Eight Biceps and Bulges of South Carolina

Link to the n*de photos

 I have relatives in South Carolina, and I had a job interview there, so I've visited a number of times, most recently in October 2022.  Here are some photos of biceps and bulges that I may or may not have seen in real life.

The nude photos are all from public websites or posted with permission of the subject.

1.Wrestlers from Beaumont.

2. Spiderman, ready for trick-or-treating in Charleston's French Quarter

3. Cadets at The Citadel.

Old City Market, Charleston

An interesting house in Walterboro

4. Yes, they have ballet in South Carolina.

More after the break

The Secrets of Sulphur Springs: three boys with girlfriends, time travel, and future hunkoids. Just another day on the Disney Channel

 

When The Secrets of Sulphur Springs premiered on the Disney Channel, I did a key word search on the title and "gay" yields: "this series is about two married gay men who get a divorce so they can marry other men."  Unlikely for a Disney Channel teen com, but maybe there are some gay subtexts.

No, it's a ghost story-time travel mystery written by people who can't spell "sulfur."

Ben (Josh Braaten, top photo) and his children, Griffin (Preston Oliver),  Wyatt (Landon Gordon, left),and some girls, move from the Big City to the tourist trap...er, resort of Sulphur Springs, Lousiana, where Ben  grew up. They are going to re-open the creepy, haunted Tarant Inn.

Thirty years ago, young Ben and a girl named Savannah sneaked into the Tarant Inn.  He heard an odd noise and went off to investigate, and when he returned, she was gone!  He is trying to work through the trauma and guilt, and the suspicions of the townsfolk, who think that he...well, this is the Disney Channel, so let's just say "knows something about the disappearance."    So he decided to come back?

This is a teen series, so eldest son Griffin is the focus character.  He immediately meets the Girl of His Dreams, who happens to be mystery obsessed and anxious to help investigate the mystery.  They discover a secret room at the inn that leads to the distant-past year of 1990.  There they meet Savannah, alive and well, but constantly being pestered/hit on by the young Ben.  

It's a soap opera all around, back then: Young Ben (Jake Melrose, left) has an abusive father (Jim Gleason) and a stalker, the Mean Girl Jess, who is constantly trying to sabotage his budding romance with Savannah so she can seduce him.  These are 13-14 year olds on the Disney Channel, so no s*x acts will actually occur, but all the tropes are there.

Meanwhile Griffin's sibs, paranormal enthusiasts, try to contact the ghost of Savannah to find out how she...um...disappeared.

More after the break

"Sinners": Twin brothers fight vampires and klansmen in the Mississippi Delta. With Yao wang and Jordan junk

 

Link to the n*de dudes

For movie night this weekend, we actually went to a movie in a theater, for a change: Sinners (2025), about twin brothers fighting vampires in the Mississippi Delta in 1932.

The first hour is quite naturalistic: Smoke and Stack (Michael B. Jordan in a dual role) return to the Deep Delta from their gangster career in Chicago with a lot of money and Irish booze, buy the old abandoned mill from a klansman who says he's not a klansman, and organize a juke party. We get the sense of the vast emptiness of the cotton fields, and the terror of everyday life for African-Americans in the Jim Crow South.  

You had to be very careful; glance at or speak to a white woman, accidentally bump into a white man, and you would be attacked.  Gay people live with a similar fear -- hold hands with your boyfriend or display a Pride flag, and you could get attacked or killed.  But at least heteronormativity results in most gay people being assumed straight, so they can keep hidden in the riskiest situations.  Most African-Americans could not.

The brothers pick up Preacher Boy (Miles Caton), who is torn between the church and the guitar (which his Preacher father calls Satanic).  After he agrees to perform tonight, they split up.  

Stack and Preacher Boy go to town, where they recurit another performer, the elderly, alcoholic Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo).

They hire shopkeeper Bo Chow (Yao) to make up signs and fry the catfish.

Left: Malaysian actor Yao received a MFA from Yale University in 2023.  He played a gay character in #LookatMe (2022).

They pull Cornbread (Omar Miller) from the cotton fields to act as bouncer.

The brothers are so intimate that I was sure that one or both would be gay, but heteronormativity is running rampant.  Both of them, and Preacher Boy, get girlfriends, whom they have s*x with, one after the other.

1. Stack with his ex-girlfriend Mary, who is an octaroon (one-eighth black), so Jim Crow laws still apply to her.

2. Smoke with his estranged wife Annie (Wummi Musaku).  She's rather old , so I thought she was his mother until they started doing things.  

She's also quite butch, so I figured that the actress must be a lesbian. LezWatch says that she is cisgender, unspecified s*xual identity, but she has played at least three queer characters.

3. Preacher Boy with Pearline, a married singer.  Fortunately, her husband isn't around. 

It keeps going like that.  Bo Chow has a wife (we learn their favorite s*xual activity).  Cornbread has a pregnant wife.  Delroy Slim isn't married, but discusses the hetero exploits of his youth.

Left: Michael A. Newcomer, who plays a bartender in a white joint, is gay in real life.  

Vampires after the break

Jason Bradley Jacobs: From a cowboy cruising in the shower to a Kentucky cartoon Adonis to...well, isn't that enough?

Link to the n*de photos

Insurance companies go to great lengths to produce clever commercials, but they rarely venture into the realm of beefcake.  That's why the Eastwood Insurance cowboy was so memorable.

In California in the 1990s, a series of at least 30 tv commercials showed the Cowboy riding up to a befuddled car owner, almost always a man, who was paying too much for car insurance, and "saving the day" with Eastwood's low, low prices.

The best commercials had him in the shower, n*de except for his white cowboy hat, cruising...um, I mean talking about insurance to another guy, who seems more interested in his physique than his insurance policies.

Nudity in unexpected places is always stunning.

Besides, he had quite a smile.


The Cowboy was played by Jason Bradley Jacobs, who has only two acting credits on the IMDB:

A record company executive in Selena, 1997, about the Tejana singer who topped the Latin music charts and sang at the Astrodome.

Maurice Charpentier in The Feast of All Saints, 2001, based on the Anne Rice novel about "the Free People of Colour" in 19th century New Orleans, "a dazzling yet damned class caught between the world of white privilege and black oppression."  Anne Rice -- shouldn't there be vampires?

It stars many recognizable African-American celebrities, including Robert Ri'chard, Ozzie Davis, Ruby Dee, James Earl Jones, Eartha Kitt, Ben Vereen, and Forest Whitaker. 

Jason provided the voice and artists' model for a character in a comic book and animated series, Plowboy in the Cornmeal Universe, created by D.W. Newman.  It is set in the Appalachia of 1978, the era of Jimmy Carter, Hee-Haw, and The Dukes of Hazzard, and emphasizes the "raw physicality and blatant s*xuality."

More after the break

True Blood: Vampires come out of the closet amid a Southern Gothic soap opera, with some n*de vampires

  

Link to the n*de photos

Last night we latched onto True Blood, which ran from 2008 to 2014 on HBO.

This is the stereotypic South of Eudora Welty and Mama's Family, where people named Hoyt Fortenberry shop at the Piggly-Wiggly and drink sweet tea on the veranda, where everyone is related to everybody else's great-grand daddy once removed, and where the War means the Civil War...um, I mean the War of Yankee Aggression.   

It starts in media res, two years after vampires have "come out of the coffin," har har -- yep, the connection with LGBT people is just that heavy-handed -- due to the invention of artificial blood, brand name True Blood, which some humans have developed a taste for.  Snooty fratboy Brett (Josh Kelly, top photo), looking for a store that sells it, learns too late that every long-haired, multi-ringed Goth isn't a vampire; and sometimes chubby rednecks are.

We switch to the problems of Tara, who gets fired from or quits every job because she doesn't abide idiots and her best friend Sookie, who can read minds.  Sookie and soon Tara work at Merlotte's Bar, where the owner, Sam Merlotte (Sam Trammell), is in love with her.  He won't come out with it, but of course Sookie can read his mind.

The only gay character so far is the bar's swishy cook, Lafayette (Nelsan Ellis), a stereotyped flamboyant, promiscuous queen who  claims he's done most of the men in town, and likes to flirt with racist, homophobic rednecks to get them all scared. He doesn't get a boyfriend until late in the series.

That same evening, the bar's other waitress, Maudette, hooks up with Sookie's brother, Jason (Ryan Kwanten).  She's a fangbanger, a human who likes sex with vampires, because they get rough.  She offers to show him the video, which turns him on so much that he wants to do rough sex, including strangling her...a little too enthusiastically.  And she's taping the encounter!

Ryan Kwanten shows his stuff on  RG Beefcake and Boyfriends

More after the break

The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas

The last place you'd expect to find gay content is in a movie about a brothel for heterosexuals, with no gay characters.  But The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas is loaded down with gay symbolism.

The Chicken Ranch is a nice, cozy, down-home whorehouse in rural Texas, run by the heart-of-gold Miss Mona, and ignored by sheriff and occasional customer Ed Earl.  When a crusading tv reporter named Melvin P. Thorpe finds out that "There's a Whorehouse in Texas!" and starts a Moral Majority protest, Miss Mona isn't concerned; she's handled right-wing bigots before.  Besides, she's busy preparing for the annual visit by the winners of the big college football game (who sing "The Aggie Song" with their shirts off).

Turns out that Miss Mona was short-sighted; the tv crusade galvanizes the religious bigots, many of whom are customers "on the downlow."  Eventually the Governor himself, though a master of "the Side Step," calls to announce that the brothel must be shut down.  Defeated, Miss Mona and the girls get on "The Bus from Amarillo" and scatter to new lives.

It's a bit racy for high school and college drama departments, but there have been some productions, In March 2013, the Gay Men's Chorus of Washington, DC, sponsored an all-male version.

When the original play opened on Broadway in 1978, Anita Bryant's "Save Our Children" campaign was in the air, and fundamentalists were increasingly abandoning their old bogies of feminism, paganism, and evolution to scream "There are Gays in Our Town!"  Audiences could hardly fail to make the connection.

The movie adaptation arrived in July 1982, at the height of Jerry Falwell's anti-gay Moral Majority crusade, and gay director Colin Higgins made the symbolism even more obvious, with an ongoing romance between Miss Mona (Dolly Parton) and Ed Earl (Burt Reynolds) that must be hidden ("Sneakin' Around").

Plus lots of wink-wink casting: perennially gay-coded Dom Deluise as Melvin P. Thorpe, and open-secret Jim Nabors as sympathetic Deputy Fred.

And an increase in the beefcake.  Burt Reynolds, who previously posed naked in Cosmo, hangs out in a towel, Dom Deluise hangs out in his underwear, and the Texas Aggies sing in the locker room fully nude (lots of rear shots, and even a few frontals if you freeze frame).

See also: 10 Stage Musicals with Unexpected Beefcake.

Beefcake Boys in "The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas"

Mitch Vogel: The Bulge and Biceps of Bonanza

We needed as many freckle-faced redheaded boys as possible during the 1970s: Ron Howard on Happy Days, Johnny Whitaker on Sigmund and the Sea Monsters, and Mitch Vogel on Bonanza (1970-73).

He played Jamie, a teenager adopted by the Cartrights to give Ben someone to offer fatherly advice to (and, apparently, to give Michael Landon some competition in the bulge department).




But before he blossomed into teenage biceps and bulges, Mitch was a popular child star, with roles in Adam-12, Ironside, The Young Rebels, and The Immortal.  

He was best known for The Reivers (1969), set in turn of the century Mississippi, as an 11-year old who tags along with his free-spirit relative (Steve McQueen) on a trip to a brothel in Memphis, sees naked ladies, and "comes of age" (although he doesn't actually have sex with anyone).

But the teenage Mitch did a lot of buddy-bonding, too.

In Two Boys (1970), Jud (Mitch) and his boyfriend Billy (Mark Kearney) "come of age" in a small Midwestern town.

In The Boy from Dead Man's Bayou (1971), Jeannot (Mitch) and Claude (Michael Lookinland from The Brady Bunch) buddy-bond as they wrest a church bell from the jaws of a giant alligator.

His characters got girls on Little House on the Prairie  (1975) and State Fair (1976), and were backwoods outsiders who didn't get anyone on Here Come the Brides and Saturday morning's The Mighty Isis (1975) and Ark II (1976).

His last credit movie role, Texas Detour (1978), is a Dukes of Hazard clone about three hippies stuck in a hayseed town.  Except it's a drama.

Today Mitch lives in Southern California, where he is active in directing, music, and church groups.

But gay Boomers will always remember him for the bulge and biceps of Bonanza.

Lil' Abner: Backwoods Adonis with No Interest in Women

During the 1930s and 1940s, gay kids could pick up any daily and Sunday comic strip to see a muscular, usually shirtless teenager who was not interested in girls, plus a committed same-sex couple.

Al Capp's L'il Abner, started in 1934, chronicled the adventures of 19-year old muscleman Abner Yokum, his elderly parents, and the colorful residents of Dogpatch, U.S.A.  It was part of the contemporary hillbilly fad.

Books, movies, and radio programs were presenting the hills (Ozarks or Appalachians) as an untouched wilderness, an Eden inhabited by rustic Adonises whose muscles and rude manners provided a remedy for the ultra-sophistication of Cary Grant and Clark Gable.

The backwoods Adonis became a common image, extending through Jethro of The Beverly Hillbillies to The Dukes of Hazzard.

The prelapsarian state had one drawback, at least for heterosexual readers: no place for heterosexual romance.  So uninterested were the men of Dogpatch that Al Capp instituted a Sadie Hawkins Day, an annual festival in which man-hungry spinsters chased "skeered" bachelors, and whoever got "ketched" had to marry.

But there was plenty of room for same-sex romance, notably the man-mountain Hairless Joe and his diminuitive Indian companion, Lonesome Polecat, who live together, embark on various money-making schemes together, and even count themselves as a "married couple" on their census form.  

When they think they are going to die, they hold each other: "I want to die in your arms."They are actually frozen, so two weeks of strips featured two men locked in an embrace, and maybe kissing.

In 1952, changing sociocultural mores -- such as the increasing awareness that a man who is not interested in women may be interested in men -- prompted Al Capp to marry off Abner.  Soon he became a father.

Increasingly conservative and unfunny as time progressed, the strip pushed forward in a dwindling number of newspapers until 1977.

There were two movie versions of the strip.  Everyone remembers the 1959 version, with Peter Palmer as Lil' Abner, and a plot about a "yokumberry tonic" that turns ordinary men into bodybuilders but has the side effect of making them uninterested in women.

See also: Li'l Abner, the Musical; and I Go Pogo: The Gay Possum of Okefenokee Swamp

The Bloated White Caterpillar of "A Confederacy of Dunces"

When I was an undergraduate at Augustana College, I got bored to death with Southern Gothic. It was all any English major ever talked about, except for Ulysses:  I had my fill of The Sound and the Fury, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Light in August, The Grass Harp, A Streetcar Named Desire, the disgusting stories of Flannery O'Connor and Eudora Welty...

So when everybody began praising A Confederacy of Dunces, around the fall of 1980, my junior year in college, I wasn't interested.

But they kept up.  Spectacular!  A masterpiece!  A classic!  The greatest novel ever (except for Ulysses).

Plus, like all "great novels," it had an interesting origin story.  John Kennedy Toole (1937-1969), a gigantic mass of flab, an aspiring writer, a literary wit, a permanent student who never finished his Ph.D. (although he was much smarter than his professors), an avid heterosexual stymied by constant "just friends' speeches from girls  (maybe cut back on the cake?), an anti-Catholic teaching at a Catholic college, a prude who railed against the vulgarity of the 1960s co-eds who filled his classes, finally couldn't take it anymore, and committed suicide at the age of 31.

While cleaning out his things, his mother found a carbon copy of a novel called A Confederacy of Dunces (the original had been rejected by some publishers and finally destroyed).  She contacted writer Walker Percy, who at first refused to read it -- who needed another Truman Capote, especially a heterosexual one?  But eventually he gave in, loved it, and after 11 years managed to get it into print.  The rest was history:  Stupendous!  Colossal!  A masterpiece!

Prey to peer pressure, I bought a copy, read a few pages, and threw it out, not so much offended as disgusted, like when you touch a door handle and there's something gross and sticky on it.  40 years later, I don't remember what the problem was.  I remember that it featured a bulbous jerk who hated everybody and everything except Boethius, but why the visceral disgust?  Why does it come back every time I hear about Confederacy.

So I found a preview on Amazon and read the first few pages.

Page 1: In a godforsaken small town in the South, no doubt somewhere near Yoknapatawpaw County,  the bulbous Ignatius waits for his mother to finish shopping and criticizes the fashion choices of passersby (Ignatius is O'Toole. I get it).  He's wearing a hunting cap and boots too small for his bulbous feet.  He's so fat that movement is difficult.


Page 2: The town turns out to be New Orleans (not that small).  More about how fat he is:  when he tries to move, "in his lumbering elephantine fashion," he sends "waves of flesh rippling."  Even his boots are swollen to bursting from his swollen fat feet. (This guy isn't just fat, he's a disgusting bloated white caterpillar with a nearly human face..  That's what caused the disgust!  I feel my gorge rising even now!).

Plowing on:  the bloated white caterpillar is upset because his favorite game at the arcade is missing, which we hear about for several paragraphs.  (Boring, but it beats hearing how fat he is again).

 Page 3: More about the arcade game.  A police officer, seeing his bag of sheet music and spare string for his lute, saunters up and asks him for an ID.  Ignatious objects, complaining that the city is full of criminals, like sodomites and lesbians.  Why not target them instead?  (And he's blathering homophobe!  Help!)

Page 4: Meanwhile, Mom is buying macaroons and cakes.  More about how fat her son is. She talks to a friend, who complains about her feet (More about feet!  Was Mr. Toole a bit of a foot fetishist?).  They discuss the fact that Ignatius isn't married, and how he gets nasty when she doesn't provide enough cake (he's nightmarishly fat -- I get it).

Page 5: Back on the street, people are gathering around in defense of Ignatius, and the cop threatens to arrest them, particularly when they imply that he might be a "comuniss." Fortunately, Mom comes to the rescue, macaroons and wine cake in hand (I'm never eating a piece of cake again.  I may never eat again, period).

According to wikipedia, I'm not missing much plot.  Confederacy seems to be mostly episodic, minor adventures with various colorful characters, in fact, just about everyone from his opening-cop diatribe, including a sodomite, lesbians, strippers, onanists, and so on.   Meanwhile, Ignatius discusses how vulgar modern society is, and how much he likes Boethius.  The only major events:  Mom decides to get married, and to commit Ignatius to a mental hospital (good!)

There's a statue of Ignatius on Canal Street in New Orleans, to scare away the tourists. He looks rather svelte for a bloated white caterpillar.

There have been numerous attempts to film the book, but most actors who have agreed to play Ignatius died before they could sign a contract: John Belusi, John Candy, Chris Farley, Divine.  John Goodman is still alive, but getting a little old to play the 20-ish misanthrope. Will Farrell and Zack Galifianakis have also agreed to star in versions that never got made (good!)

Oddly, I have no problems with chubs or even superchubs in real life.  I find them rather attractive.  But the bloated white caterpillar was disgusting. And homophobic.

David Macklin: The Boy with Something Extra

I don't remember much from 1965, when we were living in Racine, Wisconsin, but I remember my dismal, depressing 5th birthday on November 19th.  My mother and I were both sick.

I got a Tell-the-Time Clock with a smiley face and gloves on its hands, but I was too sick to play with it.  There wasn't any cake.  I sat on the couch, sipping 7-Up and watching tv.  First The Flintstones, and then Tammy, with a sugary mawdlin song that's still etched into my brain.

I hear the cottonwoods whisperin' above.
Tammy--Tammy-Tammy's in love.

It was a hayseed sitcom (1965-66) about a bayou gal who becomes the secretary for a powerful industrialist and sets her sights on his fey son.

An earlier movie series (1957, 1961, 1963) had the bayou gal (Debbie Reynolds, Sandra Dee) bringing joie de vivre to effete city folk, and meanwhile falling in love with a different rich boy in each installment (Leslie Nielsen, John Gavin, Peter Fonda).  The theme song peaked at #1 on the pop charts in 1957.

My parents liked it so much that they named my sister "Tammy."

I hated the song (maybe because my father sang it at random moments for the next twenty years), but I liked the tv show, because Tammy was courting a boy (David Macklin) who didn't really like girls.  He was just playing along.

And he obviously had something extra beneath the belt.


David Macklin popped up again and again during my childhood.  A teen surfer on Gidget (1966).  A fratboy on The Munsters (1966).  A hippie on Ironside (1968). An abused rich kid on Cannon (1973). A boy who hosts his visiting aunt without realizing that she's dead on The Twilight Zone (1960, but I saw it around 1974).

His characters never liked girls, unless they were forced to, and he had a thin, haughty face and haunted eyes that made him look like he knew about the Tripods.

You never saw David nude, or even shirtless, but if you looked closely, you could tell that he belonged to the Burt Ward, Frank Gorshin, and Ken Clark club of beneath-the-belt hugeness.





He had only a few significant movie roles.  In The Young Animals (1968), new kid in town Tony (Tom Nardino, who would go on to star in the gay-themed Siege) tries to make peace between warring gangs, especially the white gang led by Bruce (David).  The Mexican was led by Paco (Zooey Hall, who would go on to star in the gay-themed Fortune and Men's Eyes with Sal Mineo).  I haven't seen it, but apparently there's some substantial gay subtexts.

Welcome to Arrow Beach (1974) is about a brother and sister who eat people.  David plays a hospital orderly who stumbles onto their nefarious plot.

David disappeared from the screen in the 1980s.  Today he lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where he makes ceramics, collects Sherlock Holmes memorability (especially involving Basil Rathbone), and teaches acting.  He also runs a yahoo group for movie fans, where he often publicizes issues of gay and lesbian interest.

Maybe he's gay.  His characters were gay enough for a 5 year old.

Spring 1983: Reading Faulkner: Redneck Muscle and Boys in Drag

Nothing brings back my memories of college literature classes more than William Faulkner.  Other authors I can return to with respect, even with pleasure, but Faulkner is mostly incomprehensible, and the parts I understand fill me with disgust.

In the spring of 1983, I took a horrible class in turgid, heterosexist "classics."  First Ulysses (by James Joyce).  Then "The Waste Land," by T.S. Eliot.  Then...shudder, gasp... The Sound and the Fury (1929), by William Faulkner.

"Marvelous!" the Professor chirped. "Stupendous!  A masterpiece!  The greatest novel ever written!"

I doubt he has ever read it.  I doubt anyone has.  It is literally impossible to understand even a sentence.  Check out the first two sentences:

Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting.  They were coming toward where the flag was and I went along the fence.

Benjy the Idiot (Faulkner's term) is standing on the other side of a fence from a golf course, watching golfers hitting balls toward the hole, which is marked with a flag.  I looked it up -- no way anyone could ever figure it out from the cryptic text, even if they knew about golf, which I didn't. 

As I understand it from extensive research, The Sound and the Fury is about three brothers in the dying, decrepit, depressed Compson family of Mississipi: Benjy, Quentin, and Jason.  I imagine they look like this.

Part 1: Narrated by Benjy, an "idiot" who has no conception of time, and jumps back and forth at random between events that he didn't understand in the first place.  He cries a lot, and he's obsessed with his sister Caddy's muddy underwear.

Gay subtext: The elderly "Negro" servant Dilsey warns her grandson Luster to stay away from the Man with the Red Tie.  Wearing red is probably a gay symbol, like wearing lavender today.  Maybe they're having a gay affair.  And hopefully Luster looks like this.

Part 2: Narrated by Benjy's brother Quentin, a Harvard freshman who's crazy, and whose mind jumps back and forth at random just like Benjy's. He's obviously gay, in love with his roommate, Shreve, who responds by grabbing his knee.  Someone even calls Shreve his "husband."

He claims to have committed incest with his sister Caddy, but he's lying to hide a worse shame -- she had sex with someone else.

Wait -- aren't you supposed to have sex with someone other than your brother?

This part is also completely incomprehensible.  Not even a single sentence makes any sense. I understand Quentin commits suicide.

Part 3: Narrated by Jason, the third brother, the only one who thinks normally and writes normally.  This part is sort of comprehensible, except for references to events from the first part that we don't know about because they were written in gibberish, and the fact that a different Quentin shows up -- this one Caddy's daughter.  Giving two characters the same name is taboo for fiction writers, as it inevitably leads to confusion, and this is already an incomprehensible book.  

Jason's story is about stealing money from Quentin #2 (Caddy's daughter).

Part 4: No narrator. Miss Quentin has taken the money Jason stole from her, plus some of his own, and run off with the Man with a Red Tie (the one Luster is having an affair with in Part 1).  So maybe Miss Quentin is a boy in drag.  Jason does get awfully upset when he sees "her" in a bathrobe.

The homophobic Jason looks for Miss Quentin, to get his money back, but finally gives up.  The end.

It took a lot of creativity and endless Cliff's Notes to get through!

And beefcake photos.  Here's a semi-nude William Faulkner, thinking up new and better ways to torture English majors.

There's a gay dating story about William Faulkner on Tales of West Hollywood.

"Dolly Parton's Heartstrings": The Gay Couple Two Doors Down

 

I knew that Dolly Parton was gay-positive, but I had no intention of  watching her Netflix series, Dolly Parton's Heartstrings: "Eight stories celebrating family, faith, love, and forgiveness," each inspired by a Dolly Parton song.  Sounds like Sunday morning services at the First Baptist Church, all set to country-western music.  I was shocked to discover that the episode "Two Doors Down"  won a GLAAD Award in 2020.  So let's take a look.  It might not be horrendous.

Intro: Dolly explains that when she wrote "Two Doors Down" in 1977, she was on the road a lot, away from her family, but she found a new family with her crew, which was composed of "all kinds of people: different colors, gay, lesbian, transgender, different faiths, but we all loved each other.  Love is love."  It goes on like that.

Scene 1: Singing "Two Doors Down," naturally, Ty (Broadway actor Andy Mientus) drives down country roads "to the place I belong" (sorry, wrong song). Switch to Mom busily micro-managing his sister Lee's upcoming wedding, and wondering why she looks so miserable. Could it be...Mom butting in?

Scene 2: They all arrive at the elegant hotel in the South.  I thought they would be hillbillies, but Mom is loaded!  Mom tells Ty that he's sure to get a lot of attention from the ladies at the wedding, because her Gay is buying his outfit: "that's the one thing gays are good for, right?  Fashion!"  

Estranged Dad (Ray McKinnon) arrives.  Now that's a hillbilly!  He looks like he just finished huntin' possums with Jed Clampett (there actually is a dead deer in the back of his truck).

Scene 3: Ty discusses his secret with his boyfriend, the uber-swishy Cole (Michael J. Willett): "As you know, Dear, I'm not out to my family, due to Mom's homophobia.  When marriage equality arrived, she said it was the end of the world.  But I'm going to tell them all this weekend." Cole notes that Sister, his bff, already found out by accident, but she wants Ty to tell her in person.  

Also, they are having a long-distance relationship problem. Cole lives in Atlanta, and Ty lives in Athens, 72 miles away.  

Ulp, Cole hides in the closet as Mom comes in.  She discusses the life-threatening Steel Magnolias disease that she had last year, which left her "a sentimental puddle," so she really wants Ty to find a girl.  

Scene 4:  In the absurdly elegant parlor, Sister and her fiance Digby are discussing their secret: "As you know, Sweetheart, after the wedding we are leaving small-town Atlanta for Los Angeles so I can pursue my acting career.  Don't tell Mom!"  Digby?

Scene 5: Mom and Dad discuss their secret: "As you know, Dumbbell, we hate each other.  I think you're a country bumpkin, and you think I'm a rich snob.  We're going to get a divorce.  But don' t tell the kids!" Uh-oh, dark secrets all the way down.

Scene 6: Ty comes out to Sister in the stupidest way possible: "Seeing you and Digby so happy has made me realize that I'm happy, too.  So happy that you might say I'm...gay."  

Sister is proud of him for having the courage to come out. Digby?  How did the poor guy survive middle school?  "You can tell Dad, but don't tell Mom.  She'll stick her head in the oven." 

Sister tells Ty her secret about moving.  Whoops, for a wedding present, Mom and Dad bought them a house in Atlanta!  Complications! 

Scene 7:  Sister trying on wedding dresses with Ty's boyfriend Cole and her gal pal, Mim Tinkelpaugh (and I thought Digby got bullied a lot!).  Mim is trying to get with Ty.  Sister explains that he's...um...seeing someone.  

Mom comes in to complain about Lee's cousin Renee (Aidan Langford) doing something weird "with her bridesmaid's dress."  Sister explains that they have come out as nonbinary, and prefer the name Ren.  Mom huffs: "More LGBT XYZ nonsense!  You give me one week with her, and I'll straighten her out!"

Scene 8:  The rehearsal dinner.  Ty is upset because women keep hitting on him.  Mom tells her friends that Ren is now her nibbling, a gender-neutral term for the child of a sibling.  They smile politely.   Wait -- she's ok with nonbinary but not ok with gay?  While rehearsing the vows, Sister becomes so stressed about the various secrets she's hiding that she blurts one out: "Did y'all know that Ty is gay!" 

Mom takes charge, clears the room, and apologizes to Ty: "She was just stressed.  She didn't mean any of those horrible accusations."  Whoa, Mom, way homophobic.  Ty says that he actually is gay, but Mom won't have it: "You are not that way!  Don't talk such nonsense!" 

Scene 9:  Minutes after discovering that his son is gay, Scary Redneck Dad grabs a gun and asks if he wants to take a drive into the woods to relax.  Um.... no, thanks, Dad, I'd rather live.  But it's ok, they've been going hunting together since Ty was a kid, and Dad is fine with him being gay.  He actually wants to talk about his own marital problems, har har.

Scene 10:  Mom visits Cole the Boyfriend: "You're a real gay, as swishy as the night is long.  But Ty is  normal.  Could you talk some sense into him, show him what real gays are like?"  Cole: "You don't have to be swishy to be gay."  

Mom: "But I just can't imagine Ty choosing your lifestyle."  Cole: "You don't choose to be gay."  I had conversations like this with heterosexuals a lot, back in the 1990s.  Not in 2020.  But I guess the intended audience -- who tuned in for a story of "faith and forgiveness" -- hasn't had them yet.

Scene 11: Uh-oh, Dad accidentally shot Ty during their late night hunting expedition!  He's ok, just grazed, but everyone rushes to the hospital, and and Mom sees Cole kiss Ty!  Plus they all see Sister playing a vampire on tv! (Remember, she was keeping her acting career a secret.)  Mom doesn't know which secret to be more horrified by.  

Scene 12:  After calming down a bit, Mom asks Ty if Cole has been trying to seduce him so he'll turn gay.   Ty says "No, I made th first move. He didn't want to get involved someone who was in the closet, but I won him over."  

Mom is adamant that Ty can't be gay, since he's not feminine: "I could set you up with a therapist who works with confused kids."  

Scene 13: Ty and Ren (his nonbinary cousin) have a heart-to-heart: "Welcome to the rainbow."  Telling the world that you are nonbinary is relatively recent; telling the world that  you are gay has been a standard practice for over 50 years.  Why is it so much more difficult for Ty than for Ren?

 Ahh, there's a live possum in the parlor!  Shoot it!  But they're not concerned: "Maybe it's your spirit animal."  Now I know these people are from the South.

Scene 14:  The wedding.  But before it starts, Sister and Digby (Digby?) clear the room and say that they already got married, downtown.  They just didn't want any more drama. Maybe do this before you rent the hall, buy the outfits, and invite 500 people?  

Mom  takes the top of the wedding cake to her room to eat while being depressed.  Meanwhile, the other problems are resolved: Ty and Cole's long distance relationship (they move in together), Digby and Sister's move (they'll stay in Atlanta, where there is lots of film and tv work).

The reception goes on as planned.  Surprise!  Dolly Parton performs!  "Two Doors Down," naturally.  

Ty goes to Mom's room and asks her to come to the party.

convinces her to come down to the party.  

"No, I'm too depressed."

"Dolly Parton is performing."

There's a Mom-shaped hole in the door as she zooms downstairs.  

Then Dolly sings "Aud Lang Syne."  Did you know that this wedding was scheduled for New Year's Eve?  Yeah, me neither.

Beefcake:  No.

LGBTQ Characters: 3

Anachronisms:  A weird juxtaposition of time periods.  One moment they're in 2020, and the next they're having a conversation right out of the 1990s: "How do you know you are that way?"

Problems for the Sake of Drama: 4

My Grade:  C