"Christmas on the Square": Be grateful that you haven't seen this movie. With some nude guys to make up for having to read about it

Usually I stay away from Christmas romcoms that preach how wonderfully fulfilling small towns are, as opposed to those soulless, heartless monstrosities, big cities, because I grew up in a small town.  My parents rhapsodized, almost daily, about my destiny: find The Girl of My Dreams,  get married, go to work in the factory, buy a house, have kids, die.  There were no other options.  There was no escape. 

Link to NSFW review

They, my other relatives, my teachers, my preacher, and my friends, everyone, without exception, eagerly awaited the moment when I would "discover girls," understand that the sole purpose of life was to gaze into Her eyes forever.  The interrogation began in junior high, and became louder and more demanding in high school: "What girl do you like?  What girl do you like?  What girl?  What girl?  What girl?"  

There was no such thing as same-sex desire or romance.  You spent time with boys in order to talk about girls or strategize on how to get girls.  When you found Her, you would abandon male loves, instantly and without hesistation.  They were trivial, steps on the road to the Girl of Your Dreams destiny.

I kept looking for a place where I could be escape, where I could go through an entire day without the "What girl?  What girl? What girl?" interrogation.  Where people cared about beauty, wisdom, and love, not just reproduction.  Maybe even recognized the existence of men loving men. 

After college, I lived West Hollywood, New York, Fort Lauderdale, and Minneapolis.  Bookstores, art museums, cathedrals, Ethiopian restaurants, Thai restaurants, stores with rainbow flags in the windows, guys holding hands as they walked down the street: heaven.    

Oh, sorry, you wanted me to review the movie.  

Christmas on the Square was written by gay icon Dolly Parton, and stars gay icon Christine Baranski, plus Josh Segarra (left and below), who has played gay characters several time (he even played RuPaul's boyfriend). Furthermore, Dolly promotes the movie in an interview in Pink News, the gay magazine.  Surely this is a gay-positive Christmas romcom.  So here goes:

Scene 1:  A sound-stage town square in the town of Prairie View, with folks making merry.  Some very hot guys rush past, doing a high-step dance number -- but they ruin it by double-taking, en masse, at the hot girl who walks by.  At the end of their dance, they pair off, each boy with a girl.  Yuck!  This is the same brainwashing  I grew up with: "Every boy will fall in love with a girl!  There's no way out, no escape!  You are doomed!" 

A car drives past, with the evil, sunglasses-wearing Christine Baranski.  She sings: "Forget the past, be free at last, gotta get out of this town."  I like her -- she's the voice of thousands of LGBT people growing up in homophobic small towns, longing for a place where they can be free.  Of course, she's the villain. 

Amid the dancing, frolicking characters, the white-haired guy who runs the general store, no doubt Christine's Love Interest (played by Treat Williams, left) sings that "lovers walk in pairs." We only see male-female lovers.

 Focus character Felicity drives up and greets the stereotyped 1950s mailman.  She's the assistant of evil Christine Baranski, who continues to sing: "I know in time I'll lose my mind, if I don't get out of this town."  I had the same thought many times, back in Rock Island amid the "what girl do you like? what girl? what girl? what girl?" interrogation!

I'm getting angry.  They should have a trigger warning for all LGBT people who get trapped into viewing this thing.  I won't last much longer.

Christine passes out eviction notices.  She's going to tear down the whole town.  Good! 

In his Christmas shop, Josh Serrano and his wife talk about new fertility procedures, then sing about how much they want a baby. Good lord, it never ends..  

I'll just go through it on fast fast-forward, to check for any same-sex bonds.

Nope.  I couldn't keep track of all the boy-girl couples finding love, but the only reason guys interacted was to console each other over not having the Girl of Their Dreams, or to congratulate each other for finding Her. Where's the darn trigger warning?  I'm literally nauseous.  I'm done.

There are nude photos of Josh, Treat, and random hunks on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends

See also: Dolly Parton's Heartstrings

"This F*king Town": This f*king gay-free Hollywood. But bonus photos of some of my celeb hook...um, acquaintances

 

This Fucking Town, a TV short about "actors looking for love and work in L.A."   When I lived in West Hollywood, about half my friends were "actors looking for love and work" so I tried to check it out.  But it didn't seem to exist.  Tubi and Roku advertised it, but "content isn't available."  A rave revew made it sound like an entire web series, not just a short, but the links provided led to "content unavailable."

Link to NSFW version

Finally I found it as a movie on Amazon Prime, and rented it out of sheer frustration. It starts out ok, with Mark (Michael Mark Friedman) flexing and Jeremy (Gregory Holt, left) dancing in his underwear, displaying a sizeable bulge. They meet up and drive to a party.  Jeremy is worried meeting someone new: they always dump him the moment they discover that he has a huge penis.  Really?  

At the party, Jeremy runs into his ex, Caitlin, who thinks all actors are pathetic losers.  She took a witchcraft class and put a spell on him, to ensure that he will never find work.  Her new guy, Brett (Tony Cavalero)), is a personal trainer.  "So you hold people's feet while they do sit-ups," Jeremy sneers.  Brett calls him a "dick." and stomps off.

Then  the movie turns into a soap opera about heterosexual relationships, with six lengthy kissing scenes amid discussions of auditions and roles.  No more beefcake, and no LGBT people exist.

Believe me, life in West Hollywood was a lot more fun than this short/ web series/ movie suggests.  LGBT people definitely existed.  And celebrities: I met Keanu Reeves and Robin Williams, had lunch with Michael J. Fox and Richard Dreyfuss, saw Christopher Atkins' dick, and hooked up with...well, never mind.

There are some nude and bulging photos of some of them on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends

"Florida Man": Edgar Ramirez solves a murder in a beefcake-free Florida. So I'm including his butt and dick for free

Florida Man: 98% match on Netflix!  That's quite impressive.  There must be a lot of hunks in Speedos, or gay guys who aren't queerbaiting, or something.  Or maybe it's just because I lived in Florida for four years, and I like men. 

Left: Random Florida hunk

Link to NSFW review

Scene 1: A Gambler's Anonymous meeting.  Mike (Edgar Ramirez) notes that his gambling lost him his wife and his job.  Heterosexual identity established, we move on.

Scene 2: Mike is working as an enforcer for a mobster, the Super Hunk Moss Yakov (Emory Cohen) He tracks down Gil (Nick Basta)  at a hardware store, criticizes his weight, and then chases him to the loading dock, whereupon Gil falls and breaks his legs.

Later, Mike meets up with his ex-wife, a standard hot-woman-with-chubby-guy arrangement. He returns the ring that he pawned, but she still won't take him back. Having just been made detective, she asks for his help getting at the gangster Moss Yankov.  He refuses.

Scene 3:  Super Hunk accosts Gil from Scene 2.  Gil offers sunken treasure instead of the money he owes, but Super Hunk says no.  

Cut to a woman with her boobs showing and the hair of a country-western singer sits at her vanity, next to a framed portrait of her boobs.  Apparently boobs are uncommon, so the camera has to give us a good look, in case we've never seen any before.  Gil is getting beat up downstairs, so this must be his house or Super-Hunk's house.

How can she concentrate on her make-up with all that screaming?  I agree; that's what enforcers are for. 

She storms downstairs, as the camera shows us the rest of her body. Ever hear of a bathrobe, lady?  "Super-Hunk, it's my birthday!  When are you going to be done with work so we can go out?"

Scene 4: Mike is now the chauffeur, driving Super-Hunk and Boob Lady to somewhere fancy in downtown Philadelphia. He checks out her butt as she walks past.  

At dinner, Super-Hunk gives Boob Lady her birthday present, a fancy necklace.  But there's a girl's hair in the clasp!  So he got it off a corpse?  Upset, she storms out. Super-Hunk tells Mike to get her home ok.

Scene 5: Mike follows Boob Lady down the street, joking that it looks like he is stalking her.  She's not up for a joke.  He offers to take her to a club instead of going straight home.

Scene 6: A fancy dance club. Boob Lady dances with her hair for about 20 minutes and makes "I want to go down on you" eyes at Mike.  He moves in for a kiss.  She protests: "I thought we said this wasn't going to happen again." Uh-oh, cheating with Super-Hunk's lady!   

Slow dancing ensues (odd, since this is a fast number).  And sex in the car.  Wait -- you prefer Mike to Super Hunk?  No accounting for tastes.

Scene 7: On the way home, Boob Lady tells Mike that Super-Hunk doesn't respect him. Mike's too busy taking side-glances at her boobs to care.  Ten minutes in, and we're not even in Florida yet, and I see no beefcake or gay anything.

She suggests that they run away to Florida together.  "No way -- I'm from Florida.  I'm not going back."  So, Georgia, then?

Scene 8:  The next morning. Mike wakes up in his weird industrial loft (no beefcake). Super-Hunk calls: "on the way home from the birthday, did Boob Lady say anything?  Like she's cheating on me with some jerk that I'm going to have you kill?"  

"No, she didn't say anything."  Just 'do me faster,' 'I love your dick,' that sort of thing."  

"Well, she ran away to Coronado Beach, Florida."  Dumb of her to give him the address, but I guess he wasn't abusive or anything, just clueless about how entitled she was.  "So go get her." 

"No way -- I'm from Florida!  I'm not going back!"  "I'll pay you $50,000."  "I'm on my way!"

Scene 9: Mike finally arrives in Florida, and steals some guns from the luggage carousel at the airport.  

One the way out,  he passes a nuclear family that gains focus: Daddy (Clark Gregg, left) telling the kids that they'll go to Disney World soon "Daddy picks up his gun."  Why do parents talk in the third person?  Don't they think their kids understand personal pronouns?

Finally, some Florida scenery -- and the opening credits!  Wait -- was this all prologue, explaining how Mike got to Florida?  I was ready to call it quits.  Now I'll have to see if any of the colorful characters he meets are gay.

Scene 10: First colorful character: Benny (Isaiah Johnson) the owner of the horrible Palms Hotel (you'd think Super-Hunk would spring for somewhere classy).  Nope -- he's heterosexualized by the little boy doing homework in the next room.

In his room, Mike opens the gun case  -- the gun is extremely ornate, with a naked lady engraved into the handle.  uh-oh, it belongs to the Scene 9 Daddy, aka Durham County Sheriff John Ketcher. 

Scene 11: Mike goes down to the beach.  Darn, every single guy is fully clothed.  Not a bare chest or a Speedo for miles around!  This scene was definitely not blocked for the gay crowd. He flashes back to a traumatic event from his childhood, but the images are too confused to understand what's happening.   

Uh-oh, a naked supermodel is in trouble, and the lifeguard is too busy demonstrating that she's heterosexual to notice.  So it's up to Mike to rip off his shirt (leaving his undershirt --  this ain't Baywatch) -- and rush into the surf.  

Whoops, the naked supermodel is not happy at being saved.  She accuses Mike of sexually assaulting her, because her bikini top is missing.  He rushes back into the ocean to fetch it for her, and a shark bites him on the cock!

Scene 12: He is awakened in the hospital by his sister, who lives in Florida.  His sexual assault-shark bite story is all over the news...and the internet.

I'll just fast forward to see if the sister is married to a woman.  Nope, she has a husband (the intensely cute Michael Esper) and a surly teenage daughter.

Beefcake: Not a pec.

Gay Characters: Not a brunch in sight.

Heterosexism: This is all heteronormative, gay-free, male gaze-infested hetero porn garbage.  I'd rather be queerbaited.

"Broad City": This ain't your Daddy's "Seinfeld"

 

I highly recommend Broad City (2014-19), about the adventures of two women in contemporary New York: the effervescent "let's get high and climb the Empire State Building" Ilana and the "I can't -- I have to decide on a color scheme for the bathroom tile" stick-in-the-mud Abbi.  

Link to NSFW version of this review.

Episodes are built around the trivial annoyances of evreyday life: 

Accidentally leaving your cell phone in a hookup's apartment, when you don't want to see him again.

Offering to wait to sign for a package for your neighbor, but it never arrives, and you're stuck.

Spending all day in the ice cream shop because you can't decide which flavor to get.

Telling your sex partner that you want to "switch" positions, but he thinks it means something else.

Washing your boyfriend's favorite dildo in the dishwasher, only to have it melted, then scouring the sex shops to find a replacement.

Wait...um...

This ain't your daddy's Seinfeld.

Instead of a street on the back lot in Studio City, Broad City features beautiful exteriors in Manhattan.  The gang visits everywhere from Grand Central Station to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Instead of sex off camera, the girls and their friends are doing the deed in front of you. Lors of bare chests and butts.

Seinfeld was informed by homophobic anxiety about LGBT people, or attempts to get them to "switch teams" (Kramer successfully converted a lesbian, but Elaine couldn't convert a gay man because she wasn't good enough in bed).  But in Broad City, LGBT characters are fully integrated into the stories without comment. Ilana herself is bisexual, with a crush on Abbi, but they don't let it get in the way of their friendship.  

Instead of guys taking their shirts off three times in ten years, Broad City is overloaded with hunks.

Ilana's gang includes:

1. Lincoln (Hannibal Buress), Ilana's regular sex partner.  In the first episode, she face-times Abbi while having sex with him.

2. Jaime (Arturo Castro), her roommate, who is gay and unapologetically slutty, until he gets a boyfriend.

More hunks after the break

"Lucifer": A hetero-horny angel, a homophobic cop, and gay/bi erasure. With some bonus butts and a dick

Lucifer (2016-2021) is a drama about Satan being exiled on Earth, forced to live in Los Angeles to expiate his sins. Hey, I lived in Los Angeles for twelve years.  It wasn't heaven, but it came close.  I reviewed Episode 5.15: "Is This How It's Really Going to End?"  Uh-oh, sounds Apocalyptic.

Link to the NSFW Version

Scene 1: God is retiring, and the angels have to vote for either Lucifer (Tom Ellis, below) or the Archangel Michael (also Tom Ellis) to take His place. Luce's chances are limited by that war-in-heaven thing, but he argues that his years of penance on Earth have changed him, given him the skills necessary to be successful in the job. He needs his siblings, including Jophiel (Miles Burris, top photo), to campaign for him.  

They meet in a night club of some sort -- all we see is the bottom halves of girls' bodies.  Jophiel gazes goofily at the boobs of the invisible girl bringing them drinks.  He is wearing a suit coat with no shirt, so he can flex his pecs to impress girls.

 Lucifer claims that Michael has been doing a Wormtongue-thing on the Big Guy for milennia, making him think he's losing power in order to grab the Throne for himself.  What is this, Succession?  But Jophiel can't decide -- Luce is a lot of fun, but is he a good administrator?  "Michael's  kind of a dick, but he keeps the trains running,"  

Scene 2: Luce offers a female friend or girlfriend a job as consultant, but she doesn't want to move to heaven in the middle of a school year. "Well, hold off until I can convince my siblings to vote for me."  He calls her the future "Mrs. God," so they're romantic partners.

Scene 3: At a bloody crime scene, Dan (Kevin Alejandro, left) wants to fix up the forensic photographer (a lady) with his old cop partner Carol.  Lesbians?  No: 

"A guy with a girl's name?  I'm out!" she says in disgust.  Hey, just because he has a traditionally feminine name doesn't mean he's a fruit, you homophobe!  

"He's a guy, and a good one," Dan continues.  Do you mean "a good guy," as in "nice," or "good at being a guy," as in "not a fruit"?  

I'm a little impatient today, and we've already seen a ton of heterosexism in the first five minutes.  One more homophobic comment, and I'm out.

Why doesn't Dan want her for himself?  Maybe he's gay, and has a boyfriend waiting at ho,e.

Photographer thanks Dan for the thought, but with all the horrible tragedies she has lived through recently, she's not ready to start dating yet. This must be a regular character. 

Lucifer and Girlfriend enter, and hear about the corpse: Jonathan Donnelly, 53, a medical techician, tied up, forced to drink wine for several hours, and then shot.  His phone reveals a nasty argument with a guy named Mo.  So Lucifer's day job is police detective?  I thought he liked crime.

(Top photo: Mo Anouti, who plays an evil Arab guy.  No connection to the "Mo" sending the texts.)

Scene 4: Girlfriend addresses the cops: she's put in her two-week notice, because she's retiring.  Dan congratulates her, but wonders why she didn't tell him. "You'd be too jealous, since you're secretly in love with me."  The Photographer is irate: "I can't solve crimes without you! Is this really how it's gonna end."  Hey, that's the episode title!  

Girlfriend notes that Lucifer is retiring, too.  "We're going to move to Heaven...um.. I mean Florida...so Luce can run the univers...I mean his Dad's business."   Now Photographer starts screaming in Spanish and threatening to kill them both.  "I'll kill you if you leave me" ?  That's classic toxic relationship. Did this episode come with a trigger warning?   

On to the case: the threatening text was sent by a woman named Odetta.  Hey, she texts using a boy's name, Mo.  Shouldn't Photographer get all disgusted? No, she's still busy being obsessive and creepy.  

Scene 5:  Lucifer and Girlfriend interrogate Odetta, a psychic -- presented as a fraud, of course.  The Dead Guy was her con partner: he would steal valuables from corpses, and Odetta would advertise a psychic ability to find them -- for a substantial fee.  They were very successful, so why murder him?

So who else would want to kill him?  When the families didn't take the bait, Dead Guy fenced the items with someone named TJ.  Check him out. (Left: Shemar Moroe, who I thought was in this episode.  I can't find any photos of the real guy).

This is a police procedural.  I expected Lucifer -- the actual Devil -- to show off some powers -- at least levitate now and then.  Have an office in Hell with a fiery desk or something.  This guy might as well a regular human "black sheep" of a rich family.  

Scene 6: Dan playing cards with his preteen daughter.  Not gay.  And Jophiel does not appear again. I'm out.

Beefcake: None here.  Acording to the Lucifer Wiki, Luce takes off his shirt a lot, but not here.

Gay Characters: None here. The Photographer may come out as lesbian later.

 According to some very critical articles  in Medium and Bi.org, Luce is outed as bisexual during Season 2, when someone starts killing off a lot of women; Lucifer notices that they are all former sex partners.  When the next victim turns out to be a man, Girlfriend triumphantly exclaims that his theory is wrong.  Men don't have sex with men!  She lives in Los Angeles, but has no idea that gay or bi men exist. 

 Fortunately, when Lucifer explains it to her, she does not seem particularly disgusted; she just didn't know that such things happen. 

In the rest of the series, Lucifer is absurdly hetero-horny.  Depending on the writers' whim, he makes an occasional quip about being bisexual or asserts that he finds men's bodies repulsive. 

My Grade: With heteronormativity, homophobia, no beefcake, and no supernatural powers?  Granted, I only watched half the episode, but D-.

Bonus butts and a dick in the NSFW version.

"Malibu Rescue":: A Beach, No Girl-Craziness. What Else Do You Need to Know?

After Country Comfort, my next  foray into the works of Ricardo Hurtado led me to Malibu Rescue (2019), a pilot for a tv series on Nickelodeon.  I went in with some trepidation: most teen movies are heteronormative, with all adolescent passions and intrigues omitted in favor of "Girls are the meaning of life!  If we win this race (or whatever the Maguffin is), we'll get Girls!"  

But Savage Steve Holland's movies tend to go easy on the girl-craziness, so I gave it a try.

Link to NSFW version.

In the middle-class San Fernando Vally, teen operator Tyler (Ricardo Hurtado) plays one too many pranks, and as punishment, is assigned Junior Lifeguard Training.  I'd rather be saved by someone with an interest in lifeguarding, not a high school kid on detention.

 The training will take place in Malibu, home of ultra-rich, bullying snobs.This will become important later.

 

Tyler's fellow Valley Kid trainees, The Flounders, are woefully unprepared.  Have they ever actually seen a beach before?  They include two girls and the nerd Eric (Alkoya Brunson, who has beefed up since 2017).  Their trainer is a blond lady.  Not much beefcake potential so far.

Meanwhile, the rich townie snobs look down on Valley kids, and resent their intrusion into "our beach."  They include Tower Captains Brody (J.T. Neal, left) and Spencer (Cameron Engels).

Plus Garvin (Ian Ziering), the program director, hates Valley kids, and invited the Flounders just so they would fail the training and get ridiculed.

So it's on, nerds vs. jocks in a battle royale to see who gets to become real Junior Lifeguards. Wait -- do they really choose lifeguards via team competitions?

There is, indeed, a pleasant lack of heterosexual interest.  No one gawks at any girl, even for an instant.  There is no Girl of His Dreams for Tyler to pursue, nor a Girl Next Door Who Supported Him All Along for him to end up with. (There's heterosexual romance in the tv series.

However, there are no gay subtexts, either.  Tyler appears to have no friends.  There is no buddy-bonding, anywhere.  And a surprising lack of beefcake. This is a beach.  These are lifeguards.  Where are the muscular physiques?

Every guy on the beach, child, teenager, or adult, lifeguard, junior lifeguard, or civilian -- every guy -- wears a t-shirt and shorts.  Even in crowd scenes.

Have you ever heard of a beach where no male chests on display?  It's like the 1930s, when taking off your shirt in public would get you a citation for public indecency.

Ricardo Hurtado takes off his shirt exactly once, in a rescue scene where you can't see anything.

The lack of girl craziness is nice, but sometimes you need a little more than that.

My grade: D.

Bonus: Nude lifeguards, or at least guys from California, on the NSFW site.

Gidget and Her Boys

During the early 1960s, there was a surfing craze. The Beach Boys were singing "Surfing Sarfari" (1962) and  "Surfing U.S.A." (1963). The documentary Endless Summer (1966) followed buff young men around the world in search of the perfect wave. Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello starred in seven surf-and-sun movies: Muscle Beach Party (1964), Beach Blanket Bingo (1965), How to Stuff a Wild Bikini (1965).


And in the fall of 1965, the 19-year old Sally Field, soon to become one of the most accomplished and successful actors in Hollywood, played Gidget, the "girl midget" who dares enter the male-only surfing world  (a role originated by Sandra Dee in 1959, and based on a novel by Frederick Kohner).

It aired on Wednesday nights after teen fave rave The Patty Duke Show, and was expected to draw a similar audience.  It was hip, in color, with a modern soundtrack and lots of exterior shots -- almost unheard of for a sitcom.  But in 1965 there was usually just one tv set per household, and the grown-ups all wanted to watch The Beverly Hillbillies or The Virginian,  so it wiped out after only 32 episodes.

Too bad.  It had a lot for gay kids to like.  Fortunately, it's available on DVD.

1. Although Gidget and her best friend Larue both have boyfriends, they seem more social necessities and objects of competition than conduits of desire.  The main emotional bond comes between the two girls.

2. And for the gay boys in the audience, there is an endless parade of beefcake.  In color.

Gidget's main boyfriend, played by Peter Duel (who would go on to Alias Smith and Jones).

Her boy pals, played by Rickie Sorenson and Michael Nader, left (nephew of gay actor George Nader)

Martin Milner of Route 66 and Adam-12 as the surfing great Kahuna.

Lots of muscular guest stars lounged in swimsuits on the beach,  included Dick Gautier, Walter Koenig (Star Trek), Daniel J. Travanti (left), and Tim Rooney (Village of the Giants).

Sally Field went on to star in The Flying Nun and become one of the most respected actresses in Hollywood, but she still has a soft spot in her heart for Gidget and her boys.