The Top 10 Hunks of Shazam

Captain Marvel (1941-53) was DC Comics' attempt to circumvent the obvious homoeroticism in the 1940s superhero-teen sidekick relationship by making the two the same person.  14-year old Billy Batson transforms into adult superhero Captain Marvel when he says the magical word Shazam.

Which, by the way, is an acronym for the magical beings who bestowed the power upon him: Solomon, Hercules, Atlas, Zeus, Achilles, Mercury.

It's all very silly, and it provides a new problem: how to give Captain Marvel a girlfriend, when he's really a teenage boy with muscles?  He can't very well be dating Lois Lane.

The 2019 movie has Billy (Asher Angel) turning into an unnamed superhero (played by Zachary Levi).  But it also gives Billy a sidekick of his own, Freddy (Jack Dylan Grazer).

And, in the absence of a girlfriend, they have a gay-subtext romance.

Plus one of his foster-home buddies, Pedro (Jovan Armand) appears to identify as gay when they hide out in a strip club and he says "not my thing."




The result is a pleasantly non-heterosexist superhero movie, which also has a surprising number of hunkoids in the cast.

1. Adam Brody, Freddy's adult superhero alter-ego (left).

2. Zachary Levi.

3. All of the other residents of Billy's foster home morph into superheroes.  Eugene (Ian Chen) into Ross Butler

4. Pedro (Jovand Armand) into D. J. Cotrona

5. Instead of a whole fraternity of immortals from the Bible and Greek and Roman mythology, Shazam is a single person, played by Djimon Hounsou.

6. Cooper Andrews as the beefy foster father to the superheroic crew.

7 Mark Strong plays the Big Bad, Dr. Silvana, who unleashes the Seven Deadly Sins (Sloth, Lust, Envy, and so on) onto the world.  What's with all the villains with Ph.D.s?  Part of the culture of anti-intellectualism?

8. The teen idol set is already familiar with Asher Angel.

9. Evan Marsh as the main bully who is terrorizing Freddy.

10. Landon Doak as the bullying brother who terrorizes a teenage Dr. Silvana.

The Gay Tease of "Always Be My Maybe"

Netflix recommended this movie for me with a 98% match: Sasha and Marcus had a brief romance in high school.  15 years later, Sasha has become a celebrity chef, while Marcus is still living in his parents' basement.  They feel the spark of attraction again, but can they adapt to each other's worlds?

I sat stunned.  Blurbs about movies with gay people don't include the terms "romance" or "spark of attraction."  They say "forbidden love" and "attraction that threatens to destroy their lives."

And the title would never be Always Maybe.  It would be something like Alex Strangelove.    But the illustration -- it's hard to see from across the room -- seems to show two men.  And Sasha and Marcus are both boys' names.

Remember Sasha Mitchell, sitcom star turned martial artist (top photo)?

And Marcus Schenkenberg, the Swedish model who was popping up all over the tv screen in the 1990s?

Could a gay romance be presented so nonchalantly, as "a romance"?  Could gay people be just....people?  How come we overcame, and nobody told me?

Just to be sure, I checked the byline: Ali Wong, Randall Park, James Saito.  Two of those people are Sasha and Marcus, and all three are men.

So I turned it on.

More after the break.

"Jinn": Arabic Teen Angst-Horror with a Gay Character

In the Netflix Arabic-language drama Jinn (2019), a group of high school students sets out from Riverdale...um, I mean Amman, Jordan...on a field trip to the ancient archaeological site of Petra.

1. Veronica...um, I mean Mira (Salma Malhas), who has just broken up with bad boy Reggie...um, I mean Nasser (Mohammed Nizar)

2. Good girl Betty...um, I mean Layla (Ban Halaweh), who is dating Fahed (Yasser al Hadi)

Ok, I'll stop with the Archie references.

3. The frizzy-haired know-it-all Hassan (Zaid Zoubi), who happens to be Mira's cousin.

4. The bullied good-boy Yassin (Sultan Alkhail, left)

5. The bellgerant drug-dealer Tareq (Abdelrazzaq Tarkas)

6. Tareq's gay-coded sidekick/boyfriend Omar (Mohammed Hindieh, left, the one in pink)

At Petra, Tareq, Omar, and Nasser beat up Yassin, who runs away and falls into a pit.   He is rescued by the mysterious Vera (Aysha Shahaltough).

That night, amid the sexual shenanigans, someone throws Tareq off a cliff to his death.  Guess who?

Later, a mysterious boy in an old-fashioned Bedouin costume comes through Mira's window.  His name is Kerasquoixian, Keras for short (Hamzeh Okab, top photo).







Keras has come from the other realm to warn Mira that she and her friends are in deadly danger: an evil jinn has been unleashed, with a murderous hatred of all humans.  They must find its summoner (the person who called it from the other realm) to push it back, or other jinn will be released, and everyone will die.

At a memorial service for Tareq, Nasser  pulls out a knife, says "We don't belong in this world," and slits his throat.

Two of the three bullies who harassed Yassir.  Do you have any idea who the jinn and its summoner are?

Meanwhile, Hassan returns to Petra to look for clues about the jinn.

Omar, investigating on his own, discovers that Keras looks like a missing Bedouin boy named Hosny. Was this all the insane ramblings of a deluded boy?

There are some game changers, some "Wow, I never thought that you were a jinn!" moments, and a pleasant cliff-hanging ending.

Heterosexism: The jinn and the summoner are always male-female, and jinn always wants to "unite" with the summoner so they can "be together forever."  Sounds like a heterosexual union to me.

On the other hand, Mira and Keras don't seem to be attracted to each other.

Beefcake: No.  Yassir takes his shirt off while he's in the pit.

Gay references:  No.  This is the Middle East.  What did you expect?

Gay subtexts:  Omar is quite obviously gay, in love with Tareq, and then he buddy-bonds with Keras.

Jordanian scenery:  A lot of Petra, not much Amman.

Side note: How secular is Jordan?  No hijabs anywhere in the city.

My grade: A-.

"The Shape of Water": The Things We Do For Love

"I've been dying to watch The Shape of Water," Doug says.  This is our first date, so I'm inclined to agree to anything, but really, what a dumb title!

"Water has no shape; it fills whatever vessel it is in."

"That's the point, silly!"

I see on the blue-ray cover that the thing was directed by Guillermo Del Toro.   His movies alway trick you with a bait-and-switch: you think you're getting a cute fantasy, but instead it's about people dying.

"So what's it about?  Elves being killed during the Spanish Civil War?"

"Close.  You'll see.  Anyway, there's a gay character."

I see that I have no choice.  Doug the film buff wants to see it, so it's either watch or not get invited to see him naked later.

Well, he's cute...

We sit cuddling on the couch.  He lowers the lights so I can't even escape by reading a magazine.

Openng: a gratuitous full-frontal nude shot of a woman taking a bath.  Disgusting!  Decreasing my interest in my date's bedroom.  And completely irrelevant to the plot.

The gratuitous nude girl, Elisa (Sally Hawkins), is mute, so she uses sign language. Not important to the plot.

Every day she she gets gratuitously nude, then boils three eggs and makes egg salad sandwiches, which she shares with her elderly invalid neighbor Giles (Richard Jenkins), who keeps a tv on at all times.  It shows only movie musicals from the 1930s.  No importance to the plot.

Everything is so washed out and drab and unpleasant to look at that I think we're in an awful dystopia like 1984, but  it's actually some apartments over a movie theater in Baltimore in 1962 or 1963*.  They can actually look down at the movies playing.  Not that any of them are important to the plot.

They got the dates all wrong: We see Mr. Ed (1961-66), The Story of Ruth (1960), and Mardi Gras (1958).

Every night she goes to work amid a crew of cleaning ladies in a top secret government installation run by incredible jerk scientists. Colonel Strickland (Michael Shannon) keeps trying to have sex with the women.  This is before sexual harassment laws.

One day they bring in the Creature from the Black Lagoon (Doug Jones).  Elisa feeds it eggs and plays it some dance music, and soon discovers that it is sentient, male, and hot.

A Soviet spy (Michael Stuhlbarg) helps Elisa break the Creature out (who knew that the Soviets were the good guys during the Cold War).

Wait -- this should be the end of the movie.  The plot is resolved, right?  I ask Doug to put it on pause so I can go to the bathroom.  It's only half over!

In the last half of this endless 123 minutes, Elisa takes the Creature home and plunks him into the bathtub where she takes her gratuitous nudity,  planning to release him to the ocean on the day that the canal opens.  Um...there aren't any beaches in Baltimore?  

Meanwhile both the Americans and the Soviets are trying to find the Creature, so there's some Spy vs. Spy shenanigans.  And Elisa has fallen in love with the Creature.  They have sex twice (full female nudity, no Creature penis).

Not to worry, it all ends happily when Elisa develops gills and goes to live in the ocean with her beloved Creature.

Really?  I would think that to live in the ocean, you'd need more than gills.  It's cold down there, you can't swim around very well, and won't she eventually want to hang out with some other sentients?

Besides, the Creature is from the Amazon.  How is he going to handle the ecosystem of the North Atlantic?

Beefcake: None.

Interesting sets:  None.  Everything is washed out and drab.

I wasted two hours on this garbage, just to get invited into a guy's bed?

Gay characters:  Oh, I forgot.  Giles isn't an elderly invalid after all, he just acts like one.  He's actually a graphic artist who gets fired from a lot of jobs.  He makes a series of strange fumbling come-ons at the counter man (Morgan Kelly) at the local pie restaurant, who finally catches on and recoils in homophobic horror (not to worry, he's also racist, an all-around bigot).

Ok, an elderly gay man in the early 1960s should know how to determine if someone is gay before grabbing.

So Giles is one of these depressed, lonely gay guys who knows nothing about gay culture but happily facilitates the True Love of the heterosexuals.

My grade: F-.

All this for a penis?  Next time I'm just going on Grindr.

Tales of the City: Gay Guys, San Francisco, Who Cares?

Year after year, people tell me "The Tales of the City books are stupendous!  Amazing!  Wonderful!  The best thing every written!"

"And they're historically vital!  Gay author Armistead Maupin originally published them in serial form in the San Francisco Chronicle, back when gay characters were unheard-of in mainstream literature!"

"And you lived in San Francisco! They will resonate strongly with your experiences!"

"And they're hilarious!  You've never laughed so much in your life!  You'll love them!"

So, again and again, I pick up the first volume, Tales of the City (1978).  Midwesterner Mary Anne Singleton comes to San Francisco on vacation, converses with her old college friend Mona Ramsey, and decides to stay.

This is not the least bit humorous.  It's dull, dull, dull!

She moves into 28 Barbary Lane, where her free-spirit landlady, Anna Madrigal, tells her, "My dear, I'm not opposed to anything," and gives her a marijuana joint as a housewarming gift.  Mary Anne is determined not to be shocked.

My life in San Francisco was nothing like this!

She goes shopping, sees two guys, and wonders if they might be gay.  She's determined not to be shocked, if they are.

Maupin eases into the revelation of their gayness.   I guess he had to be very, very careful, writing for heterosexuals in the 1970s.

I can't go on.  I'm so very, very, very bored.

But sooner or later someone will start praising the books again, and I'll try again.

I already know what happens next: Mary Ann befriends a gay man named Mouse.  He starts dating A-gay gynecologist Jon Fielding, who is dying, Mona Ramsey dates D'Orothea Wilson, and Mary Anne has an affair with Beauchamp Day. Anna Madrigal turns out to be a MTF transwoman, who has an affair with Beauchamp's father-in-law, who is dying.

Got all that?

 Through eight books and thirty years, Mary Ann, Mouse, and their huge group of friends encounter angst and tragedy as life hits them with unemployment, failed romances, homophobia, transphobia, death -- lots of death -- and AIDS -- lots of AIDS.

This by you is humor?

More recently, the characters have been getting way old -- like, they remember the 1960s old -- and starting to ruminate on their mortality.  Yes, they are going to die.  So am I.  Why would I want to read about it?

Why would anyone think it was funny?

The tv miniseries (1993, 1998, 2001) were a bit more palatable, maybe because they were not so episodic, and they got into the gay characters right away, instead of hinting around for weeks and weeks.

Besides, there were naked guys. (Pictured: Thomas Gibson as Beauchamp Day.)

I can't think of any other reason to care about Tales of the City 

See also: Netflix's 'Tales of the City': Not Your Grandfather's San Francisco

"Bangkok Love Stories": Lots of Naked Thai Guys, No Temples

Of course I'm going to watch a tv series in the Thai language, which is not related to Chinese, Vietnamese, or any other of the major languages of East and Southeast Asia.  Even if it has a stupid title: Bangkok Love Stories: Innocence.

My first thought: there's nothing innocent about these twinks falling in and out of lust with each other.

My second thought: where did the rest of the world get the idea that Bangkok was just about sex? Sure, sex is an essential part of any trip, but Bangkok has enough cultural treasures for a month of sightseeing:  the Grand Palace, home to Thai monarchs from 1782 to 1925; the Suam Pakkad Palace: Wat Pho, with its 148-foot long Reclining Buddha.

None of which appear in the first episode.  There are no interesting location shots.

My third thought:

So no one told you life was gonna be this way
Your job's a joke, you're broke, your love life's D.O.A

(I often have no choice but to watch Friends on the treadmill at the gym).

This group of zany friends are:

1. Rachel...um, I mean Claudia (Nida Patcharaveerapong), who has a terrible job at a salad bar, where she has to fend off handsy customers all day.

2. Joey...um, I mean JC (Kawin Manonukul, top photo and left),who has a terrible job at a KFC, but his real passion is parkour (urban acrobatics).  He's into Claudia.

3. Phoebe, aka Mednoon (Tachakorn Boonlupyanun), a flirty, boozy party girl.

4.  Her bff Ross, aka Simon (Tosatid Darnkhuntod, right), who is gay, and presumably will start dating someone (there's a boy-boy kiss in the opening credits).

5. Chandler, aka Eve (Narupornkamol Chaisang), a businesswoman whose job involves going to "hostess clubs" (like brothels without the sex).

6.  I guess that leaves Monica.  Danny (Pond Ponlawit Ketprapakorn), a skateboarding teenager with a crush on Eve.  I couldn't find any beefcake photos, so here's another of JC.

Let's not forget Keaton (Max Nattapol Diloknawarit), whose dream is to open a gym where the patrons perform shirtless.

Gay characters:  There's a gay character, but in the first episode, he doesn't do much.  The straight characters, however, do a lot.  More than I wanted to see.

Beefcake:  Lots of shirts come off.  Two -- two scenes of guys dancing shirtless.

Sexism:  Everywhere.  It's somewhat uncomfortable to watch.

Interesting Location Shots:  None.

Interesting Plot:  No.

I suggest fast-forwarding to the good parts.  Maybe a future episode will involve flirting in front of the Reclining Buddha.

Or watching Friends instead.

What Has Nolan Gould Been Up To Lately?

I thought that Modern Family would end in 2019, after 10 seasons.  I actually don't know anybody who watched after the first few seasons, after the novelty of seeing a gay couple (albeit highly stereotypic) integrated into the affluent extended family wore off.  The Modern Family was just so affluent, so entitled, so removed from any actual problems of modern society that it transcended escapism, becoming just annoying. 

But it's still getting 4 million viewers in the U.S.  Go figure.

Nolan Gould was the only reason for watching, his hunkiness expanding exponentially as the seasons progressed.  He didn't capitalize on his physique as deliberately and ostentatiously as, say, Alan Kaiser of Mama's Family( even today, while watching old episodes, you are stunned by how blatant his bulge was).   But still, the transformation was startling.

However, Nolan seems to have tapered off.  Either he's not hitting the gym quite as often, or he's more interested in being taken seriously as an actor than in causing teenagers to write his name amid little hearts in their chemistry textbook.  Recent beefcake photos are hard to come by.

Just having your shirt off doesn't make it a beefcake photo.  Looking extremely uncomfortable destroys the hotness.

Flexing in front of the Coliseum in Rome.  You're not thinking "How buffed!"  You're thinking "So he's been to Rome."

Maybe there will be better beefcake in Nolan's upcoming projects.  He has two coming out:

Camp is a web tv series about a Jewish summer camp. There may be hijinks and swimming.

Yes is a drama about a washed-up former child star (Tim Realbuto) who mentors -- and falls in love with -- a 17 year old ingenue (Nolan). At least there are gay characters.

See also: My 10 Favorite Pictures of Nolan Gould;
Even More Nolan Gould

The Top 10 Hunks of "The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina," Season 2

I'm not liking the second season of The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, about the adventures of half-witch Sabrina as she straddles the witch and mortal worlds.  The coherent plotline about Sabrina resisting her initiation into the Church of Night has been muddled, the previously strict separation of the two worlds transgressed over and over again. Episodes are mostly about "look what weird rituals the witches have," equivalents of mortal Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter, and Valentine's Day. 

Plus it somehow turned heterosexist.  Cousin Ambrose (Chance Perdomo) is "pansexual," but he dropped his boyfriend for a girl, making him for all intents and purposes straight.  The witch rituals involving only heterosexual pairings.  The school dance at Baxter High shows only male-female couples.   There's a transman, Theo (formerly Susie),but he doesn't date anyone.

And the cast list is so woman-oriented  that it's hard to find any beefcake.  You have to skulk around the margins to find anyone other than the guys introduced last season (Cousin Ambrose, his ex-boyfriend Luke, Sabrina's boyfriends Harvey and Nick).

The Academy of Unseen Arts

1. Tyler Cotton as Melvin, a meek, shy warlock who loses his virginity during Lupercania, the Satanic Valentine's Day.  I don't buy it.  Witches are so into the "sins of the flesh" that he'd never make  it through a week at the Academy without being cherry-picked.  Of course, we're also led to believe that Aunt Hilda, who is over 100 years old, has never been cherry-picked either.

2. Adam DiMarco as Dario, a member of the Judas Society, anti-witch faction of the  Church of Night.  Apparently there's a lot of sexism among witches:  The High Priest must be a man; the Top Boy must be a boy; Dorian's Gray Room, the warlock hangout, is off limits to women.

3. Jeddidiah Goodacre as Dorian Gray himself, the guy with the painting in the attic, who runs the warlock-only nightclub.   After the first mention, however, the sexism is quietly dropped, and Dorian's Gray Room becomes a standard hangout, like Pop's Choklit Shop in Riverdale.

4.Liam Hall (left) as Marcus Pierce, a warlock killed by witch hunters.

5. Luke Cook (top photo) as Lucifer himself.  When he actually appears as El Diablo, he wears tons of prosethics, growls and grunts,and speaks in a ridiculous British-villain accent.

















The Witch Hunters


6. Spencer Treat Clarke as Jerathmiel. There's a mouthful.  You know that those Hebrew names mean something, right?  -El endings are "of God."  He belongs tothe Order of the Innocents, a witch-hunting club.

Why are there witch hunters? Couldn't the witches just turn them into frogs or something?

7. Graeme McComb as Gideon, another witch hunter.  He doesn't really push my buttons,but after watching Sabrina, Prudence, Dorcas, Agatha, Miss Wardwell, Hilda, and Zelda getting it on, I'll take whatever I can get.










Baxter High

8. Remember Miss Wardwell, the "lonely old spinster" whom Madame Satan has been possessing?  Turns out she wasn't so lonely after all; her boyfriend was just overseas doing charity work. Adam (Alexis Denisoff) returns, and Miss Wardwell/Madam Satan is horrified at the thought of hooking up with such a goody-goody, until she discovers that he gives foot rubs and cooks.

9. This is actually cheating, since the character of Billy (Ty Wood), appeared in Season 1 as a bully who harasses Susie for her gender-transgressive traits, and gets his comeuppance when a spell makes him kiss a guy (how humiliating! For all its inclusivity,this show has a homophobic edge). When Susie transitions into Theo, Billy is all smiles and apologies. Apparently he just doesn't like girls.

10. Peter Bundic as Carl Tapper, his sidekick, who according to Aunt Hilda is "in lust with him." Nothing comes of it, though.  What could -- they're both guys.

See also: The Top 10 Hunks of "The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina."

"The Society":Two Gay Guys, No Beefcake, Not Enough "Lost"

In the elite, entitled small town of West Ham, Connecticut, 200 high school kids ignore the ominous portents around them (a mysterious smell, the phrase "mene mene tekel upharsin" scrawled on a wall, a production of Rosencratz and Guildenstern are Dead), and head out for a school-sponsored camping trip.  They don't get far.

"Change of plans," the bus driver announces."Rock slide, road closed, you're back home."

They get out. The buses drive off. There is no one to pick them up, so they walk home. But home is deserted. The whole town is deserted.  Cell phones won't call out; there's no tv or internet;  no way to communicate with the outside world. Eventually they discover  that there is no outside world, just a wilderness (no predators though, just wild turkeys).  They are alone.

Once they realize that they will not be rescued soon, the castaways rename their town New Ham and set up The Society.

Most episodes are about the growing pains of the colony, with checks and balances, crime and punishment, and various power struggles, along with standard survival problems and a lot of high school "who's hooking up with who?."  More Lord of the Flies meets The O.C., not so much Lost.  

Sidebar: How much survival do they need in a fully-equipped town? Surely there's enough frozen and canned food to last for years.

And why do they wait six months to explore beyond the town limits, to see if there are animals to hunt, streams to fish in, fruit trees, amber waves of grain?

I would definitely prefer more Lost.  Ordinary survival problems are not particularly interesting without zombies to fight. And the cast is very large, with nothing particularly distinctive (they're all Golden Boys and It-Girls), so it's often hard to determine who is allied with, romantically interested in, or feuding with whom.  I needed several articles to pull them together.

1. The Student Council. Cassandra (Rachel Keller), former student body president, becomes the first leader of the colony.  She is eventually murdered.

Casandra's sister Allie (Kathryn Pressman) becomes the primaryleader,  but not without opposition. Her main allies are Cassandra and Will (Jacques Colimon, left), a poor foster-care kid, who dates her except for a brief fling.

2. The Science Club.   Gordie (Jose Julian, left), who uses his Gilligan's Island Professor-type trivia knowledge to assist the castaways in the absence of the internet, has a crush on Cassandra.

His brainy sister Bean (Salena Quershi) wears a hijab, suggesting that they are both Muslim.

3. The Van Snobs.  Rich bitch Harry (Alex Fitzalan) becomes one of Allie's main opponents in the various power struggles. Maybe he's mad because Allie's boyfriend Will had an affair with his girlfriend. 

His allies include fellow rich bitch Lexi (Grace Victoria Cox);  and Campbell (Toby Wallace, left), a gun-wielding psycho who is abusive toward his girlfriend Elle (Olivia de Jong). So she tries to poison him, and ends up poisoning half the town.

4. The Gay Kids.  Campbell's younger brother Sam is deaf and gay, played by a deaf, non-gay actor (Sean Berdy, left).  His main ally is Becca (Gideon Adlon); she becomes pregnant (not from him), and he vows to help her raise the first baby in the brave new world.

Later in the season he starts a romance with outdoorsman Grizz (Jack Mulhern).

5. The Jocks.  Luke (Alex MacNeill), Jason (Emilio Garcia-Sanchez), and Clark (Spencer House) continue to wear their lettermen's jackets and sign on as the colony's police force.  They have some gay subtexts, although .Luke is also dating the super-religious Helena (Natashia Liu Bordizzo), who won't have sex with him.

Got all that? It's really not worth the trouble.  Especially when the gay guys get only two kissing scenes, and the beefcake is minimal. We're a long way from Riverdale.

And when the mystery is eked out in a few throwaway scenes, as if the writers forgot about it until the last minute and said "We should throw in a clue or something."

Hint #1: The stars are a little off, like they would be in the distant past.
Hint #2:  A mysterious Pfeiffer demanded $1,000,000 to remove the smell, and later was the bus driver who took the children (the Pied Piper?)
Hint #3: About that rockslide....