Zak Ford Williams: Better Bridgerton Batteries and the British Stonewall: all gay roles all the time. With a lot of c*cks.

   

Link to the n*de photos

Awhile ago I profiled Ruben Reuter, the "short guy with a d*ck" who starred in the Channel 4 Britcom Pushers.  In 2023 he appeared in the short Mobility,  about three high school students with different disabilities riding the same bus every day.  

I decided to check out his co-stars -- maybe the others were gay, too -- and found the extremely attractive Zak Ford-Williams. 

Zak was born in Ramsbottom, about 15 miles from Manchester, in 1999.  Growing up, he was deeply involved in the theater, joining Summerseat Players and the Manchester Royal Exchange Young Players.  He took his secondary school at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts and university at the Manchester School of Theatre (B.A., 2020).

His first on-screen role was in a 2021 episode of Wolfe, with Babou Ceesay as a university professor/ murder investigator.  The team finds evidence of a ritual killing in a "giant fatberg" in Manchester's sewers ( a fatberg is a giant blockage).  Zak's character offers to guide them into the sewer, and then attacks.

Next Zak had a recurring role in Better (2023), about a corrupt police detective striving to "do better."  Her son Owen (Zak), disabled after a bout of meningitis,  starts a relationship with the Crime Lord's son Donal (Ceallach Spellman, n*de on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends).

The short Battery (2023) is set during a lockdown that has turned London into a post-Apocalyptic nightmare.  A boy with cerebral palsy (Zak), forbidden to leave the flat because "it's not safe," sneaks out and braves the mean streets to reunite with his boyfriend (Nadeen Islam, who performs stand-up as "the only brown deaf gay man in England")  It was repeated in the anthology movie 4Love (2023).  

Next came an episode of the long-running  Midsommer Murders.  He plays Ludo Trask, a teenager obsessed with a book supposedly containing clues to a treasure -- and its author, who ends up murdered.  Spoiler alert: he didn't do it.  No heterosexual interest mentioned.

Two episodes of the historical soap opera Bridgerton, as the snarky gossip-girl Lord Remington (dig the old-timey wheelchair).  He hangs out with Penelope (left), but does not express any romantic interest in her.

And she is is busy courting Colin Bridgerton (Luke Newton, n*de on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends) and Alfred Debling (Sam Phillips).

If you're keeping score, that's five roles, two canonically gay, one gay vague, and two queer coded through lack of expressed heterosexual interest.

More after the break. 

Atticus Mitchell: "My Babysitter's a Vampire," "Stonewall," "Now I can be who I am," and n*de photos, but has he done anything gay lately?

  

Link to the n*de photos

When I was researching Star Trek, Strange New Worlds, I looked for nude photos of various cast members, and found several of Atticus Mitchell, who played an ensign "scared by a dog" in one episode.

You are probably more familiar with him as Benny Weir of My Babysitter's a Vampire (2010 movie, 2011-12 tv series):  teenager Ethan (Matthew Knight)  battles demons, zombies, and various paranormal perils with the help of his buddies, Benny (Atticus, left) and Rory (Cameron Kennedy), plus his sister's vampire babysitter. 

 

 Everyone was intensely hetero-horny, but there was a lot of beefcake. Here the guys agree to be sacrificed so an ancient Aztec goddess can be reunited with her boyfriend.  She's not interested in them, and they're going to die, but that's not important.  She's a girl, so whatever she wants, she gets. 

My earlier review of the series pointed out a lot of gay subtexts, although this is probably a back-stage shot of Atticus and Cameron hugging.  

Born in Toronto in 1993, Atticus became interested in acting in elementary school, and performed in four plays while at St. John Elementary School:

The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs of the Black Forest

James and the Giant Peach

50 Below Zero

When he graduated to Malvern Collegiate Institute (a public high school, in spite of the ponderous name), Atticus switched to on-screen acting with the teencom How to Be Indie (2009-2011), which is about an Indian-Canadian girl, not indie rock. Dylan Everett (n*de photo on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends) played her best friend.  Atticus played a bully.

Next came Vampire, followed by the teen movie Radio Rebel (2012), about a shy high school girl with a secret identity as an underground radio dj. So she's Hannah Montana.  Atticus plays Gabe, a musician who tries to sneak and snark his way into air time, and his future boyfriend or good buddy Adam DiMarco plays as Gavin, the girl's "love interest."  

Aside from Vampire, Atticus is best known for his role as Mickey Hess on Fargo (2014): he runs a shady trucking company with his dad and brother. No girlfriend, but he is established as heterosexual by playing with a female adult toy.

I was more interested in the role of Matthew in Stonewall (2015), about the 1969 riots that started the Gay Rights Movement, with Danny (Jeremy Irvine) as a white masculine Saviour from Indiana.  

Problem: Matthew doesn't appear in the synopsis, and I don't recall him from watching.  But surely he's gay.

More after the break

"Difficult People": Billy pretends to be straight, Julie pretends to be Italian, and the son of the guest star takes his shirt off

  

Link to the n*ude photos

Yesterday on the treadmill, I watched Difficult People, a two season sitcom about two jerks, the Jewish Julie and the gay Billy (Julie Klausner, Billy Eichner. below). I've had a file of photos for a long time, so why not write a review?

Julie and Billy are trying to break into stand-up comedy as a pair. We only see snippets of their act, but it seems to involve insulting people.  Plots often involve pop-culture name dropping or the pairs' crazy relatives.  Among the famous guest stars are Amy Sedaris, Lucy Liu, Tina Fey, Mark Consuelos, and Kathy Lee Gifford.

Rounding out the cast are James Urbaniak as Julie's business suit-wearing husband, who works for PBS; Andrea Martin as her yenta mother; and Cole Escola, left, as the swishy queen who works with Billy at his coffee shop gig. 

This episode, "Italian Piñata" begins with the pair walking past the Stonewall Tavern, where the Gay Rights Movement began: queens upset over the death of Judy Garland weren't going to take the police harassment anymore, and fought back.  The Judy Garland angle has been completely discredited.  These were young adults in the 60s. They were into the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, not some singer from their grandparents' generation.

Billy notes that it's National Coming Out Day, when super-hot A-gays who spend the rest of the year snubbing everyone who isn't a Greek god do their public duty by offering to introduce newly-out guys to the culture.  It doesn't even matter if they're ugly or have a horrible personality -- or both, like Billy -- if you're newly out, you're in. 

Julie Turns Italian: On their way to a horrible party that Julie's husband had to plan for his PBS job, in Hoboken, the pair drops into an Italian meat shop, where some ladies like Julie's jokes about "meat in my mouth."  They have big hair, eat everything in sight, carry purses that "fell off a truck," and discuss what they'll do to the penises of boyfriends who betray them.  Julie is in love!  She announces to her mother and husband that she's coming out -- she now identifies as Italian!  The two are horrified.

Mom works as a therapist whose client -- the famous Mink Stole -- has a daughter in a cult.  They discuss deprogramming -- kidnapping the brainwashed girl and yelling at her until she "believes what I want her to believe." Mom thinks this would work on Julie.  

Billy Turns Straight: Meanwhile, Billy and Julie go to a New Jersey gay bar, where he gets the idea of pretending to come out.  He announces that he was straight until today, and Julie is actually his soon-to-be ex-wife.  The gay guys, including bartender Pasha Pelosie, left, all want to welcome him into the gay community.  

He gives the hunky Joey (Mark Consuelos, top photo) the job, hoping to get into the guy's pants for his "first time."  But Joey wants to take it slow.  First, a long, detailed course in gay culture -- which he gets all wrong, even the Judy Garland-Stonewall connection. Billy turns him on by pretending to be straight -- wearing cargo pants, thinking that Judy Garland was hot -- but it doesn't help. No sex.

Left: The guy with Mark in the top photo is his son Joaquin, now attending Michigan State University, where he is a wrestler.

When the two groups get together, Julie and Billy are outed -- he knows who Liza Minelli is -- and they are dumped by the Italians and the gays, respectively. At that moment, Mom and the Husband shove a bag over Julie's head to kidnap her for deprogramming.  The Italian ladies think that she's getting an  "Italian piñata." Use your imagination.

Subplots involve Mink Stole, bad hair resulting from getting it styled by students; and the husband's PBS party, which ends up with an office full of kids and a scary clown chasing his boss down the hall.

Beefcake: A split-second of Mark with his shirt off.  When you have to depend on the son of the guest star and guys far down on the cast list, you know there's something wrong. 

Left: Ben Bauer plays a Gay Rights Activist in one episode.

Heterosexism:  Not much. Julie and her husband don't seem to like each other. The swishy queen at the coffee shop notes that he came out a year ago and left his wife, but he still thinks about her all the time, so maybe he should give her a call. Maybe you're a swishy bi guy?

Homophobia: Billy's boss at the coffee shop, who is trans, calls him a "fag": "I can say it because I used to be one."  One of the Italian ladies suggests that they go to the gay bar next door and hang out with her "fag" brother: "I can say it because he is one."

Left: Sean Martin Hingston shows the pair his penis in another episode.

My Grade: I liked the episode construction, with the various subplots linked together, but the humor was outdated and trite.  Jewish mothers, har har.   A swishy straight guy, har har. 

Some dicks and butts from far down the cast list on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends

See also: Stonewall: A movie about the riots that started the Gay Rightes Movement

The naked pres bro on the bus on "The Girls on the Bus"

Joe Canoli's canoli: frontal nudity and erotic promise from the groovy 1960s

 

Link to the nude photos

Readers were asking about Joe Canoli, one of the random hunks in the Season 2 Gemstone Memes. 

Walter Kudzincz, born in 1925, began photographing his well-hung buddies and boyfriends, establishing a catalog of guys in skimpy outfits pretending to be cowboys, pirates, or gladiators, trying to avoid being overtly homoerotic, as was required by the strict censorship and intense homophobia of 1950s society.    You could get them via mail order, or in "fitness" magazines like Physique Pictorial and Tomorrow's Man.  

In 1952 Walt met Jim Stryker, an 18-year old recent high school graduate, pranking his friend by urinating on him from a tree branch.  Stryker became his friend, lover, and the top-selling model in the gay male subculture for the next ten years.

In 1962, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that male nudity was not necessarily obscene, and in 1965, magazines began printing frontal nudity, allowing Walt to challenge the "chaste," closeted gay models of the earlier generation.  It was the era of the psychedelics revolution, the sexual revolution, the youth counterculture, and the more open, out gay subcultures that would culminate in Stonewall and the Gay Rights Movement.  The modern gay man was willing to admit that he liked to look at cocks as well as muscles.

So Walt's Champion Studio models got naked.  Sometimes their photos were campy and cool, brightly colored, "mod," groovy.  Sometimes they made fun of the posing-strap cowboys and football players of the uptight 1950s.  Sometimes they were unabashedly erotic.  

I'm covering a lot about the life of Walt Kudzincz because I have found almost nothing about Joe Canoli.  The earliest photo I could find, a black-and-white with rear nudity, comes from between 1962 and 1965. 

More after the break

"Stonewall": The riots that started the Gay Rights Movement, with nice cops, a White Saviour, J. Edgar Hoover, and some dicks

 

Link to NSFW version

The Stonewall Riots of June 28-30, 1969 began with patrons of the Stonewall bar in Greenwich Village fighting back against police harassment.  They ended with the modern Gay Rights Movement and the "minority group" model of LGBT identities. Today there are Pride festivals and parades around June 28th of every year to celebrate that beginning., and queer history, literature, culture, and politics are definitively divided into pre-Stonewall and post-Stonewall. 

Although there have been many books and documentaries, Stonewall (2015) is the first movie intended for a mass audience.  It assumes that you are straight, with little or no knowledge of the riots, an ally but mostly unaware of the closeted, harassed, hounded life of LGBT people before Stonewall (and sometimes still today)

1. Danny Winters (Jeremy Irvine), a clean-cut all-American kid from rural Indiana, gets a scholarship to Columbia, but before his parents can fill out the scholarship papers, they discover that he is gay and kick him out.  His closeted boyfriend, football star Joe(Karl Glusman), refuses to talk to him.  

Bonus Karl Glusman cock after the break

So he goes to New York anyway, where everybody -- repeat, everybody -- falls in love with him.  Well, what do you expect from the focus character?

Danny lives on the street, and works as a hustler (although the look of pure disgust he gets whenever a client tries to go down on him would probably limit his success).

He hangs out and often lives with a group of androgynous gay and transgender street kids led by Ray/Ramona (Johnny Beauchamp). 

2. They are regulars at the Stonewall Tavern, a dive-bar run by Mobster Ed Murphy (Ron Pearlman), who may have murdered Ray's boyfriend. It was illegal to serve alcohol to "a known homosexual," so all gay bars were underground, mostly run by the mob.

3. Meanwhile Danny gets involved with Trevor (Jonathan Rhys-Meyer, left), a middle-class college student,  who picks up twinks by playing Procul Harem's "Whiter Shade of Pale" on the jukebox.  I'm always moved by the line: She said "There is no reason 
And the truth is plain to see."

More after the break

"The Boys in the Band": Any Day that Ends with a Naked Man is a Good Day

 

The movie The Boys in the Band, based on Mart Crowley's 1968 play, appeared in 1970.  I watched it on VHS sometime in the 1990s, and even with some leeway for being pre-Stonewall, I hated it.  A party with a bunch of screaming queens oozing with self-hatred, sniping viciously at teach other, obsessed with straight guys who don't know that they exist, trying to seduce a strraight guy who stumbled in by accident.  Yuck!

I just saw the 2020 Netflix version, and liked it a lot more.  The tone was more upbeat and positive, thanks to some subtle changes to the script (the line "if only we didn't hate ourselves quite so much" is gone) and additions to the mise en scene. For instance, we see the characters interacting after the party, eating in a restaurant, attending Mass, cuddling in a cab, having sex, building a life in spite of their homophobic society.

Some viewers thinks that Boys is "gay misery porn," but remember, it's 1968.  "Homosexuality" is a psychosis, so you are in psychotherapy searching for a "cure."  Sodomy is an imprisonable offense, gay bars are illegal and underground, and there are no gay organizations except for the highly-closeted Mattachine Society.  The world hates you.  But you are still determined to live, so you throw a birthday party.

1. Michael (Jim Parsons), who is in debt up to his eyeballs and suffering from Catholic guilt, hosts the party.  He gets a shocker when a straight college friend, Alan (Brian Hutcherson), calls out of nowhere and wants to stop in "for a drink."  You never tell straights (the term "coming out" means acknowledging that you are gay), so he asks the other guys to act straight.  

When Alan figures it out anyway yet doesn't run away screaming, Michael introduces a party game to compel him into coming out: you have to call the one person you have always loved and tell them.  He assumes that Alan will call his other college buddy, now out, whom he was obviously in love with.  But the plan backfires when Alan calls his wife.

So Alan was straight all along?  Or is he still in the closet?  Michael is devastated.  But after the party, he goes to midnight Mass and feels better.

2. Donald (Matt Bomer, right), Michael's best friend and former lover, is visiting for the weekend.  He doesn't play the game.  But he does take a shower, giving us a nice beefcake scene that did not appear in the original movie.

3.-4. Hank (Tuc Watkins, left) is in the process of divorcing his wife so he can be with Larry (Andrew Rannells).  Larry recoils at the thought of heterosexual-style monogamy, but still calls Hank during the game.  They decide to try an open relationship.

5. Bernard (Michael Benjamin Washington), who is black and has to deal with racist jokes (even from his friends), has always loved the first guy he had sex with, the son of the rich family his mother used to work for.  In a flashback, we see them frolicking naked in a pool, butts and cocks visible. He calls, gives the message to the mother, and is devastated.

6. Benard's best friend is the campy queen Emory (Robin de Jesus), who was outed and ridiculed when everyone at his high school discovered his crush on an older boy.  Later he apologizes to Bernard for his racist quips, and they are shown having dinner together.

7.-8. Harold, (Zachary Quinto) the guest of honor, is a "32 year old ugly pock-marked fag Jew" who takes lots of weird drugs and  constantly picks at imaginary facial blemishes.  They seem to all love him, but he strikes me as threatening, observing and criticizing the events like a petty tyrant.  I kept wondering what he had on them.

The Cowboy (Charlie Carver, top photo) is a dimwitted hustler hired as one of Harold's birthday presents.  They get more romantic interactions than in the original movie, kissing, cuddling, and, in the last scene, having sex (Harold has a surprisingly nice butt).  

The "call someone you've always loved" game still seems too cruel to foist upon your friends (and you can only play it once), but at least the self-loathing is gone.

My Partner: "It was awful!  Gay life as endless misery!"

Me: "But it wasn't all misery.  They had friends.  They had lovers.  Any day that ends with a naked man in your bed is a good day, in 1968 or  2020."

See also: Andrew Rannell and Adam Devine: bromance, bulge and butt pictures