend to "look at the studs."
3. On the logo for his Wake and Bake appearance, notice what he's dreaming of.

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?

Pete and Nick Spanakos, the Boxing Twins

Identical twins Petros (Pete) and Nicholas Spanakos were born on July 26th, 1938 in the working-class Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York.  They were the youngest of eight boys born to Greek immigrants Michael and Stella Spanakos, who owned the Paramount Restaurant on Court Street.

Topping off at 5'3", and the only Greek kids in Red Hook, Pete and Nick were often targeted by neighborhood bullies -- the Italians one day, the Irish the next.  Bigger guys were always calling them out, insulting them.

One day when they were 14 years old, they walked into a gym, and someone said "You guys want to try punching the big bags?"  They did.  They strapped on pairs of boxing gloves, and never took them off.

In 1952, they entered the Golden Gloves competition for amateur youth, making sure that they had different weights so they wouldn't have to fight each other (although they usually entered the same tournaments).

On February 21, 1955, they both won boxing matches on the same night.

They were fast and energetic, not hard-hitters.  But what they lacked in strength they made up for in sheer enthusiasm.  Over the next 10 years, they won 17 Golden Gloves titles.

Pete competed the 1959 Pan-American Games in Chicago, and Nick won a bronze medal at the  1960 Olympics. His roommate was the future Muhammad Ali.

  Later he fought the Greek champion in an exhibition round in Athens.

Pete and Nick used their boxing prowess to get scholarships to the College of Idaho, a private liberal arts college that has produced governors, journalists, and Nobel Prize winners, and then went on to graduate school.

Pete got a law degree and moved back to New York, where became a school counselor, later opening a school for South Bronx kids who had been expelled.  He bought a historic house in Sea Gate, Coney Island, and founded the Sea Gate Historical Society.

One of his close friends was Joe Rollino (1904-2010), the "strongest man in the world," who used to perform at Coney Island, lifting 635 pounds with one finger.

Nick got a Ph.D. in Business Administration and taught at SUNY for many years.   He recently retired to Miami Beach.

I can't find a lot of gay connection in their biographies, just some same-sex friendships.  But the beefcake was spectacular.

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.