"Mortel": Gay-Tease Teenagers Fight Voodoo Gods in Paris

When I searched online for Nemo Schiffman, this photo came up, with the byline "Melanie Thierry et Raphael, fin de partie."

I don't know who those people are, but obviously neither one is Nemo Schiffman, the 19 year old singer/actor who is starring in Mortel (Deadly), a French drama about two teenage boys fighting supernatural evil.

Here's a guy who goes to Gay Pride Parades, records songs without "girl! girl! girl!" lyrics, and is the bff of queer singer Bilal Hassani, "an icon to queer youth."  There must be a gay subtext!  Or maybe even a canonical gay couple!

It's worth a shot.

Episode 1:

Sofiane (Carl Malapa), a student at a run-down high school in a working-class arondissement of Paris, has been a wreck since his older brother Reba (Sami Outalbali) disappeared four months ago.  He even tries to commit suicide.  He starts getting visions of a supernatural being with dreadlocks and fiery glasses (Corentin Fila), who explains that he is Obé, the Voodoo god in charge of transporting murdered souls to the other world.  Reba is trapped in limbo, but Sofiane can release him by murdering someone else.

Release him to the other world, or bring him back to life?  And why is he trapped?  Can't Obé just transport him over?

Sofiane chooses Victor (Nemo Schiffman), the outcast weird kid who's been in and out of mental hospitals.  He lures him onto a roof, and, with Obé egging him on, tries to strangle him.  But Sofiane can't do it.  Maybe Obé would accept his brother's murderer instead?

The god agrees.

Episode 2:

Sofiane receives the power of physically moving people (handy for getting bad guys to punch themselves), and Victor receives the power of reading minds, and they get to sleuthing.  They seek out the help of classmate Luisa (Manon Bresch), whose grandmother is a Voodoo priestess (I didn't know there was a large Afro-Caribbean community in France).  She suggests that it might not be a good idea to trust a being who claims to be a Voodoo god.

Uh-oh.  The Girl.  Will one of the two boys demolish the gay subtext by falling in love?

Victor invites Sofiane home for dinner: middle-class household, conniving little sister, stepfather who makes Pad Thai.

"When we met, it was friendship at first sight," Sofiane explains.

The family is delighted, and implicitly assumes that they are a gay couple.

But I'm concerned about The Girl, so before I commit to watching the whole series, I'd better skip to the last episode to see if the two walk off into the sunset together.


Episode 6:

Bad things went down last night, and Victor is incoherent, drawing monsters in his underwear and screaming at his family.  Sofiane sends them all away and grabs and hugs Victor as he cries.

So far so gay.

They decide to storm the building where Luisa is interviewing the Bad Guy.  Sofiane has to use his powers to fight off several armed guards.  It's difficult and very painful.  Victor hugs him.

Great, but what about the very last scene:

Victor and Sofiane sitting on a bench.  It's all over, so now they can get on with their lives, walking side by side into the future, right?  Victor says that he still has issues to work on, so he's going back to the mental hospital.  Sofiane starts to cry.

Wait -- they're breaking up?  But it's not permanent -- he'll be out in a few months.  And besides, mental hospitals allow visitors. Why....

And now Victor has to say goodbye to Luisa.

Uh-oh, they're hugging.  Luisa tells him how much she cares for him.

In a Platonic, brotherly way, right? 

Right?

Wrong.  Their foreheads press together.  Victor says "I want to show you the life we can have together."

Boo!

That's two hours of my life that I'll never get back.

I should stick to tv series where the description specifically states "This character is gay. He likes men.  He doesn't fall in love with a woman."

Like Being 17, starring Corentin Fila (Obe) as a teenager who is gay and falls in love with his mother's houseguest, who is also gay.

"Huge in France": Watch It for the Beefcake

Huge in France (2019) stars Gad  (Gad Elmileh, a comedian who actually is huge in France).  He comes to America and is shocked to find that no one recognizes him.  He is constantly walking into a room, announcing "C'est Gad!", and expecting people to fawn over him.

He's come to reunite with his long-estranged son Luke  (Jordan Ver Hoeve), who wants to become a professional model, and...

um, sorry, I lost my train of thought.

Maybe just one more photo, to get me through the rest of the review.

23-year old Jordan is from San Diego (I would have guessed Amsterdam).  He's represented by Brand Model and Talent, which offers a large portfolio of his work.  His instagram offers some even more revealing shots.

Ok, this is the last one.

Luke is being managed and trained by his mom's boyfriend, failed actor Jason (Matthew Del Negro).

The beefcake is amazing.  Luke and Jason don't own shirts, and there are ample bulge and bare butt shots.  But beefcake will only take you so far.

Jason veers between annoyingly obsequious and borderline abusive, and Luke is entitled, whining, rude, and generally obnoxious.

Jason:  I can't come up with the money for your pec implants.
Luke: You idiot!  Can't you do anything right?  My modeling career is over because of you!

Gad: I spent $25,000 to arrange for us to have dinner with your modeling idol.
Jason:  Too bad.  You were never there for me when I was a kid, so I'm going to blow you off.

Plus we're expected to believe that Luke has "girl problems": a crush on the school it-girl, who thinks of him as a friend because she's dating fellow model Zene (Austin Fryberger).  Zene, by the way, comes off as incredibly nice, so nice that one wonders why he wants to hang out with Luke at all.  But the three of them go bowling.

Meanwhile, "C'est Gad!" is only funny the first two or three times.  You'd think that Gad would eventually realize that, since he knows nothing about American pop culture, it makes sense that Americans wouldn't recognize him, and stop trying to use his fame to cut in lines or pick up girls.

There are some funny penis references.  Apparently comedians use the phrase "He gets my dick hard" to mean "I like him" but non-comedians misunderstand.

Jerry Seinfeld has a cameo.  For someone who hasn't seen him since the series finale of Seinfeld twenty years ago, the aging is a bit of a shock.

There are some buddy-bonding moments between Gad and his puppy-dog-cute assistant, Brian (Scott Keii Takeda), but no gay characters that I know of, just a few gay references that veer toward the homophobic:

Jason: I need you to pay for this trip with your credit card.
Brian: It's for emergencies only.
Jason: Whip it out!  Whip it out, or I'll whip it out for you!
Brian (Uncomfortable): Are we still talking about credit cards?

Desperate for money, Jason signs up to "deposit" at a sperm bank.  The manager offers to give him an advance on his fee, if he can watch Jason in the act. 

Later:
Girlfriend:  How did you get the money?  Did you suck someone's cock?
Jason: No, I didn't suck anyone's cock.
Girlfriend: Because I couldn't be with someone who would suck someone's cock for a pec implant.


Watch it for the beefcake.

C+

Lutte, Lucha, and Ringen: Graeco-Roman Wrestling for Grown-Ups

The high school and college wrestling we know, with adolescents in very revealing singlets trying to pin each other, is purely American, not practiced anywhere else except in a few Canadian schools.

In Europe, it's all Graeco-Roman wrestling. lutte in France, Ringen in Germany, borroka in Basque.  And practiced primarily by adults, not as a school sport.

I never did see the point in displaying the biceps and bulges of teenagers to an audience of strangers.  It makes more sense to wait until they're adults, and are more able to handle the knowledge that they are objects of admiration.

Besides, grown-up physiques are far superior to thin, lanky, barely post-pubescent puppy-dog muscles.

Teenagers do participate in Lutte on occasion, but it's not a usual thing, and they don't seem to be very good at it.  Here Nazaryan from Bulgaria beat Nifri from France 9 to 0.

Of course, grown-ups don't display their beneath-the-belt parts quite as much, or as aggressively, as the high schoolers, but that's not necessary a bad thing.  No embarrassing "Should I pretend not to notice?" moments.



















Besides, they are open for dating.  Or at least a romantic fantasy about dating them.

















Grownups are less likely to be proficient in English, so if you are going to cruise, a familiarity with French helps.  Or Greek.

10 Reasons Not to Visit St. Tropez

I don't understand St. Tropez. You fly all the way across the ocean to France, and you go to Paris, with the Louvre, the Musee d'Orsay, Notre Dame, and about a dozen bathhouses, right?  Or you tour the chateaux on the Loire.   Or you go out to Brittany to see the Carnac Stones built by Mesolithic tribes.

Why would you want to go to the beach?

Or if you have to go to the beach, I suggest Deauville or Dinan.  Definitely not St. Tropez, the heterosexual capital of Europe.

Here are 10 reasons to stay away.

1. St. Tropez was a sleepy fishing village until the 1950s when it became a favorite of the French New Wave Cinema, which showed heterosexual women taking their clothes off.  The most famous of them was And God Created Woman, 1956, with Brigitte Bardot as a heterosexual woman who takes her clothes off and has sex.

The topless one in this case is her director, Roger Vadim.

2. There was also a kurfuffle over real topless swimmers at the beach, resulting in a comedy, The Troops of St. Tropez (1964), in which uptight police officer Cruchot (Louis de Funes) tries to stamp out female nudity, and ends up foiling robbers. 

It spawned innumerable sequels: The Troops in New York (1965), The Troops Get Married (1968), The Troops on Vacation (1970), The Troops Meet Aliens (1979), and so on, as well as a museum in St. Tropez (which actually covers all of St. Tropez as visualized in the movies).

3. Going topless is now acceptable on St. Tropez beaches.  As are revealing bikinis.  You'd be subjected to whatever is behind the black box a dozen times a minute.


4.  In the 1970s, when I was in high school, there was a series of commercials in which a very thin white woman with a very dark tan applied suntan lotion to herself, while a sultry voice sang "Bain de Soleil for a St. Tropez tan."

Apparently men in the 1970s didn't worry about melanoma.

You can still get Bain de Soleil, and the commercials still show thin white women with very dark tans.

5.   The art museum of St. Tropez is the Musée de l'Annonciade, a former chapel with a rotating series of 20 paintings, and a statue of a naked lady.

6. There's also a butterfly museum, the collection of 35,000 specimens donated by painter Dany Lartigue, in the former home of his mother.  He explains his interest:  "I had fallen in love with a butterfly that was so beautiful I had just been touched by grace.  This feeling of supreme happiness at the sight of a butterfly I have kept all my life."

So he killed as many as he could find and took them home to affix to paper and mount on his wall.

Actually, that sounds sort of interesting.  And Dany definitely sounds gay.

7. For architecture, you have Église Notre-Dame-de-l'Assomption de Saint-Tropez, which is...well, orange and yellow.   I'm not sure what's heterosexual about that, but I'm on a roll.

8. For men, instead of 20 bathhouses and gay bars with darkrooms, you have a gay-friendly beach, the Plague de Pamplonne.

Just gay-friendly?  I can get totally-gay back in Paris.

9. Of course, it's probably the only place in France, other than Cannes, where you can regularly see American celebrities.  Like Patrick Schwarzenegger.

He's heterosexual.

10. And European celebrities, like soccer star Cristiano Ronaldo.

He's heterosexual too.

Your Grandfather's Beefcake: Circus Strongmen

Today every gym is crowded with guys with 60-inch chests and 20-inch biceps, but 130 years ago, they were rare. Poor nutrition, poor hygiene, and a lack of understanding of kinesiology limited the average man's ability to build  muscle.

Those few who developed muscular physiques found themselves in demand in carnivals and circuses as 'strong men," celebrated for their raw strength rather than for their size and symmetry.

But they certainly provided an erotic thrill.  Contemporary accounts often praise their masculine beauty.

The most famous of the strongmen was Apollon (the Greek god Apollo), born as Louis Uni (1862-1928), who joined the circus at the age of 14 and eventually became a headliner, appearing in music halls throughout Europe.  His act involved such feats as bending the iron bars of a cage, lifting 300-pound train wheels over his head, and holding two cars back with chains.

Donald Dinnie (1837-1916) appeared in 11,000 sports competitions, including 16 Scottish Highland Games, where he excelled in wrestling, hurdling, cable-throwing, and hammer-throwing.  He became the equivalent of a millionaire through his exhibitions in the United States and Europe, where he was advertised as "The Strong Man of the Age." In an early advertising tie-in, his likeness was put on bottles of Iron Brew, a soft drink aimed at athletes.

Interestingly, he was 6'1" with a 48 inch chest and 15 inch biceps.

At my peak condition, I had a 51 inch chest and 17 inch biceps, and I was nowhere near "The Strong Man of the Age."  Not even "The Strong Man of the Hollywood Spa.

Edward Aston was a boxer, wrestler, and finally a competitive weight-lifter.  In 1910, he won the World Middle-Weight-Lifting Championship, and in 1911 he was named Britain's Strongest Man with such feats as a clean and jerk of 282 pounds

Not bad for someone who weighted 160 pounds.  Schwarzenegger, who weighed 235 pounds, just managed a 298 pound clean-and-jerk.

He wrote an early weight-training manual, Modern Weight Lifting; and How to Gain Strength.  

Sig Klein (1902-1987) grew up in Cleveland, in the early days of physical culture.  He performed feats of strength on stage and in competitions, and in 1927 was named the world's greatest athlete by Le Culture Physique magazine.  He was featured in Ripley's Believe It or Not 10 times.

Later he moved to New York and Attila Studio, which trained athletes, bodybuilders, stuntmen, and actors, among them Zero Mostel, Montgomery Clift, Ben Gazzara, David Carradine, Joel Grey, and Karl Malden.

I don't know who this guy is, but he has quite a physique, and he has quite substantial beneath-the-belt gifts.

Thomas Inch (1881-1963), "Britain's Strongest Man," is known for lifting the "Thomas Inch Dumbbell."  It was specially designed, weighing 172 pounds (the heaviest dumbbells you can get today weigh about 80 pounds).

See also: Circus World

Andre the Giant: The Biggest Hands in Hollywood

When thinking of beefcake icons, Andre the Giant (1946-1993) does not immediately come to mind, but take another look at him.

Not bad.

Born Andre Roussimoff in 1946, a Frenchman of Bulgarian and Polish ancestry, Andre was afflicted with gigantism due to hypersecretion of the pituitary gland.  He was already 6'0 tall (1.8 meters) at age 12, and reached a full height of 7'4" (2.2 meters) and a weight of 520 lbs (235 kilograms)

Promoters liked to emphasize his massiveness by posing him with exceptionally small men.

Along with his gigantism came acromegaly, a pituitary disorder which results in the long jaw that some people might find unattractive, plus exceptionally large hands and feet.








Here he's having a beer with a friend.  Imagine those hands on your...well, anything.

When he broke into wrestling in 1966, Andre was billed as a novelty, an immovable wall that opponents couldn't tackle, but soon he displayed talent that far exceeded mere bulk.

 As one of the "good guys" in professional wrestling scenarios, he was undefeated for fifteen years, until "villain" Hulk Hogan finally defeated him at Wrestlemania 3 in 1987.

In the 1970s he began an acting career, with roles in BJ and the Bear, The Six Million Dollar Man, and The Greatest American Hero.  He is best known for playing the cuddly sidekick Fezzik in The Princess Bride.

He was especially popular among adolescent boys, who found him an image of their own pubescent struggles with growth spurts and clumsy hands and feet.

Here they are lining up to touch him.

He was a major foodie and a prodigious drinker.  He could drink 16 bottles of wine or 156 beers in one sitting.

Gigantism takes its toll on the circulatory system, the bones, and the joints.  Andre had surgery on his back and knees, and had to wear a brace, but continued to wrestle on occasion -- his last match was in Japan in December 1992.  He died of a heart attack in a Parisian hotel room in January 1993.

With all the photos of Andre with his hands all over men, you're probably wondering if he was gay.

I haven't found any information about any romantic attachments, except for a cryptic story about an estranged daughter.  But since he grabbed at everything life had to offer, I imagine he invited fans of both sexes up to his room.

And no doubt many of them accepted.

A Beefcake Tour of the Louvre

I love the Louvre.  I could go every day.  But everybody else on Earth, literally, wants to visit, too.  It gets 8,000,000 visitors per year,  so if you're not careful, you'll be caught up in the crowds.

1. Go on Wednesday or Friday evening (they're open to 9:45 pm).  Or else Christmas Eve; you'll have the place to yourself.

2. Buy your ticket online, and pick it up at a FNAC store.

3. Don't go through the crystal pyramid; try the Passage Richelieu, off the Rue de Rivoli.

4. Skip the Big Sights.  The Mona Lisa looks like the Mona Lisa, and the Venus de Milo looks like the Venus de Milo.  Target!









People have been going to the Louvre for beefcake since 1793.  In the 1920s, Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald spent afternoons looking at the penises on statues.


Here's a perfect 3-hour beefcake tour.

6:45 pm: Having picked up your ticket and had a quick snack, go through the Passage Richelieu, and wander around in the French sculptures for about 15 minutes.  Look for Julien's Wounded Gladiator and Desjardin's Captive (above).

7:00 pm: Go up two flights to the Second Floor, and the German, Dutch, and  Flemish paintings.  Finding the beefcake here takes a little work, so it's best to do it at the start, when you're not tired yet.  Look for Malouel's round Pieta with the naked Jesus, Carl Van Loo's portrait of Neptune, and Van Dyck's Amor and Psyche.  About 20 minutes.

7:20 pm.  Next stop, the French paintings in the Sully Wing.  You're looking for Oedipus and the Sphinx (Ingres), the semi-nude Echo and Narcissus (Poussin), Berthelemey's Creation of Man, Couder's Fight Between Hercules and Antaeus (top photo), Pierre Subleyras's Charon, with a nude backside (left), and Francois Boucher's Venus Demanding Arms for Aeneas.

More after the break

The Small-Town Beefcake of France

Finding small-town beefcake in France is not as easy as it sounds.  There just aren't a lot of pictures of swimmers, wrestlers, and other beefcake icons posted online.  But by doing a judicious search on lycée, université,  équipe de natation, and nageurs, I've managed to come up with some high school and college swimmers.


1. The  Lycée Camille Jullian is in Bordeaux is one of the few schools in France to offer Slovak instruction.

2. The Lycée Carnot in Paris is the alma mater of former French president Jacques Chirac and postmodern philosopher Gilles Deleuze.

3. Swimmers from the Stade Français Olympique, a swim club in Courbevoie, near Paris.

I like the peace-sign swim trunks.

4.The Lycée Monge is a technical school in Chambéry in southeastern France, the home of philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

5. I don't know who these swimmers are, but they're from Bagnères-de-Bigorre, a commune in the Pyrenees Mountains, very close to the Spanish border.

More after the break.