Timothy Colombos: The WITS wizard in training grows up to a world of masculine beauty. And real estate. With Sri Lankan and Dubai d*cks

  

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I started this research with just a photo of two muscular, shirtless guys and the name "Timothy Colombos." 

Colombo is the capital of Sri Lanka, so maybe he's South Asian.  

It's not hard to find photos of Timothy surrounded by muscular men.  In this case, nine of them.  But he's never alone, so I still don't know which he is.  Maybe the one on the far right?

Timothy's Instagram contains 12 photo dumps. He visits Greece, the French Riviera, Dubai, Morocco,.  Every photo shows men, in pairs and groups, or sometimes a roomful. 

Here he visits the Cabana Beach Bar in Thessalonika.   

Ok, there's no doubt that Timothy is gay, but what about his acting?

According to the IMDB, he's actually of Greek ancestry,  born in Manhasset, New York.  He studied at the Actor's Garage and did some commercials before being cast as Ethan in WITS Academy (2015), a sequel to Every Witch Way.

WITs (Wizards and Witches in Training) attend a standard post-Harry Potter magical academy, but with a slight difference from Hogwarts: here every WIT is paired with a Guardian:

Focus Andi (a girl), the first human Guardian: Jessie (the Chosen One) and Ben (Jailen Bates).

Andi's boyfriend Luke (Ryan Cargill): Sean (Andrew Ortega) and Gracie.

More after the break

The Tripods: John Christophers teen dystopia finds a home on British tv

John Christopher's Tripod series (The White Mountains, The City of Gold and Lead, The Pool of Fire) was one of my childhood favorites, so I eagerly watched the 1984-85 British TV series when it appeared on PBS, part of the British invasion that also included Doctor Who, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Monty Python's Flying Circus, The Tomorrow People, and The Prisoner).

The plot was about the same: in a dystopian future, people live under the thrall of the tripods.  On their 16th birthday, teenagers are capped with mind-control devices so they won't rebel.  Will  (John Shackley, left) decides to flee to the White Mountains (the present-day Alps), where he can be free.  He brings two companions, his cousin Henry (Jim Baker, center) and a French boy named Beanpole, or Jean-Paul (Ceri Seele, right).

When they reach the White Mountains, Will and the German boy Fritz (Robin Hayter) are sent out on a reconnaissance mission to a tripod city.

But the differences were depressing.

There is an extraordinary amount of beefcake, but the heterosexism is rapant.

In the book, a homoromantic bond is Will's motive for trying to escape: Jack, a few months older, has been capped and no longer cares for him.  In the tv series, the homoromance is absence.

In the book, Will briefly considers staying at the Chateau Ricordeau in France, where everyone is very nice to him -- he could have a "normal" life instead of always running.  He meets a girl named Eloise, but they are just friends.  In the novel, Will falls in love with Eloise and decides to marry her. There's an entire romantic plotline.

Beanpole is also given a heterosexual romance.

In the book, Will infiltrates one of the tripod cities, along with his German friend Fritz.  They have an intense, passionate, homoromantic friendship.  But in the tv series, they are coworkers and acquaintances, nothing more.

During the 1980s Reagan-Thatcher era of conservative retrenchment, homoromantic subtexts were rare, and the "fade out kiss" emphasized even more aggressively than in the 1970s.  So I should have expected it.  But I didn't.  After a few episodes, I stopped watching.

None of the principal actors has continued in show business.  Today John Shackley and his wife live in Chile, where he works in hotel management.

Ronnie Kroell: How is the Playgirl model and gay movie star related to Ronnie Rise Kroell, the anti-gay political strategist? With lots of d*cks

  

Link to the n*de dudes

The celebrity d*ck site posted some photos of a retro Playgirl spread, bringing memories of the days when you could only see pictures of n*de guys by buying an expensive monthly magazine.  But the gay ones (Mandate, Blueboy, In Touch) were not sold outside of gay neighborhoods, so you were stuck buying Playgirl, and saying it was for your sister.  

Today, when you can see a hundred n*de guys before breakfast, it's hard to remember how special it was.

Is this really a flashback to our mostly-closeted gay past, or a recent homage.  Time to research the model, Ronnie Kroell.  

There's an Instagram for Ronnie Rise Kroell, filled with photos of Ronnie holding hands with his wife and asserting that vaccines cause autism; schools assign gay pornography for homework; and he thanks God every day for bringing us the Orange Goblin.  He's the chair of the election committee for Leo Zacky, running for governor with the slogan "Take Our California Back" (from the gays?).  

I suppose it's possible to pose n*de in Playgirl and be a homophobic, transphobic Orange Goblin fan, but it doesn't seem likely.  Surely he knew that many of Playgirl's readers are gay men.   Maybe Ronnie Rise is Model Ronnie's son, or  a cousin.

.  

The IMDB lists an actor Ronnie Kroell: he was born in Chicago in 1983, attended community college, did some modeling, and became famous by competing on the first season of the reality tv show Make Me a Supermodel in 2008. He was runner-up to Holly Kiser.    

A lot of subsequent articles and photo-spreads mention Ronnie and his boyfriend, actor Taylor Proffitt.  Eight acting roles followed, almost all in gay-themed movies:

Eating Out: Drama Camp (2011): They're performing Taming of the Shrew, with love triangles and closeted guys.  Casey (Daniel Skelton) thinks that his boyfriend is too eager to kiss his co-star Benji (Aaron Milon, right) on stage, so he stands in, and the dude gets acive!  So Casey dumps the boyfriend and rebounds into the arms of fellow camper Beau (Ronnie)

More after the break

"The Seven Dials Mystery": Murder on an English country estate in 1925, with a gay couple, a gay bar, Bluemel's backside, and Frodo's junk

 

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Note: I revised this review based on Episodes 2 and 3.

I've been trying to get into reading mysteries lately, including classic Agatha Christie: Murder on the Orient Express, Death on the Nile, and The Seven Dials Mystery (1929): one of her earlier works, while she's still fumbling around to create an ongoing amateur sleuth.  A tv adaption has dropped on Netflix, starring Corey Mylchreest, who is straight but likes to pretend to be gay.  So maybe he'll be pretending here, too.

Prologue: An elderly man walks through Ronda, an Andalusian village about an hour from Malaga., with beautiful establishing shots.  He enters the empty Plaza de Toros and checks his watch, and finds a note (a picture of a clock).  Suddenly a bull rushes out and gores him to death!

Scene 1: Chimneys, a stately country house in Gloucester, 1925.  A party, with everyone wearing masks and being decadent.  Lady Caterham (Helena Bonham Carter) and her daughter Bundle hate the ghastly masks, but they had no choice; it was the idea of Lord and Lady Coote, to whom they are indebted.  Lord Coote wants to meet George Lomax, so they can form a relationship: "His Foreign Office, my steel factories." 

Lol, I can't hear the name Coote without thinking of Cornelius Coot, who founded the city of Duckburg in Disney comics.

Bundle, apparently the focus character, continues to mingle.  She approaches Ronny (gay actor Nabhaan Rizwan, right) and his Boyfriend (Hughie O'Donnell), who explain that their mate Gerry hasn't gotten up before noon all week, so they're going to prank him with seven alarm clocks hidden in various places in his room.

Next, she talks to Gerry (Corey Mylchreest, top photo, backside on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends).  He gawks with Girl of My Dreams hetero-horniness, and tells Bundle how incredibly gorgeous she is.  Ok, so he won't be pretending to be gay in this one.  She counters that he is incredibly gorgeous as well.  

They gaze at each other for about five minutes, then he asks her to dinner, and implies that he's going to propose.  The gazing continues.  I'm fast-forwarding past it.

Scene 2: Cut to the boyfriends giggling as they hide alarm clocks in various places in Gerry's room.  Then to a card game, with Bundle and Boy of Her Dreams Gerry continuing to gaze at each other while the others chitchat. Jimmy (Edward Bluemel, left, backside on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends) joins them.

 Then raucous Jazz Age dancing and more gazing.  

The boyfriends are not dancing.  They are engrossed with each other.  I think they're a canonical couple.

Bundle drops Gerry to mingle, then goes out into the garden. 

Scene 3: Morning.  Establishing shot of the country house surrounded by marshland.  Ronny and his Boyfriend complain of being hungover, and fill their plates.  The others arrive, equally hungover.

At 11:15, the alarm clocks go off in Gerry's room.  He's not turning them off, so they send the Butler to wake him.  Then Bundle goes.  She finds that Gerry is...dead!

Cut to the doctor (Tristan Gemmill, p*nis on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends), who finds a sleeping draft next to the bed.  Gerry must have taken a draft to help him sleep, and since he was drunk, the combination was lethal.  

"Impossible!" Bundle exclaims.  "He never used sleeping drafts!"  And she knows what he did before bed because....

"Then maybe it was deliberate?" the doctor suggests.

The Boyfriend: "Well, he was stressed at work.  His boss, George Lomax, was always riding him."

"No way!  Impossible!  He was planning to propose to me."

Next up: a bumbling detective (Jake Davies, left), on his first case, ineptly examines the crime scene while making jokes.  Bundle thinks that it was a murder.  Otherwise be lousy story.

"Wait -- there are seven clocks on the mantle.  I thought you guys hid them?"  The Boyfriends glance at each other in shock.

More after the break