"The Naked Brothers Band," the most heterosexist teencom on Nickelodeon. Plus the grown-up brothers' d*cks, backsides, and gay-vague characters.

 

Link to the n*de dudes

Around 2008, I researched queer codes on children's tv for what turned out to be three scholarly articles.  I gave high scores to Drake and Josh,  Ned's Declassified School Survival Guide,  The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy, The Wizards of Waverly Place, and The Suite Life of Zack and Cody.  Phil of the Future, Ed Edd and Eddy, and Zoey 101 got low scores, and the lowest: The Naked Brothers Band.

It was a mockumentary about the misadventures of a fictional band led by preteen brothers, Alex and Nat Wolff.  They never explained the embarrassingly salacious name, but I assume that it meant that you would be seeing their real life, uncurated and unmediated. 

Of course, it was curated and mediated.  Alex and Nat did have a band, and some of their real-life bandmates (like Dan Levi, left) were in the cast, but most of the characters and situations were purely fictional.  They were not at all famous.  Yet.   

In 2004, actress Polly Draper had the idea of making a mockumentary about her sons' band, sort a preteen Spinal Tap or A Hard Day's Night.  She got her wealthy (or wealthier) brother to finance The Naked Brothers Band, filmed it in mid-town Manhattan, and entered it the 2005 Hamptons International Film Festival.  Nickelodeon bought it, and suggested a teencom spin-off, competition to the upstart Myley Cyrus in Hannah Montana. 

Nat Wolff was only twelve years old, and Alex was nine,  a little young to handle a teencom by themselves, so Polly added adults to the cast to pull some of the weight.  Mostly her relatives: husband Michael Wolff as the boys' widowed dad; niece Jesse as their babysitter; brother Tim as the school principal. Plus a steady stream of celebrity friends, including Ryan Seacrest, Tony Hawk, and Whoopi Goldberg, popped by to play themselves.

The result was three seasons of intense nepotism and aggressive "girls! girls! girls!' hetero-horniness (2007-09).

I only watched one episode for my research project (there were over 30 programs in my dataset), so to be fair, I reviewed another episode:  "Three is Enough" (February 8, 2008)

In the teaser, Alex wants to practice putting his arm around his "true love" in the movies.  Nat is skeptical -- he has a new "true love" every week.  But he agrees to play the girl.  Then Alex plays the girl so Nat can practice.  The gender-play is a queer code, but it's drowned out by the endless discussion of how many girls they like.

Next: they have writen a new song, "Three is Enough."  Babysitter Jesse agrees: three is the perfect amount of everything, from donuts to boys. For instance, she can't choose between the three "adorable Timmerman Brothers" (played by Polly's excessively rich nephews).  She implies that she is dating all of them, and perhaps not one at a time. Maybe they are involved in a queer four-way romance.

Then the Handsome Foreigner next door (Michael W. Barry)  asks her to the big horror movie.  The Timmermans get jealous and decide to spy on them.

At the studio, famous cartoonist Jules Feiffer, playing himself, is drawing cartoons to project over the band's new song.  Alex asks to be portrayed as cooler and more teenager-ish, and for the girl he is in love with to look more like his real-life true love.  

The main plot: their manager, 12-year old Cooper (Cooper Pillot) accidentally asks a girl for a date.  The band suggests various ways to get out of it, but he doesn't want to get out of it. He just wants Nat to come along for moral support.  But Nat needs a date, and he can't ask his on-off girlfriend Rosalie (not pictured) while they're "on a break."  Can he?  This section can't be easily queered; it's boys and girls all the way down.

Verdict: A few gender-bending moments , but no gay subtexts.

I couldn't even find any gay actors in the cast, except for Andre Keenan-Bolger, who played the snippy director Christophe in four episodes.

After the break: Have the Naked Brothers continued their heteronormative erasure as adults?  Have they gotten naked?

The brothers have continued to perform, and release studio albums (2011, 2014, 2023) and some solo singles.  Each has also pursued an acting career.

Nat has 38 post-Naked acting credits:

A boy who is secretly in love with a female classmate in Stuck in Love (2012)

A boy dying of cancer, who gets a girlfriend, in The Fault in Our Stars (2014).

In Paper Towns (2015), Quentin (Nat) meets the Girl of His Dreams during a wild night, but the next day she has vanished, so he and his friends search for her.  

In Death Note (2017), a high school student named Light (Nat) discovers that writing someone's name in a mysterious notebook will kill them. He works to rid the world of criminals and terrorists, and win the Girl of His Dreams.

Nat's backside is on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends.

A depressing number of Winning the Girl movies. But Nat does play a gay-ish Mormon missionary in an episode of Room 104 (2017), and he kisses John Cameron Mitchell in Joe v Carole (2022).  And he's dating bi  pop star Billie Elish.  That sort of makes him gay-adjacent.

Alex Wolff has 39 post-Naked acting credits, including:

Derf, the best buddy of future serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer (Ross Lynch), in My Friend Dahmer (2017).

A nearly-canonical gay boy possessed by a demon in Hereditary (2018).

Nick, who gets involved with a girl but also has a gay-subtext romance, in The Cat and the Moon (2019).

Algernon in The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde's gay-subtext classic (2020).

Reuben, a hospice nurse killed during the early hours of the alien invasion, in A Quiet Place: Day One (2024).  He doesn't have a girlfriend.

I like this resume better.

Plus he shows his d*ck in So Long, Marianne (2024), based on the relationship between Leonard Cohen and Marianne Ihlen. I've never heard of either of them, but I guess they're famous enough to warrant a biopic tv series. Allen Ginsberg appears in five episodes, so they must have been famous during the 1950s and 1960s.   

Two views  of Alex's d*ck are on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends.

Spoiler alert: they meet on the Greek island of Hydra, while Marianne is dating someone else.  Thus giving me an excuse to post a photo of a Greek guy (n*de on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends)

See also: "The Cat and the Moon": An almost canonical gay couple and a gay-subtext romance on the Mean Streets of New York

Tommy Nelson's Hot/Hung Photos, Part 2: Boyfriends, buddies, bromantic partners, crushes, and c*cks.  And Alex kissing Ross Lynch.

"Hereditary": A Gay Demon and his Boy Host

"The Consultant": Tawdry, Tasteless Homophobia at a Modern Gaming Company

Room 104: Two Mormon missionaries come out, sort of.