Going Dutch: Military sitcom with an Old Soldier, a gay tease, and a muscular private (sigh). With a bonus private's privates

Link to the n*de dudes

In the last few days, I've started a dozen movies and tv shows that seemed promising -- guys gazing at each other on the icon, a trailer with buddy-bonding -- only to start them, and the focus character is kissing a woman by Minute 1.  The constant gay teasing is getting annoying.  Why tailor your project to attract viewers who are going to turn it off in 20 seconds?  

I'm so frustrated that I'm going to review something at random, the first "new!" title that appears on Hulu, Going Dutch: "After an epically unfiltered rant, an arrogant, loudmouth U.S. Army Colonel is reassigned to the Netherlands, where he is punished with a command position at the least important army base in the world. 

An army comedy?  Yuck!  But here goes, Episode 1.1:

Scene 1: USAG Baumholder Command Center.  I don't know what USAG means. Google says a gymnastics association, but that can't be right.   

Two army guys walk down the hall, the Old Guy (Dennis Leary, left) giving the Swishy Guy notes on how to introduce him: "Mention the Rangers, give America an erection."  Google says that the Rangers are an ice hockey team.

Swishy Guy: "I'll mention your Medal of Honor and your tours of Iraq and Afghanistan, and end up with your daughters, so you'll come off as a family man, and everyone will love you."

Old one: "No, don't mention them. I don't want to be beloved. I need to be tough, this close to Russia!"  Dude, you're in the Netherlands.  Russia is five countries and 2500 km away.

Swishy one: "We shouldn't mention how eager you are to start World War III." 

Scene 2: They meet with the Commander, General Davidson, who immediately asks about his daughters. "I hear you're a grandfather now."  Sorry, dude, he wants a family man.

Old Guy doesn't know what he means.  Oh, the baby?  "That's not a human being yet, more of a blob." Maybe stick with starting World War III.

Uh-oh, Old Guy was told that he was going to be the Commander.  Change of plans: he was caught on tape calling General Davidson a bleep, so he's in charge of  USAG Stroopsdorf, a supply center: "The least important army base in the world." 

Scene 3:  They walk through the Stroopsdorf Base: a miniature golf course, an outdoor fitness center. Old Guy is outraged at a "fat hippie on a bike."  Where's the discipline?   He vows to turn "this dump" into a proper combat base. 

Next, a tour of the fromagerie, the bowling alley, and the laundry, the three things Stroopsdorf is known for.

Plus a teen center with a sign "Reading is radical."  There are no teens on the base, so civilians from town use it for pool and video games. Old Guy tries to eject  "a small time gigolo" and a very muscular Private. 

Left: Small Time Gigolo is played by Icelandic actor Arnmundur Ernst Björnsson

Scene 4: The Interim Commander, a blond woman, addresses the troops: they have new headphones to use on the treadmills in the gym. No one mentioned Old Guy's wife. She must be dead, so he and Interim Commander can start a  "will they or won't they" romance.

Nope, she is his estranged daughter!  The Commander didn't mention that little detail.

She cut off all contact with him two years ago, but he didn't notice, because he "was busy saving America."  But working together will be an even worse punishment thatn being assigned to a "Dutch Club Med.

Scene 5: Swishy Guy flirts with Muscular Private as he plays foosball.  Wouldn't you?  Asked "What does your X/O mean?", he responds "I'm the Commander of Hugs and Kisses." Smooth move, dude.  But he impresses Muscular by winning the foosball game, then rushes to the Commanders to note that everyone can hear them arguing.

Muscular Private is played by Dempsey Bryk, who has rather an androgynous presence, but plays a lot of muscular guys (top photo).

Swishy Guy is played by Danny Pudi, who is heterosexual, but played a gay-subtext character on Community.  It's probably the same here: swishy as a gay tease, but soon to be outed as straight.

Interin Commander notes that they are marching in the Tulip Festival tomorrow, the first time they have been invited, so their presence is "crucial to diplomatic relations."  

More after the break

Gemstones Episode 2.1 Review: Junior likes d*cks, Kelvin likes pecs, and f*k yeah, we got both!

 

Link to NSFW review

Season 2 of The Righteous Gemstones began over two years after the Season 1 finale, and the back stories, personalities, and even the genre has changed.  Remember, Danny McBride likes his seasons to be complete stories, with no or few call-backs, so new viewers easily understand what's going on.  In fact, it may be fun for us to start afresh, watch as if we have never seen or heard of these people before.  

Memphis Soul Stew: Memphis, 1968. Teenage Eli Gemstone, the Maniac Kid (Jake Kelley), is playing a heel, a pro wrestling villain: "from the wrong side of the tracks, a newcomer to the League, all muscle, all attitude."  He fights dirty, pretending to reconcile with opponent Kyle Hawk, then throwing him out of the ring.  

As he fights, his manager Glendon Marsh (Wayne Duvall) cheers. Glendon's teenage son Junior (Tommy Nelson) watches, sometimes happy but usually disturbed.  Is he jealous of the attention Eli is getting?  Is he a rebellious teenager during the era of the Generation Gap?.

Junior is gay: In the locker room, Glendon offers Eli "some bonus pay on the South Side," while Junior looks on, smoking a cigarette, still either jealous or angry. As they leave, they pass a n*de guy.  Junior is so busy looking that he trips, and then looks back again.  The boy is definitely into men.

Jim Crow Must Go:  As they drive through a black neighborhood on the South Side of Memphis, near where Martin Luther King, Jr. will be assassinated on April 4th.  Junior looks out at the townsfolk in disgust. 

Suddenly they are surrounded civil rights protestors: "Jim Crow must go!" "We protest injustice."  Junior calls them "bums," which was usually applied to hippies, not African-Americans, leading me to believe that something changed between writing the script and hiring the background actors.  Glendon punches him: "they just want what everybody wants, a piece of the fucking pie."

Ok, Junior is racist, and Glendon is abusive, but why this scene? Hiring background players, costume, and staging must have been very time-consuming, with no payoff: civil rights are never mentioned again.  

The Loan Enforcer: Glendon is a loan shark as well as a wrestling manager: the job involves beating up a deadbeat.  Eli and Junior both go, squabbling over who's the boss.  

"Kill 'em!" we hear.  Psych!  It's the tv.  We meet a slovenly, drunken, foul-mouthed, abusive jackass of a husband.  While Junor subdues his wife and baby, Eli punches him a few times and asks for the money, and when he doesn't have it, breaks his thumbs. Junior laughs "derangedly" (according to the subtitles).

Afterwards Glendon drops Eli off, hands him some money, and tells him, "Buy yourself something nice." This is a feminizing statement. 

As Eli drives off on his motorcycle, we hear Buck Owens' "Tall Dark Stranger":

 They say a tall dark stranger is a demon, and  that a devil rides closely by his side.

 So if Junior is the demon, Eli must be the devil riding beside him.  How long will they ride together?

Abusive Daddies all the way down:  Eli drives to the Gemstone residence (it's not a stage name, apparently), where his abusive dad chastises him for being late for dinner. So they're eating after Eli's wrestling match?  Like at 11 or 12 pm?   There's also a mousy, skittish mom and a little sister, May-May (important in Season 3). 

Ordered to say grace, Eli jokes: "Good food, good meat, good God, let's eat," which makes May-May laugh.  Dad slaps him.  End of flashback.

We're fine with the faggots:  In 2022, elderly Eli Gemstone is a megachurch pastor and televangelist.  He and the satellite church ministers are discussing the case of Pastor Butterfield (Victor Williams), caught with his wife and another woman in a dance club restroom, while they were all high on Molly ("we thought they were Sweetarts").  The story made the front page of The New York Times, thanks to reporter Thaniel Block (Jason Schwartzman), who has made a career of publicizing ministerial  scandals.  Eli wants to be lenient, but the others object.  (Left: random pecs)

A Spanish speaking pastor explains: "My church is ok with the maricones (roughly faggots), but we're not ready for swinging and tropus."     Pastor Diane translates: "His church is really cool with the gays and the queers, but not so much about the swingers and the thruples."  They fire Pastor Butterfield; he tries to commit suicide.

 Why did Pastor Diane translate maricones with two words, gays and queers?  Why queers, doubtless with the old pejorative meaning rather than the contemporary reclamation? I get the impression that the pastors are not really ok with maricones, so any gay ministers might want to stay in the closet, especially with the reporter snooping around.  Since this is the first scene in the present day, it is doubtless setting up one of the main conflicts of the season.  But who is the gay minister  Eli, Junior, or someone not yet introduced?  

Left: God Squad pecs

Tell the girls:  A young man rides a motorcycle to the Gemstone Compound, doing crazy stunts (this will be important later), while the background song advises:

Tell the girls that I am back in town.  They'd better beware

They may run, and they may hide.

I'll follow, and I'll be there.

 At least we know that he's not the closeted gay minister.  He turns out to be Eli's grandson Gideon, back from a job as a stuntman to assist with the Gemstone ministry.  He's going to move into the house that Eli built for his abusive dad.

In other news, Gideon's younger brother Abraham has been leaving "secretions" all over the house, like in the freezer next to the Dreamsicles.  

We cut to a church service with Eli Gemstone and his children, Jesse, Judy, and Kelvin, announcing the start of their streaming service, GODD.  We see Jesse's wife Amber, their kids, and Judy's husband BJ in the audience.  No partner for Kelvin. He must be single

F*k, yeah!  More after the break

Mickey and Goofy, the Gay Couple of "Walt Disney's Comics and Stories." With Christopher Knight bonus

Way to feel old.  I just bought the 75th Anniversary Edition of Walt Disney's Comics and Stories, the flagship of the Disney comics empire.

Back in 1991, I bought the 50th Anniversary Edition

And Christopher Knight (Peter Brady) is 67.

When I was a kid, I loved the Disney Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge titles, with the ducks adventuring in exotic locales, in search of the Mines of King Solomon or the lost crown of Genghis Khan.

But I had no use for Walt Disney's Comics and Stories.

There was always a Duck cover, and the first story starred Donald Duck, but it was a slapstick comedy, not an adventure.

Then several stories involving minor Disney characters adapted from movies that came out before I was born:

1. The Little Bad Wolf, a "Casper the Friendly Ghost" who butted heads with his single father, Zeke, aka the Big Bad Wolf from The Three Little Pigs (1933).  Neither father nor son expressed any interest in girls, so that was a glimmer of gay subtext, anyway.  But also:

2. The patois-speaking Indian Little Hiawatha,who apparently starred in some cartoons in the 1930s.  f Offensive even for a 10 year old in 1971

3. Jiminy Cricket from Pinocchio (1940).  Who?

4. Scamp, the son of the two dogs who got together in Lady and the Tramp (1955).  He was rascally, adventurous, a gender-stereotyped "boy," with sisters who were gender-stereotyped sissy "girls."  Offensive even for a 10-year old in 1971.

5/ Then a text story, unreadable, just so they could ship the comic books at book rates.

6. But the worst was the last feature, a serial by artist Paul Murray (1911-1989) that paired Mickey Mouse and Goofy.  

They were usually detectives trying to solve a crime with science fiction elements, though there were also outer-space and historical stories.

The problem was, I never could read a serial straight through.  Buying comic books was always a gamble, based on what Schneider's Drug Store stocked, what was left by the time I got there, and how much money I had.  There was never an opportunity to buy the same title several months in a row, so instead I always arrived in media res, or in time for "the ghost was really your disgruntled assistant" Scooby wrap-up.

More after the break

That scene from C*A*U*G*H*T, the Australian hostage comedy. You can't see the television series, but you can see the d*cks

  

Link to the n*de photos

I've been looking at n*de guys in mainstream movies and tv shows for a long time. Accidental displays all the way back to Mark-Paul Goesselaer in Dead Man on Campus (1998), full, open displays on Europhia and The Righteous Gemstones.  But this morning I saw a screenshot so shocking that I couldn't believe it aired on a mainstream television program (after the break).

So I had to research the program: C*A*U*G*H*T, with asterisks, like M*A*S*H,  to distinguish it from the other tv series named Caught that premiered that year.  It is a six episode comedy produced, written, and directed by Kick Gurry (Kick?), which aired on the Stan network in Australia, in September 2023.  It was pulled from international release, so not available in the U.S., but I read an episode guide.

The plot: four Australian soldiers go on a secret mission to the war-torn island of Behati-Prinloo, where they are mistaken for American spies and captured by "freedom fighters."  They release a homemade hostage video that goes viral, resulting the U.S. Secretaryof State, played by Susan Sarandon, negotiating for their release and Sean Penn offering to exchange himself for the guys.

As far as I can tell, all of the characters and actors are heterosexual.  

The four are:

1. Lincoln Younes as Albhanis Mouwad.  The former Home and Away soap star is known for Down Under, Tangle, and Grand Hotel.

2. Kick Gurry (Kick?) as Dylan Fox.  He is best known as Sparky in Speed Racer and Griff in Edge of Tomorrow.  He's rather unattractive, so we'll skip his photo.

3. Ben O'Toole (shouldn't that be Rod O'Toole?) as Rowdy Gaines (Rowdy?).  He is best known as Snapper Webster in Barons (Snapper?).

4. Alexander England as Phil Choi.  He appeared as Mnevis in Gods of Egypt.

More after the break, including that scene

Mark Haynes: Psycho-slasher, leather daddy, singer, translator, pec fan. With bonus Mark and David Deluise d*cks

 Link to the n*de photos

Mark Haynes has like 300 hot/hung pictures online, so I was going to do a hot/hung photo ollection, but the post is geting so few page views that I switched to a regular profile.

Mark (right) grew up in York, Pennsylvania, and now lives in Burlington County, New Jersey, near Philadelphia.  He has tried a number of career paths, including bodybuilder, hairdresser, bodyguard, model, translator, and personal trainer, and as Mark Intocable, a singer.  Spotify lists a lot of his singles, including "Take Me Back," "Drag Me Down," and "I am a Goth."  

"My Monster" is about a monster who pops up in the middle of the night when he's trying to sleep, or when he gets up to pee, "he's looking at me," saying "I control you, you do what I say."  Of course we all know what he's referring to.

Mark also films gay wrestling videos under the stage name Mark Muscle.

But his  main interest is in stunt work, especially choreographing fights and action scenes.  He has doubled for Dave Bautista in several movies, as well as Florian Munteanu, Travis Kelcem and Victor Drago

 For stunting he prefers fight scenes, but for acting he prefers gay characters.

His gay roles include:

High Town (2020): Leather Daddy #3 helped his fellow leather daddies beat up a drug dealer for making homophobic comments.

Bros (2022) was advertised as the first mainstream, non-niche movie by a major studio, "with an all-gay cast" and a plotline about a couple (Billy Eichner, Luke McFarlane) falling in love in spite of career problems.  It did not perform well, as heterosexuals were mostly afraid to see it, and LGBT people had already seen a hundred movies with the same plot.  Mark played a Rowdy Bear during a bar scene.

Intimacy Workshop (2022): A short featuring group of men gather for "a symposium on the art of human connection."

5Turning Teddy (2023), a tv series about a straight guy (Jamal King) who falls in love with an action-adventure star, "even though he likes women." Um...no big mystery there.  It's called being bisexual. 

Mark's most recent "gay" role was in Stream (2024), with Tim Curry as a hotel manager who sends masked Players out to kill his guets.  He plays Player 4, who doesn't get much character development, but it's significant that he targets only men: the foreign tourist Louis (Andrew Rogers), retired cop Bernard (Tim Reid),  and family man Roy (Charles Edwin Powell)

You can get Player 4 cutouts and action figures at fan conventions.

More Mark after the break

Confessions of a Mask

When I started grad school in Bloomington, Indiana, I didn't have much trouble finding gay books.  There was no gay section at the campus bookstore or the White Rabbit bookstore downtown, but you could just scan the fiction shelves for titles that were dark and sinister, about secrets and lies and despair: The Flowers of Evil, A Thirsty Evil, The Thief's Journal, The Color of Darkness, The Immoralist, City of Night, The Young and Evil.

So when I saw Yukio Mishima's Confessions of a Mask (1949) on the shelf, I knew that it was gay-themed.

It's about Kochan, a Japanese schoolboy in the 1930s who is tormented by same-sex desire.

He gazes lustfully at a night-soil carrier (a man whose job it is to carry human excrement) and at pictures of dead soldiers, knights, and Christian martyrs, especially St. Sebastian who was pierced by arrows (traditionally a subject of gay painters; Franz Kafka also posed).  He fantasizes about killing beautiful young men, enjoying the image of their beautiful faces bruised and bloodied, their muscular bodies seeped in blood.  Homoerotic desire is inextricably linked to the desire for filth, and to the desire to destroy.

Through his childhood and adolescence, Kochan never falters in his belief that he is wrong, deviant, evil, a monster masquerading as human.  He watches his schoolmates, especially a muscular boy named Omi who writes his name in urine on the snow.

He tries to suppress his urges for excrement, men, and death, even going as far as to have sex with a woman, but he realizes that he can never truly love anyone.  His desires are not only deviant but impossible; male beauty can only appear amid excrement;  a man cannot love a man without killing him.

Wow.

A rather depressing view of my future

Mishima was gay himself, and led a tortured life, obsessed with bodybuilders and death. He felt humiliated by the Japanese defeat in World War II, and in 1970 attempted to incite a coup d'etat to restore the power of the emperor.  When that didn't work, he committed ritual suicide.