Adam Basil: Bodybuilder, gay pirate, gay-subtext creature, gay-icon zombie. Are you getting the idea? With his mushroom, n*de Spartacus and Sherlock Holmes

   

Link to the n*de dudes

In the original stories, Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes shows no interest in women and a lot of interest in his "roommate," Dr. Watson.  But most film and tv versions aggressively heterosexualize the guys, sometimes with queerbaiting first.  So I had no faith in the new Amazon Prime series Young Sherlock Holmes. 

With good reason: he meets the Girl of His Dreams almost instantly.  Plus the reviews say that he's nothing like the traditional Sherlock; he's a gormless, idiotic, girl-chasing rapscallion.

The rapscallion's rear is on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends.

But there was something of definite interest in the first scene (top photo): Mycroft Holmes goes to Newgate Prison to spring his wastrel brother (set up for pickpocketing, although he always returned the wallets after swiping them), and finds him at fisticuffs with the shirtless muscleman Barney (Adam Basil, top photo).  

Pecs, abs, biceps...dude, you're breath-taking.  Why have I never seen you in anything before?

Turns out that I've seen him in a lot of things, but he's playing characters named The Beast, The Butcher, and The Demon, under heavy stage makeup, so you can't really see his face.  Or physique.

Pity.

I didn't find a lot of biographical information, just what is listed on the IMDB: Adam grew up in the east of England, studied acting, and performed traditional British theater.  His "unusually high levels of athleticism" (meaning his muscles?) led him to creature work.

After a few small roles, Adam became Disney-famous for the live action version of Beauty and the Beast (2017) -- as the Beast, before the spell is broken and he turns into Dan Stevens.

Disney today, Marvel tomorrow: in 2021, he starred in Venom 2: Let There Be Carnage as the sarcastic, gay-coded symbiote who shares the body of journalist Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy). Shares the body?  Tell me more.

But it was his role as The Bloater in The Last of Us (2023) that sealed Adam's popularity with gay fans.  

Wait -- The Last of Us is about a zombie Apocalypse caused by a mutated wheat fungus.   The Bloater is completely covered with fungal pustules, which act like iron plates, making him impervious to bullets -- and giving him super-strength, so he rips people's heads off their bodies, like the zombie Samson in 28 Years Later.  

They also make him so disgusting that I had to avert my eyes whenever he appeared.  How does a being like that gain gay fans?

But in interviews in Out and The Pink News, Adam states that the Bloater has become a s*x symbol in the gay community.  He gets DMs that call him Big Daddy Mushroom.

Are you sure that they mean the Bloater, and not your mushroom....

Adam's mushroom is on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends

More after the break

"Zip and Zap and the Captain's Island": Peter Pan, a crush on Dad, a gorilla Sherlock Holmes, and the boys all bulked up

The Spanish bad boys Zipi y Zape, sort of Dennis the Menace squared,  first appeared in a comic strip in Pulgarcito magazine in 1947.

They have since spun off into many more comics, three movies, a television series, a video game, and tons of merchandising.  But Zip and Zap and the Captain's Island (2016) is, as far as I know, their first appearance outside el mundo español.

Zip (Teo Planell, top photo and left) and Zap (Toni Gómez, right) are lanky androgynous teenagers who remind me of the Sprouse twins on The Suite Life of Zack and Cody, except that they're constantly insulting and yelling at their parents: stick-in-the-mud novelist Pantuflo (Jorge Bosch) and his wife (who is so mousy and withdrawn that she doesn't get a name in the cast list).

At Christmastime, they visit an isolated island so Dad can meet with a publisher.  They get lost, and end up at a children's home run by the enigmatic Miss Pam (Elena Anaya), a sinister butler, and a cackling, demented nun.

The next day, Miss Pam tells Zip and Zap that, due to all their mischief, their parents have abandoned them. They will live at the children's home forever.  

Oh, and won't you meet two other new residents, the too-cool-for-school Macky (Máximo Pastor, recent photo left) and super-inquisitive flibbertigibit Flecky (Iria Castellano).

Zip immediately starts a gay-subtext buddy-bond with Macky, while Zap gets a goofy hetero-crush on Flecky.

Did you figure it out?  Yep -- Miss Pam has lured the family to the island. She is using a retro Frankenstein machine to regress "troubled parents" to their 11-year old selves, before they lost their primal joie de vivre.  She's Peter Pan, making her own crew of lost boy-adults who shouldn't have grown up.

The children's home is occupied mostly by regressed parents, except they're not really regressed.  The parents are locked in a chamber while their young selves...but not really.  At the end of the movie, all of the regressed parents leave the island to rejoin their parents.

Wait -- Zap gets a crush on his own mother?  Why does that bother me, when Zip crushing on his own father seems fine?

But we're not done.  Miss Pam is also collecting people who look or act like literary characters...then...turning them into other things. So she turns a detective who acts like Sherlock Holmes into a gorilla.

Why not turn him into Sherlock Holmes?

A girl who looks like Pippi Longstocking has an octopus-submarine like Captain Nemo's Nautilus

The children are being controlled by a magic snow globe kept in an aquarium.

Did I mention that it's Christmastime, for no apparent reason?

I think you're just supposed to give your brain a rest, let the bizarre imagery flow over you, and wait for the father-son and mother-son couples to hug. 

By the way, since the movie came out, Toni Gomez has lost his androgynous long hair and hunked up a bit.  His photos online mostly show him modeling and kissing girls.

Wait -- why is it the Captain's Island?  There is no captain.....

See also: Noah Matthews Matofsky: Head Lost Boy, model, disability advocate, Oscar Wilde fan, boyfriend. With bonus n*de Matthews and Captain Hook's hook

"The Claus Family" A Pretty Princess Doll for Tommy, and a Shirtless GI Joe for Jules

Philip Jose Farmer: Gay Sci-Fi with Muscles

When I was in college, you couldn't walk into Adam's Bookstore at the Augustana Student Union or Readmore Book World downtown without seeing a dozen sci-fi novels by Philip Jose Farmer (1918-2009) on display.  Bright, colorful paperbacks with amazingly muscular hunks on the covers, sometimes nude, and stories inside that sounded fascinating.

Sometimes they were.

There were three main types:

1. The World of Tiers: The Maker of Universes (1965), A Private Cosmos (1968), etc.  A man from our world is trapped on a multi-plane world occupied by various human, alien, and mythical beings.   He kills lots of bad guys and falls in love with a girl.  Yawn.

2. The Riverworld series: To Your Scattered Bodies Go (1971), The Fabulous Riverboat (1972), etc. Every person who has ever existed wakes up on the banks of an endless river.  Richard Burton, Alice Liddel (the inspiration for Alice in Wonderland), Mark Twain, a Neanderthal named Kazz, and other colorful characters search for answers.

The first book is great, but it takes three more before anyone solves the mystery, and then it's a complete let-down: "So this was what all the fuss was about?"

Still, it was nice to imagine every person who has ever lived standing around naked, including Genghis Khan, William Shakespeare, and my high school history teacher,

3. I was most interested in the postmodern, self-referential mash-ups of fictional heroes: Tarzan meets Doc Savage (Lord of the Trees and the Mad Goblin, 1970), and Sherlock Holmes (The Adventures of the Peerless Peer, 1974).  

The Jules Verne hero Phineas Fogg meets aliens (The Other Log of Phileas Fogg, 1973).  

Dorothy's son returns to Oz (A Barnstormer in Oz, 1982).

One of the first sci-fi writers to incorporate sexual activity into his stories, Farmer went wild, with graphic descriptions of multiple sexual acts.  But no gay characters that I can recall, though in A Feast Unknown (1969), Tarzan and Doc Savage find that they can only get aroused through violence, so they enter into a violent homoerotic relationship of sorts.  It was originally published as porn.

Also, in Flesh (1960), the good guy mass-murders a tribe of gay-stereotype Elves.

Mikel Murfi: Intellectual, Avant-Garde Bulge

Speaking of Irish men that I want to see a lot more of:

I saw the movie The Last September (1999) because Elizabeth Bowen, who wrote the 1929 novel, often included gay-coded characters.  So I figured there would be gay subtexts.

It was set during the Irish War of Independence in 1920, when a wealthy Anglo-Irish family go through romantic intrigues against the backdrop of the political crisis. I didn't see much gay subtext.

But there's a three-scene minor character, Sergeant Wilson, who terrorizes and humiliates the Irish villagers.

They get revenge by kidnapping him, stripping him naked, and sexually assaulting him (off camera).  But there's a frontal nude shot.

You have to freeze frame to see it, but his beneath-the-belt gift is astounding. Easily Mortadella+.  Definitely deserving a place on my Sausage List.

Sergeant Wilson was played by Mikel Murfi (great name!).  The Internet Movie Database lists some screen appearances, mostly in Irish movies that I haven't seen: After Midnight (1990),  Guiltrip (1995), The Butcher Boy (1997).  

In 2014 he starred in Edwart and Arlette, a gender-bending take on the Sherlock Holmes story "The Adventure of the Cardboard Box."

Most of his work has been on stage, a lot of avant-garde theater, with some gay subtext potential:

The Man in Woman's Shoes: about a man walking to town to deliver a pair of shoes in rural Ireland in 1978.

Sick Dying Dead Buried Out: the relationship between two clowns who are dying.

Ballyturk: Two men (Mikel Murfi, Cilian Murphy) trapped in a room, don't know how they got there or how to get out..

Murfi has also produced and directed a lot of avant garde plays through his theater company, Barabbas.  He's particularly interested in works that invoke the spirit of playwright Samuel Beckett.

And, apparently, have gay subtext potential.

The Country Girls: two girls from the west of Ireland in the 1950s have a relationship.

The Last Days of Ollie Deasey: a man searches through Ireland for his long-lost father.

Penelope: four men at the bottom of a swimming pool wait to die.

Knowing that he's done so much intellectual creative work, it's rather embarrassing to be thinking about something so mundane as Murfi's package.

But it was a magnificent sight.

Sherlock Holmes, Gay Icon

As a kid I liked science fiction, fantasy, and jungle adventures, but not detective fiction, except for Michel (because he was cute, and in French), The Hardy Boys (because they were in love), and Sherlock Holmes: "The Red-Headed League", "The Five Orange Pips," "The Musgrave Ritual," and many other stories by Arthur Conan Doyle.

They were short enough to read quickly, exciting but not scary, mysterious but always realistic (no ghosts or monsters).  Sherlock Holmes' power of logical deduction was appealing to a boy just starting to tease out the patterns, conventions, and constraints of adult life.

And he was gay.

The original stories, published between 1881 and 1927, give Holmes a rather sexist disapproval of women's "weakness," and a dislike of heterosexual romance: "he never spoke of the softer passions, except for a gibe and a sneer."  He admires Irene Adler, the heroine of "A Scandal in Bohemia," but has no romantic interest in her.  However, he quite enjoys the company of men, especially his roommate, assistant, and life partner, Dr. Watson.




Watson did express heterosexual interest; in The Sign of Four (1890), he falls in love and marries.  But marriage always puts a damper on adventure, so soon Mrs. Watson was written out with a brief reference to her death, and Holmes and Watson were together again.

Many movie versions of Holmes appeared during my childhood and adolescence:
The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970)
The Hound of the Baskervilles (1972)
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes' Smarter Brother (1975)
Sherlock Holmes in New York (1976)
The Seven Percent Solution (1976)
Murder by Decree (1979)

But none offered any beefcake -- Sherlock started displaying a bare chest only in the 2000s.

And only The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970) openly alluded to the homoromantic relationship between Holmes and Watson, and then only as a joke.  Some kept the buddy-bonding, but most presented Holmes as avidly heterosexual, leering at women, dancing with them, falling in love with Irene Adler.

Another Hollywood attempt to erase the existence of gay people from the world.

Not to worry -- Jeremy Brett played him as rather more gay-vague in the late 1980s and 1990s.