Lucas Neff: Beefcake and Gay Characters after "Raising Hope"

Raising Hope (2010-2014)  was about a wacky working-class family whose son, Jimmy (Lucas Neff) became a single dad after a one-night stand with a serial killer.  There were no gay characters, except for an occasional walk-on, but there were ample buddy-bonding subtexts, including a father-son subtext so obvious it looks intentional.

Plus the beefcake was constant.

Jimmy has a surprisingly buffed, hirsute chest and nicely shaped biceps.

Lucas Neff grew up in Chicago and received a BFA in theater from the University of Illinois in 2008.




He moved to Hollywood almost immediately, with a role in the buddy-bonding war movie Angelo (2010), followed by Raising Hope. 

What has he been up to since 2014?  And more importantly, has he taken off his shirt for the camera since?

According to the imdb, he's been in some indie, horror, and comedy movies, including:

There are Ghosts (2015), about a "closeted homosexual with a death wish."

I Love You Both (2016), about a brother and a sister both dating the same guy.

Slash (2016), about a gay teen (slash means the pairing of heterosexual media characters).

Cock N Bull 2 (2017), about a gay couple who decide to have an open relationship.









That's a lot of gay content.

Plus he's dating Caitlin Stasey, who is an out lesbian (who says lesbians can't date men without having to classify themselves as bisexual?).

He's let his hair grow out just a bit.

See also: Axl in Underwear

The Real Gay Characters of "The Real O'Neals"

What happens when a "perfect" Irish Catholic family finds out that they're not perfect after all?
Mom and Dad are divorcing.
Oldest son has an eating disorder.
Daughter has some kind of psychological issue.
Youngest son is gay.

Got it, being gay is inferior, a "problem" like having an eating disorder or a psychological issues.  Can't be a "perfect" family with a gay kid.

With that intensely homophobic beginning, I gave the first season of The Real O'Neils a miss.  But it keeps getting praised by the Trevor Project, so I watched a couple of episodes.

Former teen idol Jay R. Ferguson plays the hapless dad.

Matt Shively, last seen on the Disney Channel, plays the dimwitted older brother.

His problem, and his sister's problem, are not mentioned.  The plotlines are about the parents living together and dating other people while divorced, and about the gay son.

His first gay coffee house.
Starting a gay club at school.
Hosting a Halloween party.
Joining a gym.

The flamboyant stereotype son is played by Noah Galvin.

Not too great.  Here's why his crush (Sean Grandillo) didn't come out:

"Do you like avocados?"
"Yeah..."
"Why didn't you tell me you like avocados?"

Liking dudes is not nearly the same thing as liking avocados.

People don't want to kill you because you like avocados.
Parents don't kick you out of the house because you like avocados.
You don't have to worry every moment if you will become the victim of a hate crime for liking avocados.

Here's a pic of Sean Grandillo.

But there haven't been that many cringe-inducing moments, and I like the lengths the conservative parents go through to try to welcome their son.

And there's substantial beefcake.  Matt Shively and  Noah Crawford (left) aren't averse to shirtless shots.

Neither is Chris Pipkin as one of his classmates.

Plus I've noticed an occasional bulge that no one remembered to censor.

See also: The Real Bulges of the Real O'Neals.

The Ice Storm: The Most Hetero-Phobic Movie Ever

The Netflix blurb of The Ice Storm (1997) said something about "hidden secrets coming out during Thanksgiving," and the director was Ang Lee of Brokeback Mountain, so I ordered it, expecting gay chararacters.

It's the 1970s, see?  We know because the tv is always in the background, showing us Richard Nixon, MASH, Room 222, The Green Hornet, Time Tunnel, and Divorce Court.

And there are these rich white heterosexual couples in New Canaan, Connecticut (Kevin Kline, Joan Allen, Sigourney Weaver, Henry Czerny, Jamey Sheridan, Kate Burton).  I can't tell them apart, but it doesn't matter: they're all identical in every way.  They drink, abuse prescription drugs, shoplift, argue, and have sex with random people, whether they like them or not.

The sex is dreadful.  They insult each other, they feel guilty and start crying, or they get bored and leave halfway through.

They go to a key party, where the husbands put their car keys in a bowl, and each wife picks one of the sets at random and has to go home with whoever it belongs to.  Grim, set-faces, deer-in-headlights stares.  No one wants to do it, but they feel they must to be accepted in Stepford...um, I mean New Canaan.

Somehow they have time for Thanksgiving dinner before going back to the booze, sex, and angst.

There are also teenage kids around.  I don't know which belongs to which family, but at least I can tell them apart -- there's Frodo, Spiderman, Wednesday Addams, and Kid Brother (Elijah Wood, Tobey Maguire, Christina Ricci, Adam Hann-Byrd), plus a couple in New York.

They're identical to their parents in every way.  They drink, use prescription drugs, shoplift, blow things up, listen to their parents argue, and obsessively try to have sex.  They never actually get sex -- one of them starts screaming, or passes out, or a parent discovers them and erupts in hypocritical rage.  But one senses that, if they did have sex, it would be horrible.

Spiderman sort-of narrates with over-intellectual, absurdly pretentious voiceovers:

"Your family is the void you emerge from, and the place you return to when you die. And that's the paradox: The closer you are drawn back in, the deeper into the void you go."

Read that over for a moment.  It's not a paradox at all.  "The closer you are drawn into the [void that is your family], the deeper into the [void that is your family] you go."

And there's an ice storm.  The streets are a mess, so stay inside.  Wouldn't you know it, this is the exact time that they all decide to rush out of the house in a huff, drive drunk, get on a train, and walk down the ice-encrusted road by the ocean, contemplating suicide.

You know someone is going to die.  Actually,by this point, you're hoping they all die, and get some relief from their horrible lives.

Not a lot of gay interest.  A little beefcake: some chests of random guys who are trying to have sex.

No gay characters, subtexts, or references, except for a "fag" yelled at a kid who can't catch a football.

But this is the most hetero-phobic film I've ever seen.  Heterosexuals lead desperate, tragic lives, and their sexual practices are utterly unfulfilling.  It's like a straight Boys in the Band.

The Ice Storm was based on a novel by Rick Moody (apt name!)

The Real Bulges of "The Real O'Neals"

Last night I watched the December 6th episode of The Real O'Neals: Kenny, the gay kid (Noah Galvin), goes out for wrestling, and turns out to be good at it, due to his expertise in the dance numbers from West Side Story.

He wins the adulation of his conservative Catholic high school, receiving cheers, gifts, and an invitation to sit at the jock table, but infringes upon the territory of his brother, Jimmy (Matt Shively).

At first I found it only mildly entertaining.  I was waiting for some beefcake shots of Matt Shively and his teammates.

But I never expected to see anything like this on a prime time comedy.

He's an extra; I don't have his name.  I wish I did.

Ok, time for Kenny's match.  He drops his gym trunks, revealing a singlet of his own.

Doesn't he notice that his singlet is a bit...um...snug?  Doesn't the director notice?

Noah Galvin is 22 years old, by the way, so it's ok to look.

It's impossible not to look.

It gets better.

And better.

Suddenly I'm a real fan of The Real O'Neals.

See also: The Real Gay Characters of "The Real O'Neals"

What's Gay about "Married with Children"

One day in 1988, I was at the gym in West Hollywood, and I saw someone wearing a t-shirt reading "Married...with Children Fan Club."

I knew about Married...with Children.  On Sunday nights, my roommate Derek and I always watched the beefcake-heavy: 21 Jump Street and Werewolf  on the fledgling Fox network, but we turned the tv off when the "Love and Marriage" theme song began.

Who wanted to watch a tv show that praised the heterosexual nuclear family?

Big mistake.  Married skewered the institution.

Al (Ed O'Neill) and Peggy (Katey Sagal) are a middle-aged married couple who hate each other.  Sexually voracious Peggy keeps trying to trick, cajole, or berate Al into having sex with her, but he isn't interested (although he likes women in general).

In the first season plot arc, Al and Peggy have fun trying to destroy a naive newly married couple, Marcy (Amanda Bearse) and Steve (David Garrison).  They're like George and Martha in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, except their tactic is criticizing wives and husbands, respectively, and it works!  The couple soon divorces, and Marcy hooks up with metrosexual boytoy Ted McGinley

 Other episodes involve problems with the kids, the promiscuous teenage Kelly (Christina Applegate) and the rowdy preteen Bud (David Faustino) -- soon a nerdy teenager.

No significant buddy-bonding, although Peggy and Marcy and Al and Boomererson come close.

Lots of beefcake -- Kelly had lots of shirtless, muscular boyfriends, such as Dan Gauthier, and in later seasons, Bud began to muscle-up big time.

Gay people appear only once.

Yet Married -- at least in its early years, before the downward spiral of Seasons 7-10 -- artfully revealed the flimsy foundation of the "fade out kiss," the myth of universal heterosexual destiny.  In the heart of the Reagan-Bush Era of conservative retrenchment, that was worth any number of "old friend visits and turns out to be gay" episodes.

Amanda Bearse came out in real life in 1993, and the rest of the cast are strong gay allies.




Katey Sagal and Christina Applegate have made public statements supporting gay marriage.

Ed O'Neill now stars in Modern Family, as the patriarch of a family that includes a gay son and son-in-law.

David Faustino played gay characters in Get Your Stuff (2000) and in Killer Bud (2001), and in Ten Attitudes (2001), he played "himself," not gay but on the gay dating circuit (for a sleazy reason). He also played "himself" in the webseries Star-Ving (along with buddy Corin Nemec).  See his post here.

He's currently in talks with producers about a Married spin-off, with Bud as an adult, married...with children.

Justin Berfield's Very Special Episode

I hate it when you watch a tv program for countless episodes under the impression that a character is gay, only to find out that he was straight all along -- or, more likely, the producers noticed the gay subtext and retconned the character to "correct" him.

On Malcolm in the Middle (2000-2006), about a dysfunctional family, dimwitted hunk Reese (Justin Berfield) never expressed any interest in girls for five seasons, even though nearly every male teenager in mass media, including his brother Malcolm (Frankie Muniz), is scripted as indefatigably girl-crazy. 

 He was also over-emotional and interested in cooking, two gender-transgressive traits that could easily mark him as gay.  

To make matters worse, the scripts kept dropping unmistakable hints.  

Reese says “Sorry, I’m gay” to dissuade an amorous girl.

He “courts” an attractive male classmate.

He sells "his services” to neighborhood men and then blackmails them in an amazingly blatant parody of male prostitution (he even lounges at poolside in a swimsuit like a kept boy). 

Fans began to speculate that a special “coming out” episode was planned. Then, in the Season 5 finale in May 2004, Reese is distraught over a breakup with a never-before mentioned girlfriend. “You are mistaken!” the producers seemed to squeal. “Reese was straight all along!  There are no gay teenagers!”

Justin Berfield is the subject of gay rumors in real life, too, but he adamantly refuses to make any public statements.

See also: The Top 10 Hunks of Malcolm in the Middle

Brock Ciarlelli: The Uncle Tom of "The Middle"

As a long time fan of the dysfunctional-family sitcom The Middle (2009), I have complained several times about the incessant heterosexism: boys like girls, girls like boys, period, end of story.

Charlie McDermott's Axl has some gay subtext scenes.

I thought that preteen Brick was gay, but no, the minute his character hit puberty, his "hormones" kicked in, and he became girl crazy.

And that's about it.

There is a recurring gay character, sort of: the uber-stereotypic swish Brad, Sue's high school friend.  The joke is: no one realizes that Brad is gay except Sue's parents, Frankie and Mike.

Certainly not Sue, who is unaware that gay people exist.  Not even Brad, also unaware.

Wait -- don't these teenagers watch Glee?  

So who is this person with the 5,000 teeth who has won two Young Artist Awards for his contribution to the erasure of gay people from the world?

His name is Brock Ciarlelli, and he's 19 years old, a Littleton, Colorado native currently studying at Chapman University.

Other than The Middle, he only has two projects listed on the IMDB: a walk-on in the thriller 2.0 (2010) and the tv movie Beth and Ali (2013).

Asked if he minded playing a gay character, he said "no."

Asked about his character's obliviousness to his gay identity, he said: "to me, that says that sexual orientation doesn't matter."

I've got news for you Brock: sexual orientation matters a great deal to the LGBT kids who are told daily that no gay people exist.

Brock and other teen favorites, such as Nickelodeon's Nick Cannon, are involved in an anti-bullying program where they talk to kids in classrooms via Skype.

That doesn't make up for being an Uncle Tom.

Postscript: In the October 14, 2015 episode, Brad comes out to Sue, sort of:

Brad:  "Sue, I have something to tell you.  I'm...."
Sue: "I know."
Frankie (voiceover): "Since Brad had the courage to tell Sue who he was...."

Ok, the word "gay" was never used.  It still must never be spoken, only implied.

See also: Axl in Underwear; Raising Hope/The Middle

The Beefcake is Back: Axl in Underwear on "The Middle"

Beefcake alert -- I just saw the season premiere of The Middle.  The episode itself wasn't great -- about Sue going off to college.  But Axl (Charlie McDermott) spent the entire first two acts in his underwear.

He was fully clothed most of last season.

It's nice to see the beefcake back.

I've been watching The Middle since it premiered in 2009.  It's a striking contrast to Modern Family, which comes on ABC shortly afterwards: two "family sitcoms," but the families are rich/poor, big city/small town, West Coast/Middle America, and inclusive/not-inclusive

White -- all white all the time.  Christian.  And heterosexual.  I was holding out for quirky youngest kid Brick (Atticus Shaffer) to be gay, but nope, he "discovered" girls, and now he's as hetero-horny as his brother Axl.

The flamboyantly feminine Brad, one of high schooler Sue's friends, appears occasionally.  But the joke is that no one thinks that he's gay except Sue's parents.  Not even him.

Other than that, nothing.  Not a word or a scene suggesting that same-sex desire, behavior, or identity exists.  This is a complete, utter heterosexist wasteland.

To what can we attribute this void?

Maybe the producers, Eileen Heisler and Deanne Heline believe that all gay people live in L.A. or Manhattan, so Orson, Indiana must obviously be gay-free.

Or the suits at ABC

Or the cast.  Most are not exactly gay allies:

1. Patricia Heaton (Mom Frankie), formerly the wife on the heterosexist Everybody Loves Raymond, is openly conservative, although she states that she has gay friends.  She complains that the kids of The Middle would never display themselves as sexual objects, like the kids of Glee.  Um...Axl and his friends are displayed semi-nude in nearly every episode because....?

2. Neil Flynn (Dad Mike), formerly the sardonic janitor on Scrubs, doesn't have any gay roles on his resume and hasn't made any pro-gay statements.

3. Charlie McDermott (the shirtless Axl) has played in several movies with "aren't gay people ridiculous?" jokes, such as Sex Drive (2008) and Hot Tub Time Machine (2010).

4. Eden Sher (the over-enthusiastic Sue) has a gay best friend.

5. Atticus Shaffer (Brick) had a role in the homophobic Year One (2009), but he was only 11 years old at the time, so you can't really blame him.  He hasn't made any pro- or anti-gay statements.

I guess we'll have to make do with subtexts.

See also: Raising Hope/The Middle and Brock Ciarlelli: The Uncle Tom of The Middle

Frankie and Erik in the Middle

The heir of dysfunctional family sitcoms like Roseanne and Married...with Children, Malcolm in the Middle (2000-2006) was about the middle boy (Frankie Muniz) in a family of miscreants, who happened to be an academic overachiever.

I've already posted on the rather explicit gay subtexts of Malcolm's older brother Reese (Justin Berfield), and the lesser but still substantial subtexts of his oldest brother, Francis (Christopher Masterson).  But how do the other two boys in the family fare?

Not good.  All of the show's heterosexism seems to distill onto them.

Malcolm spends the series hot for one girl after another, with no close male friends except Stevie (Craig Lamar Traylor), who uses a wheelchair and has a lung problem that allows him to say only a few words at a time.  Not a lot of buddy-bonding there.

When Malcolm joins the photography club, his mother believes that he joined only to meet girls -- that's the reason any boy does anything, isn't it?  "What's her name?" she asks, over and over.  Malcolm insists that there's no girl. . .but, in a plot twist, there really is one!  Boys play sports, join clubs, choose classes and careers, for one of two reasons: to meet girls, or to impress The Girl.  Period.

Not a lot of gay interest in Frankie Muniz' later career, either. The hetero-horny Extreme Movie (2008), with Ryan Pinkston.

Pizza Man (2011), who wins The Girl of His Dreams.

What about the youngest, Dewey (Erik Per Sullivan)?

No better.

When the boys get a hot female babysitter, they try various strategies to win her over, but Dewey has the best: he has a "bad dream."  She promptly invites him into her bed, and he grins with triumph as his brothers watch.

After Malcolm, Erik starred in Mo (2007), about a teen with Marfan Syndrome who "discovers girls."

At least he's rumored to be gay in real life.

See also: The Top 10 Hunks of "Malcolm in the Middle"

What's the Gay Connection in "The Sound of Music"?

When I was living in West Hollywood, people kept saying things like:
"I can't go out tonight -- The Sound of Music is on!"
"Which Sound of Music character are you?"
"The Sound of Music is playing at the community theater.  We have to go!"

I have never seen it all the way through.  It gives me bad vibes.

It's my fourth grade teacher's fault.  She told us about Anne Frank and The Sound of Music at the same time, and I got them mixed up, thinking that the musical ended with everyone dying in a concentration camp.

When I used to hear the songs, they gave me a frisson of dread, since I thought they were being sung by the prisoners at Auschwitz.

But even without the horror, they made no sense.  Look at "Do, Re, Mi":

Far, a long, long way to run.  It's  pronounced far, not fahhhh.

Ti, a drink with jam and bread.  Who drinks tea with jam and bread?  For that matter, what the heck is jam?

Or "My Favorite Things"
Cream colored ponies and crisp apple strudels.  Ponies don't come in cream colors, and strudel is a soft pastry, not crisp.

When the dog bites -- when the bee stings.  If a dog bites you, thinking of "favorite things" wouldn't help -- you need a rabies shot. And why would you feel sad when bitten or stung?  It's not sad, it's painful.

"Oh, no," everyone kept telling me.  "It's the greatest musical of all time!  And the gayest!"

So I've been looking for the gay connection.

Not in the plot: it's just a "servant inspires joie de vivre in disfunctional family" story, done to death on tv: Hazel, Charles in Charge, Mr. Belvedere, Give me a Break, The Nanny.  Here the nanny is future nun Maria (Julie Andrews), and the family belongs to the stern Captain Von Trapp of the Austrian army (Christopher Plummer).  After they learn joie de vivre, the family hits it big as professional singers, and finally they escape from the Nazis by climbing over the hillside into Switzerland.



There is no beefcake or buddy-bonding.

There are no gay or gay-vague characters, except maybe Max Detweiler, who becomes the children's agent.

 In 1965 he was played by Richard Haydn, who was gay in real life.  This scene does not appear in the movie.

Maybe there's a gay connection in the cast?

Julie Andrews, of course, went on to play a woman disguised as a drag queen in Victor/Victoria (1982).

Christopher Plummer  won an Academy Award at the age of 82, for playing a gay man who comes out after retirement in Beginners (2010).  In the top photo, he seems to be having a little loincloth malfunction in The Royal Hunt of the Sun (1969).

Nicholas Hammond (left), one of the two boys in Von Trapp's mostly female family, played Spider-Man on tv (1977-78), where he displayed a respectable bulge.  He was married for only four years, and is rumored to be gay.

Not a lot of gay connection there.

What about the real life Von Trapp Family, lead by patriarch Georg Ritter Von Trapp (1888-1947)?  Ok, they were professional singers long before they met Maria, and they were Italian citizens who didn't need to escape Germany -- they just bought train tickets.  After the War, they opened a lodge in Stowe, Vermont.  

Most of the kids eventually married, although Agathe may have been gay: she ran a kindergarten with her "friend of 50 years," Mary Louise Kane.

Still not a lot of gay connection.

The Sound of Music Live! (2013) starred Carrie Underwood as Maria and Stephen Moyer (left) as Captain Von Trapp, Christian Borle (second photo), who plays a lot of gay characters, made his Max Detweiler as gay-vague as possible.

Not much there, either.

So the gay connection of The Sound of Music consists mostly of bulges?

See also: Charles in Charge; Mr. Belvedere; My Fair Lady.

The Goldbergs: 1980s Beefcake for a New Generation

Heterosexual adults always envision their adolescence as a Golden Age, simple, fun, and joyous, when people looked out for each other and you could walk down the street without fear.

Gay people know better.  Their adolescence was, at best, an age of turmoil and confusion, as they negotiated "what girl do you like?" or "what boy do you like?" interrogations and dealt with nameless, "impossible" desires.  More often it was a nightmare of homophobic harassment and internalized guilt.

So I don't have much sympathy for nostalgia tv like The Waltons (1930s), Happy Days (the 1950s), The Wonder Years (the 1960s), or That 70s Show.  Aside from the grating "Wasn't life great then, and isn't it awful now?" rhetoric, the Good Old Days being depicted is always gay-free.

The most recent nostalgia comedy is The Goldbergs (2014-), which revisits the childhood of creator Adam F. Goldberg in a working-class Jewish family in small-town Pennsylvania during the mid-1980s.

The family consists of: (left to right):
1. Dimwitted older brother Barry (Troy Gentile).
2 Adam, age 11 (Sean Giambrone), the focus character, with voice-over commentary from his adult self.
3. Self-absorbed sister Erica (Hayley Orratia)
4. Smothering Mom Beverly (Wendi McClendon-Ovey)
5. Loud, obnoxious Dad Murray (Boomer Garlin)
6. Raunchy, unpredictable grandpa, Pops (George Segal).

Their acting style is very big, with broad, theatrical gestures and loud voices.  They yell constantly over the minor conflicts that fuel the plots: a driving test; a new pair of shoes; sneaking into a R-rated movie; a talent show; a Halloween party.

It's not terrible, just loud and heterosexist.  Gay people do not exist. Everyone is absurdly hetero-horny, even 11-year old Adam.  There are a few glimmers of buddy-bonding between Barry and Ari Caldwell (gay-positive actor Jackson Odell), and between Adam and Chad (Jacob Hopkins), but with such a large family vying for attention, neither couple spends much time together.

But there is significant beefcake.  Murray has a solid bear physique and often hangs around in his underwear. Barry is an aspiring wrestler and martial artist, and appears shirtless regularly.

And look for beefcake of all sizes and shapes in minor roles, like hirsute bear Ben Zelevansky as "Dale"

Or heavily-muscled male model Tyler Stokes (far left) as Drew Kemp, son of the "perfect" family next door.

And for the preteen gay kids dragged into watching by parents who were young in the 1980s, there's Tanner Buchanan as Adam's friend Evan.

See also: The Beastie Boys