"The Tick": Can a Man and a Boat Find Love?

I'm completely obsessed  over the relationship between a man in a moth costume and a talking boat.

The Tick. created by Ben Edlund in 1986, is a superhero parody that examines how being super might play out in the real world, where the rent is due, buildings you smash up have to be repaired, and you suffer from anxiety and depression over "being different."

The comic book, animated series, and tv series versions have all been slightly different, but the Tick and Arthur always capitalize on the superhero-sidekick homoerotic bond: they live together, share expenses, share a bed, bicker like a married couple.  The 2001 series, with Patrick Warburton as The Tick, was called "the gayest show on tv" for dealing with issues like coming out to parents and gay adoption.

The latest adaption, on Amazon Prime (2016-2019),is even more gay-coded.  In previous versions, Arthur gets girlfriend, but here, he (now played by Griffin Newman) does not express any heterosexual interest.  Neither does the Tick (Peter Serafinowicz).  Everyone accepts them explicitly as a couple.  They are invited to parties together; Mom invites "the two of you" to dinner; they apply for official superhero status as a pair.

Of course, they are not actually lovers; the Tick is happy to see Arthur "getting out there" and dating new people.  Or new boats.

Fellow  superhero Overkill (Scott Speiser) has a sentient boat named Dangerboat (voiced by Alan Tudyk in a parody of Kitt , the talking car from Knightrider).  Early in the series, Dangerboat announces that he identifies as male.  This starts out a little discomforting, like a transphobic joke, but after the initial “identifies as” scene, everyone just accepts that Dangerboat is a male boat. Furthermore, he is gay, attracted to both male boats and male humans. He was in love with his previous owner,  Michael, and now he has a crush on Arthur.

He gets a  little frisky while Arthur is taking a shower (inside him).,but then he apologizes, and just asks Arthur out (or in) to movies.Arthur keeps blowing him off. (“Just date the boa!” I yelled at the screen.“You could do worse.” )

 Tick is enthusiastic about the potential romance,but Arthur isn’t sure – a man dating a boat? How would that even work?  (Gay human couples get the same response).  “”I don’t want to confuse him, or confuse me.  I’m already confused.  He’s just a boat, right?”

Thing come to a head when Dangerboat has a post-traumatic episode over Michael’s death, and Arthur talks him down from a "deep cleansing" that would kill them all: “I know what it’s like to lose someone you love”   Dangerboat admits that he loves Arthur, and Arthur responds "I know you do."

Darn.

Later, Dangerboat apologizes for losing it, and hopes that they can still be friends.  “We are friends,” Arthur affirms.

Darn.

So I guess they won't be dating.  But I still think Arthur could do worse.

By the way, this version also has a lot of beefcake.  Arthur is nude frequently, and there are glimpses of other superheroes, like Superion  (Brendan Hines, left), and villains, like Stosh (Tyler Bunch).  

Plus a Season 1 plot arc involves the Very Large Man (Ryan Woodle), an ordinary guy zapped with a ray that makes him 200 feet tall.  At that height, he's no longer sentient, but he does have a 20 foot long d*ck (we only see his backside).

The perennial question: smart but tiny, or dumb but hung?

See also: "Superman" (2025): You'll believe a man can queerbait.  With Alan Tudyk.

The Chair Company, Episode 1.6: More queer codes at Seth's 18th birthday party. Plus Seth's selfie, a queer puppeteer, Ebenezer Scrooge, and Brock c*ck. With Tyler Bunch.

10 Things You Should Know about "The Tick"

Revisiting Brideshead Revisited: Does the groundbreaking portrayal of (temporary) gay love hold up after 40 years? WIth bonus d*cks

January 18th, 1982, a Monday night.  I'm lying on the bed in the attic room my brother and I share, reading a book for my Advanced Spanish class.  Significantly it's Ciro Alegria's El mundo es ancho y ajeno: Broad and Alien is the World.  

Link to NSFW version

I always watch tv while studying.  Tonight the only options are two boring movies, MASH (doctors during the Korean War), and something called Brideshead Revisited on PBS.  It turns out to be an adaption of the Evelyn Waugh novel about 1920s Oxford undergrad Charles Ryder (Jeremy Irons) falling in love with the flamboyant, decadent, teddy bear-toting, alcoholic Sebastian Flyte (Anthony Andrews).

 

They run away to Venice together. They go slumming in Soho, along with Sebastian's sister Julia.  Then Ryder begins a romantic entanglement with Julia, and the outraged Sebastian dumps him and runs off to Morocco. 

 Later Sebastian hooks up with a sleazy German guy named Kurt, and later still he dies.  Ryder can't marry Julia because she's Catholic and he's an atheist, so they just live together.  Later he becomes Catholic.

I'm mesmerized.  In 1982, surrounded by the hetero-horniness of workplace sitcoms, my parents demanding "What girl do you like?", and the preacher at church bellowing about homa-sekshuls, just seeing two men involved in a romance is a revelation.  Sure, no one says "gay," Ryder turns straight, and Sebastian dies, but they walk arm in arm, cuddle, even go nude sunbathing!  And everyone around knows! Even Sebastian's mother.  Even Julia, who tells Ryder that "all our loves are hints and signals," leading us to God.  A same-sex romance leads us to God?  Hear that, Preacher?

40 years have passed.  I've studied a lot of LGBT history and literature, and watched a lot of gay movies, published a lot of books and articles on queering fictional texts, and recently I decided to revisit Brideshead Revisted.

You can't go home again.  Rewatching today,  I strongly dislike Brideshead.  Sebastian is a decadent, flamboyant stereotype who ends up dead.  Ryder may fall in love with him, but then he moves on to Julia.  Evelyn Waugh, like Freud, believed that gayness is a phase -- adolescents, newly potent but forbidden access to the opposite sex, turn to each other.  Their brief period of quasi-romance ends when they move on to "mature" heterosexual love.


In 2008, the BBC aired a new version of Brideshead, with Matthew Goode as Charles Ryder and Ben Whishaw as Sebastian.  This time there's no subtext: Sebastian is gay.  But there's also no romance: Ryder is heterosexual but pretending to be interested in Sebastian to gain access to his vast wealth.

 

It's more honest -- and there's a lot more nudity -- but nothing can match the joy of seeing same-sex romance on screen for the very first time.

See also: Angus De Kirkby: Posh femme boy with long legs, a boyfriend, and a lot of furs. But is he a royal, a model, a fashionista, or just rich?

"Saltburn": Brideshead Revisted for the post-gay generation, with kink and p*nises

 Matt Smith: Who doesn't want to see the p*nis of Doctor Who, Christopher Isherwood, Charles Manson, Superworm, and Prince Philip?

Kampan Soni: Czech-Indian boy plays a ghost-chaser and a bartender, jokes about cats, doesn't mention girls. With potential n*de photos

 

Link to the n*de dudes

Ride or Die on Amazon Prime, features a professional assassin named Judith, being pushed out of the business due to her age, who discovers that baddies are targeting an MP (that's Member of Parliament, to Yanks) and his wife, Debbie.  Who happens to be her "ride or die" (best friend).

I reviewed the first episode.  Not a fan. 

Not much beefcake. We see Judith's hookup (Taylor Napier, on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends) shirtless, and her mark (Ed Skrein) coming out of the shower. 

No gay characters.  Calum Lynch (left) as Judith's handler gives off a gay vibe, but he flirts with a girl.

Even crowd scenes display endless arrays of male-female couples. 

And there's a nasty bit of queerbaiting.  In an antique warehouse, the PM's wife Debbie gets to a prized apothecary cabinet before celebrity antique dealer Drew Pritchard and his boyfriend.  They fume with envy.  Except the real-life guy is straight.  They just pretended he was gay to fool viewers. 

The only bright spot was Kampan Soni, the  cute bartender who Debbie complains to as she downs tequila after tequila.

Kampan grew up in Ahmendabad, in Gujarat State in western India, and graduated from St. Xavier High School in 2018.

He then moved to Prague, where he received a B.Sci. in Agriculture and Food Sciences in 2022.  He is currently a Global Mobility Specialist at   Amazon Prague, which means working in Human Resources.

There are two n*de photos on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends.

Plus he does comedy povs: "Making you question things you never noticed: Facts, Psychology, Hidden History"

"Why does the ATM pin have only four digits?"

"What do cats really think about?" 

"Why do we like horror movies?"

"Why are popcorns so expensive?"

More after the break

Lee H. Montgomery: The Boy Who Fought Mutants

When I moved to Los Angeles in 1985, my mother called every week, usually early Saturday morning, and asked "What stars have you met?"  But she wasn't familiar with most of the actors of my generation, so "Michael J. Fox" got a polite murmur, "Robin Williams" a vague "Oh yeah, I've heard of him," and "Lee H. Montgomery" a blank "Who's that?"

But Lee had more than enough claims to fame (and he was a lot friendlier than Robin Williams).

He played the boy who taught his pet rat to kill in Ben (1972).  If you separate it from the premise, the theme song, sung by Michael Jackson, is a touching evocation of same-sex love:

Ben, the two of us need look no more
We both found what we were looking for.
With a friend to call my own, I'll never be alone,
And you, my friend, will see, you've got a friend in me.

In The Savage is Loose (1974), an entry in the "s*xually dangerous kid" genre that Mark Lester  and Scott Jacoby specialized in, David (Lee) is shipwrecked on a desert island, along with his Dad (George C. Scott) and Mom.  David eventually morphs into the bodybuilding hunk John David Carson (left), and tries to kill his Dad so he can mate with Mom.  About the same plot as What the Peeper Saw, but with more n*dity.

In Burnt Offerings (1976), a married couple (Oliver Reed, Karen Black) moves into a California mansion with their son David (Lee) and elderly Aunt Elizabeth (film legend Bette Davis).  As the house starts asserting  itself, it tries to drown David, and then drops a pillar on him.

Was there a fad for threatening half-naked kids in the 1970s?  It also happened in The Possession of Joel Delaney  and The Omen.

By the way, the hunky Oliver Reed hangs out in a swimsuit.  He showed his altogether during the n*de wrestling scene in Women in Love (1969).

More after the break

Nicolas Bechtel: Soap opera prince and Stuck twin femmes up, hot tubs with hunks, still believes. With two Prince prongs and a Cole c*k

  

Link to the n*de photos

The next person in my "Profiles to Do" folder that I've never heard of: Nicolas Bechtel.  I get a positive vibe from his name due to the lesbian cartoonist Allison Bechdel, whose Bechdel Test measures women's representation in movies.

But I'm sure he has no connection to that.

According to Wikipedia, Nicolas was born in 2005 in Fontana, California, nd is  best known as Spencer Cassidine on General Hospital and Lewis Diaz on Stuck in the Middle.

Prince Spencer Cassidine was born in 2006, son of Greek prince Nicholas Cassidine (Ty Sheridan, n*de on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends).  He began his life fighting, born  premature and infected with the deadly virus that was rampant in Port Charles. As a baby he goes through a paternity test, kidnapping, attempted murder, and his dad's near-fatal illness (it's General Hospital, after all).  

Nicolas plays Spencer from 2013 to 2020: he is  trapped in a fire and severely burned, kidnapped twice more, and sent to juvenile hall after stalking his mother.  

A 2020-24 Spencer, played by Nicholas Chavez (left), is attacked by the Hook Killer, beaten into unconsciousness, and kidnapped again. Finally he drowns in the River Seine (or maybe not).  He is heterosexual, with four girlfriends at various times. 

The Disney Channel's Stuck in the Middle (2016-18) stars Jenna Ortega as Harley Diaz, an engineering prodigy who is "stuck in the middle," third of seven children. She has three brothers, aspiring singer Ethan (Isaak Presley) and the twins Lewie (Nicolas) and Beast (Malachi Barton).  Neither of the twins seem to have any hetero crushes, according to the episode synopses and fan wiki.

Left: Malachi Barton has muscled up.

Nicholas has 14 other acting credits on the IMDB, including episodes of Good Luck Charlie, Baby Daddy, Girl Meets World, and American Crime Story.

He's got a 7-episode run in Rake (2014), with Greg Kinnear as a defense attorney who gets beat up a lot. 

Two movies:

The List (2013): Michael Peña stars as an FBI agent tracking down a killer who is targeting everyone on a list of people in the Witness Protection Program. Gary Cole (n*de on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends) plays his boss. Nicolas plays a kid. 

More after the break

Spider-Man: Brand New Day: Spidey flexes, visits a bathhouse, and brings a guy flowers. But it's not what you think.

 

Link to the n*de photos

 Marvel Cinematic Universe movies are not great at LGBT representation, and for some reason Spider-man movies are the worst of the lot: "Like all stories, and I mean every single story that has ever been told from Gilgamesh on to the present, including Death in Venice, The City and the Pillar, Call Me By Your Name, and Heartstopper, this story is about a boy and a girl."   So I went into Spider-Man: Brand New Day expecting to hear "feminine smiles are the meaning of life!" every few minutes.

I wasn't wrong.

There are three plotlines that actually could be three separate movies.

Plot #1: In the last movie, Spidey, aka Peter Parker (Tom Holland), zapped the memories of his True Love MJ and buddy Ned to "keep them safe."  Now he's living as a full-time superhero, ignoring the advice of his supervisor and the superhero Black Widow that he should get a girlfriend. 

Suddenly his powers start accelerating, giving him Hulk-style Roid Rage, but his web things fail to work at the most awkward moments.  He needs a device to inhibit some of his spider DNA while allowing the rest of it to keep giving him superpowers.  So he seeks out Incredible Hulk Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo, n*de on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends), who teaches at Empire State University.

Hulky has lost his True Love.

Cliche alert: The Advanced Physics class is held in a giant lecture hall, like all college classes in movies.

Plot #2: 

After interrogating the various people who helped the Supervillain Scorpion (Michael Mando) escape, Spidey realizes that they're dealing with a being who can jump from mind to mind, peering into their memories and controlling their actions.  They're interested in getting access to a secret vault at the Damage Control headquarters (where they clean up the damage caused by superhero fights, including a lot of superpower-enhancing detritus).  

Eventually the being occupies the mind of Spidey's True Love MJ, and threatens to drop her off a building her unless he helps with their goal.  But some of the stuff at Damage Control could hurt millions of people, so Spidey refuses.   

More after the break, with a spoiler and a d*ck.

Noah Centineo: The Boyfriend of your Dreams, with five butts, three bulges, two d*cks, and no gay characters.

  

Link to the N*de Dudes

I've used stills from Noah Centineo's adult video as illustrations twice, but I don't know who he is, only that he filled in when Jake T. Austin left The Fosters. So, time to do some research.

He was born in 1996, and first appeared on screen with a kids' film, The Golden Retrievers, in 2008.

He appeared in three episodes of Austin & Allie, the first Disney Channel teencom to feature a canonical gay character, but he didn't play the gay character.

More guest spots on teencoms like Marvin Marvin and Shake It Up, and then his first starring role, How to Build a Better Boy, 2014.  He plays Jaden, the jock that science nerd Mae is crushing on, so she builds a cyber boyfriend to help win him. Matt Shively, left, plays her brother.

There's some some adult pictures in SPF-18, 2017, but it's not Noah, it's Jackson White, a depressed musician.  The focus character has to choose between Jackson and Noah, who is mourning the death of his father.  It gets a 3.3 rating on Rotten Tomatoes, probably because it is advertised as a romantic comedy, but is actually a depressing angst-fest.  

After 53 episodes of The Fosters, 2015-2018, Noah starred in To All the Boys I've Loved Before, 2018, but he's not the one loving the boys.  He's the Love Interest of focus character Lana, whose letters to her secret crushes are made public, destroying her life. 

In Sierra Burgess is a Loser, 2018, loser Sierra gets the help of the school's It-Girl to win the Boy of Her Dreams, Noah.  It also stars Will Peltz, left, as Spence, the It-Girl's boyfriend who dumps her.

More after the break

Marcus Hodson: Shape-shifting demon or hyper-masculine Midlands model? With n*de merman bonus

 Link to the n*de dudes

On Dead Hot (2024), Marcus Hodson plays a shape-shifting demon, a hermetic Magus who travels between esoteric realms through the Eye of Horus bar and its mysterious Red Phone.  I wanted to know if he plays other mysterious Pucks or Lords of Misreason, but his IMDB listing is rather basic  Five roles, all 2022-2024: 

You Like That, a short about a gay American student in Edinburgh.

The Stand-up Sketch Show, where comedians perform "a surreal reconstruction of their own material."  Marcus is a background player in five episodes.

An episode of Domino Day, about a young witch "haunted by her need to feed on others." In Episode 2, Marcus plays a hookup who smooches with her and is eaten.

Gentleman in Moscow is about a Russian aristocrat placed under house arrest in a hotel for the rest of his life after the 1917 revolution.  He befriends a girl who also lives in the hotel; Marcus plays her piano teacher.

He also plays one of the mermen in The Little Mermaid.

Only one other paranormal show, and he doesn't even play a supernatural being?

Not many biographical details available. A 2021 article in Pause magazine states that he is 25 years old, from Manchester but living in London. He began modeling at age 18, then started university, but left to go pro.

In spite of the paucity of biographical details, Marcus has a very active social media presence, with hundreds of posts about travel, food, and beefcake. Here he is in Greece

In Rome

On the beach.  Does Marcus have a palsy disorder in his left hand, or is he displaying some magickal gestures?

More after the break

Alex Krazen: College wrestler with a physique, only male friends, an interest in short guys, and a unique quality. Plus some collegiate d*cks

Link to the NSFW version

I  don't usually post the last names of non-actors, but college wrestler Alex Krazen is unique, for reasons that will become apparent.  Besides, he has the same initials as Aleks Kurdzielewicz, who I profiled yesterday.

On his Instagram, Alex states that he is a student at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Connecticut.  

But he poses in a singlet from Praire View A&M in Texas. 

Comments to this photo are rather frisky: "I swear it looked at me first" and "Is it essential to be that way during wrestling matches?"

He's got some very buffed buds.

And a crazy travel itinerary.  Why would you travel to Tuscaloosa, USC, Boston, and Paris, all in the same month?

I'll take the short guy in the middle first, then the striped pants, and Alex third.  Sorry, dude.

More after the break